Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Floris Bernard - Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025-1081-Oxford University Press (2014).
395 Pages
Acknowledgements
It may appear as a typical act of Byzantine humility, but I honestly feel a bit uneasy that my name should appear alone on the cover of this book. The help, support, and ideas of many people have been vital in the long process of its coming into being.
Kristoffel Demoen has been father, midwife, and spiritual guide all in one. He led me on the path to eleventh-century Byzantine poetry by suggesting a master’s dissertation on Christophoros Mitylenaios. He was the generous, thoughtful, and understanding supervisor of my doctoral dissertation. His support has ranged from personal motivation to suggestions of better translations, and from patient correcting to paternal advice. In fact, this book should contain many footnotes with the indication “conversation with K. Demoen (Ghent 2006-12)’; I hope this acknowledgement can replace all these footnotes. Marc De Groote and Klaas Bentein were the other members of the Ghent project on eleventh-century poetry that provided the framework of my doctoral dissertation; I thank them for their valuable contributions.
Yanick Maes has been a guiding light in the misty regions of literary theory; his ideas have inspired many questions implicitly or explicitly present here, and his unrelenting readiness for discussion has refined my thinking on many points. Margaret Mullett steered the dissertation in a more focused direction when it was still in the phase of conception. It is no coincidence that even at the very end, a question that came from her made me rethink some of my terminology. Niels Gaul initiated me into some very important manuscripts, and inspired me to pursue my sociological approach. I also thank the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO), which provided the funding for the doctoral research project.
The result of this work, a doctoral dissertation, is what it is: part of a learning process. Its mistakes and oversights are numerous, and the decision to write it in English has made it appear yet more garbled and imperfect than it already was. An institutionally required ‘publication’ on the internet has given it more exposure than expected; I hope it will from now on be safely ignored in favour of the present book.
The Byzantinists present on my doctoral jury, Wolfram Horandner, Michael Jeffreys, and Marc Lauxtermann, were generous with useful comments and corrections. At the festive occasion of the viva, Marc Lauxtermann and Michael Jeffreys suggested the work should be published by OUP. They took it upon themselves to guide the dissertation towards a readable and publishable book. They helped me through the publishing process and suggested many welcome changes to the general format of the work. I thank them for their confidence and their advice.
During this phase of revision, a fund from BOF at Ghent University provided essential assistance, and a fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection gave me the ideal environment and resources to complete the work. Moreover, I could rely on the help of many friends and colleagues who shared their ideas and their current work with me. I owe much to Stratis Papaioannou’s willingness to let me read his work in advance of publication, and our discussions about the fascinating figure of Michael Psellos.
Foteini Spingou kept me updated about her important work on the Marcianus. Rossitza Schroeder, my neighbour at DO, was always ready to give helpful and insightful advice. I was fortunate to be able to count on the hospitality of Ilse De Vos, even in redoubtable places such as Leuven and Oxford. I learned much from seminars and conversations with Daniele Bianconi, Paolo Odorico, Charis Messis, Michael Griinbart, and Alexander Riehle.
Marc Lauxtermann once more scrutinized the penultimate draft, improving many translations, suggesting bibliography, and pointing out errors and omissions. Attention from his expert eye was the best thing that could have happened to this book. Elizabeth Jeffreys kindly provided many valuable suggestions and linguistic corrections, and gently steered me through the final stages of publication. Judith Ryder has been a wonderful proofreader, not only correcting linguistic mistakes but also helping to clear out vague or convoluted passages.
Notwithstanding all this expert help, my foolhardiness and my constant tampering with the text have undoubtedly enabled some mistakes to slip through the net.
Finally, I thank all those friends who have made the work on this book pleasurable and rewarding, thanks to their encouragement, understanding, and curiosity. I especially want to take the opportunity to thank Bert, Steven, Michel, my parents, sisters, grandparents, and my wife Elisabeth. This book is dedicated to the memory of Chrisje De Pauw, who was for many years secretary of the Department of Classics at Ghent University. Her legendary optimism, patience, and kindness of heart are precious gifts for which we will always be thankful.
Washington DC, March 2014
Note to the Reader
I have chosen not to anglicize personal names of people living in the medieval Byzantine empire: hence, for example, loannes Mauropous instead of John Mauropous. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.
Introduction
1.1. BUILDING A BRIDGE
One of the most exciting events in eleventh-century Constantinople must have been the horse races. Even Christophoros Mitylenaios could not escape the lure of this spectacular sport. It so happened that, on one particular day when horse races were being held, some of his friends were away in the countryside. They were, quite naturally, burning with curiosity to find out how the race went. For their convenience, Christophoros composed a profuse piece of poetic sports journalism (poem 90). This is the introduction to the poem:
Christophoros’ poem will act as a faithful mirror, making his friends feel that they were really present at the horse race of ‘yesterday’. They only need to look into the mirror of his words to imagine the race in their mind’s eye. The impression is thus created that this poem was written and read on one particular day, the day after the races, since the race day is referred to as yOés (‘yesterday’). But the poem is, of course, not intended only for Christophoros’ friends.
As a poet of some repute, Christophoros must have known he was in fact writing for a wider public. The indication y@é need not be taken literally, but rather as a device to heighten the liveliness of this poetic sports report. Nevertheless, the poem expects of its readers that they can imagine the x0es as the day before their reading, and that they can imagine themselves in the place of Christophoros’ friends. They can look into the mirror of Christophoros’ ‘present words’ and ‘see’ the races.
But can this mirror still work for us, at such a distance from the Constantinople of Christophoros and his friends? Can we still imagine the y0és of the poem as the day before the day we read this poem, and conjure up the races in our minds? The cultural gap between us, modern readers, and the world the poem evokes may simply be too great: we are not able to relive the thrill of an eleventhcentury Constantinopolitan horse race, to become emotionally involved with all the details about the control of the reins, the turmoil when the corners were taken, the unexpected twists in the course of the race.
