Download PDF | Byzantine Commentaries On Ancient Greek Texts ,12th-15th Centuries
398 Pages
This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in Byzantium. It adopts a broad chronological perspective (from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries) and examines different types of commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. By discussing the exegetical literature of the Byzantines as embedded in the sociocultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, the book analyses the frameworks and networks of knowledge transfer, patronage and identity building that motivated the Byzantine engagement with the ancient intellectual and literary tradition.
BAUKJE VAN DEN BERG is Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at Central European University, Vienna.
DIVNA MANOLOVA is Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
PRZEMYSEAW MARCINIAK is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Silesia in Katowice.
Contributors
PANAGIOTIS A. AGAPITOS is Emeritus Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on textual and literary criticism, with an emphasis on Byzantine rhetoric and its performance, poetics, erotic fiction and the representation of death in Byzantine literature. Over the past thirty years, he has published some eighty scholarly papers, three single-authored studies, the first critical edition of the thirteenth-century verse romance Livistros and Rodamne (Athens 2006), the edited volume Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, 1100-1400 (with L. B. Mortensen; Copenhagen 2012) and, most recently, an English translation of Livistros and Rodamne for Translated Texts for Byzantinists (Liverpool 2021). He is currently working on a narrative history of Byzantine literature (AD 1050-1500).
BAUKJE VAN DEN BERG is Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at Central European University, Vienna. Her research focuses on Byzantine scholarship, Byzantine education and the role of ancient literature in Byzantine culture. Her recent publications include the monograph Homer the Rhetorician: Eustathios of Thessalonike on the Composition of the Iliad (Oxford 2022) and the co-edited volume Emotions and Narrative in Ancient Literature and Beyond: Studies in Honour of Irene de Jong (with M. de Bakker and J. Klooster; Leiden— Boston 2022). She is currently preparing a volume with translations of and commentary on various works on ancient poetry by John Tzetzes.
PAULA CABALLERO SANCHEZ is Lecturer of Ancient Greek at the University of Malaga, Spain. Her dissertation was published as a monograph by Nueva Roma (Spanish National Research Council, 2018) with the title El Comentario de Juan Pedidsimo a los Cuerpos celestes de Cleomedes: estudio, edicién critica y traduccién. Her research covers the reception and transmission of scientific and literary Greek texts during the Byzantine Palaiologan Renaissance (1261-1453) and the European Renaissance, primarily in a scholastic context, as well as Greek codicology and palaeography. She has collaborated with several Spanish research projects with the aim of delving deeper into the scientific and literary contribution of Byzantine scholars.
LORENZO M. CIOLFI completed his undergraduate studies in philology and Greek palaeography at Sapienza University of Rome and is currently a PhD candidate at L’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux, Paris. His dissertation project concentrates on the figure and role of John III Vatatzes in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras, with particular focus on the emergence of his cult within the framework of Byzantine imperial sainthood. In parallel, he is working on Greek paroemiographic collections in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their relationship with the developments of Western proverb anthologies.
ANDREA M. CUOMO is Professor of Greek at Ghent University. From 2012 to 2021, he worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where he led the Greek Scholia and Medieval Greek project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF-P 30775-G25). In 2020, he was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project The Meaning of Language: A Digital Grammar of the Greek Taught at Schools in Late Constantinople (No. 101001328 MELA). He has published on the history of the Greek language, late Byzantine historians and linguistics.
KRYSTINA KUBINA is a research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, specializing in late Byzantine poetry. She has published a monograph on the fourteenth-century poet Manuel Philes (Die enkomiastische Dichtung des Manuel Philes: Form und Funktion des literarischen Lobes in der friihen Palaiologenzeit, Berlin 2020), as well as the co-edited volume Epistolary Poetry in Byzantium and Beyond: An Anthology with Critical Essays (with A. Riehle; New York 2021).
VALERIA F. LOVATO is a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Geneva with a project on middle Byzantine conceptions of asteiotes. Her research also encompasses the reception of the Homeric epics in Byzantium and in Renaissance Europe, a topic on which she has published extensively. Her current book projects include an edited volume on Isaac Komnenos Porphyrogennetos and a monograph investigating the interplay between classicizing learning and _ self fashioning in the works of John Tzetzes and Eustathios of Thessalonike.
DIVNA MANOLOVA is Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and an Affiliate Member of the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of York and University of Southern Denmark). She works on theories of space and dimensionality in Byzantine cosmological and astronomical texts and diagrams. She obtained her PhD in Medieval Studies at Central European University (2014) and was a Marie Sktodowska-Curie/POLONEZ 1 fellow at the University of Silesia in Katowice (2016-18).
PRZEMYSEAW MARCINIAK is Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has held fellowships in Princeton, Berlin, Paris, Uppsala and Dumbarton Oaks and has published on Byzantine performativity, humour and satire. His recent publications include the edited volume Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period: The Golden Age of Laughter? (with I. Nilsson; Leiden—Boston 2021). He currently works on the Byzantine perception of animals.
MARGARET MULLETT is Professor Emerita of Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and Director of Byzantine Studies Emerita at Dumbarton Oaks. She has recently published The Church of the Holy Apostles: A Lost Monument, A Forgotten Project, and the Presentness of the Past (with R. Ousterhout; Washington, pc 2020) and Storytelling in Byzantium: Narratological Approaches to Byzantine Texts and Images (with I. Nilsson and C. Messis; Uppsala 2018). She is currently working on tents, emotions and hybridity, as well as the Christos Paschon. After leaving Dumbarton Oaks, she was Visiting Professor of Byzantine Social History at Vienna and then Visiting Professor of Byzantine Greek at Uppsala. She is now Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh.
FEVRONIA NOUSIA is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Philology at the University of Patras. Her research focuses on Greek palaeography, Byzantine literature, education, hagiography, the reception and dissemination of Greek texts in the West and critical editions of Byzantine texts.
