CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TRENDS AND DEVELOPMENTS IN THE BYZANTINE POETIC TRADITION

Christopher Livanos

“Byzantine poetry,” is here defined as verse composed in the Greek language from the time of Constantine I to that of Constantine XI. This chapter will concentrate on developments in the Byzantine poetic tradition and comparisons between Byzantine and western poetry. Notions of subjectivity developed in comparable ways in the literary traditions of Byzantium and western Europe. Autobiographical topics likewise became more prevalent in Byzantine literature in the empire’s later centuries, although medieval Greek verse never had a poet as obsessed with himself as Petrarch or the love poets he inspired. Another important point of comparison between Byzantine and medieval western poetry is the challenge that poets in the Latin West as well as the Greek East faced in reconciling pagan culture with Christian faith. The enormous amount of literature that falls under the heading of Byzantine poetry necessitates discussion of literary trends, rather than close readings of specific poetic passages, throughout most of this essay.¹

Two of the earliest poets of significance, who may be called Byzantine by most standards, are Gregory of Nazianzos and Synesios of Cyrene.² These two highly educated bishops are noted for their union of classical form with Christian content. Gregory’s close friend Basil of Caesarea gave Byzantine culture its most representative expression regarding the proper attitude of a cultured Christian toward the wisdom of pagan antiquity when he wrote that one should take what is useful and leave behind what is not, precisely as the bee knows which parts of the flower to touch and which to avoid.³ Just how much of the flower Synesios thought safe is apparent in the following passage from his eighth hymn (verses 41–54):

Smil’ed Hesperus the golden,
Who smileth soft for Venus gay!
While that horn’ed glory holden
Brimful from the fount of fire,
The white moon, was leading higher
In a gentle pastoral wise
All the nightly deities!
Yea, and Titan threw abroad

The far shining of his hair
’Neath Thy footsteps holy fair,
Owning Thee the Son of God;
The Mind artificer of all,
And his own fire’s original.⁴

The title “greatest Byzantine poet” has been given most often to the fifth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melode. In contrast to Gregory and Nazianzos and Synesios of Cyrene, who attempted to wed Christian faith with Hellenic culture, Romanos was inspired by Semitic literature. According to legend, he was a convert from Judaism. Whether or not this is true, a comparison of his work with that of the more hellenizing Christian poets tempts one to resuscitate paradigms of “The Jewish” versus “The Greek.” We can certainly understand why Byzantines believed that a poet in whom the language of the psalter is so alive must have had a Jewish background, but other Semitic influences, particularly the Syriac hymnographer Ephrem, also provide an adequate explanation for the distinctively Near Eastern character of Romanos’ hymns.

There is no doubt of Romanos’ poetic talents, but it is still curious that twentieth-century scholarship was nearly unanimous in its verdict that he was Byzantium’s greatest poet. Several epigrammists of the eleventh century could have been viable contenders. Theodore Prodromos was as technically skilled as any Byzantine writer and, if he was the author of the Ptochoprodromika, considerably more versatile than Romanos. Nonnos is certainly the Byzantine poet most widely read by classicists who do not normally work in Byzantine studies. Then there is George of Pisidia, whom, as Byzantinists are fond of noting, Michael Psellos compared to Euripides. Unlike Romanos, all of these poets followed ancient Greek models. I do not believe they were any more slavish in their use of classical forms than Romanos was in his emulation of St Ephrem the Syrian, but the esteem in which classicists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held ancient Greek literature inevitably led to unfavorable assessments of later imitators of the classical tradition. Early scholars of Byzantine literature had no such cultural biases in favor of Romanos’ poetic role models, and thus they had no prejudice against Romanos himself. Trypanis, whose views on much Byzantine poetry could be quite harsh, held Romanos in the highest esteem and made invaluable contributions to textual scholarship on Romanos’ work. The few negative comments Trypanis made regarding Romanos’ work seem to stem from Orientalist aesthetic conceptions. He criticizes Romanos for a lack of proportion in a passage reminiscent of much Orientalist scholarship that has been famously studied by Edward Said. Talented though Romanos is, according to Trypanis and Maas, he is given to occasional excess and, once in a great while, his style is marred by distasteful ornateness.⁵ Romanos’ uniquely Semitic literary influences save him from any charges of slavish emulation of the Greek classics, but at the same time they expose him, as an oriental poet, to accusations that he lacks a classical sense of proportion and restraint.