To make things worse, Christophoros’ mirror is also literally broken: the manuscript transmitting the poem is so badly damaged that about half the verses can no longer be read. We cannot even establish which colour won the race that day. The mirror of Christophoros’ poem, to use an image familiar to Byzantinists, is distorting not only because it presents reality through unfamiliar rhetorical patterns,’ but also because not all words are ‘present’ any more. The y@és in the poem, that particular day in the eleventh century, belongs now to a past we can no longer retrieve.
This double loss of connection with the world of the poem is indicative of the problems that haunt us when we try to read Byzantine poetry. Notwithstanding all our laments about the sterility of Byzantine poetry, this poem shows us a world of living experience, popular events, and curious readers. Yet readership of this poetry nowadays is confined to professional scholars, and even these professional scholars still feel the need to justify their occupation with these texts. Byzantinists are still struggling to win acceptance for the idea, self-evident in other domains, that their texts deserve to be studied and explained.
In recent decades, most scholars of Byzantine literature have finally left the traditional approach, which, as has been amply noted by now,” did not regard Byzantine literature as literature, but predominantly approached it as a potential (but unreliable) source from which to extract historical information. As to its literary merits, it was seen merely as an artificial and lifeless imitation of ancient literature, and, as such, it was bound to fall short of modern aesthetic expectations. By contrast, scholars now profess that they study this literature ‘as literature’, and they do their utmost to prove that this poetry is worth studying. But these rehabilitations of Byzantine poetry often employ exactly the same (romantic) presuppositions that influenced the traditional scholarly readings: that poetry deserving of the name should contain sensitivity, originality, and experience taken from real life.’
It is difficult to leave behind (or to recognize as modern) the aesthetic principles underlying our reading strategies. And thus, while Margaret Mullett stated some time ago that ‘it is questionable whether Byzantine literature is best served in the 1990s by such a primitively evaluative approach’,* one may still observe that the study of Byzantine literature is in the position where it has to justify the choice of its subject.
Poetry of the eleventh century, in this respect, has not fared better than poetry of other periods in Byzantium. It may be fairly said that it is even less explored than tenth- and twelfth-century poetry. In itself quite considerable in quantity, it received no more than two and a half pages in Hunger’s magisterial Handbuch.° The few translations and commentaries that do exist fall outside the focus of international scholarship.° This is all the more remarkable since the poetry especially of Christophoros and Mauropous sometimes received appreciation for its vividness and wit.’
There may be several reasons for this lack of serious engagement with eleventh-century poetry.® It cannot claim to contain the seeds of modern Greek literature, for which twelfth-century poetry is so important. Neither is it as narrowly connected to Antiquity as some ninth- and tenth-century poetry. Thus, deprived of an affinity with either Antiquity or Modernity, separated from the developments in the West (although undoubtedly sometimes running parallel to them), and apparently not imitated in other cultural spheres, poetry of the eleventh century is part of what can be described as a “dead end’,
The problem of the confrontation of our modern aesthetic experience with medieval texts has been taken up in depth by Hans Robert Jauss.? Such an experience, according to Jauss, can only reach its full potential if the modern reader takes a step back from his first reaction of pleasure or displeasure, and reflects upon this experience to become aware of the distinctive ‘otherness’ (Alteritdat) of medieval texts.
We then recognize that our horizon of expectation, determined by a set of ingrained presuppositions, has no universal value. By reconstructing a medieval horizon of expectations (which can only remain, of course, a reconstruction, as Jauss emphasizes), we can come a step closer to a better understanding of the text’s original meaning and reception, and extract a possible meaning, as we are forced to revise our own horizon of expectations.
Even if we still cannot enjoy these texts, we will be able, thanks to this reconstruction, to build a hermeneutic bridge to an alien world.'® But in this process we have to discard, with some effort, the very tenets of our thinking about literature. So we have to put into perspective the concept of a literary work (Werk) as a singular product of a creator devoted to artistic ideals, and take distance from some deep-rooted distinctions, such as those between didactic and fictional, purposeful and purposeless (‘zweckbestimmt oder zweckfrei’), etc., oppositions in which the second term of each pair is for us an indicator of ‘literariness’."’
I believe that Jauss’ insistence on the impact of these very different ‘horizons of expectation’ can prevent us from imposing our own expectations and concepts when approaching Byzantine literature. This may go as far as to question the very names we use to label these texts: namely ‘literature’ and ‘poetry’. These presuppose certain aesthetic expectations that may be frustrated when we are confronted with Byzantine poetry, and hence may hinder an objective view of these texts and their aesthetics. This book aims to critically reconsider such assumptions, and to initiate a quest for the expectations and assumptions held by the Byzantine authors and readers, a need that has been recognized by other scholars as well.'*
Hence, I will pay close attention to the discourse used by the Byzantines themselves when they dealt with what we call ‘literature’.
Another problem that I believe is inherent in the field of Byzantine literary studies is the one-sided approach to the act of interpreting texts. It has long been taken for granted that the interpreter’s task is to ‘decode’ a single message enclosed in the text. This message is always believed to be obfuscated by thick layers of rhetoric. It is this operation of decoding that is endemic to almost every modern scholarly reading of Byzantine texts. Starting from the observation that these texts were full of rhetoric, it was (and is) customary to scrape off the layers of rhetoric and topoi, to arrive at a message that is sincere and true—and, ideally, slightly subversive.
It is, of course, salutary not to take texts too literally; Byzantine texts seldom transmit straightforward messages.'* But on the other hand, this can easily lead to over-interpretation, ignoring that rhetoric for the Byzantines was not necessarily a way to obfuscate a message, but simply the most appropriate way to communicate.
It is the goal of this book, rather than interpreting texts, to describe the contexts in which meaning and meaning-giving are produced.’° It intends to chart the conventions and the interpretive strategies with which a reading community approaches a text. What we need to look at, therefore, are the reading assumptions held by Byzantine readers of poetry.
What were they paying attention to when they read poetry? How did they come into contact with poetry in the first place, and how did the medium of reading impact their experience? Who is this reading public, and how large is it? Complete answers to these questions are, of course, impossible. Yet, by examining the material remains (that is, the manuscripts), or by observing how the texts themselves anticipate contemporary readings, we may piece together some tendencies.