INMACULADA PéREZ MARTIN holds a PhD in Classical Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid and since 1997 has been a Scientific Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterraneo y del Oriente Préximo [ILCCCHS], Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas [CSIC]). She is an expert in Greek palaeography, Byzantine culture and transmission of classical texts in Byzantium, and has published several studies on Byzantine scholars and Spanish Hellenists, as well as critical editions of Byzantine texts such as Michael Attaleiates’ History. She is currently the Director of the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del CSIC in Madrid and is preparing the critical edition of Eustathios’ Parekbolai on Dionysius Periegetes.
AGLAE PIZZONE is a Byzantinist with a background in Classics. She is currently Associate Professor in Medieval Literature at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, hosted by the University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on cultural history and the history of ideas. At present, she is interested in autography and self-commentaries in the Greek Middle Ages, as well as in the Byzantine commentaries on Hermogenes and their early modern reception. She has recently discovered new autograph notes by John Tzetzes in the Voss. Gr. Qt.
MARIA TOMADAKI works as a scientific collaborator at the Géttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her main research interests are Byzantine poetry, textual criticism, Greek palaeography and the reception of the ancient poets in Byzantium. Her PhD thesis includes the critical edition of 236 iambic poems by John Geometres (forthcoming in Brepols’ Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca).
MICHELE TRIZIO is Associate Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Bari. He has received PhDs in Medieval Philosophy (Bari 2006) and in Classical Philology (Bari 2010), and has published on Byzantine philosophical texts and Greek—Latin interaction in the Middle Ages. His // Neoplatonismo di Eustrazio di Nicea (Bari 2016) is the first monograph devoted to this Byzantine commentator.
INTRODUCTION
Byzantine Commentaries on Ancient Greek Texts
Baukje van den Berg and Divna Manolova
‘Medieval thought leaves some of its richest records in glosses and commentaries on authoritative texts. Whether we want to know how medieval thinkers viewed their treasured inheritance of ancient philosophy and literature, or how they imbued their students with a love for the liberal arts, or how they studied sacred Scripture, our best access is often through their expositions of the texts that they read, taught, and copied.’ With these words, Rita Copeland describes the value of medieval scholarship on ancient texts.’ Even though Copeland writes about the Medieval West, her words hold equally true for the wealth of Byzantine scholarship on ancient authorities that has come down to us: Byzantine commentaries teach us much about the role of ancient literature in the cultural system of different Byzantine periods, about the meaning of these ancient texts for Byzantine readers, and about the wisdom and inspiration Byzantine authors found there for their own scholarly and literary production.
The present volume therefore considers Byzantine commentaries as firmly grounded in their intellectual and sociocultural contexts.” Recent studies have emphasized that commentaries — whether ancient, medieval or modern — are universally determined by their specific historical and cultural circumstances: the aims and assumptions of commentators and their readerships differ from culture to culture. The choice of what to comment on depends on what commentators perceive as the needs of their target audience.’ In other words, the questions the commentary addresses depend on the commentator’s cultural and historical assumptions and the expectations of the interpretive community, as every commentary is first and foremost an interpretation, a specific reading of a text.* By catering to the particular needs of their target audience, commentaries aim to bridge the gap that separates ancient texts and new readerships, be they ancient, medieval or modern.’
Even if this may sound obvious to some extent, it is not how Byzantine commentaries have generally been studied. Instead, the Byzantines have mostly been regarded as the conduit through which much of ancient literature has survived into the modern period, and their scholarship has been mined for what it preserves of fragments and readings of ancient texts not otherwise transmitted. Why these ancient texts were preserved, how they were used and what they meant to their Byzantine readership are questions that have only recently begun to be asked.° Byzantine commentators resemble their ancient predecessors in that they tend to project their own didactic interests onto the text under discussion and to shape the source author in their own image: for instance, they turned Homer into a teacher of grammar and rhetoric much like themselves.’ In a similar vein, late antique and Byzantine philosophers interpreted and reinterpreted Aristotle and Plato according to their own philosophical and ideological agenda.° An investigation of the ways in which commentators read and interpreted their source texts can therefore tell us much about their didactic, intellectual and cultural endeavours.
Byzantine commentaries commonly concern authoritative texts that were read in the classroom. A twelfth-century father by the name of Christopher Zonaras articulates the significance of studying these ancient texts in a hortatory discourse to his son Demetrios on the importance of education. Demetrios has just finished his grammar studies and is about to continue with rhetoric and prose composition, the next stage in the educational curriculum, in which ancient texts continued to play a central role.” Zonaras explains that one should converse with these authors of the past to train both one’s mind and one’s tongue, that is, to learn how to think deep thoughts and express them with rhetorical elegance. He presents it as a moral obligation not to waste one’s intellectual talents and be a ‘useless’ person but embark on a journey of lifelong learning so as to make both oneself and one’s parents happy.'° The discourse ends on a threatening note: should you fail to heed your father’s words, so Zonaras warns Demetrios, ‘you will give me grief and a life that is pitiable and more difficult than death; you will disgrace me and clothe me in shame — may this not happen to me, Lord Christ!’'* Much was at stake, it seems, in getting a good education in ancient literature and acquiring the knowledge and eloquence necessary to prove oneself an educated and sophisticated person.
Zonaras’ emphatic exhortations tie in with the general idea that knowledge of the ancient authorities studied in the classroom constituted the cultural capital or paideia that defined elite identity.'* The social role of paideia became particularly pronounced under the Komnenian and Palaiologan emperors, during the centuries on which this volume focuses. A familiarity with the literature of the past and a perfect command of Atticizing Greek was imperative for anyone contending for high-ranking positions in the imperial or ecclesiastical bureaucracies. Ambition and competition governed the intellectual climate of these periods, and went hand in hand with a desire for display: social and cultural credentials were worth only as much as the public recognition they earned.'’ Many texts, moreover, testify to polemics among teachers and intellectuals, often with the interpretation of school texts as their battlefield.'* By rereading and reinterpreting authoritative ancient texts, commentators constantly defined and redefined the cultural capital in terms that were meaningful to their own times. Their works demonstrate, for instance, that, in order to know one’s Homer, it was not enough to read just the //iad and Odyssey; rather, one also had to be familiar with the grammatical and hermeneutic traditions attached to the Homeric epics.'> The commentaries discussed throughout the present volume thus open up a perspective on what it meant to be educated, eloquent and erudite in Byzantium from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.
