Download PDF | (Byzantina Australiensia 22) Cynthia Stallman-Pacitti - The Life of Saint Pankratios of Taormina_ Greek text, English translation and commentary-BRILL (2018).
539 Pages
Editor’s Note
When my dear friend and colleague Cynthia Stallman-Pacitti learned that her cancer was terminal, she spent as much as possible of her remaining months with her family. Her Pancratius project, arising out of her 1986 Oxford D.Phil thesis, was nearly complete—she had revised the Greek text, dividing it into chapters and rewriting the apparatus, as well as producing an English translation and updating the commentary. Another colleague, Dr Andrew Turner, had manually paginated the Greek text and its apparatus to face the English translation and notes, pushing Microsoft Word to its limits. Before giving up work on the project, Cynthia printed out a single copy of her draft. This was scrupulously proof-read by our senior colleague Dr K.J. McKay. When Cynthia died, on 15 October 1992, her family asked Assoc. Prof. Roger Scott to look after her papers, and I archived the files on her work computer. Roger and I were not fully aware of what the other held.
Prompted by an enquiry from Professor Bryan Ward-Perkins in March 2017, Roger Scott found the printout annotated by Ken McKay (†2011) and, among many preserved drafts,I was able to identify the matching computer files. These were Microsoft Word 5.1 documents, and the Greek was in the Kadmos font (into which, in 1989, I had converted it from the transliteration encoding used to print the D.Phil. thesis); the files were converted into the current version of Microsoft Word and, with help from Lucius Hartmann, the Greek was converted into Brill’s unicode font. Roger Scott and I proof-read the entire work, incorporating Ken McKay’s suggestions. Cynthia had received advice on formatting and layout from Prof. Elizabeth Jeffreys, who was then on the executive of the Australian Association of Byzantine Studies (AABS), but she did not have enough time to implement all the suggestions that were put to her.
Given that the font change had already upset the fragile pagination, it was decided to produce a bibliography of secondary sources and implement it in the introduction and notes. The stemma, which I had drawn up in now obsolete software, was redrawn. On the advice of Brill’s most helpful representative, Marjolein van Zuylen, the apparatus criticus was reformatted. With further advice and encouragement from present and past members of the AABS executive—Prof. Bronwen Neil, Assoc. Prof. Ken Parry and Dr Ann Moffatt—the Introduction has been rounded out with an abstract and an English summary of the text, both drawn from the D.Phil. thesis. Maps have been redrawn in accordance with Cynthia’s notes.
The apparatus criticus retains her innovative economy in citing a phrase by the first letters of its words, replacing superfluous duplication with a hyphen, and using a plus sign (+) for the more usual ‘add.’ Dr Sarah Gador-Whyte assisted with reading the proofs, and Dr Kosta Simic with the index. No attempt has been made to update the bibliography. But the work is not out-of-date; it is the editio princeps of the Life and its first translation into any modern language, and it identifies many areas for further research. Ihor Ševčenko dedicated his last major publication (the Life of the Emperor Basil) to Cynthia’s memory. Her D.Phil. supervisor, Cyril Mango, wrote that this book would be a fitting memorial for her. I hope that my contribution is worthy of her friendship. I especially thank Cynthia’s husband, Nick Pacitti, and her family for permission to proceed with this publication. John Burke The University of Melbourne, 16 July 2018
Preface
That the Life of St Pankratios of Taormina has only attracted the attention of an editor some thirteen centuries after its composition is perhaps not surprising in view of its inordinate length and the verbosity and repetitiveness of the narrative in which the few episodes of interest are embedded, but it is nevertheless regrettable, given the considerable interest the text has for the Byzantinist. The Life of St Pankratios was known to scholars as early as the seventeenth century through the efforts of Gaetani, who summarized it in his Vitae Sanctorum Siculorum (1657).
The seminal modern study is that of Veselovskii (1896), which remains the most comprehensive study of the work. More recently, Patlagean (1964) has published an important, if controversial article which offers an analysis of our text, and Van Esbroeck and Zanetti (1988) have made an important study of it. A number of other scholars have commented on individual aspects of the Life, but have not given consideration to the work as a whole. An editio princeps usually needs no apology. In the case of the Life of St Pankratios, the publication of an edition is certainly justified. It is a product of a critical period of Sicilian history, within which it provides us with evidence from a local perspective concerning a considerable range of subjects. It is not, however, an historical text, and its value as a source needs to be assessed in the light of an understanding of the nature and peculiar qualities of the text as a whole. If the Life of St Pankratios is to take its place in discussions of novelistic hagiography and the Byzantine understanding of the past, a complete text needs to be available.
The study of the fate of the text, as reflected in the manuscript tradition and in its use by later authors, extends our knowledge of Sicilian and iconodule literary history. Finally, a critical edition of the Greek text is essential for the study of the Old Slavonic and Georgian translations. As this is the editio princeps, I have addressed myself mainly to the basic problems of establishing the textual tradition, the date and the provenance of the text, and in addition have attempted to comment briefly on some of the significant aspects of the Life, while realizing that many solutions to the text’s problems remain undiscovered. I have many acknowledgments to make. The present edition began as a D. Phil. thesis at Oxford. I was privileged to have Prof. Cyril Mango as my supervisor, and owe him the greatest gratitude for his direction of my research on this ‘very mysterious text’.
In the course of two years spent at Harvard, I benefited greatly from the advice and breadth of scholarship of Prof. Ihor Ševčenko. The examiners of the thesis, Prof. Robert Browning and Dr Sebastian Brock, both offered helpful criticism. The thesis was written during the tenure of scholarships from the University of Melbourne, a Junior Fellowship of the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies and a Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University. Support for travel and research has come from the University of Oxford, the Craven Fund, Balliol College and the University of Melbourne. Microfilms of manuscripts were supplied by the relevant libraries and by the PatriarchalInstitute in Thessalonica and theIstituta per la Patologia del Libro, Rome. A number of Byzantinists and experts in other fields have contributed help and advice, in particular, Dr Mary Cunningham, Dr Jeffrey Featherstone, Dr Sophia Georgiopoulou, Prof. H.L. Kessler, Dr Marlia Mango, Dr Margaret Mullett, Princess Elizabeth Obolensky, Prof. Salvatore Pricoco, Mrs Margaret Riddle, Dr Nancy Ševčenko, Miss Janise Sibly, Fr. Michel van Esbroeck, S.J., Prof. Vera von Falkenhausen, Dr Mary Whitby and Dr Michael Whitby, and Mrs Susan Hockey and Mrs Catherine Griffin of the Oxford University Computing Service. Dr Ken McKay selflessly offered his superb philological expertise and saved me from innumerable errors by correcting my final draft. John Burke has given invaluable help with the computer, and I would like to thank the editorial board of AABS, Dr Brian Croke, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Dr Ann Moffatt, and Mr Roger Scott for their contribution to bringing this project to fruition. My final acknowledgement is of my family, especially my father and mother, who have always encouraged my work, my husband Nicholas, who has shown great forbearance and created precious time for me, and my daughters Caterina and Eugenia, whose births occasioned the leave from teaching responsibilities which enabled me to complete the translation. University of Melbourne February, 1992
Introduction
The Life of St Pankratios of Taormina describes the mission and martyrdom of St Pankratios, a disciple of the Apostle Peter sent to evangelize Taormina as its first bishop, and purports to have been written by St Pankratios’ successor, Euagrios. It also records details concerning St Markianos, who was dispatched to Syracuse at the same time. The text exists in three recensions. The editio princeps of the first recension is presented here, based on six manuscripts (Vat. Gr. 1591, Mess. S. Salv. 53, Crypt. BβV, Vat. Gr. 1985, Vind. Hist. Gr. 3 and Vat. Ottobon. Gr. 92), together with an introduction, a translation into English and a commentary. External and internal evidence has been used to argue that it should be dated to the early eighth century and that it is of Sicilian provenance.
The analysis of the sources of the text and its presentation of the apostolic era contributes to our understanding of the Byzantine attitude to the past and of the novelistic approach to hagiography. The Life is a product of an important but obscure period of Sicilian history, and it provides some evidence from a local perspective concerning matters such as ecclesiastical arrangements and attitudes in Sicily, views about religious images, practices in church decoration, liturgical rites, book production, the development of legends concerning the apostles, especially St Peter, civil and military administration, the Sicilian language question, the topography of Sicily and Calabria and contacts with Lombardy, as well as curious references to Slavs and Avars in Sicily. The commentary is concerned with these questions and in general with the exegesis of the text. A summary of the use made of the Life of St Pankratios by later writers contributes to our understanding of the iconoclastic controversy.
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