Download PDF | ( Oxford Studies In Byzantium) Dr Nikos Zagklas Theodoros Prodromos Miscellaneous Poems An Edition And Literary Study OUP Oxford (2023)
401 Pages
Acknowledgements
Theodoros Prodromos has been a wonderful companion in the last few years, from the first stages of my PhD dissertation to its transformation into the current book. However, it would have been impossible to delve into his fascinating literary world and grasp many of its complexities and particularities without the help of various colleagues and friends. Andreas Rhoby was kind enough to take me on as his first doctoral student and devote enormous time and energy to training me as a Byzantinist.
His constant support, continuing advice, and consistent guidance have provided me with the necessary strength to carry out this project and master its various challenges. Our endless discussions have determined many aspects of this book. Theodora Antonopoulou and Andreas Miiller acted as co-supervisors, offering insightful suggestions and corrections at various stages of the doctoral process. The former has been a devoted teacher since my undergraduate studies at the University of Patras. My doctoral studies in Vienna were supported by the Greek State Scholarship Foundation ([KY) and its European scholarship programme. A short-term predoctoral residency at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in March 2014 allowed me to finish writing up the dissertation.
I am most grateful to Margaret Mullett and all the fellows of that academic year for their interest in my project and our stimulating discussions. I also thank Ingela Nilsson and Marc Lauxtermann for acting as the external reviewers of my dissertation and offering much constructive feedback, ranging from suggestions for improvement to various corrections. Both of them provided a lot of the impetus which has led to the dissertation being turned into a book.
A short talk with Elizabeth Jeffreys during a seminar in Katowice was the first step towards setting in motion the process of publishing the book with OUP. I am most grateful to her for guiding me through the first stages of the publication process. During this period of revision, I was fortunate enough to receive support from various institutions. A fund from project UMO-2013/10/E/HS2/00170 of the National Science Centre of Poland and a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection provided me with the necessary means and conducive environments to progress with the production of the book.
A grant from the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna covered a range of expenses towards the final stages of the book production. I am also grateful to various libraries for allowing me to consult much of the material in situ: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, the Bodleian Library, the US Library of Congress, the National Library of Greece in Athens, and the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.
During the transitional period from PhD student to early-career scholar, Ingela Nilsson and Przemek Marciniak helped me become more confident in my abilities. They also helped me acquire a more nuanced understanding of twelfth-century literature. Krystina Kubina has been a wonderful colleague and friend. Our regular conversations over the last few years have given shape to many of the ideas expressed in this book. Claudia Rapp constantly encouraged me to finish the project, especially at moments when my motivation was flagging. Special thanks also to Nate Aschenbrenner for reading an earlier draft of my translations and offering many excellent suggestions for improvements.
My work has also benefited from conversations with a series of friends and colleagues: Eirene Afentoulidou, Panagiotis Agapitos, Manolis Bourbouhakis, Carolina Cupane, Kristoffel Demoen, Ivan Drpic, Antonia Giannouli, Eleni Kaltsogianni, Marina Loukaki, Ekaterini Mitsiou, Andras Nemeth, Ilias Nesseris, Eva Nystr6m, Cosimo Paravano, Anneliese Paul, Dimitris Skrekas, and Foteini Spingou. I am particularly grateful to Marc Lauxtermann and Floris Bernard for reading through the penultimate draft of the book. Their sharp eyes have saved me from a lot of mistakes, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies. Their comments have improved the quality of the English translations immensely. I am also grateful to Judith Ryder who did the final proofreading of the entire book, contributing a great deal to the final result. Special thanks also to Klidi Abazaj for helping me with the indices. Needless to say, all mistakes remain mine.
I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of the late Professor Wolfram Horandner. When I arrived in Vienna, he was already retired. However, he informally assumed the role of a co-supervisor, introducing me to the enchanting world of Theodoros Prodromos, and Byzantine literature in general. I received many different kinds of help from him, ranging from advice about a number of challenging aspects of the edition to full access to his personal library and collection of microfilms. I will never forget our long conversations and our shared enthusiasm for Prodromos’ work. During one of our conversations he even offered me as a gift a rare copy of the sixteenthcentury Basel edition by Hieronymus Guntius, which he had acquired from a second-hand bookstore in the DDR in the 1970s. Unfortunately, he did not survive to see the publication of this book, but I hope its dedication to him will be a small recompense.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Georgios and Antonia, my brother, Stamatis, and all my friends (especially Dimitris and Eleni), who encouraged me throughout this long process. Above all, I want to thank my partner for life, Stef, for her support, especially at moments when I most needed it.
Vienna, December 2021
Note to the Reader
One of the main aims of this book is to mark a new step forward in our understanding of Prodromos’ work and to make this as widely accessible as possible. For this reason, all the editions of Prodromos’ poems presented here are accompanied by translations into English. The same goes for most of the Greek cited in the main body of the page. The only exceptions are some quotations in the footnotes and the commentary. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations in this book are my own.
I have chosen not to use Anglicized forms of names for authors and other individuals who were active in the middle and late Byzantine periods (e.g. Theodoros Prodromos instead of Theodore Prodromos, Ioannes Tzetzes instead of John Tzetzes). By contrast, I have stuck to well-established Anglicized forms in the case of the church fathers and some other saints (e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus instead of Gregorios Nazianzos, John Chrysostom instead of Ioannes Chrysostom). The same principle applies to ancient Greek authors (e.g. Homer, Hesiod). Although this mixed system of transliteration results in some inconsistencies (e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus versus Gregorios of Corinth), it is aimed at striking a balance between the use of original forms and clarity.