Commentaries with an explicit patron-dedicatee offer concrete starting points for interpreting the educational, social and cultural importance of knowledge of the ancient tradition. More often than not, however, studentreaders and their investment in their teachers’ exegesis are present only implicitly in the very acts of producing and preserving the commentaries. "° A line of investigation that naturally follows from the research presented in this volume, therefore, involves shifting the focus from the Byzantine authors and their exegetical output — not just the commentaries themselves but also the practices and strategies of reading and commenting on ancient texts — to the notoriously difficult question as to how Byzantine scholarship was read, experienced and reused by its contemporary readers. This question includes issues beyond the didactic setting and the framework of patronage relations, such as the pleasure gained from reading ancient texts and the emotional response triggered by learning something new. Delving deeper into contemporary as well as later reception of the commentaries is one of the avenues for future research that this volume hopes to open.
In this book, we define commentary both in a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrowest sense, commentaries — whether marginal scholia or selfstanding works — are concerned with explaining an ancient text and the knowledge related to it, often in a didactic context. Defined more broadly, commentaries include treatises on ancient literature and paraphrases of ancient authorities, which likewise demonstrate how these texts were read and taught. In the broadest sense, commentaries can be any literary texts that creatively engage with ancient texts and, thus, shed light on Byzantine attitudes towards their ancient heritage, on practices and strategies of reading ancient literature, and on the importance attached to paideia. Together, these different kinds of commentaries and exegetical practices produce a fuller picture of the cultural role of ancient texts in the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods. This volume concentrates on ancient poetry, oratory and philosophy, thus largely leaving aside biblical and patristic texts, which were equally central to Byzantine intellectual culture and received many commentaries, not infrequently by the same scholars who commented on secular ancient texts.'” Many commentaries, moreover, remain hidden in unedited manuscripts or outdated editions. Only with satisfactory editions and detailed studies of individual commentaries in their relevant contexts will we reach a deeper understanding of Byzantine cultural history and the role of ancient texts herein, as relevant to Byzantinists and Classicists alike. "* The present volume is a step in this direction.
Grammar and Rhetoric, Poetry and Prose
With the strong focus on poetry in Byzantine grammar teaching, it is no surprise that many commentaries concern the ancient poets. The twelfth century saw an intensified interest in Homer, which has been connected with the military ideology of the ruling aristocracy: the [liad and Odyssey (especially the former) provided rhetors with appropriate language and imagery for praising their rulers as modern-day heroes.'? The ‘first Byzantine commentary on the Jliad was likely produced by a member of this ruling elite, the sebastokrator Isaac Komnenos Porphyrogennetos, son of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and younger brother of Anna Komnene, who herself wrote a Homerizing biography of her father with the title Alexiad.*° The twelfth century also saw the (re-emergence of self-standing commentaries, works that existed independent of the texts they commented on rather than in their margins.*' The monumental works on the Jliad and Odyssey by Eustathios of Thessalonike (ca. 1115-95) are undoubtedly the best known.** The grammarian John Tzetzes (ca. 1110-70/80) appears to have planned his Exegesis of the Iliad as a similarly ambitious work of Homeric scholarship, intended to be the first ever commentary to discuss every aspect of the J/iad, so Tzetzes claims in his long prefatory essay.’ He, however, never managed to complete his project: only the introduction and the commentary on //iad 1 survive.
Even if Homer continued to be read, his poetry did not dominate the scholarship of the Palaiologan era to the same extent. The most prominent scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries lavished their erudite attention on many ancient authors, notably the Athenian playwrights. ** Maximos Planoudes (125 5—1304/5), Manuel Moschopoulos (ca. 1265— after 1316), Thomas Magistros (ca. 1280—after 1347) and Demetrios Triklinios (fl. 1305-20) produced recensions of and scholia on comedies of Aristophanes as well as the most-read tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.*’ Their scholia were often the product of intellectual collaborations and engaged with the work of contemporaries as well as predecessors, which resulted in a fluid textual tradition that is often difficult to disentangle.*® The Palaiologan scholia are predominantly (if not exclusively) grammatical, concentrating on lexical, morphological and syntactical aspects of the ancient texts.*”
A similar grammatical focus emerges from various collections of schedography and epimerisms that were produced in the same period, with different ancient texts as their points of departure. Such grammatical exercises work outwards from a word or phrase in the text in question and relate it to the wider context of ancient Greek language. Often this word is the starting point for discussing more or less related terms, commonly illustrated with citations from other ancient authors.”® Examples include Manuel Moschopoulos’ Schedographia, which was based on various pagan and Christian texts and remained influential beyond the end of the Byzantine Empire and into the Early Modern period;*’ the epimerisms by George Lakapenos (fl. ca. 1297-1311) on, among other texts, the letters of Libanios, a much-admired model author throughout the entire Byzantine period;’° and the epimerisms to Philostratus’ Eikones by Maximos Planoudes.’' Schedography had gained traction from the eleventh century onwards and continued to be part of grammar teaching throughout the twelfth century,’* when some teachers developed the form in ways that gained the disapproval of more conservative intellectuals such as Anna Komnene, John Tzetzes and Eustathios of Thessalonike.*’ Yet the Homeric works of the latter contain material that has close affinities with epimerisms and schedography that are of the more traditional rather than the more modern type, we may presume.**
An exception to the predominantly grammatical concerns in the Palaiologan commentaries on the Athenian playwrights is the work of Demetrios Triklinios, whose scholia demonstrate a strong interest in textual criticism and metre.’? His recensions of the tragedians and Aristophanes significantly improved the texts and remained in circulation up to and even beyond the first printed editions.*° In this way, Triklinios’ work differs not only from that of the other Palaiologan scholars, but also from that of Tzetzes two centuries earlier, whose commentaries on Aristophanes show little interest in textual issues and focus on grammar, meaning and context instead.*’ Tzetzes’ Aristophanic commentaries, moreover, display the same strong authorial presence as the rest of his work and repeatedly open up a perspective on his exegetical practice as well as the competition involved in interpreting school texts in twelfth-century Constantinople.’ * Eustathios’ Homeric commentaries testify to a greater interest in textual issues, yet not in Triklinios’ systematic way.*’ Producing new recensions of ancient texts was not a priority for twelfthcentury scholars.