The most celebrated poet between Romanos and Theodore Prodromos was George of Pisidia, author of long poems on the military achievements of the emperor Herakleios as well as an account of the six days of creation. Despite the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries, fewer literary studies have been written on him than on other Byzantine poets. The reason seems straightforward enough: the nakedly propagandistic tone in which he celebrates the military exploits of his ruler, Herakleios, tends to offend the modern reader. His Hexaemeron is less an account of God’s activities during the six days than a meditation upon the created order. At times the piece indulges in vituperations against the Byzantines’ theological and political enemies, but there are also passages in which Pisides evokes a trance-like intensity:

O distant Presence in fixed motion! Known
To all men, and inscrutable to one:
Perceived – uncomprehended! Unexplained
To all the spirits, yet by each attained,
Because its God-sight is Thy work! O Presence,
Whatever holy greatness of Thine essence
Lie virtue-hidden, Thou hast given our eyes
The vision of Thy plastic energies –
Not shown in angels only (those create
All fiery-hearted, in a mystic state
Of bodiless body) but, if order be
Of natures more sublime than they or we,
In highest Heaven, or mediate aether, or
This world now seen, or one that came before
Or one to come, – quick in Thy purpose, – there!
Working in fire and water, earth and air –
In every tuneful star, and tree, and bird –
In all the swimming creeping life unheard,
In all green herbs, and chief of all, in MAN.⁶

The eleventh century saw a flowering of epigrammatic verse that can truly be called a renaissance marked by the achievements of poets such as John Mauropous, Michael Psellos and Christopher of Mytilene. Slightly earlier was John Geometres (late tenth century), whose work is important as a precursor to the major epigrammists although he does not attain their level of stylistic refinement and literary complexity.⁷

The late tenth and early eleventh centuries were the period of the hymns of Symeon the New Theologian, which are equally important in the history of Byzantine literature and Byzantine religion. A major literary motif in his poetic work is the manifestation of God as a light which can be experienced by the intellect of the contemplative mystic. His work does not formulate a systematic theology, but the language and imagery of his work became one of the major influences on Byzantine hesychast theology, which became the most politically and religiously divisive topic in the fourteenth century.

The current Oxford Classical Dictionary states that no creative work in the genre of the epigram took place after the sixth century. The eleventh century in fact saw several major poets adapt the ancient form to the social and artistic needs of their own time. Lauxtermann has demonstrated that the middle Byzantine period was characterized less by conscious imitation of the classics than with what he calls “modernism.”⁸ His attention to what is new in Byzantine literature is an important and necessary contribution to a discussion that had been dominated for too long by the odd idea that Byzantines were merely imitators of the past who either would not have understood innovation or would have been offended by the suggestion that their writings were new and fresh creations rather than faithful replicas emerging from a venerable poetic mold.⁹

Lauxtermann argues with conviction that John Geometres was a masterful poet, and he builds an unassailable case that Geometres was a conscientious modernizer rather than a classicizer. His poems do not contain the fascinating interplay of classicism and modernism, of paganism and Christianity, that enrich the language and imagery of so much Byzantine poetry. The simplicity of his verse may appear as a defect to the twenty-first-century reader conditioned to look for intertextuality and multileveled irony, but in an early eleventh-century context, Geometres’ simple elegance was a worthy artistic achievement. In contrast to Geometres’ work, the poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous are subtle in their allusions, often ironic, and complex in their symbolism and imagery; yet they, like Geometres, are also deeply personal. The sense of personal immediacy was Geometres’ great contribution to Byzantine poetry. While later poets surpassed him in subtlety, without his influence it is unlikely that their work would have amounted to more than a series of intellectual exercises. His rather stark modernism assured that the classicizing tendencies of poets a generation or two after him would, at their best, remain personally and socially relevant, however elaborate their work might be.