Another concern of this book is the relationship between society and poetry. It has been the merit of Alexander Kazhdan and others to pull Byzantine texts out of a kind of immanent timeless sphere of philological textuality, and to situate them in their historical context.'° Consequently, Kazhdan set about the task of interpreting Byzantine texts as dots in the matrix of social and ideological forces exerting influence on the author.
The most systematic application of this undertaking is probably his study “The social views of Michael Attaleiates’, where he attempts to locate Attaleiates between the various ideological movements of late eleventh-century Byzantium.’” He did the same for Mauropous, albeit within a more restrained scope.'® It can be said that this kind of study primarily saw the relationship between text and society as ‘reflective’: a text duly reflected the author’s ideological stance and social background.’
These historicist interpretations run the risk of underestimating the impact of genre. When Mauropous portrays an emperor overcome with remorse, this is seen as scathing critique, without taking into consideration the genre of katanyktic poems.”° Christophoros’ poem 55, requesting a promotion, is considered as a reflection of the liberal cultural policies of Monomachos, an interpretation which ignores the conventions of requests and petitions.*'
In this respect, Margaret Mullett’s study “The Madness of Genre’ has done much to reconsider the formative power of genre.”” Instead of using genre to carve up the mass of texts and establish false continuities, Mullett’s concept of genre looked at the intersection between immediate occasion and inherited forms.
Interpretations that take a text to ‘reflect’ a given social force are also prone to underestimate the possibly manipulative and misleading aspects of texts. These texts defended interests; they did not seek to provide a historical record for us. Instead of reflecting a social background, they sometimes wanted to change the social positions of the authors, or to carve out new social positions.
The ‘apologetic’ and self-representative aspects of Psellos’ works are now beginning to be seriously studied,”* and I think that this track should also be pursued for his poetry and that of his contemporaries.
In any case, a more nuanced view of the relationship of a text to society would be welcome. For medieval texts, Gabrielle Spiegel has argued for an approach that recognizes the historicity of a text, but not to the detriment of its specific textual features. This approach would ideally take into account the concrete embedding of a text in the sphere of its production and reading, considering also its role as an active social agent; in sum, what Spiegel has called the ‘social logic’ of a medieval text.”4
Therefore the present study will not attempt to explain poems on the basis of the broad ideological currents and cultural trends of the eleventh century. Rather, it will try to provide some clues for understanding the immediate occasions and the reading contexts of poems and poetry collections.
As a result, this book intends to place itself among the functional approaches that some scholars have been initiating. These approaches demonstrate that Byzantine poems were used in a real-life context.*° As such, Wolfram Horandner and Marc Lauxtermann have elucidated the original inscriptional context of epigrams, and shed light on the relationship between epigrams in books and inscribed epigrams.”°
This study will also pay much attention to the sociological side of the production and use of poetry. A central question is what social motivations drove someone to commit himself to the act of writing poetry. My approach to this question has been influenced by the conceptual framework in the works of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.”’ To be sure, his methods and concepts cannot be readily transplanted to medieval literature.
But his approach makes clear that aesthetic features in texts have a social relevance that cannot be deduced directly from either the text alone or from the broad cultural currents of the time, but is played out on the level of the ‘field’, a system of people and institutions that is heavily influenced by external social interests, but also functions according to its own laws. Different persons attempt to defend or conquer positions (or to define new ones), each one of them potentially yielding some form of cultural or social capital.
Moreover, Bourdieu insists that the ‘belief’ in cultural value is something constructed by people who have an interest in its construction. This can make us alert to strategies aimed at defending and advancing ideas about culture that serve above all the producers of culture themselves. In this vein, I will consider poems as socially meaningful acts by which persons aspired to, or defended, certain cultural positions, in turn tied to social and/or material advantages. Hence, I will ask what social agenda the poet had in mind when dedicating a poem, asserting his authorship, responding to reactions of his readers, or entering into polemic.
This set of questions has resulted in seven chapters, each of which approaches our texts from a different angle. Chapter 2, ‘Concepts’, deals with the problem of the Byzantine perception and definition of literature and poetry. The third chapter, ‘Readings’, focuses on the circulation, transmission, and performance of poetry. It seeks to shed light on the expectations that Byzantines held when they came into contact with poetry. Chapter 4, ‘Collections’, builds further on the preceding chapter, looking into the ways poems were assembled in manuscripts and presented to their readers.
The fifth chapter, ‘Ambitions’, explains the function of poetic production as a tool for social advancement. This chapter also analyses the self-representative strategies that poets use to defend their position as intellectuals. The following two chapters describe specific contexts in which learned poetry was produced: that is, the world of the schools and of rival intellectuals. In Chapter 6, ‘Education’, it is argued that the various independent schools are focal points of intellectual life and literary production in the eleventh century.
This chapter also concentrates on didactic poetry, considering it as part of the transmission of knowledge in a school context. Chapter 7, ‘Competitions’, presents the logikos agon, the ‘contest of words’, as a framework for polemical and satirical poems. I attempt in this chapter to situate these poems in the struggles that defined the intellectual field. The final chapter, ‘Patronage’, investigates the material motivations for writing poetry: how was poetry rewarded or funded, and how did poets justify this system?
1.2. THE ELEVENTH CENTURY: SOME TENDENCIES
Since these questions necessarily involve a consideration of the broader historical context, I will give here a short sketch of the developments that I believe created a particular context for the production and reading of literature and poetry. The period from 1025 (the death of Basileios II) to 1081 (the ascent to the throne of Alexios Komnenos) will form the chronological framework of this study; we will venture outside this period only rarely to discuss literary and meta-literary texts. This is for a good reason: I believe that many of the observations cannot be valid for other periods, since before 1025 and after 1081 imperial authority was based on different premises, and the intellectual elite had a different place in society.
