Latin, Greek, and Roman in the Byzantine Book Of

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THE LANGUAGE OF ORDER: LATIN, GREEK, AND ROMAN IN THE

BYZANTINE BOOK OF CEREMONIES

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Erik Z.D. Ellis

Alexander Beihammer, Co-Director

Hildegund Müller, Co-Director

Graduate Program in Medieval Studies

Notre Dame, Indiana

April 2019

Erik Z.D. Ellis

THE LANGUAGE OF ORDER: LATIN, GREEK, AND ROMAN IN THE

BYZANTINE BOOK OF CEREMONIES

Abstract

Erik Z.D. Ellis

This study of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos’ De Cerimoniis, a compilation of old and new material produced under imperial patronage during the middle of the tenth century, focuses for the first time on the significance of its language. Rather than treating the book as a source for the reconstruction of ceremony, as has been traditional in the past, it looks at the place of ceremonial language in Middle Byzantine culture and its wider social functions.

By examining the place of Latin in the specialized linguistic register of De

Cerimoniis, this study challenges received wisdom on the place of Latin in Byzantium and the relative prestige of Latin and Greek both within the tenth century and across the long centuries of their contact and mutual influence. Turning to the Greek of De

Cerimoniis, the study presents a typology of “technical Greek” to explain some of the linguistic peculiarities of what scholars are now calling the “middle register” or “literary koine.” The linguistic and stylistic features of this register furthermore reveal De Erik Z.D. Ellis

Cerimoniis to take part in the long tradition of “practical philosophy,” which encompasses both technical treatises and the moral encheiridion.

The study also places De Cerimoniis in its wider cultural and literary milieu, focusing on how the text both reflects and projects a deeply philosophical and theological vision of the ways by which language and ceremony have real effects in the world and how Constantine VII understood his book as an essential tool in his project of recovering the Roman past and restoring cosmic order. In this regard, this study seeks to connect

Constantine VII’s programmatic statements to traditional concepts of mimesis, anamnesis, and liturgical realism along with contemporary speech-act and performance theory.

Finally, the study looks at the place of De Cerimoniis within the corpus of works produced under Constantine VII’s name, especially the Vita Basilii. De Cerimoniis emerges as an essential and culminating project in the work of the Macedonian dynasty to

“recover” order. This study proposes that the “Macedonian Renaissance” be understood as a two-step project, beginning with “analepsis” of the past and pointing towards an as yet unrealized “katalepsis” of an idealized future. In this conception, De Cerimoniis is the practical outcome of Constantine VII’s desire to build on the achievements of his predecessors Basil I and Leo VI. Through ceremony, the basileus and his basileia begin to reflect heavenly rather than historical taxis, and Constantine VII imagines the possibility of directing his empire towards the fulfillment of its transcendent destiny.

VXORI OPTIMAE

CVIVS ABSQVE AVXILIO

NIL FIERI POSSET

CONTENTS

Tables ...... v

Acknowledgments...... vi

Chapter 1: Language and Roman Heritage in Tenth-Century Byzantium: Linguistic Insights into the Intellectual Culture of Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis ...... 1 1.1 Ordering Language in Tenth-Century Byzantium ...... 1 1.2 Scholarly Literature ...... 6 1.3 New Methodologies ...... 8 1.4 Looking Ahead...... 12 1.5 The Present Study ...... 16

Chapter 2: The Place of Latin in De Cerimoniis and in the Macedonian “Renaissance” ..22 2.1 Status Quaestionis and Prospectus...... 22 2.2 A Census of the Latin Loanwords of De Cerimoniis ...... 36 2.3 Methodological Problems and Considerations ...... 38 2.3.1 Nouns as Loanwords ...... 41 2.3.2 The Latin Suffix -arius ...... 50 2.3.3 Macaronic Coinages...... 52 2.3.4 Greek Terms for Roman Concepts ...... 57 2.3.5 Loanwords Denoting Places and Things...... 59 2.4 A Taxonomy of Latin Influence on the Greek Language ...... 61

Chapter 3: Rhetorical Unrhetoric: De Cerimoniis between “Technical Greek” and the Mirror of Princes ...... 75 3.1 Introduction ...... 75 3.2 Technical Greek, Schriftkoine, and the Encheiridion ...... 80 3.3 The Origins and Development of Fachliteratur ...... 85 3.4 Marching Back to Xenophon: A Literary Anabasis ...... 94 3.5 From Xenophon to (East) Rome: The Formation of a Roman Tradition ...... 101 3.6 From Greek to Latin and from Latin to Greek ...... 109 3.7 Rebuilding the Roman Tradition of Technical Greek...... 129 3.8 Morale, Practice, and Eternal Victory...... 150

Chapter 4: Anamnesis and Typology in the Acclamations of De Cerimoniis ...... 155

iii

4.1 Introduction ...... 155 4.2 Historical Orientation...... 158 4.3 The Problem of Byzantium: Analyzing a Synthesis ...... 160 4.4 Theoretical Background ...... 163 4.5 A Way Forward...... 167 4.6 Procedure and Definition ...... 174 4.7 Anamnesis: Historical and Eschatological...... 178 4.8 The Return to Rome ...... 189 4.9 Recovering the Byzantine Theory of Acclamation ...... 196 4.10 From Inauguration to Acclamation ...... 216

Chapter 5: The Macedonian Recovery of Order ...... 227 5.1 Renaissance or Recovery? ...... 227 5.2 The Formation of a Narrative ...... 232 5.3 Seeking Models and Emulating Types ...... 236 5.4 Vita Basilii and the Recovery of Order ...... 241 5.5 The Mythological Foundation of the Macedonian Dynasty ...... 252 5.6 From Lawgiver to Regulator ...... 260 5.7 The Vocabulary of Recovery ...... 264 5.8 From Analepsis to Katalepsis ...... 268 5.9 Reflecting the Order of Heaven ...... 277