It is anachronistic to exalt the criterion of innovation when judging pre-modern literature from Byzantium or anywhere else. It has rightly been noted many times that Byzantines valued tradition more than do modern westerners, but it would be odd to find a pre-modern society that did not. When we consider how modern scholarship has shown that Byzantine poets were original in their subject matter, meter and linguistic register, what puzzles us is how the image of Byzantium as a society with a thousand-year phobia of change ever took root. Byzantine poetry is not the first literary tradition to undergo such a reassessment. Before Tolkien published The Monsters and the Critics, Anglo-Saxonists commonly regarded Beowulf as garbled history rather than good poetry.¹⁰ In response to the question of why the troubadour Arnaut Daniel was held in such low critical regard in the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound remarked, “Because poets have not been able to read his language, and because the scholars have not known anything about poetry.”¹¹ Taking care to avoid Pound’s venom, we may note that Byzantine poetry was usually read until quite recently by scholars whose interests were not poetry per se: literary scholars who read Byzantine poetry were typically classicists already prejudiced by a tradition hostile to Byzantine culture, and the translations that existed typically aimed to be literal rather than literary.

John Mauropous was one of the first great epigrammists of the middle Byzantine period, and I believe his verse bridges the gap, as Lauxtermann has rightly pointed out, between classicizers and modernizers. His work strives to make the classical motifs speak to the realities of his own age. One of his most notable poems is a farewell speech addressed to his ancestral house.¹² The poem may commemorate Mauropous’ departure from Constantinople to serve as bishop of Euchaita, or it may describe some other occasion, the details of which are no longer known. In the poem, Mauropous casts himself in the role of a Christianized version of the exiled hero, referring to the house as his trophos (nurse) and thereby inviting comparisons between himself and such exiled heroes as Odysseus and Orestes, whose nurses figure prominently in the works of Homer and Aeschylus, respectively. The subsequent poem in Mauropous’ collection describes the poet’s restoration to his home. The careful sequencing of Mauropous’ ninety-nine poems may be another instance of Byzantine literature anticipating a trend that would come to the West in later years when sonnet sequences and other systematically arranged verse collections became common.

Another of Mauropous best-known poems is an epigram pleading for the salvation of the souls of Plato and Plutarch. Mauropous is not so bold as to presume that his pre-Christian Hellenic heroes will truly be saved, but his clear wish for divine providence to find some way to work out the salvation of two non-Christian souls marks an important point in the history of what may be termed “Byzantine humanism.” His broad-mindedness concerning the fate of righteous non-Christians, like his interest in autobiographical themes, is a trait Mauropous shares with the humanists of the Italian Renaissance.

Christopher of Mytilene, Mauropous’ contemporary, was the most elegant Greek poet of the eleventh century and perhaps of the entire Byzantine period. Christopher composed four Calendars of Saints, two in classical meters, iambic and hexameter, one in the kanon form and one in stichera. He also wrote many epigrams on a wide variety of subjects pertaining to everyday Constantinopolitan life. His topics include chariot races, political events, sacred objects and rituals as seen by common worshippers, animals and the difficulty he had in keeping his books safe from a mouse infestation. Lamentably, rodent damage has prevented us from having a more complete collection of his work.¹³

Not the least of Mauropous’ achievements was the formative role he played in the education of Michael Psellos, one of the most original and influential Byzantine thinkers. Psellos has been studied more for his contributions to historiography and theology than to poetry, but he was an accomplished and sometimes innovative verse author. A recent volume of scholarly essays has been published on Psellos as a literary author, though his verse receives little attention in it.¹⁴ Eustratios Papaioannou has recently drawn attention to poetic innovations in Psellos’ work, notably the fact that Psellos seems to have been the first poet to identify the figure of Narcissus with the poet’s voice.¹⁵ If Psellos was indeed the innovator of this important literary topos, we find yet another instance of Byzantine poets anticipating trends that would later become central to western European poetry.¹⁶

The twelfth century was a time of bold innovation in Byzantine literature. Four novels from the time survive, three in verse and one in prose. While the eleventh century is remarkable for the elegant dodecasyllables of John Mauropous and Christopher of Mytilene, in the twelfth century we see a greater variety of genres and a greater willingness to experiment. At a recent colloquium on Byzantine Literature, Ihor Ševenko stated in his concluding observations that a common negative feature among scholars of Byzantine literature is an apologetic tone, and he told all the participants that there is no need to be apologetic, because we have been defeated. I hope I do not fail to heed Ševenko’s warning by beginning a discussion of the twelfth century with the curious Christos Paschon, an attempt at Christian tragedy with Jesus Christ as the protagonist. It is not a new observation that no true tragedy existed anywhere in the Christian Middle Ages. Christianity is a religion with a comic worldview. The greatest literary work to come out of medieval Europe was entitled simply Commedia by its author, and tragedy did not reappear until Renaissance humanists attempted to reconstruct the culture of antiquity.