Introduction
1.1. Status Quaestionis
“Theodoros Prodromos ist einer der bekanntesten und fruchtbarsten byzantinischen Autoren des 12. Jahrhunderts.;* “...a Professor of Philosophy, a poet, orator and intellectual leader in twelfth-century Byzantium; *,..among the best known of Byzantine poets, and he is certainly one of the most popular with Byzantinists’;’ ‘...the poet laureate of his time’;;* ‘... one of the most prolific and well-known writers of the twelfth century’;° ‘... the most versatile, inventive and prolific of the writers functioning in the first half of the twelfth century’;° ‘un auteur se trouve pendant une longue période au centre de cette production littéraire de la cour comnéne et il peut méme étre regardé comme une personnification du courtisan type...’.’
Unlike many other Byzantine authors, whose works have been treated with suspicion by modern scholars, Theodoros Prodromos has attracted sustained interest from those with an interest in the history of Byzantine literature, receiving many flattering appraisals of his literary pursuits, and often being described as the leading intellectual of the second quarter of the twelfth century, or even the ‘superstar author’ of the entire Komnenian period. Something else that becomes clear from the enthusiastic assessments quoted above is that his poetry occupies a special place in his work. His surviving corpus comprises approximately 17,000 authentic verses in all possible metres, both ancient and Byzantine, ranging from hexameters, elegiac couplets, and anac-
reontics, to dodecasyllables and the fifteen-syllable ‘political verse, securing him a place among the most prolific and versatile poets of the Byzantine Middle Ages. Many of his verses were addressed to or commissioned by various members of the imperial family, aspiring aristocrats, high-ranking bureaucratic and ecclesiastical officials, and intellectual peers, meaning that his poetry reflects the vibrant diversity of the sociocultural milieu of twelfthcentury Constantinople. Although he did not author a historical account or epic, his poetry offers significant fragments of historical information to the modern student of twelfth-century Byzantium.
Although one may say that the historical value of much of his poetry is the main reason it has continued to be of interest to modern scholarship, in a field that still pursues the extraction of historical evidence at any cost, nevertheless some of his poems have also been discussed for their literary features: their conspicuous rhetorical opulence and their ‘poetic’ qualities,* the authorial self-praise and pride usually partially masked by a veil of self-deprecation and humility,’ or even their highly satirical overtones, which share many features with various ancient satirical strands.*°
Working on commission, as did many writers of his day, Prodromos produced a wide array of texts, both in prose and verse—from lengthy narratives (a novel and a hagiographical vita) to fully fledged rhetorical texts (letters, orations, and monodies), satires, educational exercises (the so-called schede), along with philosophical, theological, and grammatical texts. These works employ various modes (encomiastic, narrative, self-referential etc.) and revolve around different themes (friendship, love/eros, death, vanity, pleasure, envy etc.).
However, a feature that makes Prodromos exceptional as an author is his keenness to experiment with forms to subvert the traditional expectations of a given genre. For example, he is very keen on bestowing verse form on genres with a long-established tradition in prose. The most telling example might be his novel Rhodanthe and Dosikles, written in the style of ancient novels. Unlike its predecessors, which are in prose, Prodromos'’ text is composed of 4,614 dodecasyllabic lines,’ making it the first verse novel in the long history of the genre in the Greek tradition. On other occasions, Prodromos even combines verse with prose.
Apart from his numerous schede, which usually open with a prose section and conclude with verses, some of his satirical works are also a mixture of prose and verse. Good examples are the two satirical works in the Lucianic style: Amarantos, or the passions of an old man, and Sale of the political and poetical lives. The former combines prose with elegiac couplets and anacreontics,”” the latter is a blend of prose and hexameters.'* The mixture of diverse metres within the very same poem is a further characteristic of his versatility and resourcefulness as an author. For example, historical poem 56, addressed to the Orphanotrophos Alexios Aristenos and described as a metrical tour de force,"*
consists of sixty-one dodecasyllables, fifty hexameters, twenty-four pentameters, and twenty-eight anacreontics. Such quasi-prosimetric and multimetric texts are evidence of a major technique in Prodromos’ work, which enjoyed widespread popularity in the twelfth century and beyond;”* and this mixture of various forms reflects a constant shift in the relationships between genre and occasion throughout his long career, affording him a leading place among his peers.
In addition to the distinctive literary features—as well as the historical value—of his writings, Prodromos has become a household name among modern Byzantinists for yet another reason: namely, the question of the relationship between the ‘three Prodromoi, Theodoros Prodromos, Manganeios Prodromos, an anonymous author of 148 poems, and (Ptocho)prodromos, another anonymous author of four vernacular poems.*® Though it was already clear from the beginning of the twentieth century that Theodoros Prodromos and Manganeios Prodromos are two different authors,’’ the relationship between Theodoros Prodromos and (Ptocho)prodromos is much more uncertain.’*
The complexity of this question is reflected in the vehement debate among various well-known scholars, especially since the 1970s. HansGeorg Beck argued that the works attributed to (Ptocho)prodromos may well have been written by Prodromos, but he did not exclude the possibility that they are vernacular versions of his learned poetry, written by an unknown poet.’? Unlike Beck, who was more flexible concerning the authorship of these poems, many other scholars either accepted or rejected Prodromos’ authorship.
