.

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

by RobertBrowning

A good deal has been written on the debt to Homer of this or that writer or group of
writers in the Byzantine world. A good example is Agne Vasilikopoulou's recent
study of Homer in the literary renaissanceof the twelfth century.' Most of these
studies have failed to distinguish clearly between incidental quotation of Homeric
tags, direct acquaintance with the text, and creative use of Homeric motifs -which
does not always imply knowledge of the text. What is interesting is not so much who
could quote Homer, or even who read him, but the purpose for which Homer was
read, the place of knowledge of Homer in the life of Byzantine society, and the
extent to which study of Homer led to results, direct or indirect, which go beyond
the pleasure of the immediate reader.
The present paper is intended as a preliminary survey of the field in the light of
these principles. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, and though textual studies will
be touched upon, it is not concerned with studying the history of the text of the
Homeric poems in the way in which the pupils of the late Professor Alphonse Dain
have studied that of the text of many other Greek writers. In spite of the recent
work of Erbse,2 van der Valk3 and others, the time is not yet ripe for an Histoire du
texte d1fomere.
First, let us remember that Homer was always a schoolbook, a prescribed text,
from which generation after generation learned to read with understanding.4 A
rather elementary grammatical commentary arranged alphabetically, the 'E1T/lLeptG,uoL,was composed probably in the sixth century;5 the latest authority quoted is
John Philoponus. Constantine, the future apostle of the Slavs,finding difficulty in

1 Agne Vasilikopoulou-loannidou,

'H ava'YevvTjutc;TWV 'YpajljlaTWV KaTa TOVfl' atWva Eic;TO

BvtavTWV Kat <>'bjlTjpoc;, (Athens 1971-1972).

2H. Erbse, Beitriige zur uberlieferung der Iliasscholien (Munich 1960); idem, Scholia Graeca
in Homeri Iliadem (Scholia Vetera) 1 (Berlin 1967).
3M. H. A. L. H. van der Valk, Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad, (Leiden
1963-1964).
4 Rhetoricians

used him as a model of eloquence too

Cf. Tzetzes, Allegories on the Iliad,

15.37-41: Dc; liv 6e xpTjtTj jleOo6ov 6EtVOTTjTOC;

jlavOavEw/KaL OlXEt p%pa
6Etv6V Kat Elvat
XO'YO'YPlil{lOv/
Kat jlETaoppaUEt XP17uOat6 e, Tfl Kat jlETa1rOtTjuEt/Kat M'YWV 1raXw T<laUra 60KEiv WC;
aXXa XE'YEtV/TOV"OjlTjPOV EXETWjlOt 1rapMEt'Yjla T17C;
TeX/J1jC;.
sEd. A. J. Cramer, Anecdota graeca Oxoniensia 1 (Oxford 1835) 1-451.

ROBERT BROWNING

16

understanding the Fathers of the Church, went from Thessalonicato Constantinople

to pursue his education. He finished off grammar in three months, according to the
Slavonic life, and then went on to study Homer.6 Michael, Bishop of Ephesus early
in the eleventh century, learned commentator on Aristotle, pupil of Michael Psellos
and friend of Anna Comnena, mentions that boys learned Homer by heart at school,
thirty lines a day for the average pupil, up to fifty lines a day for the brightest.7 A
little earlier Michael Psellos, who by any standards must have been a bright pupil,
began reading Homer at the age of eight, and in one year had gone through the whole
of the Iliad, not only the e1TO1TOLta
he tells us, but also axflJla Kat 7p61T0~
Kat Ae~L~Kat
Jle7a1popaeVKaLpO~Kat apJlovia UVV(}r/K11~.s
Interestingly enough his daughter
Styliane began her reading not with Homer, but with the Psalms,' for which there
also existed a body of 'E1TljlepLUJloiby George Choiroboskos.lo Even Anna
Comnena, fifty years later, was not allowed by her parents to study classical
literature, and had recourse to surreptitious lessons in grammar and poetry from
court eunuchs.11 When we turn to the late Byzantine period, we find Homer still a
schoolbook, though often only in selections. For instance, Manuel Moschopoulos at
the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century compiled a
commentary on Iliad 1-2.493 as the first item in his teaching selection of classical
poetry -which also included three plays each of Sophocles and Euripides, Pindar's
Olympians, Hesiod's Erga and the first eight poems of Theocritus.12 The form of this
commentary is what the later Byzantines called a 7exvOAOrta,that is, a word for
word paraphrase of the text, introducing lexical equivalents by l1rOVv,1170L,
70V76u7L,
syntactical equivalents by Cw7L70U,words to be understood by 511AOVO7L,
and so on.
Embedded in this continuous paraphrase are longer notes, either grammatical, and
taken from his own Ep(")7r/Jla7a,or dealing with synonyms, and doubtless copied
from some work not yet identified.13 Finally there are many manuscripts of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries containing Book I of the Iliad followed by one
play each of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, some Pindar, some Theocritus,
and a brief selection of the poems of Gregory of Nazianzus, all accompanied by
interlinear glossesand very elementary grammatical and lexical commentary. These
are schoolbooks, embodying the selection of classical poetry read by a particular

'Cf. A. Vaillant, Textes vieux-slaves1 (Paris 1968)5.

7Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca20 (Berlin 1892) 613 lines 4-7.
.C. Sathas, MEaatWVtKf)
(JL(j~OO1)KTJ
5 (Venice 1876) 14.

'lbid. 65.

10Ed. T. Gaisford, Georgii Choerobosci dictata in Theodosii Canones,necnon epimerismi in

Psalmos 3 (Oxford 1842) 1-92. On Choiroboskos cr. most recently, P. Lemerle, Le premier
humanisme byzantin (Paris 1971) 79-80.
II J. Darrouzes, Georgeset D~metrios Tornikes: Lettres et discours (Paris 1970) 243-245.
12Ed. 1. Scherpezeel, Homeri fliadis lib. I-II cum scholiis Manuelis Moschopuli (Utrecht
1719); L. Bachmann, Scholia Lipsiensia fasc. 3 (Leipzig 1835-1838).
13Typical manuscripts of the Moschopulean selection are cod. Vat. gr. 50, cod. axon. Laud.
gr. 54, cod. axon. Auct. F. 3.25, cod. Neapol. Farnes. II F 9, cod..Vat. gr. 1303, cod. Vilt. Urbin.
gr. 140.