A more successful twelfth-century attempt to engage with the genre of tragedy is a poem, commonly known by its first line, which Ruth Macrides has translated as “An unprecedented report and an ultra-tragic one.”¹⁷ Panagiotis Roilos has characterized the genre of the poem as “tantalizingly elusive.”¹⁸ Its brevity, at 165 lines, as well as its overall rhetorical style mark it as clearly not an authentic tragedy, but use of the term tragodia in the opening line suggests that its twelfth-century author found the ancient genre of tragedy relevant to the poem’s subject matter. The poem is an account of a nun accused of cannibalism and murder, and allusions to Euripides have been found in the text.

Major developments in twelfth-century literature include increased use of the Greek vernacular and the appearance of four long works of prose fiction, commonly called the Byzantine novels. Important studies of Byzantine literature from the twelfth century have been offered by Margaret Alexiou and Panagiotis Roilos, notably in the latter’s Amphoteroglossia, an extensive study of innovations in the novel and in satire.¹⁹ I believe it is important to discuss Christopher of Mytilene as a figure who foreshadows several literary trends that Alexiou and Roilos have identified as important in twelfth-century literature. Christopher’s poems display a refined satiric sense. A notable epigram targets an arrogant doctor, thematically linking him with the medical satire found in the twelfth-century prose work Timarion. Christopher’s work consistently sympathizes with the non-elites of Byzantine society. His most famous poem is a jaded meditation on the insurmountable gap separating the rich from the poor, and in his concern for the lower classes he anticipates such twelfth-century texts as the Ptochoprodromika.

Michael Choniates has left little surviving poetic work, but among his verse is a poem on the city of Athens that I believe may be called the last great Byzantine epigram. It has been suggested that the poem was an epigram in the original sense, having been composed for a painting of the ancient city. This may be the case, but the poem itself does not attempt to reconstruct ancient Athens through visual imagery. Michael meditates instead on the impossibility of knowing the past and the limitations of language. The poem is noteworthy in that the line, “living in Athens I see Athens nowhere” anticipates the “looking for Rome in Rome” topos that became a common conceit in western poetry from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. Another literary motif in Michael’s poem that anticipates a major trend in western poetry is the reference to secular love as a form of idolatry.

The most vibrant verse genre of the fourteenth century was the chivalric romance. The epigrammist Manuel Philes wrote an allegorical interpretation of a romance composed by one of his contemporaries, interpreting the protagonists’ secular love as a metaphor for love of the divine. Scholarship has been divided as to the validity of Philes’ reading. Some have maintained that Philes’ reading of Christian spirituality into secular romance is a form of textual violence akin to the medieval allegorization of pagan classics, while others, such as Roderick Beaton, have argued that Philes’ interpretation must be taken seriously as one of the very few commentaries to come from a contemporary source.²⁰ Philes’ reading of a romance by a fellow Byzantine is, as I believe Beaton correctly implies, quite different from the sort of criticism Eustathios of Thessalonika performed when he wrote allegorical interpretations of Homer that strike the modern reader as outlandish and that could have had very little to do with the worldview of the ancient bards who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. Philes was writing about his own culture, and, in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we must suppose he understood it better than we do. If Philes’ reading is justified, the romance in question is certainly not the only work of medieval fiction to hide a Christian meaning under a secular surface. Allegory was a favorite technique of medieval writers, and they varied in the degree to which they masked a work’s underlying meaning. Even a text as seemingly remote from the Christian world as Beowulf is in fact filled with Christian symbolism from the hero’s descent to a lake of fire, to his agony and desertion by his followers at the ninth hour, through to his death and the funeral rites performed by twelve followers.²¹ If even the king of the Geats is revealed upon close reading to be a Christ figure, like many other characters in medieval literature, we should not dismiss allegorizing readings of Byzantine fiction that claim to find a Christian subtext.