Chapter 6: Conclusion...... 285 6.1 Overview ...... 285 6.2 De Cerimoniis and the Recovery of Latin ...... 288 6.3 Technical Greek and Practical Philosophy ...... 290 6.4 Ceremonial Realism and Anamnesis ...... 293 6.5 De Cerimoniis as an Instrument of Macedonian Katalepsis ...... 296 6.6 Building on the Foundation ...... 299

Appendix A: Thematic Lists of “Latin” Words in De Cerimoniis ...... 301

Bibliography ...... 311 Primary Sources ...... 311 Reference Works ...... 314 Secondary Sources ...... 314

TABLES

Table A. 1 Titles, Roles, Offices...... 303

Table A. 2 Places ...... 305

Table A. 3 Other Nouns ...... 307

Table A. 4 Verbs and Adjectives ...... 309

Table A. 5 Phrases ...... 310

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While I came to Byzantium almost too late, I am supremely grateful to all of those who helped me find my destination along the way. Study of De Cerimoniis pulled me in many directions and bears the marks of engagement with many scholarly literatures and the aid I received from a diverse group of scholars working in history, theology, and classics. Each of these people has left their mark on my work and has helped me to bring cohesion and clarity to a challenging topic.

The idea for this study was first proposed to me by my teacher, Peter Jeffery, during a seminar on Ordo Romanus Primus that I took in my last semester of coursework.

He told me that De Cerimoniis was a difficult and understudied text that would benefit from being looked at by someone trained in classical languages, with an interest in cultural history, and an appreciation for liturgical theology, and he suggested that I take up the task. I did nothing with his suggestion until I met with Alexander Beihammer half a year later, who reiterated what Peter Jeffery had said, provided me with a bibliography, helped me to sketch out a general outline, and told me to delve deeply into the text and the history of the people and times that produced it.

Hildegund Müller and Aldo Tagliabue have provided expert philological guidance and constant encouragement throughout the long period when my proposal for a fairly straightforward, philological study transformed into this interdisciplinary study. vi

Hildegund Müller’s often repeated and sober advice, “tene rem,” has brought me back to earth when I was tempted to fly too close to the sun of Constantine VII’s transcendent vision, and Aldo Tagliabue helped me to think about the power of narratives and the long tradition of Greek prose.

To all of my friends who have helped me refine my thinking and who read early versions of chapters, I extend my deepest gratitude. In particular, I have benefitted from the culture and erudition of Nikolas Churik and Fr. Demetrios Harper, whose knowledge of liturgical scholarship, appreciation for the peculiarities of Byzantine Greek, and love of both Old and New Rome know no bounds.

I also wish to thank the Medieval Institute and Classics Department of the

University of Notre Dame, and especially Dick and Peggy Notebaert, whose financial assistance made it possible for a former Latin teacher with a young family to attend graduate school, make research and professional development trips, and begin an academic career.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Rebecca West, who despite the difficulties of raising three children and being engaged in her own doctoral research has been indefatigable in helping me complete this dissertation. She has encouraged me when I thought I could not go on and read every footnote, checked every margin, and examined every bibliography entry more times than anyone could count.

vii CHAPTER 1

LANGUAGE AND ROMAN HERITAGE IN TENTH-CENTURY BYZANTIUM:

LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS INTO THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF

CONSTANTINE VII’S DE CERIMONIIS

1.1 Ordering Language in Tenth-Century Byzantium

The text known as De Cerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae, or Ἔκθεσις τῆς βασιλείου

τάξεως, was produced under the patronage of, and likely authored at least in part by, the tenth-century Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos.1 As one of the most important works of the period of cultural renewal traditionally called the Macedonian

1 There has been no complete edition of De Cerminoniis since Leich and Reiske’s Constantini Porphyrogenneti Imperatoris Constantinopolitani Libri Duo De Ceremoniis Aulæ Byzantinæ, ed. Johann Heinrich Leich and Johann Jacob Reiske, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1751). Reiske’s text was reprinted with a Latin translation and commentary in 1829 as part of the “Bonn Corpus” of Byzantine historical texts, and this remains the standard edition. Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, Constantini Porphyrogeniti imperatoris de cerimoniis aulae Byzantinae libri duo, ed. Johann Jacob Reiske and Barthold Georg Niebuhr (Bonn: Weber, 1829).Vogt attempted a new edition with commentary and got through most of Book I and produced a valuable commentary, but the edition remains unfinished. Albert Vogt, Le livre des cérémonies (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935). Dagron promised a new edition for the Vienna Corpus, but nothing had yet been published before his death in 2015. A report on progress towards the completion of the edition expected at the 2016 Byzantine Congress in Belgrade was not delivered, and the current status of the project is unclear. The most recent complete edition is the 2012 English translation in Byzantina Australiensia, which photographically reproduces the Greek text of the Bonn edition of Reiske and includes an introduction, bibliography, and brief explanatory notes. The Book of Ceremonies; with the Greek Edition of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn, 1829), trans. Ann Moffatt and Maxene Tall (Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 2012). For various reasons, none of these editions is wholly satisfactory. Reference to De Cerimoniis is complicated because Reiske, Vogt, and the MS all number the text divisions differently. Since Reiske’s remains the only complete edition and use of his numbering system is most widespread in the secondary literature, references in this study use Reiske’s now conventional “R numbers” to point to specific locations in the text of De Cerimoniis. 1