On the basis of style, metre, language, and manuscript transmission, Wolfram Horandner, Stylianos Alexiou, and Margaret Alexiou have argued in favour of identification with Theodoros Prodromos, while others such as Hans Eideneier have argued against it. In recent years, the debate has taken a rather surprising turn, since it has even been suggested that (Ptocho) prodromos might be the same person as Manganeios Prodromos.”® However, in one of the most recent studies on this issue, Panagiotis Agapitos credited Theodoros Prodromos anew with the authorship of the (Ptocho)prodromika, even going as far as arguing that the first poem was presented together with the learned poem 24 to the emperor Ioannes II Komnenos in 1141/42.”*
It is true that the (Ptocho)prodromika pose challenges to modern scholars, especially in the absence of a comprehensive study examining them alongside each other. There even seem to be differences between them, casting some doubts on the attribution of all of them to Prodromos. For example, when compared with the first three, the fourth poem possesses some syntactic and metrical idiosyncrasies.”” Moreover, on the basis of numismatic evidence and historical references, poems 3 and 4 may have been written after 1160, when Prodromos was already dead.”*
That said, the marked reluctance of some modern scholars, particularly Hans Eideneier,”* to accept that these poems were written by Prodromos owes much to the opposition—artificial, I would say—imposed by some modern scholars between learned and vernacular linguistic registers.*° This reluctance has denied Prodromos’ oeuvre layers of its rhetorical style and has cast doubts on his distinctive technique of alternating between one linguistic register and another. To understand this technique better, we should view it as an analogue to the blending of prose and verse, the metrical heterogeneity, and the shift in terms of genre and style briefly discussed above, which, as Antonio Garzya has pointed out, is ‘sehr byzantinisch...vielmehr sehr tzetzianisch und sehr prodromisch.”°
As with his alternation between prose and verse, or even between different metres, the composition of poems both in learned and vernacular Greek is another means of demonstrating his range and versatility. In other words, Prodromos’ practice of using different linguistic registers, metres, and stylistic forms should be considered as a kind of literary experiment, aimed at achieving the rhetorical variation which was highly appreciated by the Byzantines. Moreover, it was his bold literary experimentations which helped him to shape his own authorial trademark and establish himself within the fiercely competitive twelfthcentury literary market.
Needless to say, a study that would examine Prodromos’ work in its entirety and further enhance our understanding of all these aspects remains a desideratum. Although the secondary literature on Theodoros Prodromos and his work has grown significantly in recent years, no one has so far attempted to piece together the entire puzzle of his literary activity and discuss him as an author working on commission in twelfth-century Constantinople. This shortcoming in current scholarship on Prodromos matches the general inadequacy of available monographs looking at the full output of individual Byzantine authors to construct the protean authorial persona across various text types and their varying contexts of performance.” To undertake such a study for Prodromos and his huge literary oeuvre would first demand some painstaking philological work.
A good number of Prodromos’ writings—especially those with grammatical, theological, and philosophical focus—still require basic editorial work. Prodromos’ exegesis on the canons of Kosmas and Ioannes of Damascus still awaits a new edition and study, since Stevenson's nineteenth-century edition includes only the preamble, the first five of the seventeen canons, and a small portion of the sixth canon.”* Prodromos’ grammatical treatise for Eirene the Sevastokratorissa is still only available in an outdated and unreliable edition by Carolus Goettling, published approximately two hundred years ago, which does not even take into consideration Panaghiou Taphou 52, a codex produced during Prodromos’ lifetime.*? Similarly, it must be regretted that Prodromos’ commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics 2 has been entirely overlooked by modern Byzantine philologists, no doubt because Michel Cacouros’ doctoral dissertation with an edition of the text was never published as a book.*° Instead, it has only been used as a source for the study of the reception of Aristotle in twelfth-century Byzantium.**
A modern critical edition by Michiel D. J. Op de Coul of Prodromos’ prose letters and orations is expected to be published soon,** while most of Prodromos’ satirical writings have been edited in a dissertation by Tommaso Migliorini, which remains unpublished.** Just as most Byzantine schede remain unedited and thus insufficiently studied, so too do most schedographical texts by Prodromos.** Finally, a number of rhetorical, theological, satirical, and philosophical works are to be found only in old and poorly accessible editions.**
If we focus on Prodromos’ poetic work, it is clear that there has been a lot of progress in this area over the last seven decades. In the mid-1950s, Ciro Giannelli published an edition of the cycles of tetrastichs on the great martyrs*°—Theodoros, Georgios, and Demetrios—as well as an edition of the calendar, also written in the form of tetrastichs.*” In 1968, Herbert Hunger produced a modern edition of the Katomyomachia,** heralding the leading role that the Viennese school of Byzantine Studies would play in the Editionsgeschichte of Prodromos’ poetry, reinforced by the publication of Wolfram Horandner’s edition of Prodromos’ Historical poems six years later, in 1974. Horandner’s edition signified a turning point in our understanding of Prodromos’ work and its prominent place in Komnenian literary culture, since it includes all the poems that permit reconstruction of Prodromos’ activity in the courtly and intellectual life of the capital.
Eighty poems (6,912 verses) with divergent genre types and themes are grouped under the broad title ‘historische Gedichte’ (Historical poems).*°
After the edition of the ‘historische Gedichte} other major compositions by Prodromos, in the field of religious poetry, found their way into modern editions. In 1983, Augusta Acconcia Longo produced the editio princeps of Prodromos’ iambic calendar,*° while in 1997 Grigorios Papagiannis presented the first solid edition of Prodromos’ iambic and hexametric tetrastichs on the Old and New Testaments.** In the 1990s, Hérandner undertook the edition of some poems by Prodromos which were not included in the ‘historische Gedichte’ In 1990, he published the first edition of two figured poems (no. 157 from his list), which form a poetic diptych consisting of an admonitory poem together with another centring on the theme of envy,*” and in 1997, he published no. 126, a small epigram of fourteen iambics about the Last Supper.”
More recently, Mario D’Ambrosi published an edition of Prodromos'’ tetrastichs on the life of Gregory of Nazianzus.** In addition, D’Ambrosi is currently working on the tetrastichs on the life of John Chrysostom. A new edition of Prodromos’ tetrastichs on the life of Basil the Great had been promised by Acconcia Longo, but the fate of this editorial project is uncertain following her death. The vernacular poems ascribed to Prodromos are also available in modern editions: the so-called ‘fifth’ (Ptocho)prodromic poem was edited as early as 1913,*° while a modern edition with a German translation of the four (Ptocho)prodromika, by Hans Eideneier, appeared in 1991.*° In 2012, Eideneier’s edition of the (Ptocho)prodromika was reprinted with some minor textual corrections and a new comprehensive introduction in modern Greek.*”
But for all this significant progress, a good deal of Prodromos’ poetry has been overlooked by modern philologists and literary scholars. An examination of the long list of Prodromos’ works that prefaces H6érandner’s Historische Gedichte reveals that many of them remain scattered in outdated and completely unreliable editions.** They mostly belong to three main categories according to Hérandner’s classification list: religious epigrams (nos. 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, and 133), rhetorical/ satirical works (nos. 142 and 143), and works on various themes (nos. 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, and 162). Many of these works are poetic cycles of several poems,” resulting in a corpus of 1,002 verses. Because they do not contain historical information, they have never been properly edited or analysed. It is the principal goal of this book to rescue these texts from this state of oblivion, study them, and present them in a modern critical edition.