Much of Philes’ own work consists of entreaties beseeching the emperor for financial assistance. For this reason, he has sometimes been compared to the author of the Ptochoprodromika, yet the similarities between the two authors are actually quite scarce. Philes wrote in a high style, while Ptochoprodromos wrote in a lively style full of colloquialisms.²² We cannot judge how well the learned author imitated the language of the streets, but we cannot mistake the liveliness of the poet’s language. Arguments against the authorship of Theodore Prodromos, a known and technically skilled poet, hinge upon the variance in linguistic register, yet such arguments would have us believe the same man could not have written both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Letters of Samuel Clemens, or both The Divine Comedy and De vulgari eloquentia.

Philes’ poetic output includes a vast corpus of versification that modern scholarship would tend to classify as “non-literary.” He also composed many epigrams that were written as inscriptions to accompany works of visual art. In these poems, we see how the Greek epigram had come full circle, returning to the function it had had in the ancient world and from which its name derives. Manuel Philes is likely to remain one of the Byzantine poets read more for his historical than his literary value. Barry Baldwin has taken a critical view of Philes’ poetic abilities. One common approach among today’s scholars, in Byzantine studies as well as most others, is to sidestep the issue of who is a “good” poet and who is a “bad” poet altogether, but I do not believe Byzantine literary studies are well served by a dismissal of aesthetic appreciation. As a comparatist who studies medieval Italian as well as Byzantine literature, I have been asked by western medievalists first hearing that such a thing as Byzantine poetry exists, “Is it any good?” In response, I agree with Harold Bloom’s position that aesthetic appreciation is supremely important in any discussion of literature, but not with his assertion that “time reduces what is not genius to rubbish.”²³ There is nothing to be gained from trying to find a Byzantine Chaucer or Dante, but there are Byzantine poets whose work can still be appreciated for its value as literature.

It has become a recurring motif in Byzantine studies to make disparaging remarks on the poetic abilities of Theodore Metochites. Indeed, when Ihor Ševenko remarked that Byzantinists too readily take an apologetic tone, he was referring specifically to the attitude literary scholars express when discussing Metochites’ work. I believe that we should heed Ševenko’s advice, but the admission that not every Byzantine poet was a great talent is not an apology but a sign of confidence. If the tradition we study includes Romanos and Mauropous, whose talents only the most antiquated chauvinist could deny, then we may exercise parrhesia in assessment of poets who do not command the same admiration.

I have compared Michael Choniates and John Mauropous to the great troubadours not only because their thematic concerns were sometimes similar but also because I believe their literary achievements were of a similar magnitude. Manuel Philes and Theodore Metochites were not of the same poetic caliber, but they are important to literary scholars in that they share with famous western poets of the fourteenth century a conscious interest in self-construction. Fourteenth-century literature in the West is characterized by a degree of introspection far greater than had been seen in any literary work since St Augustine’s Confessions. Petrarch, the great self-explorer of medieval letters, took the inspiration for his autobiographical enterprise from Augustine himself. In his Ascent of Mt Ventoux, he relates a mountaineering excursion he undertook with his brother. At the summit of the mountain, he opened a copy of the Confessions packed conveniently for the trip, and read the following: “And men go about admiring the high mountains and the mighty waves of the sea and the wide sweep of the rivers and the sound of the ocean and the movement of the stars, but they themselves they abandon.”²⁴

Petrarch used Augustine as a role model for the profound psychological introspection found throughout his work, especially in the Canzoniere. Prior to Petrarch’s time the Confessions had not been one of the more influential of Augustine’s work. It does not seem that any western writer in the nearly 900 years between Augustine’s time and Petrarch’s felt so important as an individual to justify an autobiographical project of such magnitude. The autobiographical emphasis that Petrarch brought to western poetry was not without parallels in Byzantium, although medieval Greek poets did not produce an autobiographical work of comparable scale or complexity to his Canzoniere. Notable verse works with distinctively autobiographical features from the fourteenth and late thirteenth centuries include Manuel Philes’ Dialogue of a Man with his Soul, Theodore Metochites’ poems to himself and several works by Stephanos Sachlikes.²⁵

Self-assertion had always been a feature of Byzantine poetry, but the literary self is constructed quite differently in the poems of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than in earlier periods of the empire’s history.²⁶ To take an example from the earliest period of Byzantine literature, we find autobiographical subjects in many poems of Gregory of Nazianzos. In the middle Byzantine period, Christopher of Mytilene and especially John Mauropous place their poetic egos firmly in their epigrams. Yet none of these poets engage in anything like the self-reflection we find in Theodore Metochites. The shift from self-assertion to self-reflection is, I believe, one of the more significant trends in late Byzantine poetry and one that is sure to provide fruitful ground for comparisons with the literary traditions of western Europe, in which increased focus on the self during the late medieval and early modern periods is a familiar topic to scholars.