Triklinios’ work on Pindar’s odes likewise is strongly text-critical and metrical in character, whereas the scholia of his Palaiologan predecessors and contemporaries again have a strong grammatical thrust.*° A focus on language and style emerges also from the preface to a lost or never completed commentary on Pindar by Eustathios, who discusses, among other things, the stylistic obscurity and lexical inventiveness of the poet, in addition to the moral value of his maxims and the wealth of historical and mythological material woven into his odes.*’ Triklinios’ metrical work has a predecessor in a verse treatise on Pindaric metres by Isaac Tzetzes, which heavily relies on the Encheiridion by Hephaestion of Alexandria (second century AD).** Even if such minute study of Pindar’s intricate metres may go beyond classroom utility, there is ample evidence that students learned versification and were required to compose verses of their own, which suggests a practical and productive dimension to at least some metrical scholarship.*’ A verse treatise on the nine most important ancient metres by Isaac’s brother John, for instance, is didactic rather than scholarly in nature and seems to be designed for teaching practice.**
In addition to grammatical explanations, many commentaries include longer or shorter paraphrases of the texts under discussion, which likely reflects a much-used_ pedagogical strategy to promote students’ understanding of the text.* In addition to paraphrastic material in scholia and commentaries, free-standing paraphrases of ancient texts existed, particularly of philosophical texts, most notably the works of Aristotle.*° Homer’s poetry likewise was the subject of various paraphrases: Moschopoulos, for instance, paraphrased the first two books of the /liad, while Manuel Gabalas/Matthew of Ephesus (ca. 1271/2-1355/60) composed a partial prose paraphrase of Odysseus’ wanderings.*” John Tzetzes paraphrased the iad and Odyssey in political verse and allegorical terms for the edification and entertainment of the foreign-born Empress Irene and, later, the aristocrat Constantine Kotertzes.** The intensified interest in Homer — and ancient mythology more generally — in the eleventh and twelfth centuries went hand in hand with a renewed interest in the allegorical interpretation that had been an important part of earlier Homeric exegesis.
Michael Psellos (ca. 1018-78) wrote various allegorical essays on ancient mythology.*” His interpretation of [liad 4.1-4 inspired a similar essay on the same lines by a certain John Diakonos Galenos, an otherwise obscure figure who is now usually dated to the twelfth century.’° Tzetzes’ Exegesis of the Iliad also features allegorical interpretations as well as programmatic statements on myth and allegory.’’ Eustathios articulates his own approach in the prefaces to his Homeric commentaries: his allegorical interpretations are not primarily apologetic but make allegory an aesthetic and didactic practice that allows the poet-rhetor to add an extra layer of meaning to his mythical inventions.’* Without being employed to systematically Christianize ancient poetry, allegory had the potential to support the moralizing reading that was widespread in Byzantium.’’ The ancient poets were sources of wise maxims and proverbial expressions, which were collected in gnomological collections and woven into many new texts as part of Byzantine literary aesthetics. ’*
Tzetzes’ allegorical paraphrases of Homer are among various didactic texts in verse designed for the classroom or as ‘edutainment’ for aristocratic audiences.’” Psellos was the first to use political verse for pedagogical purposes in his didactic poems for members of the imperial family.”° His example was followed by other teachers such as Niketas of Herakleia (ca. 1050—after 1117), who wrote didactic poems on various grammatical subjects, some of them in hymnographic metres.’ In addition to the Allegories, Tzetzes composed didactic verses on ancient poetry, comedy and tragedy,** a synopsis of Porphyry’s Jsagoge and a commentary on various rhetorical handbooks by Hermogenes.’” Tzetzes’ Carmina Iliaca, a hexameter summary of the history of the Trojan War with scholia by the author himself, belong — at least partly — to the same didactic category.°° He also composed a Theogony in political verse for the sebastokratorissa Irene, largely (but not solely) indebted to Hesiod’s poem, presenting the genealogies of the ancient gods and heroes without taking recourse to allegorical interpretation.°' The Synopsis Chronike of Constantine Manasses (ca. 1130-87) — also commissioned by Irene — similarly presents mythological and historical lore in literary form.°* Familiarity with ancient history and mythology was expected of every educated person in Byzantium, and many scholia and commentaries aim to expand students’ knowledge of the mythical, legendary and historical past. Prose treatises such as that of John Pediasimos (ca. 1240-1310/14) on the labours of Heracles served the same purpose. °°’
Exegetical material on other ancient poets survives, displaying a similar focus on language, style and ancient lore, even if the exact use of these texts and the accompanying exegetical material in the classroom (and beyond) remains to be studied. Among these ancient poets are various Hellenistic poets: Tzetzes commented on Lycophron, whose Alexandra offers a wealth of mythological material as well as recherché vocabulary.°* Palaiologan scholars worked on Theocritus, whose Syrinx received scholia by Manuel Holobolos (ca. 1243—1310/14) and John Pediasimos.°* Even if Theocritus did not write in the much-admired Attic dialect, students were expected to be familiar with other dialects too, as registers of literary language rather than historical phenomena.°° Planoudes studied Aratus’ Phaenomena out of an interest in astronomy.°’ Andronikos Kallistos (d. 1476/84) worked on Apollonius of Rhodes.°* Hesiod’s Works and Days was studied by Tzetzes, Planoudes and Moschopoulos, while Pediasimos produced scholia on Hesiod’s Shield.°? Tzetzes and Eustathios seem to have worked on Oppian’s Halieutica, even if only scanty evidence survives.”° The latter also produced a commentary on another didactic poet from the Imperial period, the geographer Dionysius Periegetes, whose Description of the Known World continued to be read in Byzantium.”'