However, it should be emphasized from the outset that the present corpus does not include all the poems from Horandner’s list of the poems that have not so far been presented in a modern edition. First, it does not include any poems from Horandner’s list of Prodromos’ dubious works,”° with the single exception of no. 164.°’ The evidence for the remaining eight poems (nos. 173-180) is sparse and does not allow us to attribute them safely to Prodromos. Second, it does not include genuine poems for which new editions are currently being prepared by other scholars. As we remarked above, new editions have been announced for the iambic and hexametric tetrastichs on the lives of Basil the Great and John Chrysostom, which, with the recent edition of tetrastichs on the life of Gregory of Nazianzus, will complete the poetic cycle for the three Hierarchs. Third, the edition omits the poems Against a lustful woman and Against a man with a long beard, nos. 140 and 141 from Horandner’s list, because they were edited with Prodromos'’ satirical writings by Tommaso Migliorini.*”
Despite the omission of these poems, this book aspires to bring us significantly closer to having modern editions of all of Prodromos’ poetic works and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of his entire literary corpus and its place within the literary tradition of its time. It is arranged in two main parts. The second part includes the edition of the poems, accompanied by translations and commentaries. The first part is made up of five chapters, which aim to approach the texts from the perspective of both literary interpretation and traditional philology. The remaining three sections of Chapter 1 examine more closely the poems’ authorship and their thematic features and genre characteristics, as well as the original function of the first six poems which form a poetic cycle. They seek to demonstrate the ambiguity regarding many aspects of these poems, and attempt to resolve some of them. Building upon the first chapter, Chapter 2 constitutes a study of the intellectual pursuits of Theodoros Prodromos, looking at his social professions as teacher and court orator, the complaints that pervade many of his writings, and the multifunctionality of many of his works. Chapter 3 shifts our attention to more philological aspects of the corpus by discussing the metre and prosody of the poems. Chapter 4 lists and describes the manuscripts and includes the first detailed analysis of the main manuscript, Vaticanus gr. 305, and a survey of the dissemination of the poems across the centuries. Chapter 5 includes a complete list of all previous editions and presents the editorial principles employed here.
1.2. Miscellaneous Poems
Before we embark upon the study of these poems, it is necessary first to find an appropriate title to describe them as a single group. Whereas certain links can be drawn between many of the poems of the present corpus, no uniform thematic nexus can be established which unites all of them. Unlike the Historical poems, very few of these poems were composed for an identifiable occasion or are addressed to a specific individual. They were not composed at one particular point in time or for a single event, but were written at different times over Prodromos’ long career. They are not all transmitted together in a single Byzantine poetry book; instead, they are dispersed across numerous manuscripts. Thus, the selected corpus cannot be traced back to a single collection assembled by the author himself or a later scribe. All these peculiarities pose various challenges to the description of this corpus, and this has consequences for our methodological approach. Designations with strong overtones, such as ‘neglected’ or ‘minor’ poems, have been avoided because they would tend to undermine the value of these poems. Instead, inspired by the title ‘2 7iyvou dudgopov of the miscellaneous poetry books by Ioannes Mauropous in Vat. gr. 676 and Christophoros Mitylenaios in Grottaferrata Z a XXIX, I have opted for the subtitle Miscellaneous poems.**
1.2.1. Some Perils of Authorship
Few other Byzantine writers have been the subject of as much scholarly dispute over authorship as Prodromos, with the (Ptocho)prodromic poems at the centre of such discussions.** As I have discussed, many scholars have argued in favour of or against the attribution of these four vernacular poems to Prodromos. These, however, are not the only works for which Prodromos’ authorship has been contested. What should be emphasized first is that issues of authorship are difficult to resolve, especially when it comes to works written by contemporaries. Many of their works written under similar historical and literary conditions tend to resemble each other in vocabulary and thematic focus, and even when there are some rare words or hapax legomena it is not easy to discern whether they were written by a particular author or by one of his peers. In this respect, it is hardly surprising that some works by other twelfth-century authors have been spuriously attributed to Prodromos. A good example is the astrological poem for Eirene the Sevastokratorissa, which was long considered a work of Prodromos.** Only in recent years has its authorship by Konstantinos Manasses gained scholarly consensus.”°
The scarcity of manuscript evidence can also challenge the authorial attributions of some Byzantine texts, and in the case of Prodromos the manuscript transmission has cast doubt even on some of his most well-known works. Prodromos’ authorship of the Katomyomachia, for example, is documented only in a single manuscript (Marcianus gr. 524) out of twenty copies, strengthening the perception among early scholars that it was an anonymous work, a position espoused in its first edition by Arsenios Apostoles, published in Venice around 1495.°” Another issue is the pseudonymity which permeated Byzantine literary culture: that is, the tendency to attribute anonymous texts or texts by lesser-known writers to well-known figures. This served a number of needs, such as the intensive preoccupation of the Byzantines with authority and their eagerness to associate certain texts with well-known individuals. This is another reason why authorship of some Byzantine texts is doubted.**
Even middle Byzantine authors were credited by later scribes with the authorship of works produced much later than their lifetime. Michael Psellos stands out as an author to whom dozens of later works are falsely attributed.*? Such is also the case for Prodromos, who in the late Byzantine period became a model poet, together with Gregory of Nazianzus and Georgios of Pisidia;°° his popularity was immense in Byzantine book culture throughout the last three centuries of the empire.*’ All these issues pose a series of challenges for modern readers, who have become very cautious—occasionally perhaps too cautious—when discussing issues of Prodromean authorship.