Renaissance,2 De Ceremoniis provides a rich source of evidence for the use of language among the Byzantine elite during the cultural campaign of the period following

Iconoclasm. Studying the formal balance and layered varieties of register along with lexical and formulaic features of the language of De Cerimoniis will illuminate the diachronic and synchronic development of the Greek language and help to establish a linguistic typology for the language of the tenth century. Close engagement with the language of De Cerimoniis will also shed light on the widespread currency of Latin loanwords in medieval Greek.3 Cataloguing the Latin vocabulary of De Cerimoniis and correlating it with specific semantic domains will demonstrate to what extent and in what contexts Latin retained a place of honor in Byzantine culture, even as late as the tenth century. Contrary to prevailing attitudes about the position of Latin in Byzantine culture generally and the decline of literary Greek in the tenth century,4 De Cerimoniis shows a

2 Jeffrey Featherstone, “De Cerimoniis and the Great Palace,” in The Byzantine World, ed. Paul Stephenson (London: Routledge, 2010), 162.

3 This phenomenon has been little studied. For a brief, recent overview of past work and a consideration of how best to proceed, see Eleanor Dickey, “Latin Loanwords in Greek: A Preliminary Analysis,” in Variation and Change in Greek and Latin, ed. Martti Leiwo, Hilla Halla-aho, and Marja Vierros, Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at Athens 17 (Helsinki: Suomen Ateenan- instituutin säätiö, 2012), 57–70.

4 The entry ‘Latin’ in the The entry “Latin” in Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1183 is typical of previous approaches to the place of Latin in the East. The article presents Latin as having been largely absent from Byzantine culture from the time of Heraclius until the Fourth Crusade. The focus is on Latin literary works produced in Constantinople, and there is no attempt to discuss the subtler forms of linguistic influence that this proposal identifies. Conversely, the influence of Greek on the culture of the Latin middle ages has been exhaustively and repeatedly studied, most famously in Walter Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, Rev. and expanded ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988). In his Byzantine Humanism, Paul Lemerle makes sure to note the decline of Greek in Italy but does not discuss whether a similar decline in the study and and knowledge of Latin occurred in the West. Even in his treatment of the tenth-century compilation literature, he does not consider that literature’s debt to Latin, which in the case of the Basilica, a translation and adaptation of Justinian’s law code and its accompanying commentaries, was considerable. Paul Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism: The First Phase: 2 continuing concern to preserve and pass on the Roman heritage, both Greek and Latin, of the Eastern Roman Empire.

An in-depth study of the language of De Cerimoniis,5 particularly in its description of imperial and ecclesiastical ceremonies and the texts recited during them, will make it possible to better understand how Constantine VII used language to structure the activities of the cultural, ecclesiastical, and political elite of Byzantium.The standard narrative of Byzantine history has remained surprisingly stable since writers like Gibbon and Voltaire established it in the eighteenth century.6 That narrative is of glacial but inexorable decline, of a stifling dedication to inherited forms, and of a sterile husk surrounded by new and vigorous cultures. This strongly negative evaluation of the

Byzantine achievement has discouraged scholarly work and contributes to widespread prejudice against and ignorance of Byzantine history and culture.

Notes and Remarks on Education and Culture in Byzantium from Its Origins to the 10th Century (Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986), 11ff., 309–46.

5 Despite evident interest in the text, its language has attracted little attention so far. Scholars have generally approached the text as a source of historical information. Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) uses it to reconstruct imperial ceremonies; John F. Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565-1204, Warfare and History (London: UCL Press, 1999) to explain how the Byzantine army mustered and moved in formation; and David Cannadine and S. R. F. Price, Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) to examine how imperial ideology found concrete expression in ritual action.

6 Runciman’s “Gibbon and Byzantium,” is a classic discussion of the problems with Gibbon’s interpretation of Byzantine history as well as its pervasive and continuing influence on Western views of Byzantium. Steven Runciman, “Gibbon and Byzantium,” Daedalus 105, no. 3 (1976): 103–110. In his romantic way, Runciman had already traced the Western bias against Byzantium to the Crusades in Steven Runciman, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium (Cambridge: The University Press, 1929), 9. For a recent overview of the reception of the Byzantine heritage both positive and negative, see Dimiter G. Angelov, “Byzantinism: The Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium in Southeastern Europe,” in New Approaches to Balkan Studies, ed. Dimitris Keridis, Ellen Elias-Bursać, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis (Dulles: Brassey’s, 2003), 3–23.

Averil Cameron devoted a recent book of essays to answering these charges of irrelevance and in one chapter attempts to explain why Byzantium is absent from most

Westerners’ understanding of the past.7 According to Cameron, Byzantinists themselves continue to work under the negative historiographical assumptions of the past, and, if they have successfully brought Byzantium into the consciousness of their contemporaries, it is under the rubric of exoticism. To counter these two tendencies in

Byzantine studies, scholars must work to bring Byzantium into the mainstream. One way of reaching this goal is to “domesticate” Byzantium, that is, to take it from the periphery and to make its history an integral component of the standard narratives within which contemporary scholars and the general public operate. The first step in this realignment is the deconstruction of long-held assumptions followed by the reevaluation of the evidence along new lines, to see unity in what has long appeared to be disordered diversity.

Like the explosion of ‘Late Antiquity’ that preceded it,8 the burgeoning field of

“Mediterranean Studies” has over the past several decades reconfigured the divisions that scholars use to organize their study of past cultures.9 In the nineteenth century and before,

7 Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 7–25.