An innovation in the grammar teaching of the Palaiologan period was a stronger engagement with prose texts. Planoudes integrated prose texts into the curriculum with what has been called the ‘Scholastic Anthology’ or the ‘Anthology of the Four’.”~ The Anthology contains excerpts from Philostratus’ Eikones, Aelian’s Natural History, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the Planoudean collection of the Greek Anthology; all texts are accompanied by (schedographic) scholia that point to their use in the classroom.’* Together with, for instance, scholia on Philostratus’ Eikones by Moschopoulos, the Anthology gives insight into the didactic methods and linguistic expectations involved in grammar teaching in the school of Planoudes and Moschopoulos and beyond.’* Other prose authors enjoyed similar popularity, notably Aelius Aristides, whose works received marginal comments by probably the only Byzantine female scholar known to have written (and copied) scholia: the noblewoman Theodora Raoulaina (ca. 1240-1300).”*
We find another form of commentary on ancient prose authors (and orators in particular) in various literary critical essays by Theodore Metochites (1270-1332).”° Comparing Aristides to Demosthenes, Metochites concludes that, even if the latter is indeed eloquence personified, the former — working in an autocracy rather than a democracy — is the more useful of the two from a Byzantine perspective; Metochites thus departs from the traditional pre-eminence awarded to Demosthenes and ties Aristides’ relevance to the type of eloquence required in an imperial political system.’” Other essays — included in the miscellaneous Sententious Notes rather than transmitted among Metochites’ orations — discuss the style and eloquence of prose authors such as Aristotle, Josephus, Philo, Synesios, Dio Chrysostom, Xenophon and Plutarch.”* A characteristic of Metochites’ approach is his combined focus on matters of style and morals.’” His dispute with the scholar and court official Nikephoros Choumnos (ca. 1250/5—1327) about the best literary style illustrates again that much was at stake in the study and criticism of ancient texts in the competitive world of Palaiologan Constantinople.*° Scholarship has often pointed to political reasons lying behind the dispute, reading the rivalry between the two men as a rivalry for the position of ‘prime minister’ under Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos. Alexander Riehle, however, has recently revisited the dispute and argues that it is built not on political rivalry but on irreconcilable views about literature and its social implications.**
Another group of ancient texts that received continuous exegesis and commentary throughout the Byzantine period consists of various grammatical and rhetorical handbooks that remained central to Byzantine education. Moschopoulos, for instance, turned the influential Art of Grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax (second century BC) into a schoolbook in question-and-answer form (Erotemata), which continued to be used into the Early Modern period.** Tzetzes produced a verse synopsis of various texts of the Hermogenean corpus that was at the core of rhetorical education.** His contemporary Gregory Pardos wrote a commentary on Pseudo-Hermogenes’ On the Method of Skilfulness, and Planoudes did the same for all four Hermogenean treatises.°* John Chortasmenos (ca. 1370-1431) composed a commentary on the equally popular textbook of progymnasmata by Aphthonios,*’ which had long prompted teachers and intellectuals to compose their own model progymnasmata, often using subjects from ancient mythology and history as well as biblical stories, from Libanios in the fourth and John Geometres in the tenth century to Nikephoros Basilakes in the twelfth and George of Cyprus in the thirteenth century.*° Other teacher-rhetors such as George Pachymeres (1242-ca. 1310),°’ Constantine Akropolites (d. before 1324), Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos (d. ca. 1328)°? and Nikephoros Gregoras (ca. 1292-1361)”° likewise produced their own progymnasmata as part of their teaching practice.
Many Byzantine texts testify to the linguistic competence, rhetorical skills and wide knowledge in which the educational system trained their authors: they are written in Atticizing Greek and feature an abundance of allusions to and citations from ancient texts (pagan as well as biblical and patristic); they include ancient proverbs and gnomic sayings as vehicles of style as well as moral value; and they imitate, continue or revive ancient genres and the styles of various ancient authors. Many literary works can therefore themselves be read as commentaries on ancient literature, revealing the manifold ways in which the Byzantines dealt with their ancient heritage. Some conspicuous examples include Theodore Prodromos’ Katomyomachia (‘Battle of Cat and Mice’), which draws on ancient tragedy and partly parodies Aeschylus’ Persians;?' the Sale of Poetical and Political Lives by the same author, conceived as a sequel to Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale, in which Prodromos puts prominent school authors up for auction;’* the anonymous Christos Paschon, which tells the story of the Passion with numerous lines from Euripides’ tragedies;?’ and Planoudes’ /dy/l, a humorous parody drawing on the satirical tradition in the style of Lucian as well as the bucolic tradition in the style of Theocritus.?* Such texts support the idea that ‘practical usefulness, and symbolic value as a marker of culture or even of mere social polish, can comfortably coexist with deep imaginative and “philosophical” appeal’.”” In fact, reading ancient poets and prose authors from a grammatical and thetorical perspective went hand in hand with a creative and active engagement with the texts of the past in the literary culture of Komnenian and Palaiologan Byzantium.
Philosophy and Science
Scholars have usually studied the philosophical commentary and paraphrase as the literary forms preferred by the Byzantines for the education and practice of philosophy, alongside the philosophical essay and dialogue.”° Thus, the reader will find that the didactic setting in which the philosophical commentary functioned in Byzantium tends to be a given in discussions of Byzantine material and is rarely a subject of analysis on its own. As Michele Trizio demonstrates in his contribution to this volume, however, it is no longer useful, productive or, indeed, acceptable to perpetuate the generalizations employed in scholarship so far. Such generalizations include not only presupposing a didactic setting for each and every philosophical commentary, but also assigning a place within the curriculum to thematically grouped commentaries (e.g. stating that commentaries to the logical works of Aristotle belong to the early stages of the curriculum) without acknowledging varying degrees of complexity displayed within each group. For Trizio, ‘the real task would be to locate the production of a given commentary on a classical philosophical work within the Byzantine cursus studiorum’.”’ Thus, one way of approaching research into the philosophical commentary in Byzantium is to study contemporary education in philosophy, the related and resulting textual production and the authors whose teaching activity in this field of knowledge is attested. To start with, we may wish to focus on those who occupied the imperially sponsored position of ‘consul of the philosophers’ (Stratos THv piAocdgev), starting with Michael Psellos, John Italos (d. after 1082) and Theodore of Smyrna (d. after 1112) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and continuing with John Pothos Pediasimos (d. 1310/14) in the Palaiologan period.”* Focusing on the office of the hypatos has the potential to be methodologically valuable as it encourages us to question the nature and extent of institutionalization of advanced learning in Byzantium — one possible and, indeed, likely framework within which the didactically targeted philosophical commentary was composed and circulated.