While there are striking similarities in how notions of the self developed in Byzantium and the West, certain differences between Byzantine and western constructions of the self should be borne in mind. In fourteenth-century Italian poetry, we find a nascent “cult of the artist,” a celebration of the social outcast who is at odds with his society yet who paradoxically gives it the very words by which it will be remembered.

Early studies of Byzantine literature concentrated primarily on historical questions. Roderick Beaton and Margaret Alexiou are among the pioneering scholars in studying Byzantine poetry primarily for its value as literature. Over the past two decades, they and others have published literary studies devoted to genre analysis, close reading and the application of literary theory to Byzantine texts. It is not surprising that a subject as controversial as literary theory should bring with it a certain amount of contention when it is introduced to Byzantine studies. No field within modern academia has been spared the debate on theory’s validity, and several debates that have not always been amicable have occurred within Byzantine literary studies.²⁷ Margaret Alexiou’s After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor discusses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and other Byzantinists, notably Roilos, have likewise applied Bakhtinian analysis to literary texts.²⁸ I believe it is safe to say that Bakhtin has been more widely discussed by Byzantinists than any other literary critic. While critics have questioned the relevance of Bakhtin to Byzantine letters, the reasons he has been so much discussed are fairly straightforward. Along with Erich Auerbach and Michel Foucault, Bakhtin is one of the literary theorists most concerned with the Middle Ages. If literary theory is to figure at all in the study of Byzantine literature, then it seems inevitable that Bakhtin will continue to be discussed. None of the major literary theorists has been interested in Byzantine texts, so Byzantinists wishing to begin theoretical studies must start somewhere. We must look to theoretical studies of either ancient Greek or medieval western literature and employ a comparative approach in our own work, using scholarship in related fields to examine how the literature of the Byzantines differs from that of their western contemporaries and their ancient predecessors.

The attempt at a comprehensive study of Byzantine poetry undertaken by a western scholar was that of Karl Krumbacher.²⁹ Like Byzantinists before and since, he had to contend with the negative images of Byzantine literature that prevailed since the Enlightenment. Krumbacher argued that a continuum of classical literature could be traced up to the time of Herakleios and that the then-prevalent view that classical literature ended in the fourth century was in error. Prior to Krumbacher, Byzantine verse had its admirers in the West, but they were more often poets than scholars. The most notable was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose work The Greek Christian Poets, consisting of commentary and translations, was published in 1842 in the periodical Athenaeum. Barrett Browning initiated the scholarly topos of apologizing for Byzantine poetry, but her true importance in the history of Byzantine studies is that she was the first western writer of the modern era to attempt a serious poetic rehabilitation and critical reassessment of medieval Greek poetry. After her mandatory disclaimer that, “their place in literature … is not, it has been admitted, of the highest,” she went on to make the then-contentious point, “that it was not of the lowest the proof will presently be attempted.”³⁰ Over 160 years later, Barrett Browning remains by far the most accomplished English-language poet ever to translate a large selection of Byzantine poetry. The distinction of her poetry alone should draw more attention from Byzantinists even apart from her critical insights.

One of the greatest challenges currently facing students of Byzantine literature is to overcome the institutional resistance to reading literature as literature. Theoretical matters that would have been widely discussed in other fields of literary study remain unrecognized in Byzantine studies. We may draw an example from the most famous Byzantine literary work, the epic of Digenes Akrites. In the Grottaferrata version, book five ends with the hero expressing remorse over sexual excess, and book six begins with him decapitating a serpent who has attempted the very same crime of which the hero is guilty. It is no credit to our discipline that no Byzantinist has yet discussed this clear phallic imagery, or even acknowledged its existence. This is not the place to discuss what the symbolism means, and surely many interpretations will prove to be legitimate as Byzantinists analyze literary matters of the sort that have always concerned scholars of other national literatures.

NOTES

1 The most valuable anthology for the student desiring to become more familiar with the Byzantine poetic tradition is Cantarella 1992.