This caution becomes all the more evident when we look at the introduction to the modern edition of Prodromos Historical poems. Wolfram Horandner tried to group the works attributed to Prodromos into three separate groups: ‘echte’ (genuine), ‘zweifelhafte’ (dubious), and ‘unechte’ (false). Even though Hérandner in most cases draws safe conclusions about their authenticity, there are some poems which are, in my view, incorrectly excluded from the list of the authentic poems. These are therefore included in the edition at hand. Poem 67, a short dedicatory poem for an icon made in honour of the Holy Virgin, is a case in point. This poem—no. 164 in Horandner’s list—is arbitrarily grouped among the dubious works. However, evidence both internal and external to the text suggests that the poem was written by Prodromos. The internal evidence is that the wording of the fourth verse, ‘€Eaydpacov Tats Aitats cov, 7apbéve, is very similar to the final verse ‘avTayopacov oats Aitats mpos Tov Adyov of poem 25, a dedicatory epigram for the Holy Virgin, indisputably by Prodromos. Both epigrams are also permeated with similar vocabulary associated with the slave trade. In addition to sharing phraseology with another genuine poem by Prodromos, the text is preserved with other works of Prodromos, on fol. 183" of manuscript Vind. Suppl. 125.
But Horandner should not be blamed for the insufficient investigation into the poem's authorship which led to its exclusion from the list of Prodromos’ genuine works. As has been mentioned already, the authorship of many Byzantine works was far from secure; once circulated, be it in oral or written form, their links to their author could gradually become looser. Even some of the Miscellaneous poems, which are grouped among Prodromos’ authentic works in Horandner’s list, are attributed to multiple authors in the manuscript tradition. This is the case for poems 29-54, a cycle of epigrams on virtues and vices. The twenty-five manuscripts which transmit this work do not establish a consensus on the issue of authorship. In addition to Theodoros Prodromos, two other possible authors are named. The most interesting case is arguably that of ‘Paniotes, named in the rubrics of the cycle in both Vat. Chis. gr. R.IV.11 and Laur. San Marco 318, copied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, respectively. Nicola Festa, the most recent editor of the poem, noted that the designation ‘rod [Taviwrov’ does not stand for a real author, arguing that it is simply a mistake which emanated from the sloppy copying of the word ‘zravi(ep)w(7a)Tov during the dissemination of the work.° However, a recent study has shown that Paniotes was indeed a twelfth-century author (perhaps even Konstantinos Manasses), whose social and intellectual achievements caused annoyance for Ioannes Tzetzes.°°
But the picture of the cycle’s authorship becomes even more blurred because a second cluster of post-Byzantine manuscripts suggests that the author of these twenty-six iambic couplets was Michael Psellos. The earliest codex presenting Psellos as the author of these epigrams is Paris. gr. 3058.°* This codex was copied by Arsenios Apostoles at the beginning of the sixteenth century, certainly before 1519, when a printed version of the manuscript appeared with the poems under discussion.” It is, however, hardly likely that Psellos was the author of these verses, especially in view of the length of time—approximately four centuries—between Psellos’ period (mid-eleventh century) and the oldest manuscript bearing his name as author of the poems. It seems more likely that Arsenios copied the epigrams from a manuscript in which they were ascribed to Paniotes. It is even possible that he considered the designation ‘Paniotes’ as a sort of familiar name for Michael Psellos, since Arsenios’ manuscript shares two ‘binding errors’ with Vat. Chis. gr. R.IV.11,°° one of the two manuscripts that bear the name of Paniotes.*’ One should also bear in mind that the attribution of spurious works on similar topics to Psellos is not uncommon. For instance, on fol. 198” of the manuscript Berol. Phil. 214
we read Tot copwratouv PedXod rept dpeT@v kat Kaxi@yv,°® as the title of a prose work that is, in fact, from the anthology of Stobaeus. In the case of the cycle of Prodromos’ epigrams, their authorship is secured by two of the earliest manuscripts: the thirteenth-century Vat. gr. 307 and fourteenth-century Laur. Conv. Soppr. 48. The manuscript Paris. gr. 854 is further evidence in favour of Prodromos authorship: although it transmits the cycle anonymously, it is to be found together with ten other authentic poems by Prodromos.”
Poems 22-23, two short epigrams on the Dodekaorton, are also attributed to more than one author. In the fourteenth-century Vind. Hist. gr. 106, the poem survives under the name of Ioannes Mauropous, the eleventh-century poet, probably because the scribe had in mind Mauropous’ collection of epigrams describing the Dominical feasts.’° In the late thirteenth-century manuscript Vat. gr. 1126, the poems are preserved under the name of Manuel Philes, and the same happens in the mid-fourteenth-century Bodl. Roe 18, with a later hand adding next to the rubric of the epigrams ‘Tod ITrwyorpodpépov. Once again, Prodromos authorship should be considered certain, especially if we take into account that the manuscript Vat. gr. 1126 dates before 1283, while Philes was born around the year 1270.’ Moreover, the designation of (Ptocho)prodromos stands for Theodoros Prodromos in late Byzantine book culture.””
Another poem claimed for several authors is poem 26, a short epigram on St Peter. In ms. Gottingen phil. 29, the poem survives under the name of Christophoros Mitylenaios, while the modern editor of Kallikles’ poetry lists it among Kallikles’ dubious works, because in Marc. gr. 524 it is transmitted with poems of Kallikles, but without any attribution to this author in the title. Although Prodromos’ authorship is only indicated in the thirteenth-century manuscript Vat. gr. 305, it should be considered sound. This manuscript is the richest collection of Prodromos’ prose and verse works that has come down to us.’”* The poem is found on fol. 128° rod at703 (i.e. Peodw pou ITpodpopov) eis Tov aywov Ilérpov oravpovpevov, immediately following Prodromos’ poem ‘Farewell Verses to Byzantiuny (historical poem 79), and before an epitaph for Konstantinos Kamytzes (historical poem 64).