Examples of the exegetical activity of the Aypatoi do survive. Psellos, for instance, paraphrased Aristotle’s De interpretatione,”’ while his disciple Italos commented on Aristotle’s Topics,'°° and left scholia to On the Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.'°' John Pediasimos, however, is the only Palaiologan /ypatos whose writings survive. Among them we find scholia on Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics and on De interpretatione.'°* Focusing on the activity of the hypatoi can also be misleading to a considerable degree if one takes into consideration two aspects highlighted by Constantinides in as early as 1982. First, we know of many commentators of philosophical works who did not hold this office or held a higher-ranking position while possibly performing the duties of a /ypatos at the same time.'°* In the case of the latter, the title of Aypatos would not be worth mentioning, as it was inferior to their current office. Second, while the historical record preserves the names of certain /ypatoi, such as, for instance, the thirteenthcentury Theodore Eirenikos and Demetrios Karykes, little is known of their teaching activity in Nicaea, and its remit might have been much more limited than the title of Aypatos might indicate.'°*
The activity of /Aypatoi ton philosophon is a predominantly Constantinopolitan phenomenon and, thus, it draws our attention away from the philosophical education and related exegetical production in other Byzantine cities (chiefly, in Thessalonike). At the same time, focusing on the imperially appointed and sponsored /ypatoi helps us raise a question discussed in this volume by Michele Trizio and Maria Tomadaki, namely in what ways commentaries and the exegetical strategies they employ are a result and a reflection of a patron’s (in addition to the author’s) social and literary self-representation.'°” As we discuss the impact of networks of patronage on philosophical exegesis in Byzantium, we will briefly examine several large-scale exegetical enterprises that primarily commented on Aristotle’s philosophical corpus, none of which was directed by an imperially appointed Aypatos ton philosophon.
The exegetical literature related to the patronage of princess Anna Komnene (d. ca. 1153) is probably the best known and better studied. In his contribution, Panagiotis Agapitos discusses the use of Aristotelian material by Theodore Prodromos in his novel Rhodanthe and Dosikles, dedicated to Anna’s husband Nikephoros Bryennios (d. 1138),°°° while Michele Trizio’s analysis centres on the two most prolific Aristotelian commentators of the twelfth century, both of them associated with Anna’s patronage, namely Eustratios of Nicaea (d. after 1120) and Michael of Ephesus (fl. first half of the twelfth century).'°’ Eustratios, the metropolitan of Nicaea, commented on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics 2 and on Nicomachean Ethics 1 and 6. Michael, of whose life almost nothing is known, was much more prolific. His extant Aristotelian commentaries include those on Sophistical Refutations; on Aristotle’s zoological works, such as Generation of Animals, Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals; on Metaphysics 7-14; on Nicomachean Ethics 5, 9 and 10; scholia on Politics; commentaries on Parva naturalia and on Pseudo-Aristotle’s De coloribus. Both authors were the first to produce extended self-standing philosophical commentaries in Greek on the Nicomachean Ethics, Parva naturalia and Aristotle’s ‘zoological treatises’ since the Hellenistic era.*°*
Not surprisingly, the two major publications on the philosophical commentary in Byzantium produced roughly during the past decade focus on Eustratios’ and/or Michael’s contributions. These are Brill’s Medieval Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics edited by Charles Barber and David Jenkins (2009) and Springer’s The Parva naturalia in Greek, Arabic and Latin Aristotelianism: Supplementing the Science of the Soul, edited by Bérje Bydén and Filip Radovic (2018). Both volumes, which focus on a discrete part of the Aristotelian corpus, present a collaborative approach towards an in-depth analysis of the commentary tradition and strive to revise the traditional narrative that sees Byzantium as a passive repository of ancient Greek wisdom (of both science and philosophy). These publications recognize the long-lasting (beyond the late medieval period and up to the sixteenth century) and wide-reaching (across Europe) influence of Eustratios’ and Michael’s commentaries and treat them as authors and texts that engaged with Aristotle’s philosophy seriously and on their own terms. The more recent of the two, The Parva naturalia in Greek, Arabic and Latin Aristotelianism, moreover, adopts a comparative approach and discusses Michael of Ephesus’ commentaries on an equal footing with its counterparts in Latin and Arabic (works by Avicenna, Albert the Great and so forth). It exemplifies a new stage in the research on philosophical thought in Byzantium — one that posits it as interconnected and in dialogue with other intellectual cultures that were comparably engaged with the Aristotelian tradition. In this sense, its methodology is similar to that of the ERC-funded project Reassessing Ninth Century Philosophy: A Synchronic Approach to the Logical Traditions (9 SALT; 2016-20 at the University of Vienna), which studied synchronically the Latin, Greek, Syriac and Arabic philosophical traditions of logic in the ninth century.'°”
Eustratios’ and Michael’s combined exegetical output, and Michael’s in particular, however, should not be interpreted simply, or even predominantly, as individual scholarly achievements.''° They represent in equal measure (to say the least) their patroness’s ambition to fill in the gaps in the commentary literature on Aristotle available in the twelfth century, which in turn might be connected to Anna Komnene’s personal strategies of self-representation, as shown by Trizio in this volume. The pursuit of comprehensiveness by means of providing an exegetical reading of the entire Aristotelian corpus is exemplified by two other similar scholarly projects dating to the early fourteenth century and authored by George Pachymeres (1242—-ca. 1310) and Theodore Metochites (1270-1332).