8 Andrea Giardana provides an overview of the growth of the study of Late Antiquity from the 1901 publication of Alois Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie to the end of the twentieth century. Andrea Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi Storici 40, no. 1 (1999): 157–180; Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie (Vienna: Druck und Verlag der Kaiserlich-Königlichen Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901). In the English-speaking world, Peter Brown’s heavily illustrated The World of Late Antiquity was epoch-making and perhaps did more than any other single book to create the “explosion” to which Giardana refers. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). In the second decade of the twentyfirst century, Late Antiquity has for scholarship and the wider public a period once considered decadent and of little interest.

9 Fernand Braudel inaugurated Mediterranean Studies in 1949 with the publication of the first edition of his three-volume La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen, which was revised several times and translated into many languages. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 9th ed. (Paris: A. Colin, 1990). At the time of the publication of the English translation of the second edition, Trevor-Roper gave an evaluation of Braudel’s work and methodology in 4 scholars worked, either consciously or unconsciously, in confessional paradigms that were often heavily influenced by contemporary political and religious identities. This resulted in a conception of a post-antique world dominated by a Latin, Roman Catholic

West, and an Arabic, Islamic East. The work of scholars of late antiquity has done much to upset this clean dichotomy, but Byzantium still struggles to find a place between these two great civilizations. Putting Byzantium in the center of these two cultures and positioning it as both their source and political competitor is a major component of contemporary reorientations towards mediterranean studies.

Fundamental to any such reorientation will be bringing understudied texts such as

De Cerimoniis into contact with contemporary scholarly trends in linguistics and literary studies. For too long, De Cerimoniis has acted primarily as a source for evidence leading to generalizations about the Byzantine millennium rather than an evaluation of the text in its time, and what the particular concerns and aims of its author were. Since it was at the center of so much of Byzantine art, literature, and politics, ceremony should be an important part of any understanding of Byzantium. For this reason, scholars must take advantage of the unparalleled access that De Cerimoniis provides to the practice and ideals of Byzantine ceremony.

H. R. Trevor-Roper, “Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean,” The Journal of Modern History 44, no. 4 (1972): 468–479. In 2010, John A. Marino examined the reception of Braudel in John A. Marino, “Braudel’s Mediterranean and Italy,” 2010. Braudel’s work inspired the foundation of the Mediterranean Studies Association, which publishes the journal Mediterranean Studies.

5 1.2 Scholarly Literature

Much of the scholarship on De Cerimoniis has been concerned with using the text as a source of information about imperial ideology. In this regard, the works of Michael

McCormick and Gilbert Dagron are preeminent.10 McCormick sees De Cerimoniis as encapsulating the tradition of triumphal rulership inaugurated in late antiquity and kept alive by Byzantine emperors up through the tenth century.11 In his work, Dagron made no overarching judgment about De Cerimoniis, but he mined it carefully in preparing his study of the role of the emperor in Byzantine society. Before he died, he had begun work on a new edition of De Cerimoniis, and his papers form the basis of the forthcoming volumes in the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae. Both of these studies are in various ways indebted to Sabine McCormack’s monograph Art and Ceremony in Late

Antiquity,12 which, like so many other studies of late antique and Byzantine ceremony, focuses on material culture. Recent work on De Cerimoniis continues to maintain this traditional link between the scholarly fields of political ideology and art history. 13

This emphasis on art is tied up with longstanding narratives of Iconoclasm and a subsequent ‘Macedonian Renaissance.’ There has been a decades-long debate as to whether the great outpouring of patronage and artistic production in the ninth and tenth

10 Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Dagron, Emperor and Priest.

11 McCormick, Eternal Victory, 9.

12 Sabine MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

13 Robert S. Nelson, “‘And So, With the Help of God’: The Byzantine Art of War in the Tenth Century,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 65/66 (2011): 169–192.

6 centuries qualify as a true renaissance.14 It is not important to delineate the contours of the debate here, but it is interesting to note that, as in the case of Neo-Latin, a field similarly understudied and widely condemned as uninteresting,15 the literature of tenth- century Byzantium has not generated the same level of interest as the art treasures with which it was contemporary. The classicizing trends in visual art that scholars see as evidence of dynamism in the culture of tenth-century Byzantium and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, are, when applied to literature, said to be evidence of stagnation.16

Catherine Holmes has recently attempted to sidestep these contentious arguments and investigate what role compilation literature, like De Cerimoniis, played in the political

14 Warren Treadgold summarizes the debate and gives his own evaluation in Warren Treadgold, “The Macedonian Renaissance,” in Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 75–98. Kurt Weitzmann is credited with inventing the term and wrote the text for the catalogue of a 1979 Metropolitan Museum exhibition entitled that brought Byzantine art to a wide American audience for the first time. Kurt Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality: A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980). The Metropolitan Museum of Art has also held two other symposia on Byzantine art. Helen C. Evans, The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997); Sarah T. Brooks, Byzantium, Faith, and Power (1261-1557): Perspectives on Late Byzantine Art and Culture (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007). Perhaps more than any other scholarly activity, these three exhibitions have served to raise the profile of Byzantium and popularize the idea of ‘Byzantine renaissances.’

15 In an essay entitled “Rediscovering a Lost Continent,” Anthony Grafton celebrated the then- recent release of the first volumes of Harvard University Press’ I Tatti library. Anthony T. Grafton, “Rediscovering a Lost Continent,” The New York Review of Books 53, no. 15 (2006): 6. The previous year saw the appearance of Celenza’s Lost Italian Renaissance, in which the author lamented the absence of Neo-Latin literature in most accounts of modern European culture. Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). As the I Tatti Library did for Neo-Latin, the recent launch of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library promises to bring more attention to an often-neglected but massive corpus of literature.

16 As Averil Cameron has noted, this attitude is pervasive, even among largely sympathetic scholars of Byzantium. Cameron, Byzantine Matters, 21.Vogt, the most recent editor of De Cerimoniis, made this type of judgment in the introduction to his commentary on Book I. Vogt, Le livre des cérémonies, vol. 1, xv-xvi.

7 culture of tenth- and eleventh-century Byzantium.17 Eschewing aesthetic judgment,

Holmes instead works to define the genre and its utility for the political class of middle

Byzantium.

While she relies on the work of a number of historians of the Western Middle

Ages to place her work in the context of political culture,18 an emerging methodological orientation, Holmes is careful to examine compilation literature as a phenomenon arising from and operative within the context of the middle Byzantine period. This approach prevents the sort of moralizing evaluations that were common in earlier generations and gives the texts more room to speak for themselves. In addition, such a synchronic orientation allows scholars to access these texts in their own time and to begin the difficult work of reconstructing the mentality of tenth-century Byzantium. From this perspective, scholars can begin moving beyond the category of “ideology” and examine how diverse philosophical and theological strands are reflected in the political thought of this dynamic period of Byzantine history.

1.3 New Methodologies

Transferring the methods of scholars working on Carolingian topics has particular relevance for students of tenth-century Byzantium. Ildar Garapzinov in his monograph

The Symbolic Language of Royal Authority in the Carolingian World maintains a

17 Catherine Holmes, “Byzantine Political Culture and Compilation Literature in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Some Preliminary Inquiries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010): 55–80.

18 Holmes, 55.

8 traditional focus on visual art,19 but he uses an explicit linguistic metaphor to describe how that art fulfilled a political function in Carolingian society. Early in his study,

Garipzanov traces the origin of this metaphor to André Grabar’s treatment of early

Christian art.20 Grabar posits that the components of an artistic language are like the jargon of a particular trade; they provide the means of expressing new or peculiar ideas within a larger system of signification. Garapzinov intends his study as a contribution to the recovery of these means as they pertain to the Frankish kingdoms.

He praises the interdisciplinary work of previous scholars such as Schramm,

Kantorowicz, and Koziol but argues that for too long scholars have focused excessively on narrative sources to the detriment of what he calls non-narrative sources: coins, art, and liturgy. The narrative sources, he argues, are essential, but studying their contexts along with surviving material culture allows scholars to produce “thick descriptions”21 and recover the past more fully.22

If anything, the situation in Byzantine studies is reversed from what Garipzanov describes. For as long as the discipline of Byzantine studies has existed, art has commanded much more attention than literature both among academics and the general

19 Ildar H. Garipzanov, The Symbolic Language of Authority in the Carolingian World (c. 751- 877) (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

20 Garipzanov, 14–15.

21 ‘Thick description’ was long associated with the ‘cliometric’ approach to economic history of the French Annales school. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures Selected Essays, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. As Garipzanov’s work demonstrates, practitioners of thick description are increasingly breaking out of the economic model and applying the methodology to art, culture, and social structures.

22 Garipzanov, Symbolic Language of Authority, 16.

public. Language itself is even less well understood than literature. The middle Byzantine period, like so many other “middles,” has been defined by what it is not or excluded altogether. The Greek language of the later Roman Empire and of the Byzantine Empire from the Palailogian period onwards are much better understood than they once were.

The growth of interest in late antiquity coupled with an ever expanding corpus of papyrus fragments from the deserts of Egypt has brought a far more nuanced and balanced understanding of the development of Greek in the late Roman and early Byzantine periods. In particular, Gignac’s massive grammar of the Greek papyri23 provides scholars with a vision of the diversity of Greek that had been largely hidden by the uniformity of the atticized literary language that looms large in the consciousness of scholars of classical literature. Together with this new knowledge of colloquial language, there has been the formation of the concept of “literary koine,”24 the everyday written language of the educated.

These two varieties of Greek militate against the traditional dichotomy of

“Attic/Atticized” literary register against a Koine barely differentiated from the spoken language. In the Greek of the later period, the paradigm of diglossia has been prevalent.

The concept has a deep and contentious history in modern Greek politics and is in many

23 Francis Thomas Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, vol. 1: Phonology (Milan: Istituto editoriale Cisalpino: La Goliardica, 1976); Francis Thomas Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, vol. 2: Morphology (Milan: Istituto editoriale Cisalpino: La Goliardica, 1977).

24 See Robert Browning’s essay, ‘”The Language of Byzantine Literature,” reprinted in Nagy’s nine-volume series on Greek Literature. Robert Browning, “The Language of Byzantine Literature,” in Greek Literature in the Byzantine Period, ed. Gregory Nagy, vol. 9, Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001), 112.

10 ways implicated with the language question that was at the forefront of Greek educational policy for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.25 Although they disagree on what is deserving of praise and censure, both the classicizing linguists of an earlier day and the more populist academics of recent times accept the dichotomy. In the last twenty years, academic work has to some degree corrected and complicated grand generalizations by focusing on particular writers and literary movements rather than the longue durée. Scholars such as Alice Mary Talbot26 and Christian Høgel27 have researched the metaphrasis movement of the middle period and the hardening of linguistic variation into diglossia in the late period.

Of course, the standard literature lags behind specialized studies and continues to shape perceptions for non-specialists. As Cameron notes,28 many scholars of Byzantine literature stay with works that belong to defined genres that already have a well-

25 Two classic treatments by anglophone scholars are Robert Browning, “Greek Diglossia Yesterday and Today,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 35 (1982): 49; Arnold Toynbee, “The Greek Language’s Vicissitudes in the Modern Age,” in The Greeks and Their Heritages, by Arnold Toynbee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 245–267. A more focused view of the relationship of the language question to the Byzantine past is provided in Peter Mackridge, “Byzantium and the Greek Language Question in the 19th Century,” in Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, ed. David Ricks and Paul Magdalino (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 49–62.

26 In recent years, Talbot has authored or translated numerous collections of saints’ lives and miracle tales. The language of these works is popular, and in some cases, there exist later reworkings that attempt to bring the texts in line with the atticizing aesthetic of the late Byzantine cultural elite. Two recent examples are Richard P.H. Greenfield and Alice-Mary Maffry Talbot, eds., Holy men of Mount Athos, trans. Richard P.H. Greenfield and Alice-Mary Maffry Talbot, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 40 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Alice-Mary Maffry Talbot and Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, eds., Miracle Tales from Byzantium, trans. Alice-Mary Maffry Talbot and Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 12 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

27 Høgel focuses on metaphrasis, a process that Holmes has called “stylistic upgrading,” and its social implications. Christian Høgel, Metaphrasis: Redactions and Audiences in Middle Byzantine Hagiography (Oslo: The Research Council of Norway, 1996); Christian Høgel, Symeon Metaphrastes: Rewriting and Canonization (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002).

28 Cameron, Byzantine Matters, 24.

11 developed scholarly apparatus that can be deployed in their study. These scholarly trends of keeping to certain well-trodden paths result in subsuming Byzantine philosophy within theology and, furthermore, removing theology from an account of Byzantine literature generally. This tendency towards tripartite division is evident in the volumes of the

Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft that, in the absence of competitors, continue to serve as the basis for knowledge and understanding of Byzantine literature.29 The middle register in which much of Byzantine philosophy, theology, and technical literature was written, being neither hochsprachlich nor Volksliteratur, finds an uneasy place in the history of Greek literature and language.

1.4 Looking Ahead

The emerging narrative is much more complex than the one it is replacing, but it promises to bring individual varieties of Greek into sharper focus while making the overall picture perhaps a bit blurrier. Avoiding teleological accounts of Greek that address linguistic variation neither as decadence from the classical standard nor as movement towards the demotic allows medieval Greek, in all its registers, to enjoy a full- fledged existence rather than one defined in relation to something else. In this way, the

29 Herbert Hunger’s two-volume Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner followed Hans-Georg Beck’s Geschichte der byzantinischen Volksliteratur and Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich in the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft. This tripartite division has become traditional in Byzantine studies but is problematic for texts that do not fit neatly into the scheme, such as the compilation literature of the tenth century. Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (Munich: Beck, 1978); Hans-Georg Beck, Geschichte der byzantinischen Volksliteratur (Munich: Beck, 1971); Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im Byzantinischen Reich (Munich: Beck, 1959).

study of medieval Greek is a component of the larger attempt to bring Byzantium into the mainstream.

The rise and decline of empires have long attracted writers and intellectuals of high caliber, but periods of middle age often struggle to inspire the muse. The nature of tenth-century Greek in general is not well understood. Students of the history of the

Greek language can rely on many high quality studies of the language of late antiquity30 and of the the diglossia of the late Byzantine and immediate post-Byzantine periods,31 but the middle Byzantine period has so far attracted few linguists. In histories of the Greek language and of Byzantine literature,32 generalizations that apply to earlier and later periods are extended to cover the middle period without an attempt to evaluate the evidence independently. The reasons for this oversight stem from a prejudice against the types of literature produced in the period following Iconoclasm,variously termed encyclopedic or compilation literature, and subject to the same criticism once leveled at

30 In recent decades, there has been great interest in the Greek papyri and in the language of the Septuagint. An overview of current approaches to the problems of the former can be found in T. V. Evans and Dirk Obbink, The Language of the Papyri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a survey of the state of Septuagint studies, albeit one quickly becoming dated due to the rapid growth of the field, see Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

31 See, for example, Piera Molinelli and Federica Guerini, eds., Plurilinguismo e diglossia nella tarda antichità e nel Medio Evo (Florence: SISMEL, 2013) and Alexandra Georgakopolou and M. S. Silk, eds., Standard languages and language standards: Greek, past and present (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009). Piera Molinelli and Federica Guerini, Plurilinguismo e diglossia nella tarda antichità e nel Medio Evo (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013); Alexandra Georgakopoulou and M. S. Silk, eds., Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

32 The periodization and topology of the history of the Greek language in the middle ages is tied to socio-political factors rather than to concrete linguistic changes. Egbert J. Bakker, A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 542. Horrocks takes a more firmly linguistic approach, but in a work of its size, it can only offer short discussions of difficult problems. Geoffrey C. Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010).

13 Byzantine culture in general: that it lacks originality and is derivative. In this regard, the concept of mimesis looms large. Associated most closely with Herbert Hunger,33 mimesis as a phenomenon in Byzantine literature is the imitation in form, content, or language of classical antiquity by later Greek authors.

Imitation, in its loose construction, could be the creative redeployment of antique lore, such as the medieval Alexander romances, or it could be much more closely related to its source, like the centos that Hunger himself edited. Hunger finds mimesis operating throughout the history of Greek culture, from the Hellenistic age, through the Roman and

Byzantine periods. According to this view, mimesis rather than innovation, is one of the chief aesthetic principles defining Byzantine literature. In a world before print and interchangeable parts, imitation, even the most slavish, took great skill and long training, and the Byzantines could be said to value continuity, rather than creativity.

The compilation literature, of which De Cerimoniis is a part, suffers according to canons of originality, but a better understanding of its mimetic purpose gives scholars a more productive way of dealing with a corpus that makes up a not insubstantial part of the literary production of the tenth century. According to Catherine Holmes,34 mimesis functioned in the middle Byzantine period in an innovative way. The inclusion of much obsolete material in compilations that aver practical utility as a primary purpose has long perplexed scholars, but if the compiler intended his work to be a sourcebook rather than

33 Herbert Hunger, “On the Imitation (Mimesis) of Antiquity in Byzantine Literature,” in Byzantinische Grundlagenforschung, vol. 15, 1973, 17–38.

34 Holmes, “Byzantine Political Culture and Compilation Literature in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Some Preliminary Inquiries,” 60.

an instruction manual, the problem is at least partially solved. The goal was to preserve and in some cases rediscover what had been done in the past so that it could be creatively recovered in the present and future. Although Constantine VII does not refer to mimesis in his preface to De Cerimoniis, the related ideas of katalepsis, recovery, and taxis, order, figure large not only there but also in his other works.35 Providing his readers with a comprehensive account of imperial ceremonial enabled katalepsis, while careful study of that material would result in bringing taxis to the empire and the office of the emperor as a product of the improvement of the ceremonial life of Constantinople.

I use the word “improvement” rather than “restoration” because it is a central concept of the Byzantine imperial ideal that the empire is eternal. While certainly subject to the influence of good and bad rulers, the essential character of the Byzantine state is not compromised. Perhaps for this reason, historians have grown increasingly wary of applying the typology either of the Carolingian Renovatio or the Italian Renaissance to any period of Byzantine history. The plant may have withered, but it never died. With careful attention, it could be brought back to full vigor. The compilation literature can be understood as participating in this same cultural conception, providing the necessary building material for repair work and expansion, but falling short of a full scale rebuilding along different lines.

35 These two terms are programmatic in Constantine’s preface to De Administrando Imperio and are also important concepts in De Thematibus and in his military orations.

15 1.5 The Present Study

Featherstone and many others36 have been working for several decades to reconstruct imperial ceremonies and the topography of medieval Constantinople in order to evaluate to what extent the late antique civic life of Constantinople remained a living organism in the middle Byzantine period. While these scholars have made valuable contributions to the field, no linguistic study of of De Cerimoniis has appeared. An account of the typology of the Greek of De Cerimoniis will show to what extent the language of the tenth-century Byzantine elite remained in contact with the tradition of

“literary koine” and to what extent it had already begun to show signs of the linguistic bifurcation associated with the later period. As a first step in establishing in what linguistic register or registers the material in Constantine VII’s compilation was written, we will examine the extent to which it participates in traditional literary genres and traditions. A comparison of its language, structure, and framing shows that De

Cerimoniis is not the outlier that many have considered it to be. Rather, it is a representative of “technical Greek” and occupies a place in the mostly forgotten tradition of “practical philosophy.”

Comparison with Constantine’s other works provides material for synchronic study.37 The bulk of De Cerimoniis is dedicated to describing state and ecclesiastical

36 Michael Featherstone has published extensively on the importance of De Cerimoniis for establishing the topography of Constantinople and the Great Palace. In recent years, he has focused on editing a variety of texts produced during the the Macedonian period and is a member of the team that is studying the palimpsested fragments of DC for the edition that is in preparation for the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae.

37 For an examination of the structure and rhetoric of Constantine VII’s speeches, see Eric McGreer, “Two Military Orations of Constantine VII,” in Byzantine Authors Literary Activities and 16

ceremonies throughout the year. This material consists of two types: descriptions of ceremonies and instructions for performing them, and texts to be recited during the ceremonies. The first type, which I will call “rubrical,” can be analyzed to determine the specific formulae that make them up and that have analogues in other types of writing.

Texts of the second type, scripts for what is to be chanted or recited on various occasions, are sometimes long but usually consist of short acclamations with several repetitions.

While their social function has been studied,38 the language has not received attention. In categorizing and analyzing these texts according to type and their contexts within the ceremonial cycle, it is clear that the acclamations have roots in antiquity as well as a dual imperial and Christian character. It is therefore necessary to look at not only the texts but also their ceremonial context and social function. Answering these questions about the language of De Cerimoniis deepens understanding of the development of Greek and is a a first step in taking the compilation literature out of the mushy middle between “high” and

“low” forms of Greek and giving it an existence of its own. Through this study, De

Cerimoniis helps to place the Greek literature of the tenth century on its own footing rather than relying on analogies derived from schemes developed to explain earlier and later forms of Greek and brings clarity to the slippery definition of “compilation.”

One curious feature of De Cerimoniis is its inclusion of a large number of Latin loanwords and texts. Conventional accounts of Byzantine culture make almost no space

Preoccupations: Text and Translations Dedicated to the Memory of Nicolas Oikonomides, ed. Nicolas Oikonomidès and John W. Nesbitt (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 111–38.