The Prodromean authorship of some of the Miscellaneous poems edited here was frequently disregarded throughout their dissemination in the late Byzantine and post-Byzantine period. Many of them are attributed to several other Byzantine poets, including Christophoros Mitylenaios, Michael Psellos, Nikolaos Kallikles, and a certain Paniotes, who, as mentioned earlier, may well have been Konstantinos Manasses. This is hardly surprising, since some of these authors were active around the same time. As noted, their works include individual features, but they also share with Prodromos’ poems many similarities in form and style, motifs and themes, metrical and genre characteristics, and especially wording. Take, for example, poem 6, a hexametric poem for St Nicholas. Unlike the other Miscellaneous poems, the Prodromean authorship of this text is beyond question because it only survives in Vat. gr. 305, with other works by Prodromos. Were this not the case, one might have attempted to resolve the issue of authorship on the basis of the seemingly rare word yAvkippoos in verse 5. However, the modern reader would soon notice that this word seems to have been particularly popular in the twelfth century, used by Prodromos, Tzetzes, and Manasses,”* all of whom belonged to closely connected intellectual circles, and occasionally even shared the same patron, Eirene the Sevastokratorissa. This case suggests the circulation of shared vocabulary in the works of twelfth-century peers, partly explaining the multiple claims of authorship for some of the Miscellaneous poems (and other twelfth-century works) advanced by both Byzantines and Byzantinists.
1.2.2. Poems and Epigrams: Functional Ambiguity and Genre Elasticity
Just like the collection of Christophoros Mitylenaios in the Grottaferrata manuscript,”” the collection of Prodromos’ Miscellaneous poems consists of poems on various themes written in a wide range of genres. However, to avoid imposing modern perceptions of issues of genre, which would ill serve these texts, it is appropriate to look to the twelfth century to see how Prodromos and other contemporary authors imagined the boundary lines between their works. In a funerary work for his teacher, Niketas Eugenianos praised Prodromos for his poems intended to adorn works of art or tombs, and for his imperial panegyrics in hexameters.’° Eugenianos thus hints at a taxonomy of genre distinguishing between the inscriptional and performative functions of Prodromos’ poetry, making this an excellent example of pre-modern literary criticism. This implicit classification of Prodromos’ works by Eugenianos has been the basis of many modern approaches to issues of genre in Byzantine poetry-writing, and especially for the seminal distinction between epigrams and poems proper.”’ Similarly, the poems in the present corpus can be viewed as relating to these two broad categories, though I make no clear-cut distinction between their inscriptional and performative function in each case.’* Epigrammatic poetry makes up the lion’s share of Miscellaneous poems.”° Many of them have a religious theme, celebrating the Virgin Mary (poems 24, 25, and 67) and various saints, such as the three Hierarchs (poems 2-4), and Sts Gregory of Nyssa (poem 5), Nicholas (poem 6), Barbara (poems 11-21), Paul (poem 1), and Peter (poem 26). Some of the poems are even concerned with well-known Christian feasts: poems 27-28 are dedicated to Crucifixion, while poems 22-23 deal with the entire festal cycle of the life of Christ. Poems 7-8 are concerned with the hospitality of Abraham. But there are also texts with a more secular focus: poems 55-56 could be used as inscriptions for a depiction of Life (Bios); poems 29-54 form a cycle of twenty-six epigrams on virtues and vices; and poems 57-61 consist of five iambic couplets concerned with the representation of two tangled trees springing from the breasts of a pair of lovers. But since all these texts survive exclusively in manuscripts, their epigrammatic features and their use as inscriptions can only be reconstructed with the help of various indications, such as deictic elements, the naming of a donor, or reference to the iconography or a material object.*® For example, poem 67
was written on commission for George of Antioch for an icon of the Virgin Mary. Its structure is typical of Byzantine dedicatory epigrams: the donor asks the Virgin Mary to intercede with Christ to offer him deliverance from the sins he has committed. Similarly, the text of poems 24 and 25 is based upon negotiations for a reciprocal exchange between the donor and the sacred recipient. In both poems, the anonymous donors put forward a request for remission of their sins by offering material goods. Other texts contain some deictic indications for their possible use as inscriptions. Take, for example, poem 28, which opens as follows: “Here Jesus, the giver of breath, yields his last breath.*’ The word év0a0’ helps us to understand that the viewer is addressed and encouraged to pay attention to the iconography of an object, without specifying its exact nature. In some other poems, however, we can determine the object. The rubric of poems 57-61 informs us that they were intended to be inscribed on a ring. The rubric and the main text of poem 25 include evidence that it was an epigram written for an icon which was restored by an anonymous donor.
The epigrammatic style of some other texts does not entail their use as inscriptions, or even if it does, the original occasion is so well camouflaged that it makes it almost impossible for the modern reader to reconstruct it. One of the most challenging cases is the cycle of five poems under the title ‘émt kim@ (poems 62-66). The title does not refer to the location for which it was intended, but instead signifies their subject matter. All five texts abound in strong allegorical connotations revolving around the concept of the garden and ideas of consumption, pleasure, and moderation. They should therefore not be viewed as ekphraseis of a real garden, although they contain ekphrastic elements. Take, for example, the second epigram:
The I-person articulates a strong desire to approach the garden and partake of its delights, but soon a sense of anxiety arises when the garden and its fruits are compared to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. The question at stake for the modern reader is: what do the garden and its delightful flowers stand for? The figurative language and the ambiguity that governs the narrative of all five texts, together with the absence of any extratextual evidence whatsoever, make a definite answer to this question impossible.
In discussing the fourth poem of the cycle, Ingela Nilsson has highlighted its metapoetic function: ‘it is also an implicit—or in this case perhaps rather explicit—invitation to pick the fragrant flowers of literature and create a garland or a garden of your own.*” The texts can indeed be described as invitations, permeated with a subtle sense of eroticism, reminiscent of the central theme of the Song of Songs. Additionally, as in the Song of Songs, which is a dialogue between two lovers, these epigrams form a sort of dialogue between the garden and its beholder. If we accept that these five texts are epigrams and we stick to the premise that most epigrams in Byzantium are Gebrauchstexte,*? perhaps the most appropriate genre designation for them is that of book epigrams. In other words, one could argue that the garden probably stands for an anthology of literary works prefaced by these five poems.
This would not be the only text by Prodromos with such a function: historical poem 61 was used to preface a book containing the schede of a certain Ioannikios. What is more, in a short epigram that prefaces the so-called 7wvid—an anthology of sayings put together for Pope Leo X—in Paris. gr. 3058, Arsenios Apostoles exhorts his addressee(s) to select from the material he has included in the book, using a phraseology strongly resembling that of Prodromos: ov 8 otv tpvynoov TOV twr, 60° av OéAns, / Kpivov, KpdKov, vapKLacor, OUpaov 7 pddov.** I am not saying that there is a direct influence of Prodromos on Apostoles’ text, but it is very likely that the metaphor of the garden and the invitation to pluck its flowers used by Apostoles goes back to the tradition of ancient and Byzantine epigrams prefacing literary anthologies,** a tradition to which Prodromos’ garden poems may belong.
However, in the absence of any firm reference, the question that inevitably presents itself is: how sure can we be that this poetic cycle goes back to a reallife occasion (a Sitz im Leben)? Although there is a clear tendency among Byzantinists to impose certain practical purposes on epigrams, we should also consider the possibility that these five texts may simply be purely literary compositions.*° The five texts read like epigrams, but this does not necessarily indicate that they were written for a specific object or a real-life occasion. In my view, we need to leave the possibility open that these works were philosophical allegories in verse, hence literary reflections rather than purely functional texts.
If we now turn to non-epigrammatic poetry, Miscellaneous poems may not include imperial panegyrics in the heroic metre (such as those praised by Eugenianos), but it does contain texts that are quite diverse in terms of theme and genre. The rubrics of some of the poems in the manuscripts hint at their shared genre identity.°? Poem 68, for example, survives under the title ‘Aiviypa eis tHv vepéAnv, which not only signifies the genre of the poem but also gives away the solution to the riddle.** Even more interesting are poems 69 and 70-72. In both cases, the rubric immediately attracts the attention of the reader, since it anticipates the peculiarity of the poems’ subjects.
Hypothetical verses about Pausanias petrified by the death of his son Peter The word tzroferiKo/ is also of great interest, since these appear to be the only two poems in Prodromos’ corpus—indeed, in the entire Byzantine tradition— that contain this word in their rubrics. Although impossible to determine whether these rubrics were shaped by Prodromos himself or added by a later scribe, they are closely linked to titles introducing rhetorical exercises of ethopoiia.*’ Both are variant forms of titles that we would find in such texts. For example, the title of the first poem would normally read Tivas dv ein Aoyous (...) 6 dxeup vexpos exBpacbets 775 OaAacoys. In both cases, the title suits the main text perfectly, since both poems are self-contained ethopoetic monologues.
However, it is not possible (nor, indeed, appropriate) to squeeze all the Miscellaneous poems into a single straitjacket in terms of genre. Various studies on ‘genre’ and ‘mode’ have paved the way for a more nuanced understanding of genre fluidity in Byzantium.’ Modern scholars now see ‘genre’ as standing for a group of texts that share common characteristics, while ‘mode’ permeates various works that do not necessarily belong to the same group with regard to genre. Mode operates across genre boundaries, bringing heterogeneous texts closer together.
This flexibility of the ‘mode’ results in interaction between the formal features of various genres and the emergence of the so-called genre hybridity (or genus mixtum). It is important to emphasize that, as in other literary traditions, be they pre-modern or modern, genre in Byzantium was not a static entity: it was based on an established tradition which formed the core of Byzantine rhetorical training, but, at the same time, it transformed to serve contemporary needs. Such transformations and adaptations reflect the preferences and strategies of an author and the communicative aspects of the genre in Byzantium, which aims to foster an exchange between the ‘sender’ and the ‘receiver’ of a text.’ And in the twelfth century, many authors were very keen to invent new ways to communicate with their audience by combining characteristics of well-established genres with new ones, which resulted in the reshaping of old genres, mixing of genres, and even the creation of genres not to be found in old rhetorical books.”? Prodromos’ poems 73-74, 75, and 76 are texts with this kind of complex genre identity, which cannot be assigned to a single traditional group.
Poems 73-74 are a set of two hexametric poems containing many selfreferential features. In terms of form and structure, they are partly modelled on Gregory Nazianzus’ poem Azotpom) tot movypotd Kat tod Xpiotot érrixAnots (Carm. 1.1.55), which is a prayer to Christ. In fact, the opening lines of both of these poems of Prodromos are strongly reminiscent of Gregory's poem.” Gregory opens his poem with an address to evil, admonishing it to vanish from his life, while he concludes with a plea to Christ for salvation in the hereafter. In Prodromos poem, on the other hand, the I-person addresses his books, exhorting them to flee, for he receives no benefit from the erudition he has gained from them. He also expresses his strong desire to withdraw from public places, another idea evocative of Gregory of Nazianzus.”* However, Prodromos, by mixing the mode of self-referentiality with features of religious and paraenetic poetry, all dressed in the garb of Homeric hexameters, shapes a text which, although it may bear some resemblance to various older genres or practices, at the same time is by no means an exact replica of any earlier text. Moreover, the two poems have adjusted to twelfth-century needs, since they are laced with lamentations by the poet for the degradation of true knowledge.
In the same vein, poem 75 is another good example of how a type of text with a long-established tradition can slightly shift its thematic focus to respond to contemporary conditions. The poem has a strongly moral, essayistic character, following the tradition of much of the poetry written before the twelfth century.”° Most of these earlier poems—by renowned poets such as Georgios of Pisidia, Leo the Philosopher, and Christophoros Mitylenaios— revolve around issues of vanity and social inequality. Prodromos also focuses on social inequality, but he constructs a comparison between the good fortune of uneducated craftsmen and the bad fortune of highly educated people, making this another twelfth-century work lamenting the futility of letters.
It is worth noting that poems 73-74 and 75 even share the word oxeTAaoTiKoi (‘disgruntled, ‘indignant’) in their rubrics, which before Prodromos occurs only in the title of a poem by Gregory of Nazianzus. Poem II.1.19, a self-referential work about Gregory’s sufferings, is entitled oxeTALaoTiKOV UTEp TOD adtov Tabav.’* Poems 73-74 and 75 may be quite different from each other with regard to form and length—the first two are written in hexameters, the latter in dodecasyllables; the first two are short (both fourteen lines), the latter because of its essayistic nature extends to 167 lines—but the word oye7AvaoriKoi allows us to draw a link between them: all of them include the element of complaint. Thus the articulation of complaints is a mode permeating all three poems, even if they do not seem to belong to the same category in terms of genre.
Poem 76 is a long narrative poem recounting the hardships of the personified Friendship.*” The poem is rife with allegorical overtones and lengthy descriptions of the prowess of Friendship, ranging from the regulation of the divine order and erotic desire to that of friendship and civic order.’*® Most of the text is an ethopoetic monologue by Friendship, except for the first thirty-five and final thirty-seven verses, which assume the form of a dialogue between Friendship and a stranger. Herbert Hunger placed the work among those Byzantine poems which exhibit a dramatic form.”* It is true that Prodromos’ poem can be compared to many other twelfthcentury works in the form of a dialogue, including the Dioptra by Philippos Monotropos or the poem by Michael Haploucheir. Because of its dramatic dialogue between the two protagonists, it even resembles another Prodromean work: the Katomyomachia. However, unlike the Katomyomachia, which owes a great deal to Euripides and Ps. Homer’s Batrachomyomachia,'°® poem 76 follows other literary strands.
Prodromos was inspired in the main theme of his poem by Lucian’s The Runaways.'°* In Lucian’s work, the personified Philosophy recounts how she departed from the world because of the false philosophers: people who claim to be her followers, but act wickedly. In Prodromos, Friendship relates that she has decided to leave because of her husband, the personified World.
Throughout the poem she complains that World abused her; he even replaced her with Animosity, forcing her to leave their house. In addition to the influence from Lucian, Prodromos’ text was also influenced by the novelistic tradition. For example, vv. 127-136 include motifs which are typical of novel-writing practice: (i) the intertwining tree branches between the date palms; (ii) the eel which comes to the shore to mate with the viper; and (iii) the attraction between the magnet and iron. Moreover, in the opening lines of the poem Friendship summons the stranger to come and sit together with her next to a pine tree, a setting used in Plato and Achilles Tatius’ novel.’°? Similarly, the concluding lines of the poem remind us of a novel. As with both ancient and Byzantine novels, it has a ‘happy end with the union of the two heroes (Friendship and a stranger) through marital ties.
Even the small corpus of Miscellaneous poems includes texts that reaffirm the common characterization of Prodromos as a genre-crossing author with a keen interest in breaking conventional barriers and pushing the boundaries of wellestablished genres. Just like 73-74, 75, and 76, many works by Prodromos are elastic texts when it comes to genre.
This is hardly surprising if we keep in mind that Byzantine literature is an occasion-defined literature. Since most Byzantine texts were written and performed for a specific occasion, and since they often had a particular function within the social and intellectual environment of the author—such as self-representation, accrual of attention, support of pedagogical activity, and pursuit of social advancement—genre rules were easily modified and texts given new forms to elicit admiration. Thus genre should be understood as a medium which helped Prodromos and other authors to make their texts relevant to their audiences and convey a message on a particular occasion. However, this also carries an implication for our understanding of the genre: when the occasion is not clear (or there was no real-life occasion), many of its genre and functional aspects remain quite ambiguous—and this is very much the case for the five garden poems and some other Miscellaneous poems, as we will see in the next section.
1.2.3. Veiled Occasions: Poems 1-6 and the Orphanotropheion of St Paul
The first six poems of the corpus edited here form a cycle for Paul the Apostle, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, and Saint Nicholas—all six of them prominent religious figures in Byzantium and dedicatees of innumerable poems written by well-known, less wellknown, or even anonymous poets throughout the entire Byzantine period. These are not the only poems for these six figures in Prodromos’ oeuvre: Paul is commemorated in the cycle of tetrastichs on the Old and New Testaments,’ Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, and John Chrysostom in the cycle of tetrastichs that describe various episodes of their lives, and Nicholas in a schedos.'°* What is more, all of them are celebrated in Prodromos’ iambic calendar.*°*
On other occasions, some of these six figures are even praised alongside one another in other Prodromean poems: historical poem 57 is an epigram about a representation of the Holy Virgin together with Christ, flanked by John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, and St Nicholas; in historical poem 59, Prodromos himself appeals for help from Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom in his struggle against a certain Barys who had accused Prodromos of heresy because of his keen interest in the classics; and in poem 24 of the present edition, St Nicholas and John Chrysostom are asked to intercede on behalf of an anonymous donot.
And yet, in none of these works by Prodromos are the six saints commemorated together; nor is there a similar group of six self-contained poems dedicated to them anywhere else in the Byzantine tradition.’*° Thus, this is thematically a unique cycle, raising a number of questions. Why did Prodromos decide to commemorate them together? What was the context for the composition of the cycle? Whatever the original occasion might have been, all six poems were intended to be performed together at the same time. Quite a few cross-references within the poems speak in favour of this hypothesis. The fourth poem on John Chrysostom, for example, opens in the following manner
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