In terms of institutional educational framework and questions of patronage, the cases of Pachymeres and Metochites present us with a constellation of factors different from what we have seen so far with the philosophical teaching of /ypatoi, such as Psellos and Italos, and in the case of Anna Komnene’s role in Eustratios of Nicaea’s and Michael of Ephesus’ exegetical work. Like the hypatoi ton philosophon, Pachymeres was actively involved in education while he was teaching at the Patriarchal school in Constantinople. ''’ His scholarly output is firmly embedded in the educational environment of early fourteenth-century Constantinople and resulted from Pachymeres’ teaching a curriculum that started with logic and physics and finished with theoretical mathematics and theology. He composed the Philosophia, an extensive compendium and paraphrase of Aristotelian philosophy in twelve books.''* Pachymeres also commented on Plato (e.g. on the dialogue Parmenides)''’ and wrote a textbook on the four sciences of the quadrivium. Producing a full critical edition of Pachymeres’ Philosophia has been the objective of an editorial project within the Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi — Commentaria in Aristotelem Byzantina series under the auspices of the Academy of Athens. At present, the Academy has published critical editions of Book 3 Commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo,''* Book 5 Commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorologica,''* Book 6 Commentary on Aristotle’ Parts of Animals,‘ *° Book 10 Commentary on the Metaphysics,''” and Book 11 Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics."'* Pachymeres also wrote running commentaries (as opposed to paraphrases) to some of Aristotle’s works, such as parts of the Organon, the Physics, Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics.''? Thus, Pachymeres’ case presents us with the rare opportunity, first, to compare his exegetical strategies in the Philosophia (an extended paraphrase) and in his running (lemmatic) commentaries and, second, to analyse his commentaries both within their didactic setting and as expressions of selfteaching and of his personal philosophical explorations. Much progress was made in this regard both by the editors of the Philosophia and by scholars such as Pantelis Golitsis. Nevertheless, any current interpretation remains partial and contingent on the publication of Pachymeres’ commentaries in their entirety.
A current assessment of the final significant Aristotelian enterprise we will mention in this brief survey shows that its study remains in an even more preliminary phase. Even though it is well known that the megas logothetes of emperor Andronikos II Theodore Metochites (d. 1332) produced paraphrases on all of Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy (including Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorologica, On the Soul and Parva naturalia, as well as Aristotle’s zoological works), very few of them are critically edited."*° According to Bydén, Metochites’ paraphrases of Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy were most likely first circulated ca. 1312-13; a possible alternative is adate ca. 1320-1.'~' There is little we could say about their significance for the history of the philosophical commentary at present, except to use them as an illustration of several core ideas discussed in our survey so far.
First, we have been signposting the relationship, albeit insufficiently articulated in existing scholarship, between the philosophical commentary, the processes of teaching and learning philosophy (especially Aristotelian philosophy) and the institutional and patronage frameworks which may or may not motivate and circumscribe the production of exegetical literature. The case of Metochites yet again differs from those we have seen before. A high-ranking politician and among the wealthiest people in early Palaiologan Byzantium, Metochites was not involved in teaching (except perhaps in his personal exchanges with his disciple and intellectual heir Nikephoros Gregoras) and often played the role of a patron rather than of a protégé. At the same time, he is famously and by his own account an ambitious and very keen student who spared no effort to find himself a teacher of mathematics, astronomy and harmonics. Finally, he had at his disposal one of the best Constantinopolitan libraries — that of the monastery of Christ the Saviour in Chora. With all this in mind, the rationale behind and purpose of Metochites’ Aristotelian paraphrases seem less clear. Issues of self-fashioning and of imperial patronage probably play a role in this case as well, but we may also wish to consider the extent to which the practice of paraphrasing relates to self-teaching and learning. '**
Second, the Metochitean paraphrases, written in the early fourteenth century, demonstrate nicely the profoundly genealogical nature of the practice of writing philosophical (and other) commentaries. While Michael of Ephesus emulated the late antique commentators of Aristotle, Metochites borrowed from Michael and, about a century later, George Scholarios’ own Aristotelian commentaries in fact abridged Metochites’ paraphrases.'*’ Scholars have usually interpreted this ‘concatenated’ character of the philosophical production of the Byzantines as an indication not only of its embeddedness in the tradition of Greek thought but also as a sign of its dependency, derivativeness and lack of originality. To borrow the expression from Trizio’s contribution, however, “commentaries do not merely attempt to clarify the ancient philosophical texts, but also address contemporary questions of meaning’.'** Moreover, they hold precious subversive potential, as a commentary of a work does not necessarily have to be supportive of the work’s thesis and outlook.**’ Fashioning oneself as another link in the chain of commentators perhaps brought additional cultural capital we cannot fully recognize yet. Furthermore, the extent to which Byzantine commentators oscillated closer to or further away from the exegesis they inherited may be dependent on the requirements of Byzantine education. Finally, we should note that, even though the majority of the extant self-standing Byzantine philosophical commentaries focus on Aristotle’s corpus, other authors’ texts were also furnished with an exegesis, albeit more rarely, for instance, Plato’s dialogues and Synesios’ On Dreams.'*° One way in which research on commentaries in Byzantium will expand in the future is by studying philosophical exegesis beyond the Aristotelian corpus.