2 The present essay will not be devoted to metrics. For a recent, insightful study of meter in Byzantine poetry that is both thorough and concise, the reader is referred to Lauxtermann 1999, which explains in detail the origins of Greek isosyllabic verse in the works of Gregory of Nazianzos (about whose attribution Lauxtermann is cautious) and the Greek translations of Ephrem the Syrian. In this respect, Gregory’s poetry could be said to have meaningful similarities to eastern poetry. I believe, important metrical considerations notwithstanding, that Gregory’s poetry is an attempt to reconcile Greek culture and Christianity. His work is wholly unlike that of Romanos, who shows very little influence from Greek antiquity despite writing in the Greek language.

3 Deferrari 1934: IV, 391.

4 Barrett Browning 1863: 171 I have chosen Barrett Browning’s translation for its literary merits and because I believe it is important to remember that major English poets have been interested in Byzantine poetry. For a critical edition of Synesios, see Gruber and Strohm 1991.

5 Maas and Trypanis 1963: xxii–xxiii.

6 Barrett Browning 1863: 187, lines 873–91. George’s works have been published in Pertusi 1959. For a bilingual edition of his work with Italian on facing pages, see Tartaglia 1998. Another critical edition, again with Italian translation, is Gonelli 1998.

7 Geometres’ work is found in PG 106: 812–1002.

8 Lauxtermann 2003, especially 118–22. The second volume of this study of Byzantine poetry is eagerly awaited, as the first stops short of Christopher of Mytilene and the other great poets of the mid-eleventh century.

9 The fullest treatment of the topic of innovation is found in the essays of the volume edited by Littlewood 1995. An especially helpful contribution is Margaret Mullett’s suggestion, indebted to Magdalino 1987, that the Byzantines distinguished between two types of newness – the “neos” and the “kainos,” the former being positive and the latter negative.

10 Tolkien 1936.

11 Pound 1910: 23.

12 The standard critical edition of Mauropous’ poems is Lagarde and Bollig 1882. The most thorough modern study of his work is Karpozilos 1982.

13 The standard edition of Christopher’s epigrams is Kurtz 1903.

14 Barber and Jenkins 2006.

15 Papaioannou presented this work on Narcissus in Psellos at the Dumbarton Oaks colloquium Byzantine Literature: New Voices and Current Approaches. The poem, number 5 in Gautier’s sequence, is found in Gautier 1986: 131–133.

16 It has been persuasively argued that the myth of Echo and Narcissus was the single most important poetic motif of nineteenth-century Europe. The classic study of Narcissus in western literature is Vinge 1967.

17 Macrides 1985.

18 Roilos 2005: 17.

19 Alexiou 2002; Roilos 2005.

20 Beaton 1996: 190–2 has a favorable discussion of Philes’ reading. Smith and Agapitos 1992 are critical of both Philes and Beaton. The epigram has been edited and analyzed by Knös 1962.

21 Hamilton 1946; McNamee 1960.

22 A recent edition of Ptochoprodromos 1991. Philes’ epigrams have been collected in Miller 1855–7, reprinted by Hakkert 1967.

23 Bloom 2002: 814.

24 Quoted in Musa 1985: 17.

25 Metochites’ extended dialogues not simply with “himself” but with different aspects of the self, such as the psyche, the thymos and the nous are unusually introspective for Byzantine poetry. They have been edited by Featherstone 2000. Stephanos Sachlikes’ works are often very autobiographical. Like Metochites, he is preoccupied with his own misfortunes, but his verse is much less philosophical and much more enjoyable. Sachlikes’ poems have been edited by Wagner 1874: 62–105. Philes’ dialogue with his own mind (nous), in which other personal faculties and allegorical figures occasionally chime in, is found in Miller 1855: I, 143–84. Manousakas 1972 edits and discusses a dialogue between self and soul by Leonardo Dellaporta. The piece is largely a paraphrase of a work by Ephrem the Syrian, and thus it is notable that Dellaporta, like Petrarch, drew from patristic sources of late antiquity for his introspective works.

26 Lauxtermann 2003: 26.

27 Smith and Agapitos 1992 were particularly critical of Beaton’s use of theory, which they felt lacked depth.

28 Alexiou 2002; Roilos 2005: 227, 230, 243.

29 Krumbacher 1897. The standard twentieth-century scholarly history of Byzantine secular literature is Hunger 1978.

30 Barrett Browning 1863: 18–19.