HOMER tN BYZANTIUM

17

teacher. And they bear witness to the continuing role of Homer in elementary
education, ever since, in the fifth century B.C., schoolboys had to learn by heart the
meaning of ~el.l17/JaKapT//Jaand other 'O,uftpou'YAwTTat.The Odysseytoo was read,
though less often than the Iliad. There are several introductions to the Odyssey,
clearly written for school purposes, perhaps in the twelfth century. Several are still
unpublished. One was wrongly attributed by its editor to Nicephorus Gregoras. Here
.14
IS an extract:
This godlike man makes reason his guide in all things, so that he says
nothing trivial and nothing unprofitable, even though we cannot always
grasp the import of his furor poeticus. At one moment he teaches us
theology, at another reverence for god, at another he expounds the origin
of the universe, at another the laws of nature whereby the elements now
oppose one another and now combine together, even though he does all
this behind a facade of triviality. At other times he descends,as it were,
from his lofty vantage point and moves among mankind, systematizing
and ordering all arts and crafts so as best to attain their ends. He endows
peoples with understa:ndingand guides their ways. He harmonizes men's
souls not only with themselves but with one another. He confutes and
ridicules folly, and brands ignorance and stupidity as vices alien alike to
divine and human nature. In a word, he sets himself up as a public
teacher of divine and human learning for all mankind.
This is the tone of voice of the encyclopedia salesman. But the author soon goes
on to discuss whether Odysseus really existed, and if not, whether moral lessons
could be drawn from an untrue story. This is a real problem of medieval literary
criticism. In the end he dodges the issue by saying that Homer's mastery of his craft
giveshim moral authority evenif all that he recounts is not strictly true.
Others struck a higher note in their introductory lectures. Here is how Eustathius
beganhis course on Homer:
It would perhaps be best to shun the Sirens of Homer by blocking one's
ears with wax or turning away in another direction, so as to avoid their
spell. If one does not shun them, but reads the poem, he will not pass by
willingly even if many bonds restrain him, nor if he did pass by would he
be grateful
From Ocean flow all rivers, all springs and all wells,
according to the old saying. And from Homer comes if not all at any rate
much of the material of later writers. For there is no one, whether his
concern be with higher things or with nature or with human affairs or
with any subject of profane literature whatever it be, who has passedby
Homer's hostelry without being entertained, but all have stopped there.

14The pseud<rGregorastext is published by F. Matranga, Anecdota Graeca (Rome 1850)

520-524; extract from 521. On this and the unpublished texts cf. R. Guilland, Essai sur
Nicephore Gregoras (Paris 1926) 114-115; S. I. Kourouses, MavovflA ral3aAa~ eiTa MaTeaio~
Jl1)TPO1TOAiT1)~
'Erpiuov (1271/2-1355/60) (Athens 1972) 168-169.

18

ROBERT BROWNING

And somehave stayed with him to the end of their days,enjoyinghis

catering,while othershavemerelysatisfiedsomeneedand takensomething from his storeto put in their ownwork.
(EUSTATHIUS,Comm.in Iliadem,proem.)
Since Homer was a schoolbook, we are hardly surprised to find quotations from
and allusions to Homer throughout Byzantine literature. They need not be evidence
of direct acquaintance with the text of the poems. When Synesius of Cyrene, to
illustrate the isolation in which his fellow citizens live, says," "They know there is
an emperor, for the tax-collector comes every year, but who he is they know not.
Some think he is Agamemnon, son of Atreus, since this is: a royal name they have
known since childhood, and that he has a friend called Odysseus,bald and resourceful," he does not imply that the peasantsof Cyrenaica read the Iliad. Many verses
were proverbial, and were independently transmitted by the paroemiographers.
Others were learned from manuals of rhetoric. But many imply acquaintance with
the text on the part of the writer, and presume such acquaintance on that of the
reader, particularly those whose meaning depends upon their context. A few examples will suffice to show what I mean. Arethas, Metropolitan of Caesarea in the first
half of the tenth century, bibliophile, and scholar, revised and enlarged the commentary on the Apocalypse by Andrew of Caesarea,written about A.D. 600, and
published the revised version under his own name.'6 One of the things that he did to
make Andrew's work more acceptable to his own polished agewas to interpolate into
it a number of citations from Homer and Aristotle. Arethas's older contemporary,
Peter Bishop of Argos, wrote encomia upon various saints, from Anna the mother of
the Virgin Mary to his own near-contemporary Athanasios Bishop of Methone. "
These pieces of ecclesiastical oratory are decked out with a curious classical decor
which is largely due to frequent Homeric quotations and allusions. The protocol of
the Synod of 30 January 1166, which condemned Constantine Metropolitan of
Corfu, after speaking of () KaO' 1j.ud~ 'Iapar)A, () veo~ .1a(jiB, etc., goes on: evoil
TOVrOt~Kat () TiI~ llJa!dKwv eiAT/XW~apXtepaTeVew-a'Yvoei oe oooei~ aTt KepKvpaiov~ KaAoiJatTOV~
.paiaKa~ -av.uCPpwv e06Ket'YeveaOat,18a typical example of the
adornment of official, even ecclesiastical, documents with antiquarian erudition
drawn from Homer and his commentators.
Homer, however, had not always been salonfa"hig.Radical monastic writers in the
early Byzantine period often condemn study of the poems as at best frivolous and
sometimes positively harmful. It is related of Saint John the Psychaite (early ninth
century) that he had no need of TiI~ 'O.urlPOV
IPAVapia~it TiI~ xpvail~ aVToiJaetpd~ 11

ISEp. 148, R. Hercher,Epistolographi graeci (Parisn.d. [1872)} 733.

16PG 106.493-785.
17PG 104.1352-1365; J. Cozza-Luzi,Nova patrum bibliotheca 9.3 (Rome 1888) 31-51.
18L. Petit, "Documents inedits sur Ie concile de 1166 et sesderniers adversaires," Vizantiiskii
Vremennik 11 (1904) 481.

19

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

Toil ~eV'YvueLVKat a1TO~eV'YvVeUJ

apllara.

ri~ 'Yap evreufJev OVT/aL~

ril~ rwv IlU(JCAlV
Kat

1TAaallarCAlV Kat OaLJlOViCAlV

ae(3aallarCAlV eiOrjaeCAl~ 1Tpoa'YeVT/raLroi~ ev ro()ToL~
IPvaWVllevoL~,19 A last outlier of this critique of classical culture by the burning-eyed
dropouts who made the desert a city is to be found in another older contemporary
Arethas, the well-to-do

of

Thessalonican monk John Cameniates, who wrote an account

of the sack of his native city by an Arab raiding force from Crete in 904. After
describing the choral singing in the great church of Saint Demetrius on feast days, he
goes on: "Compared
Homer

with this singing what is the mythical

or the deceitful

Orpheus, the Muse of

songs of the Sirens, adorned with lying inventions.

indeed merit no praise, for they are illusory

They

words which seduce men and deliver

them into the power of error.,,20 John Cameniates was perhaps the last defender ofa
lost cause. Half a century after he wrote, Theodosius the Deacon celebrated the
recapture of Crete from the Arabs by Nicephorus Phocas: I Again and again he
appeals to Homer to inspire his somewhat feeble verses, calling him "OIl17pe, 1T17'YfI
rc;:,v AO-yCAlV.
It is interesting

to note that John Anagnostes, who left an eye-witness

account of the capture of Thessalonica by the Turks in 1430,22 decks his story out
not only with Homeric echoes but also with direct quotations.
Another kind of Homeric reference is that by which events and personages of the
writers'

own time are described in terms that recall events and personages in Homer.

Sophisticated
suffice.

Byzantine

literature

When Constantine

is full of this kind of thing. A few examples will

IX introduced

first time, a bystander murmured

his mistress Skleraina to the court for the

0& vElleaL~, echoing the words of the Trojan elders

when Helen passed by.23 The lady, I regret to say, had to have the aJlusion explained
to her. When Nicetas Choniates writes of the emperor Andronicus

Comnenus, whose

life was marked by long years of wandering and endless picturesque adventures and
hairbreadth

escapes, he regularly attaches to him epithets appropriate

to Odysseus.

He calls him 1TOAVllriXavo~,1ToAV1TAavEararo~'av8PW1TCAlV,

1T6AeL~
a.uei1/la~ avxva~ Kat
1TAeiara efJvwv aarea

KartOwV, and even says of him

that he acts Karb. rov

1TOAV1TAavft
Kat 1ToA~pova eKeivov 11PCAla.
The result is to convey to the reader a
certain preconception
out.'"

of the character of Andronicus

A similar effect is produced

(206.6),

echoing

Eustathios

epithets

used by Homer

calls George Palaiologos

86.29);

or

Alexios

I cites Homeric

when Nikephoros

having to spell things

of Zeus and Agamemnon:

reLxeaL1TArir17~(Expugnatio

Bryennios

description

without

when Nicetas calls Manuel I KvoLaro~ llerLaro~

describing

the

pursuit

or when

Thessalonicae p.
of Basilakes

by

of the pursuit of Hector by Achilles. At another

19P. Van den Ven, "Vie de S. Jean Ie Psychaite," Le Museon n.s. 3 (1902) 109.
20Gertrud Bohlig, Joannis Cameniataede expugnatione Thessalonicae(Berlin 1973) 12.
21N. M. Panagiotakes,eeo86(7w~0 8iaKovo~ Kat TO1ToiTjjla
aiJTov"'i\AW(7t~ Tf)~ KPriTTj~,"
(Herakleion 1960).
22 PG 156.609ff.

23Michael Psellus,Chronographia 6.61.

24cr. Agne Vasilikopoulou, 'Av8p6vtKO~0 KojlVTjvO~Kat 'O8v(7(7eu~,
EEB~ 37 (1969.1970)

251-259.

20

ROBERT BROWNING

level, the anonymous

poet in the thirteenth

story from the Arthurian

cycle, probably

Polo's amanuensis Rusticianus of Pis a -The

or fourteenth

Old Knight, '0 1Tpe'a(Jvr;

i1T1ToT17r;
-wove

into his narrative images and effects of style borrowed

frequent Homeric
Knight

century who adapted a

from the Italian prose version of Marco

from the Iliad.25 Apart from

words, there are echoes of Homeric similes -for

example, the Old

stands wa1Tfp Ttr; AlOor; 'aKAWT/r;, aKo1Tor;Toir; (JaAo,ueVOtr;

(or

fJovAo,ueVOtr;)

recalling the picture in Iliad 15.618 of the A:chaeans standing their ground against the
Trojan attack
flUTE1Tf.TP1/
flAifjaTo~, JlE"faA1/,1TOAtil~aAb~ 'eyyv~ eoOaa
1j TE Jlf.VEtAt'Yf.WVaVeJlWV Aat'ljl1/pa KEAEvOa
KVJlaTa TE TpO<PEOVTa.
Ta TE 1TpoaEpEiryETataVT?}V.

Or Arthur dismissingGuinevere
a1TtOt
'Y!:IVaU<U)ViTtV
einrpe1T(A)~
Koa.uovaa Kat 1TatOiaKa~

inevitablyrecallsHector's dismissalof Andromache(Iliad 6.490ff.)

aAA'ei, O'KOV
ioiJaa7aaav717'epra K6.ut~E.
W70V 7' TlAaKd711v7E, Kat ilILlPt1TOAOWt
KeAEvE

eprov E1ToiXEa8at.

The outcome is that the Arthurian charactersare treated with a certain mocking
irony lackingin the solemnoriginal.
To return to the subjectof direct quotation,GeorgeLakapenos,schoolmaster
in
Thessalyin the first half of the fourteenth century, pupil of Maximus Planudes,
editor of a selectionof the letters of Libaniusand author of a commentaryon the
Enchiridionof Epictetus,one of thoseminor scholarsand menof letters in which the
late Byzantineworld wasso prolific, has 76 identifiable quotationsof Homerin his
33 letters and the grammaticaland stylistic commentariesthat he wrote to accompany them.26The only classicalwriter whomhe quotesmore frequentlyis Aristophanes,not from a love of classicalpoetry, but from a desireto write whathe fancied
was pure Attic, as is shown by the next four sourcesfrom which he quotesSynesius55 quotations,Demosthenes
51, Libanius44, Aelius Aristides40..Classical
Greek poetry is poorly represented-Aeschylus is cited once only, Theocritus 5
25Cf. P. Breillet, "La Table Ronde en Orient. Le poeme grec du vieux chevalier," Melanges
d'archl!ologie et d'histoire 55 (1938) 318-340.
26Text in S. Lindstam, Georgii Lacapeni et Andronici Zaridae epistulae XXXII cum epimerismis Lacapeni (GOteborg 1924). Lacapenus's life and writing~ are discussed at length in S.
Lindstam, Georgii Lacapeni epistulae X priores cum epimerismis editae (Uppsala 1910) ix-xxxv.

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

21

times, and even Euripides only 23 times. As for the Bible, Lakapenos quotes it only 8
times. His interest was predominantly rhetorical, yet even he could not resist the
song of Homer's Sirens.
With this picture in our mind of the pervasive presence of Homer in Byzantine
literature and thought, we will scarcely be surprised to find the empress Eudocia
recounting the Gospel story in a patchwork of Homeric quotations,27 or Theopylact
Hephaistos, Archbishop of Bulgaria around 1100 and author of erudite and interminable commentaries on the Bible, arguing in one of his letters for the justice of God
by quoting side by side Psalm 66.13-14, Iliad 24. 524ff. on Zeus mixing men's
destinies from two jars and Hesiod, Works and Days 179 aAA' ejl7T17r;
Kat TOWL
jlEjlEi~eraL eaOAa KaKoww,28 and in his Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles
pausing to refute the truth of Iliad 6.488-489:
Moipav 15'au Twd IP11Jlt1TfipUrJlEVOV
EJl/.lfVat w!SjJwv
ou KaKOV,DOOEJlEV eu8Aov, E1Tf1V
Ta 1TpWTarEV11Tat.

Nor, to jump back to the sixth century, need we find it strange that dedicatory
inscriptions in churches in Palestine and elsewhere were couched in Homeric verse.
The priest Obodianus at Eleutheropolis writes passable hexameters, with occasional
false quantities. The afflatus of his colleague Stephanus of EI-Boberije does not
extend beyond the first half of each hexameter, which then trails off into prose, but
with epic vocabulary and morphology .29
We have made a preliminary survey of the place of Homer in Byzantine life. Let us
now turn to our two main themes -Byzantine scholarship on Homer and the image
of Homer in popular belief and imagination.
We know very little of Homeric studies in the early Byzantine period, up to and
including the eighth century. There are virtually no uncial manuscripts of Homer on
parchment surviving. The two exceptions are in themselvesinteresting. The first is
the Ambrosian Iliad, recently studied with deep sensitivity and impeccable scholarship by Professor Bianchi Bandinelli.3O It is an illustrated edition -indeed all that
now survives are pictures with bits of text on the back -made in Constantinople or
possibly in Alexandria about A.D. 500 by a miniaturist who put together illustrations
of Homeric subjects formed by iconographic and artistic traditions of very different
ages and origins, and used them to accompany a text related to that of the
Venetus A. As Bianchi Bandinelli observes,in the fifth century decorative repertory
Homeric subjects take the place of mythological subjects, which might have given rise
to suspicions of idolatry. In particular Achilles and the events of his life, whether

27A. Ludwich, Eudocia Augusta, Proclus Lycius, Claudianus (Leipzig 1897) 79-114.
28PG 126.537D.
29SEG 8.119 (EI-Boberije near Samaria);SEG 8.243 (Eleutheropolis = Beit Jebrin).
30R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Hellenistic Byzantine Miniatures of the Iliad (Olten 1955). The
review of this book by K. Weitzmann, Gnomon 29 (1957) 606-616 should also be read.

22

ROBERT BROWNING

related by Homer or not, were the subject of many works of art from the fourth
century onwards. It is in the context of this movement that we must seek to
understand the Ambrosian Iliad, a luxury edition made for a wealthy patron. The
other uncial Homer is that palimpsested about 800 in the monastery of Qarthamun
in Syria for a Syriac translation of the Monophysite theologian Severusof Antioch,
a few leaves of which are now in the British Museum.31 One wonders how many
other monastic libraries had their copies of Homer side by side with their Psalters,
their Evangeliaries, and their Praxapostoli. It appears that Theophilus of Edessa in
the eighth century translated "two books of Homer on Ilion" into Syriac.32 Were
they the Iliad and the Odyssey or merely some mythological handbook?
A strange figure in this history of Homeric studies in the early Byzantine period is
that of Demo the authoress of a commentary used by John Tzetzes and by
Eustathios in the twelfth century. As she quotes Theodoret of Cyrrhus she cannot be
earlier than the fifth century. She could well have written in the sixth. She
commented on both Iliad and Odyssey, and dealt in allegorical exegesisof a vague
physical character, drawing upon the first-century Stoic Pseudo-Herakleitos, but
apparently not on Plotinus's pupil Porphyry, whose Homeric Allegories, intended to
defend the poet against Plato's criticisms, played such a prominent role in later
Byzantine Homeric scholarship, as we shall see. At the same time, if Karl Reinhardt is
right, she showed common sensein distinguishing between proper and improper use
of allegory .33 One would like to know more about Demo, where she lived, how she
obtained her knowledge, whether she taught pupils, and so on, for she is a welcome
figure in the masculine world of Homeric scholarship. But all precision escapesus.
Be that as it may, it is not until the ninth century that we find Homeric studies
once more in evidence, as part of that revival of learning often called the Macedonian
renaissance, though in fact it began earlier, in the reigns of Theophilus and
Michael III. The grammarian Kometas is the author of severalpoems preserved in the
Greek anthology. He was a contemporary of Photius, a pupil of Leo the Mathematician, and held some official position as a teacher after 842.34 His epigrams record
some kind of restoration of old copies of the Iliad and Odyssey, though exactly what
he did remains uncertain. The books were oOOa.uc;:,~
euTt.'YJlfPa~
and he UT"F;ac;
cSt.euJltAevue;
he rejected the Ud1TPt.a
and 'Ypd1/lac;
'eKaLPOvPrT1ue;
and his aim was that
oi 'YPciApQPTe~
might learn correctly. It sounds like either a transcription into the new

31British Museum Additional MS 17210. cr. W. Cureton, Fragments of the lliad of Homer
from a Syriac Palimpsest (London 1851); W. Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the
British Museum (London 1871) 2.548. P. Mazon, Introduction a l'lliade (Paris 1942)40ff.
32cr. A. Baumstark, Geschichteder syrischen Literatur (Bonn 1922) 341. A curious account
of the Trojan War also occurs in an anonymous Syriac chronicle; cr. F. Nau,Revue de ['Orient
Chretien 13 (1908) 90-97.
33cr. A. Ludwich, "Die Homerdeuterin Demo," Festschrift L. Friedllinder (Leipzig 1895)
296ff.; K. Reinhardt, De graecorum theologio (Berlin 1910) 57,74.
34cr. Lemerle (n. 10 above) 166-167, where references are given to the literature on
Kometas.

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

23

minuscule hand, or the preparation of an exemplar for such a transcription. And it

clearly involved questions of interpretation. How otherwise could one punctuate?
The Venetus A of the Iliad, our oldest manuscript of the entire poem, was written
at the height of the Macedonian renaissance,in the early tenth century. Attempts by
the late Professor Severyns35 and by M. Bertrand Hemmerdinger36 to identify the
main hand have been inconclusive. But it is clearly written by -or more probably
for -a scholar deeply interested in the establishment and interpretation of the text
of Homer. The text, written in a large early minuscule, is marked with critical signs.
Surrounding it is a solid mass of commentary, written in a smaller minuscule by the
same hand. Between this commentary and the text, and also in the outer margins,
there are a number of fairly lengthy notes, in the same hand, which sometimes repeat
the information in the main commentary. And finally there are brief interlinear
notes, still in the same hand. In other words, the manuscript is a compilation from
several sources. For a variety of reasons it is beyond all doubt that the compilation
was not made by the copyist of the Venetus A but by a predecessor.When and where
did that predecessorwork? The answer depends on an analysis of the sources from
which he made his compilation. Much work has been done on this in the last century.
We can identify among these sources a compilation of four late Hellenistic works on
the text of the Iliad (the so-called Viermdnner-Kommentar), the Homeric Lexicon of
Apollonios Sophista, the Etymologikon of Orion, the Lexicon of Oros, the surviving
debris of the Lexicon of Methodios, the grammatical works of George Choiroboskos,
the Homeric Epimerismi, a lexicographical work that survives in a ninth-century
manuscript in the Bodleian Library, a body of exegetical commentary that displays
an inclination towards allegorical interpretation, and which included considerable
excerpts from the Quaestiones Homericae of the third century Neoplatonist Porphyrios, and so on.3., The details are unimportant and often in dispute. What matters
is that this is substantially the material that the compilers of the first and longest of
the great Byzantine etymological dictionaries -the Etymologicum Genuinum, of
which only a small part has been published -had before them. We are in the milieu
of Photius and of the scholars of a generation before him, men like Leo the
Mathematician and Kometas, in the second quarter of the ninth century. Who the
compiler was, who the inspirer and, as we should say today, the sponsor, of this
enterprise was, we do not know and will probably neverknow. The names of Apion
and Herodorus which Eustathios in the twelfth century gives as the authors of his
version of the commentary tell us nothing. But what he was doing is clear enough. He
was collecting and putting together in a single text all that he could lay his hands on
of the surviving Homeric scholarship of Antiquity, as a fresh starting point for the

35A. Severyns,Bulletin de l:Academie Royale de Belgique (1951) 279ff.

36B. Hemmerdinger, "Sur deux manuscrits grecs," Revue des etudes grecques 69 (1956)

433-434.

37cr. H. Erbse, "Zur handschrift1ichen Uberlieferung der lliasscholien," Mnemosyne (1953)

25.

ROBERT BROWNING

24

understanding of the poems. His interest lay not only in interpretation, allegorizing
or otherwise, but also in the austere science of textual criticism. Even this is in
accordance with the spirit of the age. The Patriarch Nicephorus in some of his
theological works written shortly before his death in 829 notes variant readings in
patristic texts and suspendsjudgment on question's of authenticity in the absenceof
manuscript evidence.38 And, to take a trivial but amusing example, Photius was
accused of having faked a pedigree of the upstart Basil I, which he wrote on an old
piece of papyrus, 'YplilLf.laaw 'AAe~avopwoi~,r1lv iIoPXaU{1]V
Ortf.laAtara xetpo(Jeaiav
f.ll,l.Ll1a<i.uevo~,
bound in an old cover, and planted in the Palace Library .39Theological controversy had engendered a respectfor documentary evidence and a realization
that texts were corrupt. Indeed the very possibility of salvagingthe debris of ancient
Homeric scholarship may have been created by the collection and assembly in the
capital of manuscripts from monasteries in the provinces in preparation for the
Iconoclast Synod of 815.40
If, as we have suggested,the A-scholia were compiled in the same circle as the
Etymologicum Genuinum, they were compiled before the Etymologicum, the author
of which had before him a commentary containing all that iS,in our A-sch01iaplus
something more, and which he calledinTof.lVl1f.la'IAu:iOO~or axOAWV.We can sometimes reconstruct this Byzantine commentary by comparison of the A-scholia and
the jejune entries of the Etymologicum Genuinum, as Erbse does in his new
edition.41 This v7TOf.lVT/f.la
may have existed as a separatebook.
Perhaps we can glimpse another similar compilation behind the BT-scholia. Its
author was less interested in textual matters -or perhaps he had less information on
them at his disposition -and more concerned with interpretation, and in particular
allegorical interpretation, based largely on Porphyry. It is likely enough that there
was more than one group in ninth-century Constantinople anxious to provide itself
with a sound basis for the understanding of Homer.
What neither of them had was an ancient text of the poems. The Iliad text of the
Venetus A is a vulgate text with occasional Aristarchaean readings that can always
have been introduced from the commentary. And the battery of Alexandrian critical
signs that appear in the margin of the A text are certainly not copied from ancient
manuscripts of the Iliad. They are reconstructed -usually rightly but occasionally
wrongly -from the information contained in the commentary. This is why one may
speak of the work of the compiler as providing a starting point. These scholars did
not merely copy and preserve. They hoped to go beyond the 7TapdOoat~and

38Cf. P. J. Alexander, "The Iconoclastic Council of St. Sophia (815)," Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 7 (1953) 40,53.
39 Vita S. Ignatii, PG 105.568A.
40Cf. B. Hemmerdinger, Essai sur l'histoire du texte de Thucydide (Paris 1955) 34; idem,
"Une mission scientifique arabe a l'origine de la renaissanceiconoclaste," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 55 (1962) 66-67; R. Browning, "Notes on the Scriptor Incertus de Leone Armenio,"
Byzantion 35 (1965) 403-404.
41H. Erbse,Scholia graecain lliadem 1 (Berlin 1969) 59, n. 93.

HOMER IN BY ZANTIUM

2S

reconstruct the Homer of Antiquity. That they had neither the evidence nor the
techniques to realize this aim does not diminish the seriousnessof their intention.
What most readers wanted, however, was interpretation, not textual criticism.
And they wanted interpretation that squared with what they thought they knew
already. Hence the fortunes of allegory. The Byzantines were not the first to see a
hidden meaning in Homer. Those who replied to the criticisms of Xenophanes
probably already had recourse to this method of avoiding the horns of a dilemma.
The Stoics systematized the allegorical interpretation of Homer. And the Neoplatonists made it readily available in handbooks. All that was needed to make Homer
entirely acceptable to the most orthodox Byzantine taste was to combine pagan
Homeric allegory with Christian Old Testament allegory.42 And this is precisely what
we find happening. Indeed a beginning had been made by Clement of Alexandria.
Michael Psellos's friend and older contemporary Nicetas, a teacher in a school under
the patronage of the Patriarchate, did not stick to the letter of ancient poetry or to
the charm of its meter, but expounded its a1To8eTov
KaAAo~.So he explained the
binding of Ares as a symbol of the victory of A6'YO~
over 8uJlo~,and the IPLAl11TaTpi~
to which Odysseuslonged to return from the island of Circe asiI W(.J 'IepoUaaArlJl,
which if men forget they become as beasts.43 Michael Psellos himself was less
thorough-going. His lectures survive on three passages
of the Iliad -Pandaros's bow,
the Council of the Gods at the beginning of book 5 of the Iliad, and the Golden
Chain.44 Though he allegorizes all three passagesin the end, as others had done
before him for more than a thousand years, he reacheshis goal by a discursive route,
with much discussionof etymology and distincv::.a between synonyms. This explanatory material he collects not only from lexica and from Porphyry via a version of the
exegetic scholia, but also from his own wide reading, and occasionally, it must be
admitted, from his imagination. For by the end of the eleventh century the Byzantine intellectual world was no longer painfully gathering together the debris of the
culture of late Antiquity. Men felt at home in the civilization they had inherited.
They had confidence in their own judgment and were ready to challenge the ancients
and to disagree with them.
This new freedom in the handling of traditional material is more clearly seen in
the work of two men who in the following century wrote at length upon Homer,
Eustathios of Thessalonica, and John Tzetzes. Eustathios is an attractive character
who had a long career first as a teacher at the Patriarchal School in Constantinople
and later as Metropolitan of Thessalonika, where he encouraged reform of the
monasteries and played a courageous part when the city was sacked by the Normans
in 1185. His fIapeK(30Xai on the Iliad and Odyssey -the word is a Byzantine
technical term for a compilatory commentary -survive probably in autograph

42cr. F. Mehmel, "Homer und die Griechen," Antike und Abendland 4 (1954) 16-41
P. Leveque,Aurea CatenaHomeri (Paris 1959); J. Pepin, My the et allegorie (Paris 1958).
43 Michael Psellus,Epitaphius in Nicetam, in Sathas(n. 8 above) 87-96.
44Ed. c. Sathas,Annuaire des etudesgrecques9 (1875) 187-222.

26

ROBERT BROWNING

manuscripts of their author. They are evidently the text of the lectures that he gave
at the Patriarchal School before his translation in 1175.45 He was of course a teacher
of rhetoric, not of grammar, and in an earlier age would not have been concerned
with Homer except as a source of striking quotations. But the boundaries were long
confused. We have a description of his daily lectures from the pen of his former pupil
Michael Choniates, Metropolitan of Athens. Michael speaks of the impression produced by his wide-ranging erudition.46 And indeed the napeK(30Xaiare fantastically
discursive, the author's mind working by association of ideas. It takes him twelve
quarto printed pagesto dispose of Iliad 1.1. He had read everything -or so he would
have us believe. In particular he had not only Byzantine exegetical commentaries on
Homer but also a version, fuller than that surviving in the Venetus A, of the
ninth-century compilation of textual scholarship. It must have been similar to the
inro.uV11.ua
used by the compilers of the Etymologicum Genuinum. He attributes this
commentary -which must in his library have been a separate book, not a set of
notes in the margin of a text -to Apion and Herodorus. The names tell us nothing.
In any case Eustathios was a compulsive name dropper. His interest in the criticism
of the text, which is rather desultory, is evidence of the seriousnesswith which he
tackled the elucidation of Homer. Equally revealing is the way in which he constantly seeks illustration from his own experience. The spoken Greek of his time, the
customs of peasantsand townsmen around him, popular beliefs, recent events, are all
made to shed light on the poems. Homer in a sensebelonged to the same world as
Eustathios, and his poetry could be understood by accumulation of information and
exercise of reasoning.
John Tzetzes is a very different character. His career marred at the outset by a
mysterious error of judgment in which the wife of a provincial governor was
involved, he lived the life of a poor scholar, sometimes obliged to sell evenhis books
and to rely on his memory. He wrote on everything, for a variety of patrons, and is
one the first men in European society to live by his pen.41 Three works are
particularly concerned with Homer. First his commentary on the Iliad. Intended as a
schoolbook, to supply the explanation for the thirty to fifty lines learned daily, it is
one of Tzetzes's early works, composed about 1140, when he was no more than
thirty years of age. It is much earlier than the great commentaries on Aristophanes
and Lycophron but shows some of the same independence of view and readinessto
take issue with the giants of the past. The scale is large, like that of Eustathios's
commentary. Allegory is Tzetzes's staple, but he backs it up with a pyrotechnic
display of not always wholly relevant erudition, gathered from lexica, from exegetical scholia, from a fuller version of the Venetus A scholia -perhaps the same book

45M. H. A. L. H. van der Valk, Eustathii archiepiscopi Thessalonicensiscommentarii ad

Homeri Riadem pertinentes 1 (Leiden 1971) 50.
46S. Lampros, MtxaT)?..AKOjJ.waTOV
Toil XWVulTOV
Ta awfojJ.Eva1 (Athens 1879) 287.
47On Tzetzes's life cf. C. Wendel, "Tzetzes," RE 7A (1948) 1960-1965.

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

27

as Eustathios used a generation later -and from his own wide reading and retentive
memory. The commentary does not survive entire, and may never in fact have been
completed. Only that on the first 102 lines of Book I has been published, and that
twice.48 The complete commentary on Book I is preserved in a manuscript in the
Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is remarkable that no Cambridge scholar
has yet seen fit to produce an editio princeps. It might yield interesting fruit. A
French scholar recently edited a number of new fragments of Hipponax from the
unpublished part of the commentary .49
A work of a different kind, aimed at a different class of reader, are Tzetzes's
Homeric Allegories, of which the full text has recently become available.so These are
two long poems in fifteen syllable accentual verse -the

so-called political verses -

dedicated to the empress Irene, consort of Manuel I. Irene was born Bertha of
Sulzbach, sister-in-law of the Hohenstaufen emperor Conrad III. Brought as a young
woman to the dazzling court of Constantinople, she sought an ~asy introduction to
the greatest poet of her new country. Tzetzes supplied it. A long prologue on
Homer's birthplace and life, and on the background of the Trojan War, from
Hecuba's dream and the birth of Paris, sketches of the leading characters in the
Trojan War, and a summary of the plot of the Iliad, are followed by a paraphraseof
the story line, accompanied sometimes by allegorical explanations, often at different
levels simultaneously -physical, moral, and historical -and every now and then by
a display of usually irrelevant learning on such topics as the Nile flood, the
philosophy of Anaxagoras, or the Roman augur's staff. The bewildered princess
would be familiar with this kind of interpretation of the Bible. Problems of textual
criticism and citations of rare authors were above her head.
The Homeric Allegories already treat of matters preceding or following those
narrated in the poems. The natural curiosity of man had already called forth a variety
of literature purporting to fill up gaps in the story astold by Homer, beginning with
the Cyclic epics, and going on to Hellenistic mystifications like the diaries of the
Trojan War surviving in Latin translation under the names of Dictys of Crete and
Dares the Phrygian. This is not the kind of thing scholars worry about. It is rather
evidence for the widespread reading of Homer by ordinary men and women. The
middle Byzantine world had a healthy appetite for this kind of background to
Homer, an appetite to which the third of Tzetzes's works ministered, the Carmina
Iliaca. These are three hexameter poems summarizing events before, during, and after
the Iliad, from the Rape of Helen to the Sack of Troy. The material came ultimately
48G. Hermann, Draconis Stratonicensis liber de metris poeticis. Joannis Tzetzae Exegesisin
Homeri lliadem (Leipzig 1812); L. Bachmann,Scholia in Homeri lliadem 1 (Leipzig 1835).
49O. Masson,Les fragments du poete Hipponax (Paris 1962)4252.
soPublished in part by Matranga (n. 14 above) 43-295, and J. F. Boissonade, Tzetzae
A//egoriae lliadis (Paris 1857). The Allegories on the second half of the Odyssey were published
almost simultaneously by H. Hunger, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 49 (1956) 249-310 and by Franca
Finocchiaro, Bo//. Com. per la preparazione de//'edizione nazionale dei classici gr. e lat. n.s. 5

(1957)4561.

28

ROBERT BROWNING

from

the Cyclic

poems and Attic

Quintus of Smyrna, Tryphiodorus,

A contemporary
identified

drama. The immediate

sources were probably

and the early Byzantine chroniclers.

of Tzetzes went further.

Isaac Porphyrogenitus,

with Isaac Cornnenus, son of Alexius I, brother

father of the quixotic

Andronicus

I, wrote

who is to be

of Anna Comnena, and

a short prose work

in very affected

classicizing Greek, llepi T~V KaTaAetAp8EVT<AJV

U1TO
TOU'0.ur1POV,51 in which he begins
with

the capture

Laomedon,

of Troy

by Herakles and the Amazons,

and youth,

and carries the story on to the Sack of Troy and the

return of Agamemnon and Menelaus. This information

have extracted

the learned prince claims to

from ouijj?opa 1TaAal.i;)v (3I.(JAiaand speaks repeatedly

in its compilation.

Byzantine

by

deals at length with Hecuba's dream before the birth of Paris and with

Paris's childhood

involved

and its rebuilding

chroniclers.

Attached

to the work on what Homer did not tell is another,

shorter treatise, even more indicative

XapaKT11piu.uaTa of the principal
police descriptions

of the labor

In fact most of it comes from Dictys and Dares, via the

of popular interest in Homer. It is a series of

Greeks and Trojans, rather after the manner of

of wanted men, for example, '0 (3aUtAeVc;.A-Ya.uE.uv<AJV

.ue-ya~flv,

AevK6~, EVPWOC;,oauV1T(.)-Y<AJV,
.ueA{W8p~, .ue-yaA6IpeaA.uOC;,c1.1TT61]TOC;,
eiryevri~,
.ue-yaA6I/1vxo~. Such characterizations already existed for the principal biblical figures
from Adam to Saint Paul and for the Fathers of the Church.

They appear in the

Ozronicle of Malalas, in Tzetzes's Allegories and elsewhere, and ultimately

Dares and Dictys.
their influence

go back to

They are connected with the science of physiognomonics,

on the iconographic

tradition

and had

of Byzantine art.

It is interesting to see how the middle Byzantines envisioned the heroes of Homer.
Achilles

of course was tall, blond,

prosopos. Patroclus, surprisingly,

seus is sometimes

slender and so on, but he was also gunaiko-

was prokoilios,

bald, sometimes progastor.

must be used in its Byzantine

sense of "with

were often credited with supernatural powers.

Among the strange pieces of information
Homeric

Hector was heterophthalmos,

eyes of different

This is a typical

product

colors."

that we pick up from

texts is that Paris, as a young man, studied rhetoric

cosmogony.
edifying

but otherwise good looking. Odys-

of the schoolmasterly

which

Such men
these para-

and wrote a poem on

mind. The not very

story of the Judgment of Paris seems to have been explained allegorically

Hellenistic

in

times as meaning that Paris composed a treatise or poem arguing that love

is more powerful than wisdom or strength. In due course the poem was even written
for him, thougll

it has since perished. One finds traces of this allegorical interpreta-

tion in Sallustius's
room.

llepi 8ewv Kat K6u.uov. Even this was too much for the school-

Love, as every philosopher

knew, is the principle

that makes the elements

cohere together and form the physical world. So Paris is made to while away his idle
hours on Mount Ida by writing

a philosophical

Before we leave the brilliant

and civilized

poem on the origin of the universe.

world

of twelfth-century

51Ed. H. Hinck, Polemonis Declamationes(Leipzig 1873) 59-88.

Constan-

29

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

tinople, let us glance at the work of one other Homeric scholar, whose name we shall
never know. A group of manuscripts of the Iliad belonging to the thirteenth century
or later contains many Alexandrian readings not in the Vulgate text. Walter Leaf
believed that a manuscript might actually have survived from Hellenistic times to be
copied in the Constantinople of the Comneni.52 Allen realized that the interesting
readings in these manuscripts are selected from those mentioned in the scholia, but
thought of this as occurring by chance,since Byzantine scholars were supposedto be
uninterested in textual criticism.53 Erbse has recently shown that the archetype of
this group was edited by an unknown scholar, probably of the twelfth century, who
used the fuller version of the Venetus A scholia, which Tzetzes and Eustathios
consulted, to try to reconstruct the Homeric text of the Alexandrians by careful
comparison of the recorded variants;54 which is after all just what a modern editor
of Homer does.
The Latin capture of Constantinople and the breakup of the Byzantine empire
destroyed the conditions in which a Eustathios or a Tzetzes could flourish. But
Homeric scholarship continued. In the Nicaean empire Michael Senacherim, teacher
of rhetoric, imperial secretary, and later army commander and senior minister,
composed a commentary on Homer, as yet unpublished. 55 It is said to be largely
allegorical and of little interest. Manuel Moschopoulos's commentary on the first two
books of the Iliad we have already met. His contemporary John Pediasimos,commentator on Theocritus, writer on mathematics and archivist of the cathedral at
Ohrid, composed an allegorizing companion to the first four books of the Iliad. 56
George Lekapenos, the Thessalian schoolmaster whom we found citing Homer so
frequently, may be the author of treatises on grammar and figures of speech in
Homer, again unpublished.57 This late Byzantine material, of which these are only a
few examples, is a trackless jungle in which the first voyagesof exploration have yet
to be made. What the explorers will find will be mostly derivative and low-level
exegesis for schoolboys. But there may well be more. For Homer was still read by
men of great learning, such asthe copyist of the Geneva manuscript of the Iliad, with
its long and learned commentary, or George Chrysococces, doctor from Trebizond~

5' W. Leaf, 71Ie Riad, ed. 2 (London

53T. W. Allen,

Homeri

1902) 2, xxii-xxiii.

Rias (Oxford

1931) 1.210-216;

cf. also G. Pasquali, Storia

della

tradizione e critica del testo (Florence 1934) 212-213.

54Erbse (n. 2 above) 184-209.
55Cf. Amadeus Peyron, Notitia librorum ...qui
donante Ab. 71Ioma Valperga-Calusio u. ct.
illati sunt in reg. Taurinensis Athenaei bibliothecam (Leipzig 1820) 23; Anon. "Senacherim,"
Rheinisches Museum 18 (1863) 447; M. A. Andreeva, Ocerki po kul'ture vizantijskago dvora v
XIII veke (prague 1927) )33; M. Angold, A Byzantine Government in Exile (Oxford 1974) 160,
161, 180, 296.
56Cf. S. 1. Kourouses, Mavou1}A ra,BaAac: eiTa MaT6awc: Il1/TPO1TOAT1/C:
'Eopeaov 1 (Athens
1972) 269, n. 2.; D. M. Nicol, "The Byzantine

Church and Hellenic Learning in the Fourteenth

Century," Studies in Church History 5 (1969) 38-39.

57Cf. Lindstam, Epistulae X priores (n. 26 above) xxii-xxiii.

ROBERT BROWNING

30

and author of works on astronomy embodying material translated from Persian,who

copied the Odyssey in his own hand in 1336 (cod. Vat. Pal. 7).58
I now pass to my final topic, the impact of Homer on the popular imagination.
Achilles was a figure who lived on in the memory of the Greeks almost as did
Alexander the Great. We know from the emperor Julian that libations were still
offered at his tomb by the Scamanderin the fourth century A.D. by no less a person
than the bishop of Ilium.59 And when, 900 years later, the austere and crotchety
monk Nicephorus Blemmydes visited a church by the same Scamander he was
horrified to find among the figures in the frescoes that of a young warrior bearing the
legend "The Prophet Achilles.,,6. In his native Thessaly too he was not forgotten.
The popularity of Saint Achilles, who had been bishop of Larissa in the fourth
century, probably owed something to his bearing the name of the leader of the
Myrmidons. He appears as a s~pernatural guide and counselor aslate asthe sixteenth
century .61 Achilles is the hero of a vernacular Greek epic poem of the late Byzantine
period.62 The story it tells has little to do with Homer. It is substantially that of
another Greek folk hero, Digenis Akritas. Only at the end, and only in one of the
versions, is a short appendix summarizing the events of the Trojan war. Yet the poet
knows Homer and claims to draw upon him. And there are some strange echoes. For
instance in the Byzantine poem Polyxena s,aysto Achilles:
naTepal; Kat Jl1]Tt'pa JlOV11aile eVTia aov ewaL

.uv Kat ~(AJ1j

.uV.
Kat aoei\<PQtKat aoei\tpai Kal.IPW<:

(vv.1268-1269)
Had the poet in mind Andromache'smovingwordsto Hector
"EKTOP, UTap au Iloi eaat 1TaT1IP Kat 1TOTVtaIl1/T1]P
iIO'e Kaai'YlJ11TO<:,au Of' IlOt OaJI.epo<: 1TapaKoiT1]<:.

(Iliad 6.429-430)
Constantine Hermoniakos was court poet and probably court physician to John II
Komnenos Angelodoukas, Despot of Epirus circa 1330. John was an unsavory
adventurer, whose real name was Orsini, who reached his throne by murdering his
brother and lost it by being murdered by his wife. But he was a patron of letters in
his way. And it was at his command that Hermoniakos composed his Metaphrasis of
the Iliad into the vulgar tongue.63 This is possibly the worst poem ever written in the

58cr. S. Runciman, The Last Byzantine Renaissance(Cambridge 1970) 52-53, 89; E. Janssens,Trebizonde en Colchide (Brussels 1969) 188.
59 Julian, ep. 19.
60N. Festa, Theodori Ducae Lascarisepistolae (Florence 1898) 310.
61cr. F. Barisic, Cuda Dimitrija solunskog kao istoriski izvori (Belgrade 1953) 26.
62Ed. D. C. Hesseling,L :4chiUl!"idebyzantine (Amsterdam 1919).
63Ed. E. Legrand, Biblioth~que grecque vulgaire 5 (Paris 1890). On John II cr. D. M. Nicol,
The Last Centuries of Byzantium 1261-1453 (London 1972) 184-185.