When it comes to science in Byzantium, we define it widely, thus including more than the four mathematical sciences of the guadrivium, such as the epistemic fields of geography, medicine and botany.'*” However, science is not among the core areas of focus in this collection, and only the chapter by Inmaculada Pérez Martin addresses an exegetical text composed in connection to a ‘scientific’ field (geography). Nevertheless, it is worth formulating several general points on the subject, to give further context to the commentaries discussed throughout the volume. Education in natural philosophy, the mathematical sciences and medicine formed part of the same framework of teaching and learning whose institutionalization and ties to patronage were discussed earlier in relation to poetry, rhetoric and philosophy. Similarly, Byzantine science has been accused of being unoriginal and irrelevant in comparison with ancient Greek mathematics. Again, just as in the case of philosophy, scholars have only recently started to reassess the conscious choice of the Byzantines to model their intellectual production on the ancient and Hellenistic traditions they inherited.’**
In the opening sentence of his 1967 survey of Byzantine science, Vogel stated: “When the course of Byzantine history is surveyed as a whole, it will be seen that long periods of partial or complete neglect of the sciences alternated with periods of intensive activity.’*’ This is the impression created by the fluctuation between periods of abundant source material and periods almost completely devoid of scientific works amongst the texts preserved in Byzantine manuscripts. Vogel also saw the importance of the Byzantine contribution to the history of science in the role it played for the preservation of Hellenic science (a master narrative current scholarship strives to revise) and sketched its development in three phases, each defined by the dynamics of initial spectacular achievement and subsequent gradual decline (a historiographical model that also requires revision, albeit beyond the scope of the present volume and of this introduction). Forty-odd years later, Vogel’s chapter can now be complemented and revised thanks to the publication of A Companion to Byzantine Science within Brill’s Companions to the Byzantine World series.'*° In his overview of the mathematical sciences with the exception of astronomy included in the Companion, Fabio Acerbi rejects the usefulness of the categories of ‘originality’, ‘relevance’ and ‘(dis)continuity’ when studying Byzantine mathematics and qualifies the latter as ‘sectional, framing and embedded’:
Byzantine mathematics is sectional because it mainly comprises works that do not display a tight deductive structure; as a consequence, they can easily be, or actually are, partitioned in independent sections, or can easily be assembled to generate sectional texts ... Byzantine mathematics is framing (and not simply second-order) because it relates, to Greek mathematics and to itself, in the same way as, in a manuscript, a frame-commentary cum interlinear glosses relates to the main text: primers elaborate before, scholia above, compendia after ... Byzantine mathematics is finally deeply embedded — as a prestigious further step along the social ladder — in the highest socio-political milieux and in a rhetorical tradition that induces subtle modifications in the stylistic codes inherited from Greek antiquity.***
If we accept that Byzantine mathematics is framing, in the same way that a frame-commentary is, how do commentaries to mathematical works function in this general picture? Self-standing scientific commentaries in Byzantium are rare.’ However, at the same time, the generic instrumentarium employed for the purposes of scientific exegesis greatly surpasses the limits of the late antique commentary model, and it includes guadrivia, monographs, primers, compendia, letters, scholia and collections of scholia, notebooks, introductions, syntheses and synopses, collections of tables, Rechenbiicher, recensions and so forth.'’’ In addition, the nature of the mathematical material (especially in the spheres ofastronomy and astrology) and its applied use required continuous adaptation, for example of astronomical tables and the data they contain, or of the methods of calculation and combination. One of the most common adaptations of an astronomical table, for instance, relates to its reconfiguration for a new set of geographical coordinates. Finally, we should signal the importance of translations from Arabic, Persian, Latin and Hebrew — enterprises also motivated by the appreciation of accurate data or improved methods of calculation. The translation of nonHellenic knowledge as a special case of adaptation and exegesis is a specific feature of the scientific teaching and learning in Byzantium that did not play a role in the study of, for instance, Homer or Aristotle, and is thus worth mentioning here. '**
To conclude, we ought to state the obvious, namely that more research is needed on Byzantine science and on the role commentaries play in scientific education. However, we may also add that the contemporary approach towards the study of Byzantine mathematics, as outlined by Acerbi above, has the potential to help revise, update and advance scholarly methodologies applied to the study of other aspects of Byzantine intellectual culture and its educational context. Byzantine science is rarely taken into consideration by the general Byzantinist, who is traditionally focused on philology, literature and history. At the same time, the scholars in Byzantium who wrote on Ptolemy, Diophantos, Nicomachus and Euclid are more often than not the same as those who commented on Homer and Aristotle. If the Byzantine authors themselves worked across disciplinary divides, perhaps it is wise to follow their example when studying them.
In its engagement with the Byzantine commentary, this volume operates on two distinct levels. On the first level, it aims at introducing the reader to Byzantine commentaries: it provides an overview of the material available to those interested in Byzantium and outlines the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that the nature of the sources inevitably imposes on scholarship in the field. The volume also serves as a guide to current trends in the study of the Byzantine commentary and, furthermore, indicates various directions for future research.
On the second level, however, the editors and contributors collaborating on this collection purposefully go one step further than simply offering the reader a piece of solid scholarship. We wish to redeem the Byzantine commentary. We read, discuss and analyse it on its own terms, and we enquire into the specifically Byzantine aims behind the acts of preserving, commenting and adapting. In the research presented on the following pages, the contributors approach the process of commenting on ancient texts as a deliberate and culturally significant choice made by the commentators. Their analyses reveal that the practice of composing commentaries on ancient texts in Byzantium was more than a scholarly endeavour, often in service of an educational need. Commenting was also a creative and targeted enterprise of identity building. The cultural and intellectual identity of the Byzantine commentators is, indeed, profoundly genealogical. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that this genealogical character should not be taken as a sign of derivativeness. On the contrary, the genealogical embeddedness of Byzantine commentary practice should rather be interpreted as evidence for the fact that Byzantine authors were aware of their intellectual predecessors, acknowledged what they conceived as the immediate past of the knowledge corpus available, and worked within existing traditions, while at the same time never losing sight of the contemporary relevance of their source texts and the commentaries they were writing.
A Note on Style
Following a common practice in Byzantine Studies, we have adopted a mixed system of transliteration. Late antique and Byzantine names are generally transliterated, following the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ancient names appear in their common Latinized or Anglicized form, following the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Titles of ancient and Byzantine texts are given in English or, where this is conventional, in Latin. References to Eustathios’ Commentary (or: Parekbolai) on the Iliad and Commentary on the Odyssey include page and line numbers of the editio princeps by Niccolé Maiorano (Rome, 1542-9), which are included in the edition by van der Valk of the Commentary on the Iliad and those by Stallbaum (1825-6) and Cullhed (2016) of the Commentary on the Odyssey. They also give the volume, page and line numbers of the modern editions, which are followed in the TLG.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق