Download PDF | (Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes, 164) Filippomaria Pontani - Education and Learning in Byzantine Thessalonike-De Gruyter (2024).
231 Pages
Filippomaria Pontani
Ἤσουνα, σβεῖς, ξαναγεννιέσαι: Paideia in Thessalonike Across the Centuries
When in 1902 the German professor Karl Roth published in Kempten his novel Sapphos Verse, 1 his image of 11th-century Thessalonike was more optimistic than the one we generally hold today. 2 The villa of Callias, the wealthy protagonist of the novel, opened on the Via Egnatia with a large portico adorned with statues of Ariadne and John Chrysostom, with protomes of Christian saints and ancient philosophers side by side. Callias’ daughter Theophile used to spend her afternoons in the garden reading Sappho and Mimnermus, and looking with watery eyes at the towering Mt. Olympos across the sea, in the untranslatable act of “sich hineinträumen in die Antike”.
While nowadays we may rule out the hypothesis that parchment codices of Sappho were read in the town (or, indeed, anywhere in the Empire), 3 the very existence of cultural institutions and schools for advanced pupils (going beyond what Robert Browning calls “functional literacy”) 4 appears unlikely in the light of the general silence on the topic in sources stretching from the 10th-century Vita Sancti Fantini down to the letters of Michael Psellos. The latter, indeed, wrote a sort of encomium of Thessalonike and of its new blossoming under a new archbishop. But precisely in that context he also described — if humorously — the Thessalonians as “mules” (ἡμίονοι) and gave a memorable definition of the oblivion that had seized the ancient Greek world and grandeur: “abandoned ruins”, ἐκλελειμμένα ἐρείπια. 5 The receiver of this letter has been tentatively identified as Michael Mitylenaios, the archbishop of Thessalonike to whom Ilias Nesseris devotes in the present volume a study that represents an important mise au point concerning his scanty biographical data as well as his previously unknown hagiographical work.
Curiously enough, from Du Cange until Tafel and beyond, the idea prevailed that Psellos’ addressee might in fact be the famous archbishop Eustathios of Thessalonike, who was also a maistor ton rhetoron but lived several decades later. This mistake is diagnostic, for so much of what we know about Thessalonian learning before the Paleologan age more or less directly revolves around the learned archbishop and his monumental commentaries on Homer, Dionysius the Periegete, and the Iambic Canon. Several aspects of Eustathios’ activity — including his working methods, his literary consciousness, his political profile, and the uncertain fate of his library — were investigated in another conference promoted in 2015 by Thessalonike’s Kentro Istorias. 6
This is the same institution that — together with the Δήμος Θεσσαλονίκης, and with the invaluable support of Maria Tatagia and Angeliki Delikari — organised the May 2022 workshop where most of the papers collected in the present volume were first read. It is not by chance, then, that Vassilis Sarris, a Thessalonian whose unceasing commitment to the study and the promotion of the city’s past deserves the utmost praise, adorns the present volume by treating Eustathios’ Capture of Thessalonike as a work of political education, proceeding from his activity as a teacher not only in terms of its literary texture, 7 but also in its broader ideological and paedagogical orientation. Together with Constantinople (and Jerusalem), Thessalonike is one of the very few cities whose long name merits a specific abbreviation sign in Greek handwriting.
The dualism between the capital of the Empire and what is often called the Συμβασιλεύουσα has marked all studies of Thessalonike’s history and cultural development (after all, Eustathios himself spent most of his life and of his intellectual activity in Byzantium proper): this is why it becomes particularly necessary to analyse our written sources, in order to understand how scholars and literati travelled between both cities and combined learning from both cultural centres. In the third paper of the present collection, Ilias Taxidis sifts the epistolaries of some of the most important figures of the Palaeologan Renaissance in the search of hints as to the city’s role as an important pole in the erudite network that represents the main object of inquiry for the rest of the book. As a matter of fact, the following essays tackle different levels of the education available at and research produced in Thessalonike between approximately 1240 and 1340, the time when Theodoros Metochites’ famous statement φιλολογοῦσι γὰρ ὡς οἶσθ᾽οἱ τῇδε κομιδῇ “as you know, the locals are very devoted to studies” rested on particularly solid ground.8 Dimosthenis Stratigopoulos and Maria Tziatzi both deal with schedography, an often neglected genre that proves crucial for reconstructing the minute practices of Byzantine classrooms, whether devoted to hagiographic texts (the case of John Pediasimos, ὁ πολὺς ἐν λόγοις καὶ σοφίᾳ περίπυστος, 9 on the miracles of Saint Demetrios) or to pagan and Christian subject-matter (the case of Demetrios Staphidakes’ epimerisms on the labours of Hercules).
Fevronia Nousia and Francesco Giannachi both shed light on the methods and works of Thomas Magistros, perhaps the most influential intellectual of this period — Nousia, building on and refining the pathbreaking work of Niels Gaul, 10 delves into the facies of his Atticist lexicon in manuscripts and early printed editions, whereas Giannachi identifies and transcribes Magistros’ and Moschopoulos’ glosses and scholia to Pindar’s odes as they feature in codices, paying special attention to the use and meaning of the signs used in this context.