The period between 1025 and 1081 was marked by many changes and insecurities.** The empire’s social composition, imperial ideology, and world view were not the same in 1081 as they had been fiftyfive years before. But it is far from easy to explain the purpose behind these changes and to assess their eventual consequences.
The emperors of the mid eleventh century were only very loosely connected to the legitimate Macedonian dynasty. Up to 1055, they customarily seized the throne by marrying Zoe, one of the last descendants of the dynasty. Romanos III Argyros (1028-34) was the first to do so. Partly due to these legitimacy problems, court intrigues were rampant in this period. The short-lived so-called Paphlagonian dynasty, with Michael IV (1034-41) and Michael V (1041-2), came to power by means of court intrigues. The popular uprising against Michael V in 1042 made it clear that the populace could be set in motion by appealing to their loyalty to the dynasty.
The reign of Konstantinos IX Monomachos (1042-55), although beset by rebellions and wars, was relatively stable. But when Theodora, Zoe’s sister, died in 1056 after briefly reigning alone, the Macedonian lineage effectively died out. The subsequent emperors, quickly succeeding each other, were often puppets helped to the throne by various political factions in the capital, or by military rebellions. The impressive number of military uprisings, rebellions, and usurpations shows how fragile imperial power was in the mid eleventh century.’
Only in 1081 did one of the military aristocrats, Alexios Komnenos, succeed in establishing a stable reign and a long-lasting dynasty. The more autocratic traits of his regime signified a marked departure from the preceding fifty years of shaky imperial power.
Perhaps out of a desire to compensate for their questionable dynastic status, these emperors embarked on a policy of lavish donations and promotions: they extended the apparatus of court officials and civil servants, and made the higher echelons of the civil hierarchy accessible to people hitherto barred from it.*° Gifts of the emperor, in the form of promotions, entitlements to supervision over monasteries, tax exemptions, or rights to levy taxes were important sources of income.*' Partly as a consequence of these policies, vertical mobility is a very important and prominent characteristic of social change in the eleventh century.*” This is certainly also related to the prosperous economic conditions of the time.*’ An increasing number of people gained access to lucrative positions in the bureaucracy. More than before or afterwards, non-aristocratic people were able to accumulate wealth and influence.
New distributions of power and wealth emerged. The official hierarchy of state functions eroded and gave way to more informal dependence relationships. The court, loosely defined, was the place where people forged alliances, competed with each other for promotions, and sought to have access to the emperor, or, failing that, to people who in turn exercised influence on him. Networking and intercession became ever more decisive for the advancement of careers.**
Closeness to the emperor was of utmost importance, but it was a prerogative that could easily be lost. Psellos’ letters are an excellent testimony to the ever-shifting privilege of access to the emperor, which is urgently needed to conduct his business. New bonds of social coherence, aptly called ‘solidarities’ by Ahrweiler, came in the place of old hierarchies.*° Alliances were formed, but could shift easily. Relationships were based on the reciprocity of services. Demonstrations of friendship can in this respect be seen as primarily instrumental.*°
These new distributions of social forces and other means of establishing power permitted the formation of an elite which was in many respects a new elite. Its members did not possess traditional assets such as wealth or high birth, but made creative use of other resources (especially intellectual) to gain influence in the socially complicated world of the court.
These were the men who profited from the opportunities that education offered them to make social advancement. Typically, they first rose upwards in civil ranks, became judges in the provinces when they were young, and were adorned with a string of ever more imposing titles at court. Often, but not always, they also pursued brilliant careers in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contemporary term for this group is 76 woAutiKov yévos, mostly translated with a cognate of ‘civil’. It is primarily within this civil elite that intellectual abilities and, with them, poetry, became important assets.
Frequently opposed to this civil class is the military aristocracy (76 oTpaTwwTiKov yevos), consisting of families possessing land properties in the east, whose members were at the same time high-ranking army commanders. They propagated an ideology centred on martial prowess and clan adherence, an ideology that ultimately, under the Komnenian dynasty, came to define the image of the ideal emperor.*” These families, Doukai, Dalassenoi, Komnenoi, sometimes stood frustrated on the sidelines, but sometimes successfully managed to seize the throne, as Isaakios Komnenos did in 1057.
They frequently forged alliances and entertained relations with the civil class, and many of them had a power base in Constantinople. Hence the antagonism between these two classes has rightly been called into question.*® Yet it remains a fact that this antagonism was clearly felt and expressly put into words by authors like Psellos. Describing the rebellion of the military leaders against the weak ‘civil’ emperor Michael VI Diogenes (1068-71), he represents this rebellion as a clash between 76 oAutixdv yévos and 76 orpatiwriKov yévos.? On the other hand (just one of the many contradictions surrounding the figure of Psellos), he himself, the ultimate exponent of the civil elite, entertained close friendly relationships through his letters with, for example, the Doukai family.
An important figure in eleventh-century history is Michael Keroularios, the extremely influential patriarch (1043-58) eventually brought down with the help of Michael Psellos.*° He stood for a more populist ideology. The subsequent patriarchs, Konstantinos Leichoudes (1059-64) and Ioannes Xiphilinos (1064-75), were both from a background more narrowly connected with the civil and intellectual elite. The city populace in Constantinople gained in importance, playing an influential role in toppling Michael V in 1042.*1 The eleventh century also witnessed a tradition of mystic monasticism centred on the charisma and the memory of Symeon the New Theologian (died 1022), who proclaimed a message of individual religiosity embedded in traditional asceticism and mysticism. His pupil and ardent supporter, Niketas Stethatos, wrote the Vita of his spiritual master, as well as a great quantity of religious and mystic writings.
Psellos expressed the antagonism between the intellectual gentleman and the conservative monk most expressly in a letter to Keroularios,*” but the precise extent of their ideological differences is difficult to assess. Ljubarskij has demonstrated that both parties sometimes adopted the same lines of argumentation (in the attitude towards Classical Antiquity, for instance).** Conversely, Symeon the
New Theologian voiced his contempt for worldly intellectuals, but some of the same motifs (such as the insecurity of an ambitious life) also occur in the later poems of Mauropous. Joan Hussey’s study on the subject may be right in concluding that the basic ideas held by both ‘ascetics’ and ‘humanists’ were informed by Hellenism and Christianity alike, and that occasional clashes are rather grounded in political differences than in ideological oppositions.*” Monastic and ascetic ideals were also greatly valued in the milieu of the intellectuals, and were even, as we will see, transposed to their own self-representations.