31

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

Greeklanguage.Composedin vernacularGreekwith a copiousadmixtureof learned

forms, generallyused without any graspof their meaningor structure,it is written in
the Hiawatha meter, a distant epigone of the anacreontic.When he is short of
syllables,the poet ekes out his line with rE, rap, or roiJv.Only abouthalf of the
poemis made up from Homericmaterial.The rest,in whichHermoniakosdealswith
the life of Homer, the birth and upbringingof Paris,the kidnappingof Helen,the
assemblyof the Greeks,the Trojans' searchfor allies, the love of Achilles and
Polyxena,the death of Achilles, the quarrel over his arms,the woodenhorse,the
sackof Troy, the fate of the Trojan women,is derived from Tzetzesand from the
Byzantinechroniclers.An exampleof this lastis the Trojan requestfot help from the
prophet David, a requestpromptly refusedbecausethe Trojanswere idolaters.The
samecurious story occursin the sixth-centuryChronicleof John Malalas.It depends
on chronologicallinks establishedby early christianscholars.Somehave thought and they may well be right -that Hermoniakoshad neverread Homer at all, but
only a proseparaphrase
of the Iliad. The surgeand thunderis gone.But somethingof
Homer'sgrandeurremains,to be graspedby the unlettered.The inept work had its
readers.Three manuscriptssurvive. And long after the fall of Constantinoplea
revised version was made by Nikolaos Loukanis and printed in Venice in 1526,
without overt acknowledgment
of the debtto Hermoniakos.
Very different from Hermoniakos'sparaphraseand of far higher quality is a
vernacularpoem on the Trojan war in fifteen-syllablemeter preservedin a manuscript in the Biblioth'equeNationale,edited for the first time a few yearsago in a
Ph.D. thesisby Dr. Dimitrios Dedes,and to be publishedsoon.Heretoo the genuine
Homeric materialoccupiesonly a part of the poem.The rest dealswith the by now
familiar pre-Homericand post-Homericepisodes.The birth and childhood of Paris
are treated in particular detail, and with a wealthof invention.The infant Parisis set
adrift in a casketon the seawhich is found by a citizen of TarsosnamedSelenios.
Electedleaderof a band of children,he is hauledbeforeKing Priam for a youthful
peccadillo.Priamrecognizesthe lad as his son,and he and Hecubashut him up in a
castle.His violent conductcausesa riot amongthe Trojans,andParishasto flee for
his life, He is shipwreckedand given shelter by three monks. Now Helenis introduced,and the story of her suitorsand her marriageto Menelaustold. SoonParisis
madecommander-in-chief,
on the strengthof his prowessat the joust. Oneeveningat
dinnerhe helps Helenwith her music,and they fall in love. Menelausgoesto visit a
distant castle,leavingParis in chargeof his palace.He and Helenconsummatetheir
love. When Helen becomespregnant they decide to leave for Troy, taking all
Menelaus'swealthwith them.
The Greek chiefs assembleto support Menelausand the Trojan war begins.
Achilles,offended at the loss of Chryseis,disguiseshimself as a woman and lives
unnoticed in the Greekcampuntil discoveredby a stratagem.The war goeson, with
manynotable singlecombats.Achilleskills Hector. PriamandParisoffer Achillesthe
hand of Polyxena,and Achilles entersTroy to claim his bride, only to be slain by
Parisand Deiphobos.The angryGreeksbuild the woodenhorseand withdraw. The
Trojans take the horseinto the city, the Greeksreturn and Troy is put to fire and

32

ROBERT BROWNING

sword. Achilles's body is recovered and buried at the Hexamilion.64 While the fleet is
hindered from sailing by adverse winds, Achilles appears to the Greeks in a dream
and tells them they must sacrifice Priam and his family. This the Greeks do on the
next day, and the fleet sails for home. The poem concludes with a lament for
Achilles, what would be called in Greece today a llOtPOA6'Yt,
and with some reflections on the inevitability of death.
It is hardly likely that our poet had ever read Homer in spite of his claim to have
done so. His material comes from Tzetzes, from the chronicle of Manasses,perhaps
from Hermoniakos. And he has introduced material from the story of Apollonios
king of Tyre arid probably from some of the vernacular Greek romances of chivalry.
There is much coincidence of expression and manner with the Byzantine Achilleid,
including lines common to both texts, and with later Greek folk poetry. Whether this
is oral poetry I leave to wiser heads to decide. But it is certainly poetry for a popular
audience, for men who have little acquaintance with Greek literary tradition and who
care nothing for textual criticism or edifying interpretation, but for whom the name
of Homer and the story of Troy still retain their magic.
Homer was a closed book to the Western world in the Middle Ages. But through
the Latin versions of Dictys and Dares, the Latin Little Iliad, Ovid's Heroides, and
the like, men had some knowledge of the tale of Troy. Out of this, in the later
Middle Ages poets fashioned a story that was chivalrous rather than heroic in tone.
The culmination of this development was the Old French Roman de Troie of Benoit
de Sainte-Maure (fl. ca. 1150), which begins with the landing of the Argonauts and
carries the tale down to the return of the Greek heroes.65 It is Benoit, with his
interest in romantic passion, who first tells the story of Prince Troilus and the
faithless Briseida (whom Boccaccio transformed into Criseida). The French knights
and men-at-arms who set up their principalities and dukedoms in Greek lands after
the Fourth Crusade brought Benoit's poem with them. A generation or so later their
bilingual courts became centers of translation and adaptation of western European
vernacular literature into Greek. It was probably in the fourteenth century that
someone -we know neither who he was nor where he lived -produced a Greek
version of the Roman de Troie. Its attraction would lie not only in the additional
information it contained, but in a moral tone and social values more in accord with
the spirit of the age. The translation is fairly close, though here and there the Greek
poet omits or embroiders on passages.The difference in length -11,000 lines in
Greek, 30,000 in Old French -is largely accounted for by the difference in length of
line -8 syllables in French, 15 in Greek -but also to some degree by the tautness of
the Greek compared with the rather diffuse Old French. The translator, though no
Homer, was a skilled craftsman working in a traditional medium in which he was

64On this wall built across the Isthmus of Corinth by Manuel II in 1415 cf. Nicol (n. 60
above) 343; J. W. Barker, Manuell/ Palaeologus (1391-1425): A Study in Late Byzantine
Statesmanship(New Brunswick, N.J. 1964) 311-316.
6SEd. L. Constans,Le Roman de Troie, 6 vols. (Paris 1904-1912).

33

HOMER IN BYZANTIUM

entirely at home. His language is that of the medieval Greek ballads of chivalry,
basically spoken Greek, colored by the prestigious literary tradition. He clearly did
not know Homer, and indeed had little acquaintance with classicizing Greek literature at all, as is shown by the strange forms that he gives to his heroes' names,
transliterated from Old French -"EKOV(3a, 'Avopof.lu(Ja.But he satisfied his public.
There are at least five manuscripts of this long poem -by
far the longest in
Byzantine vernacular Greek. Only a few hundred lines have been published, and that
from a single manuscript.66 Mrs. Elizabeth Jeffreys of the Dumbarton Oaks Center is
now engaged on the preparation of a critical edition of the complete text, which will
be a major contribution to our knowledge of Greek language and literature in the
Middle Agesand to our understanding of the development of European culture.
The Latins were not the only foreigners to be captured by the tale of Troy. A few
years after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror passed
through Troy and visited the tombs of Achilles and Ajax. He praised them for their
memorable exploits and congratulated them because they had Homer to sing their
.67

praises.
Department of Classicsand Ancient History
Birkbeck College
University of London

London,Engiand
66 D. I. Mavrophrydes,

1866)183-211.
67Critobou1os 4.11.5.

'E"hO-Y1l jlV1jEiwlI Tr,C; IIEwTfpac; 'EhhTjllt"ilc;

-YhWUUTjC;

(Athens