The latter is a painstaking method, but the only way to discern a proper historical understanding of the exegesis of ancient Greek poets. In a dense paper that represents both an overview and an update, Daniele Bianconi enriches some of the findings he exposed in his memorable book on Thessalonike’s “cultura scritta”,11 and shows to what extent recent attributions and discoveries have enriched our knowledge of Thessalonian bookproduction, particularly in the milieus of Demetrios (and Nikolaos) Triklinios and Ioannes Katrarios.
I dwell on the papers of this section because they testify to the importance of joining the paleographical study of manuscripts with the reconstruction of the broader frame of Thessalonike’s intellectual fervour — the same fervour to which we owe the survival of the carmina figurata of the Bucolic corpus and several tragedies of Euripides, the first systematic metrical analysis of Greek choral lyric, and a number of other landmarksin the field of Classical philology and humanistic studies in general. Bianconi’s book has already discussed invaluable evidence of textual erudition, such as the long book-list in Vat. gr. 64 (ταῦτα ἐν Θεσσαλονίκῃ), the mention of the δυσάριθμοι βίβλοι encountered by Nikephoros Blemmydes between Mt. Athos and Thessalonike in 1241, 12 the activity of the famous illuminator Theodoros Hagiopetrites, and of course the role of Atticism (Demetrios Kydones famously stated in 1345 that “arriving here, one would believe himself to be staying in Athens with Demosthenes and Plato”).13
But more evidence surfaces as time goes by: an anonymous scribe working for the Thessalonian apographeus Apelmenes was engaged in the copy of codices of Lucian, Aelius Aristides, and Gregory of Nyssa that we can now confidently assign to Macedonia; 14 we now know that the very important ms. Marc. gr. XI.6 of Strabo’s Geography originated in Thessalonike in the 1320s, probably under the guidance of George Lakapenos, one of the most gifted pupils of Maximos Planoudes; 15 the toponyms collected by a student or teacher on f. 112v of ms. Laur. 28.49 of Ptolemy’s Geography all concern places of Thrace and Macedonia (in both the ancient and the modern form, e.g. Ἔδεσσα/Βοδινά), which may point to the production of that monumental codex, normally assigned to Constantinople, precisely in Thessalonike;16 the other famous codex of the Geography, Marc. gr. 516, bears a note — “Ἰωάννου μαΐστορος τοῦ Ἀστραπᾶ” — which may point again to the production or early circulation of such an ambitious codex in early-14th century Macedonia; 17 the great astronomical sylloge now preserved in Vat. gr. 213 and Parm. 165
was written in Thessalonike in precisely the same years when Katrarios, Triklinios and Nikolaos Kabasilas were devoting serious efforts to the study and preservation of ancient scientific writings from Euclides to Ptolemy and beyond. 18 So, Tinnefeld’s idea that “most of the late Byzantine contributions to science were written in the capital”19 may perhaps now be more precisely qualified. The second half of the 14th century and the early 15th are normally regarded as less fertile ages in terms of the town’s cultural rayonnement. And yet, Demetrios Agoritsas leads us through the meanders of the erudite circles of the age of Manuel II Palaeologus (1391–1425), concluding that one could find a good niveau of education for civil servants, notaries and judges alike, even if the evidence of letters and documents — from Demetrios Kydones down to John Argyropoulos — may still persuade us that “the extent of literacy in Thessalonica at this time was not very high”.20
Theodoros Giagkou shows that Matthew Blastares’ work on canonical law — due to exert a fundamental influence over ecclesiastical jurisprudence for centuries — could only emerge from a solid knowledge of earlier debates on the topic, from Theodore Balsamon to the more recent Council Acts; and finally, Paola Carmela La Barbera brings together what little is known, in terms of manuscripts and indirect sources, about the book-collector, diplomat and teacher Manuel Tarchaneiotes Boullotes, who may have been acquainted with no less a person than Cyriacus of Ancona. The relationship between the town and Western humanism still needs closer exploration, but it must be remembered that one of the most important Greek emigres in Italy, Theodore Gazes or Gaza, 21 was born in Thessalonike around the same year (1408) that Manuel II praised the town as “mother of rhetors and source of learning”; 22 however hyperbolic, Manuel insists that the inhabitants stand out for their commitment to their ancestors’ heritage and for their activity “concerning the learning of the most important things” (περὶ τὴν μάθησιν τῶν κρατίστων). When describing the terrible days of the Norman conquest of Thessalonike (1185), the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates wrote about the “μέσον ἡμῶν καὶ αὐτῶν χάσμα διαφορᾶς... μέγιστον”, 23 the enormous gap between “us” (the Greeks) and “them” (the Latins, the Westerners) — a famous dictum that came to define, if controversially, the entire relationship between East and West before and after the Fourth Crusade. 24
In an age when such gaps, such misunderstandings, and such bleeding wounds are opening once again on our continent, it may be good to think of Thessalonike as a safe port of call (οὐδεὶς ἄπολις μέχρις ἂν ἡ τῶν Θεσσαλονικέων ᾖ πόλις, 25 Nikephoros Choumnos once wrote), as the very place where Thomas Magistros once wrote the following gnome: ἰδιώτατον μὲν καὶ λυσιτελέστατον καὶ τοῦ παντὸς ἀξιώτατον ἀνθρώποις οἱ λόγοι, τά τ᾽ ἄλλα καὶ ὅτι πολλῷ βελτίους ἢ κατ᾽ ἀνθρώπους καθιστᾶσιν ἀνθρώπους culture is the most typical and the most useful and worthy thing for humans, amongst other things because it makes them much better compared to the human standards.26
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