For at least a short period of time during Monomachos’ reign, a ‘gouvernement des philosophes’ was in place, built around a clique of Michael Psellos and his friends.*° The function of ‘consul of philosophers’, created around 1046 especially for Psellos, gave official sanction to this intellectual precedence. In a certain sense, the position of the intellectual in the mid eleventh century was unique. His later colleagues in the Komnenian period were dependent professionals, seeking, and indeed begging for, patronage.*” And during the autocratic reign of Basileios II, intellectual efforts were tightly controlled by the emperor himself; intellectual occupations served as a rather secondary means of consolidating a high status in society. But in the few years in between, learning (hoi logoi) in its pure form was represented as something to be socially rewarded and sanctioned on an official basis. Obviously, this idea was developed and propagated by the intellectuals themselves; but some emperors were apparently all too willing to endorse this view. The reign of Konstantinos Monomachos in particular appears as a hotbed of cultural and intellectual achievements. The emperor funded building projects and was also an important figure in the patronage of literature. It was during his reign that all three of our poets came to occupy important functions.
New intellectual preoccupations came to the foreground in the eleventh century. Law was one of them. Psellos and his friend Ioannes Xiphilinos probably based a considerable part of their intellectual reputation on their legal knowledge. Philosophy is another domain that is frequently mentioned as regaining vigour in this time, under the impulse of Psellos.*® Psellos in any case identified himself as a philosopher, and took pride in the fact that he blended philosophy with what he called ‘rhetoric’. Rhetoric flourished: panegyric speeches for emperors, funeral orations, letters of all sorts, and a plethora of occasional texts that are harder to pin down to a separate genre. Teaching played an enormous (and underestimated) role in the oeuvre of especially Psellos: apart from summaries in various fields of knowledge, many of his texts deal with the practical circumstances of teaching. Evidently, the rhetoric texts produced by this elite are without exception written in a learned, highbrow, and sometimes deliberately obscure Greek.
The intellectual field, if we may so call it, had no clear-cut structure. Struggles and polemics were the order of the day. Personal relationships, especially with the emperor, were also in this domain the decisive factor. The positions occupied by intellectuals were lucrative but insecure. Favours were temporary and imperial benevolence could shift quickly. This could happen when a new emperor from the outside seized the throne, such as Isaakios Komnenos in 1057; but even under the same emperor a fall from favour was always imminent. This fate befell Psellos and Mauropous towards the end of Monomachos’ reign, when they and some of their friends were forced to leave the capital under circumstances that are not entirely clear.
That the mid eleventh century was a fruitful time for cultural and intellectual life lies beyond doubt, but the exact background and purpose are difficult to gauge. This is not so much due to a dearth of sources, but rather to the difficulty of interpreting them. A particular problem in this respect is the fact that one person dominates cultural life in this period: Michael Psellos. By the sheer quantity of his works alone he towers above the rest of his contemporaries. In his function of consul of philosophers, and later as imperial preceptor (of the future emperor Michael VII), he seems to have had a firm control over the intellectual field. It is notoriously difficult to sift a reliable voice from the myriad representations he gives of himself and of his opinions. He himself says: ‘I do not know who I am, whether a philosopher, or perhaps another animal even more complex than Typhon.”? Notions such as philosophy and rhetoric are ambivalent, and it is hazardous to assess his stance towards Antiquity and Christian theology, both of which play a great role in the content and language of his works.°° Consequently, there is considerable dissent among scholars over the question of how to interpret the figure of Psellos. Are his philosophical pursuits to be considered as the germs of an upcoming humanism,”' or as rational philosophical inquiries enjoying a short-lived atmosphere of free intellectual thought, only to be curbed by the advent of the Komnenoi,”” or even as subversive neo-pagan thinking?°* Or should we rather view his ‘philosophy’ as a means for self-representation, used merely as an aggrandizing title that loosely refers to his derivative scientific texts?°*
Hence, there remain many questions attached to general developments and tendencies in the eleventh century. Is the intellectual and civil orientation of the emperors of the mid eleventh century to blame for the military disasters against the Seldjuks in the later decades?”°
Was Monomachos a weak and indulgent emperor, squandering the resources of the empire, or was he a vigorous reformer of state and institutions, and a patron of cultural life?°° Are Monomachos’ educational reforms a step in the direction of a potentially enlightened university,’ or were they aimed at a tighter centralizing control of bureaucrats? And does the eventual ascent to power of the Komnenoi signify an important break with eleventh-century developments, or are their reforms a continuation of existing trends?°® In short, in important matters the eleventh century remains a period that is ‘hard to interpret’.°’ We can only discern certain developments running counter to each other, without understanding precisely how they clashed, or how far-reaching their impact was.
1.3. POETIC TEXTS IN BYZANTIUM, 1025-1081
As has just been demonstrated, the period from 1025 to 1081 forms a historical and cultural unity, with borders defined by the ending and beginning of periods of tight imperial control. These chronological limits moreover correspond more or less neatly with the first datable poems of Christophoros on the one hand and the last datable poems of Psellos on the other hand.
The effect of these chronological boundaries is that some notable poets fall outside the scope of this study, although they will occasionally turn up to provide a background. This is the case with some poets flourishing during the reign of Basileios II: Symeon the New Theologian, Nikephoros Ouranos, Symeon the Metaphrast, Ioannes Geometres, and the shady figures of Ioannes of Melitene and the Anonymous Patrician.®’ At the other end of the century, the reign of Alexios I Komnenos witnessed a new generation of poets such as Theophylaktos of Ochrid, Philippos Monotropos, Nikolaos of Kerkyra, Manuel Straboromanos, and perhaps Alexios himself. We will be concerned with the generation between: men (indeed, all men) who came of age under Romanos III Argyros (1028-34) or his immediate successors, attained the summit of their careers under Konstantinos IX Monomachos (1043-55), and in one way or another remained active in the subsequent decades. Niketas of Herakleia, already writing poems in the 1070s, can be situated at the transition from our generation of poets to the next one.
Although the writing and reading of versified texts in general will be the object of research, the focus will mainly be on the secular learned poetry written by a select group of people based in Constantinople. As a result, vernacular poetry and hymnographic poetry largely fall outside the scope of this book. For vernacular poetry, this can be easily justified: it has left only minimal traces in written texts firmly datable to the eleventh century. We can assume, of course, that vernacular poetry was being composed, and that it circulated orally. But it is only in the twelfth century that the first substantial written remains come to the surface, so a study of this type of text would necessarily involve a wider chronological perspective.
Hymnographic poetry was composed in the eleventh century by Christophoros and Mauropous, and, it should not be forgotten, by poets living in monastic communities in southern Italy.°' However, hymnographic poetry would require a separate study to deal with questions of function, circulation, and the like, which are, I believe, quite different from those of secular poetry.
It would be a mistake, however, to give the impression that vernacular and liturgical poetry are worlds apart from learned secular poetry. On the contrary, there was permeation between these categories of poetry (categories which were created post factum in any case):°* the fact alone that some poets were active in several of these categories is indicative of this.
Even if we narrow down our corpus of texts thus, it remains a heterogeneous amalgam with ill-defined borders. As said, it is considerable in quantity, but it is still dwarfed by twelfth-century poetic production.®* Although dactylic hexameters, elegiac distichs, and anacreontics are still used, as in previous centuries, the dodecasyllable is the dominant metre. This typically Byzantine metre combines the traditional prosodic pattern of the iambic trimeter with new rhythmic patterns, based on expiratory stress. Each dodecasyllable counts twelve syllables, has a stress on the penultimate syllable, and has a caesura after either the fifth or the seventh syllable.°* At the same time, almost each dodecasyllable from our period can be scanned as a iambic trimeter, if one is not too precise about the quantity of the dichrona (alpha, iota, upsilon). The politikos stichos is also used extensively; this more recent metre was exclusively based on rhythm and not on prosody, and was later to develop into the most favoured metre of Greek popular poetry.
Three names immediately come to mind: those of Christophoros Mitylenaios, Iloannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. They tower above their contemporary colleagues in terms of the quantity of manuscripts in which their poems are preserved, the number of poems still extant, and their reputation (in Byzantine times as well as now).
Christophoros Mitylenaios’ poems are probably the oldest of these three. Almost all our knowledge about this poet derives from the poems themselves or from the lemmata that accompany the poems in the manuscripts. The historical events or persons mentioned in his poems can all be situated in the period from 1034 to around 1045.°° The longest of the lemmata reads: ‘Various verses of Christophoros Mitylenaios, patrikios and anthypatos, becoming krites of Paphlagonia and Armeniaka.”*” There is also a seal that probably belonged to him,°* and which, as far as I can see, has gone unnoticed in studies on Christophoros. It mentions the functions of protospatharios, judge of the velum, and krites of Paphlagonia. Moreover, Christophoros has left something as a sphragis at the end of poem 114. Here, he mentions his function of imperial secretary (dvoypadeds), and the neighbourhood of Constantinople in which he lived, Protasiou (see also poem 36.12).
The collection of 145 poems of Christophoros was given the title orixot dudopor in the manuscripts. It is preserved as a whole in the Grottaferrata manuscript Crypt. Z.a.XXIX (thirteenth century), but the mice that Christophoros prophetically foresaw devouring his books in poem 103 have gnawed at the manuscript and thus considerably damaged his textual legacy.°? In the other manuscripts that preserve poems of Christophoros, the poems mostly appear in the same order as in the Cryptensis, which indicates that there once existed an authoritative collection (prepared by the poet himself ?).7°
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The editio princeps of Christophoros’ “Various verses’ by Antonio Rocchi was swiftly superseded by the edition of Eduard Kurtz, who not only provided very acceptable conjectures for partially damaged verses in the Cryptensis but also meticulously identified Christophoros’ poems in other manuscripts. These manuscripts supplemented 552 verses of the 1612 verses that are illegible in the Cryptensis. Since then, it has been possible to make a small number of corrections and additions,”’ which are now incorporated in the new edition by Marc De Groote.”” Christophoros’ poems, as their title indicates, are a hotchpotch of genres, reflecting various occasions. Religious epigrams, funeral poems (especially for family members), descriptions of events in Constantinople, many satirical and polemical pieces and mocking epigrams, riddles and other sophistic Spielereien, encomia on nature phenomena, etc. are all present. Christophoros Mitylenaios’ poetry gives us a diverse picture of eleventh-century Constantinople: its horse races, festivals, monuments, streets, churches. His poems, often witty and playful, deride contemporaries who are credulous, vain, hypocritical, or otherwise subject to human flaws.
Christophoros may also be the author of the long poem Eis 7ov Mavdxynv rept 706 povArov, transmitted before poem 65 in two manuscripts,”* but the poem is not present in the Grottaferrata manuscript. Even if Christophoros is not the author,”* the poem, describing Georgios Maniakes’ rebellion in 1043, must surely date from the eleventh century. It is at any rate the longest hexametric poem of the period.
Apart from his oréyou 5udopor, Christophoros also composed four calendars in four different metres (stichera, canones, iambic disticha (dodecasyllables), and dactylic hexameters). These calendars, which honour day by day all the saints of the year, are transmitted in many more manuscripts than his or/yor duddopou, and were even translated into Slavonic languages.’” The iambic disticha were included in the Menaea of the orthodox liturgy, which secured them a lasting popularity.”°
Ioannes Mauropous is, after Psellos, perhaps the best known author of the eleventh century. His literary legacy is for ever determined by Vat. gr. 676, a manuscript of his collected works, compiled and arranged by himself.’” The poetic section of the Vaticanus contains 99 pieces. At the beginning of the manuscript we also find some book epigrams or prefaces,’® and, at the end, an epigram by his secretary Hesaias.”? The 99 poems are also preserved in some later copies, clearly dependent on the Vaticanus.*° His poetry has been edited on the basis of the key manuscript by Johannes Bollig and Paul de Lagarde.*' His thoughtfully arranged collection revolves around the theme of the relationship between word and life. It also testifies to the blissful life at the court of Konstantinos Monomachos and it provides a lively poetic counterpart to many works of art.
Mauropous was one of the most important intellectuals of his time. He was a teacher and friend of Psellos, who dedicated to him not only numerous letters, but also a glowing encomium.** He functioned under Konstantinos Monomachos as a court orator, writing orations for important occasions, and authoring the Neara, the foundation document of Monomachos’ law school attached to the monastery of St George in Mangana. Around 1049-50, he was removed from court by being promoted to the metropolitan see of faraway Euchaita.** In advanced age, probably in the 1070s, he returned to Constantinople, to the monastery of John the Baptist tes Petras, where he continued to be active as an author.**
Since Mauropous’ collection is, by his own account in poem 1, a selection from a greater corpus of poems, we can assume that Mauropous is the author of other poems not transmitted by Vat. gr. 676. There is a didactic poem about etymology surviving in two later manuscripts, both of which attribute it to Mauropous.*° There are also some dodecasyllables transmitted in the akolouthia for the Three Hierarchs (whose feast Mauropous is said to have initiated).*° Many notices in manuscripts ascribe this whole akolouthia to Mauropous, so it is reasonable to assume that the verses are indeed from Mauropous’ hand.
Mauropous’ poetic oeuvre comprises epigrams on religious works of art, epigrams for books, polemical poems, encomia on the imperial family, and funeral poems on emperors and high-ranking officials. His efs éavrdv poems, introspective poems in imitation of Gregory of Nazianzos, are quite unique for this period. Mauropous also composed a considerable number of hymnographic canones, of which some are still unedited.*”
The third important poet of the eleventh century is Michael Psellos. His works are of a dazzling quantity and diversity. The most famous now is his Chronographia, a largely autobiographical history of the eleventh century. He also wrote many occasional orations, hundreds of letters, and many short works in almost every field of knowledge: theology, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, astrology, occult sciences, and many more. In contrast to Mauropous and Christophoros, no comprehensive collection of Michael Psellos’ poetry was ever made in the Byzantine period. The full extent of his poetic corpus is therefore yet more unclear. Many manuscripts tend to ascribe poems to him that are surely not his. Westerink’s edition (which also provides each poem with a Latin title) lists 37 genuine and 55 pseudo-Pselliana.** In his poetry, we see some of the multiple roles that Psellos played in contemporary society: the role of teacher, most importantly, but also those of the courtier and the contested intellectual. The bulk of his poems is made up of didactic poems, of which nine are lengthy poems on diverse subjects such as biblical exegesis, grammar, rhetoric, law, medicine, theology, and ecclesiastical history. A very remarkable feature is that these large didactic poems are all, except the poem on medicine, written in politikoi stichoi and dedicated to emperors. Psellos also wrote a long funeral poem on Maria Skleraina, the mistress of Konstantinos Monomachos, some court poetry for Isaakios Komnenos, two notable satirical poems, some hymnographic poetry, and (perhaps) some epigrams.
Even for some of the poems that Westerink listed as genuine, false ascriptions cannot be ruled out: poems 14 De metro iambico, 15 De regimine, 20 In Comneni sepulcrum, 31 In sanctum Georgium, 32 In Photium are all transmitted in late and/or untrustworthy manuscripts. Whoever the author may have been, poem 20 refers to an eleventh-century event, and poem 31 is likely to be a celebration of the church of St George in Mangana, founded by Konstantinos Monomachos. Also in the case of poem 30, the grounds for attributing it to Psellos are highly questionable: two of the four manuscripts in fact seem to connect it instead with Christophoros.
The pseudo-Pselliana are a very heterogeneous group of poems. Poems 53 to 61 are didactic poems, for various reasons not to be attributed to Psellos. They seem all inspired by Psellos’ versifying method, sometimes also reusing some of his verses. This could point to a later date for these poems, but it would require more research to date, identify, and contextualize the pseudo-Pselliana.*”
Apart from these three prominent poetic figures, there are some ‘minor’ poets tucked away in old editions, who have for that reason been suffering from neglect. One poet especially active in didactic poetry is Niketas of Herakleia, metropolitan of Serrai. This Niketas was also a prolific author in the theological field; his commentaries on Gregory of Nazianzos were widely copied. Some of his poems have been dated to the 1070s, most of them somewhat later; so he can be situated in the generation after Psellos. His poems have not yet been edited in full, and the existing editions are often outdated and/or hard to access.* Most of them are didactic poems, connected to the teaching of a grammatikos. Some of his poems are written, curiously enough, in hymnographic metres.
A less prominent, but no less interesting, poet is Michael Grammatikos, who has left us seven poems.”! Mercati identified Michael Grammatikos with another poet, a certain Michael the Hieromonk, but Lauxtermann has shown that these are separate persons.”” The poems of Michael Grammatikos can, on good grounds but not conclusively, be dated to the eleventh century.?? Even Michael’s small oeuvre displays a great variety of subjects. He wrote a long funeral poem and a satire on a wanton bishop; his other poems have mostly religious subjects, and there are also shorter epigrams.
Another poetry collection from the eleventh century, apparently by a single poet, was edited more than a century ago by Giuseppe Sola,”* and brought back to the attention of scholarship by Marc Lauxtermann.”° The poems of this poet, henceforth called the Anonymous of Sola (Anon. Sola), are transmitted in an eleventh-century manuscript (Vat. gr. 753). Most of his poems can be dated to the period 1028-41, while one can be dated to around 990.”° Anon. Sola wrote epigrams on objects commissioned by the imperial family. One poem is the story of an enchanting boat trip in the company of poetry lovers, and there is also a series of seven small polemical poems.
Scattered over several manuscripts, we find many more anonymous poetic pieces datable to the mid eleventh century. Marc. gr. 524 (thirteenth century) contains a highly interesting miscellaneous collection of poetic pieces. The beginning of the manuscript contains a dozen poems, otherwise unknown, connected to the period of Konstantinos Monomachos: he or Keroularios are named in poems 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, and 11.7”
Another series of eleventh-century poems can be found in Athen. 1040 (fourteenth century). A poetic section at the end of the manuscript starts with an anonymous poem on the church of Saint George in Mangana built by Monomachos, who is expressly named.”* Then follows Mauropous 47 and a poem addressed to Konstantinos Monomachos, in which an aged literate man asks for consideration for his deplorable financial state.”? Both anonymous poems were ascribed to Mauropous by Karpozilos; in the case of the latter poem, there is sufficient contradictory biographical evidence to reject this.'°° In any case, both poems can safely be dated to Monomachos’ reign. Finally, the manuscript contains a poem by a certain Basileios Kekaumenos on the death of Anastasios Lizix,'°' a historical person known to us as a friend of Psellos.'”
The circle of persons dedicated to the memory of Symeon the New Theologian also composed poetry in his honour. There are four poems on Symeon that seem to go back to the time when Niketas prepared an edition of his hymns. All authors of these poems are named: Hierotheos of the monastery Horaia Pege; Alexios, megas didaskalos; Niketas Theophiles ‘of the Great Church’ (Hagia Sophia); and Basileios, protasekretis of the Evergetis monastery.'”’ In the same milieu, Alexios the deacon wrote a poem on the work ‘on the Celestial Hierarchy’ of Niketas Stethatos, inc. Evvadi pig trav Kedadaiwv Adyov.'°* We also have one poem on the Theotokos by a certain TIoannes Kossiphes, metropolitan of Thebes.’
Some poems are preserved because they are attached to other works of more famous poets. In the case of Psellos, there is the four-line invective poem of Sabbaites (or of a certain monk Iakobos) that provoked in response Psellos’ poems 21 and/or 22.'°° Similarly, we have an epigram as an annex to a work of Psellos in defence of a grammatikos.'°”
Many poems of lesser-known poets might have been written in the eleventh century but cannot be dated precisely. Such is the case of a series of poems in Vat. gr. 1587, edited by Giuseppe Schird.'°8 These poems can only loosely be dated to the eleventh or twelfth century. The poems are related to the school of the Forty Martyrs, and appear to have been written by a teacher of that school.
There are some poems that repeatedly turn up in the vicinity of eleventh-century poetic material but do not contain any indications allowing them to be dated or otherwise precisely identified. Notably, there is a series of recently edited poems in Hauniensis 1899 (thirteenth century) that are to be found together with eleventh-century poetry (Christophorea, Mauropodea, and pseudo-Pselliana).'” A poem on the apostles, ascribed to Mauropous but in the companionship of several Christophorea in Vindob. theol. gr. 103, ascribed to Psellos in Paris. gr. 1782 and to other authors in other manuscripts, may perhaps simply be an anonymous inscription.''° Some cycles of epigrams are equally difficult to date. Each epigram in these cycles has as its subject a religious feast or a biblical scene. In some manuscripts from around 1100 such a cycle can be found,''! and Mare. gr. 524 contains a similar cycle.'!*
A considerable part of extant eleventh-century production of poetry is closely connected to the production of manuscripts. Many eleventh-century manuscripts contain so-called ‘book epigrams’, poems added to the manuscript by the scribe, patron, or reader, with various purposes. We discuss this genre later in this study. It is often hard to establish when and by whom book epigrams were composed. Book epigrams in eleventh-century manuscripts often reuse older verses and (parts of) poems. Some book epigrams are fixed formulae that occur in literally hundreds of manuscripts during the entire Byzantine era. Only a few poems seem to have been composed by contemporary authors. Such is the case for the epigrams of Markos the monk in the psalter Bodl. Clarke 15, although Markos also reuses some older verses.'!? Most Byzantine book epigrams have been edited in catalogues or elsewhere in descriptions of manuscripts, but are often incomplete or unsatisfactory.''* A research team at Ghent University now aims to compile an online database including all Byzantine book epigrams.'’”
Apart from these book epigrams, there are many other inscriptions preserved in situ: that is, on buildings or objects of art. In the eleventh century, epigrams on reliquaries and crosses take the lion’s share, but churches and city walls also bore inscriptions. The team working on the epigram project in Vienna, started by Wolfram Horandner, is progressively publishing a complete corpus of Byzantine inscriptions.''®
To what degree can we approach poetry from 1025 to 1081 as a distinct unity with respect to Byzantine poetry of other periods?'!” On the one hand, this poetry is firmly anchored in tradition and remains faithful to well established conventions. On the other hand, there are a few distinctive traits that can be discerned. Some genres flourished, especially didactic poetry. More than ever before in Byzantium, poems are devoted to public occasions and personal patronage projects. Metrical hierarchy seems to change: the politikos stichos expands in usage and is now also used for didactic poetry. Conversely,ceremonial poems in politikos stichos, such as they appear before 1000 and after 1100, are entirely absent.''® Mendicant poetry is absent as well, in contrast to the Komnenian period, which may have to do with the changing professional status of poets.''”
It has already been remarked that from the eleventh century onwards, the individual personality of the poet becomes much more present, in a self-conscious and even slightly haughty manner.'”° Eleventh-century poetry contains a good deal of humour, wit, and sarcasm, features considered rare for (learned) Byzantine poetry. There is a touch of realism, of keen observation of the contemporary world, especially in Christophoros’ poems.'* Many poems concern the city of Constantinople: its buildings, festivals, and urban culture. Polemics and rivalries, although never entirely absent in Byzantine literary history, now take up a great deal of poetic energy. There is a marked penchant for displaying knowledge, notable in Psellos but also in the works of other poets.'’” In the following chapters, all these features and tendencies will appear frequently.
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