38 H. Tillyard, “The Acclamation of Emperors in Byzantine Ritual,” Annual of the British School at Athens 18 (1911): 239.

for the influence of Latin. While Greek influence in the medieval Latin West has received exhaustive attention, cultural exchange moving in the other direction remains almost completely obscure. Given the paucity of previous work on the topic, it is difficult to gauge the domain of Latin within Eastern Roman and Byzantine culture and its extent, both notional and temporal. Eleanor Dickey begins her preliminary study of Latin loanwords in Ancient Greek by stating that to most of those who have not studied the evidence, the very idea is “an absurd concept.”39 Previous work has produced rough estimates of the number of Latin loanwords in late antique and medieval Greek,40 but no corpus has ever been published. In contrast, scholars of Latin have long been aware of the extent of Latin’s reliance on Greek vocabulary in a wide variety of contexts both in highly specialized philosophical and theological language and in the colloquial speech of everyday life.41 One cannot read very far into De Cerimoniis without encountering a profusion of Latin titles, loanwords, and even texts. The appearance of these words and texts in the highest ceremonies of church and state surely belies the statement, found in a recent reference work on Byzantium, that “[the Byzantines] considered Latin a barbaric

39 Dickey, “Latin Loanwords in Greek,” 57.

40 Henry Kahane and Renée Kahane, “The Western Impact on Byzantium: The Linguistic Evidence,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 36 (1982): 127–53.

41 Biville provides a massive corpus along with extensive philological and historical linguistic information. Frédérique Biville, Les emprunts du latin au grec: approche phonétique (Louvain: Peeters, 1990). The earlier work of Christine Mohrmann brought increasing nuance to the old dichotomy of classical and vulgar Latin. Her most accessible treatment of these is issues is Christine Mohrmann, Liturgical Latin: Its Origin and Character: Three Lectures (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1957). In recent years, J. N. Adams’ has united historical and social linguistic approaches to the problem of vulgar Latin, culminating in J. N Adams, Social Variation and the Latin Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

18 language.”42 With so much ignorance and confusion surrounding the place of Latin within Byzantine culture, almost any study of the Latin of De Cerimoniis would be a significant contribution.

The Latin of De Cerimoniis is found in loanwords and texts. The loanwords are pervasive, especially in the titles of government officeholders. The texts are more limited but frequent enough to provide interesting material for study. While the correlation of titles to specific political functions is relatively well-studied,43 no linguistic treatment of the Latin titles exists. Although Byzantine culture was strongly conservative, the preservation of outward form often concealed innovation. There is a need for a study of these titles that identifies which ones are inherited from the Eastern Roman Empire, which are invented, and which fell into disuse and were revived. Beginning to catalogue the Latin loanwords of De Cerimoniis makes progress towards putting estimates about the influence of Latin on Greek on a firmer footing. Further categorization of the loanwords according to semantic domain shows in what instances Latin penetrated

Byzantine culture. Stratifying the loanwords according to their likely date of borrowing and the length of time that they had been in Greek sheds light on the history of cultural exchange between the the eastern and western mediterranean. Preliminary corpus searches are useful in determining the former, while phonological analysis helps determine the latter.

42 The statement appears in Jennifer Lawler, Encyclopedia of the Byzantine Empire (Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2004), 184. McFarland is a major publisher of reference works marketed to public libraries and primary and secondary schools.

43 Nicolas Oikonomidès, Les listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1972).

19 For Greek loanwords in Latin, scholars can refer to two-volume work of

Frédérique Biville, but no comparable work exists for Latin loanwords in Greek. Biville organizes her work around specific phonological features in order to diagnose when and from what sources words entered the Latin language. She then arranges specific terms alphabetically and briefly considers their usage among Latin speakers and writers of antiquity. Aspects of this approach can be profitably adapted to the language of De

Cerimoniis, but this study shows a greater concern for the social and political aspects of the loanwords rather than focusing purely on philological categorization. The Latin texts of De Cerimoniis present a wide variety of problems and possibilities. The texts themselves are transliterated and often show features denoting a long history of oral transmission within Greek.44 But there are also texts that show phonological deviations from classical orthography consistent with the spoken Latin of the late empire and early middle ages. It is consequently difficult to generalize about how these various texts came to be included in De Cerimoniis. Studying when and why Latin loanwords occur In De

Cerimoniis helps to explain what role Latin played in Byzantine culture.

Taken together, these studies demonstrate to what extent Latin continued to be a cultural force in tenth-century Byzantium and how Constantine VII imagined his compilation working to restore a concept or Roman order that was at least partially based on Latin and a peculiarly Roman form of Greek. Incorporating evidence gleaned from the works of Constantine VII’s ancestors shows how Constantine understood his work to be a

44 An example of the difficulties attendant in studying these texts is given by the chant to be sung during the “Gothic Game,” DC R381-86. Previous scholars have not been able to agree on whether parts of the text are in Latin, Gothic, or Greek!

continuation and culmination of his dynasty’s “recovery” of the Roman past. These studies of the Greek and Latin of De Cerimoniis are important steps in situating tenth- century Greek within the broader narrative of the development of the Greek language and in determining whether the use of Latin in tenth-century Constantinople represents a ressourcement or a final eclipse of that language’s influence on Byzantine culture. In providing detailed linguistic information and considerations of the literary and intellectual currents that influenced De Cerimoniis, I hope to replace the vague generalizations and estimates that have plagued past attempts to understand the language and culture of the middle Byzantine Empire, laying the foundation for a comprehensive reevaluation of compilation literature, its language, and tenth-century literary culture in general.

21 CHAPTER 2

THE PLACE OF LATIN IN DE CERIMONIIS AND IN THE MACEDONIAN

“RENAISSANCE”

2.1 Status Quaestionis and Prospectus

Although scholars have repeatedly and exhaustively traced the influence of Greek language and culture on the Latin West during antiquity,1 the middle ages,2 and the renaissance,3 cultural capital traveling in the other direction is largely unexplored, or worse, assumed not to exist.4 In the last thirty years, a few scholars have attempted to

1 Palmer gives a brief, synthetic interpretation of Ancient Greek’s influence on Classical and Vulgar Latin in antiquity. Geoffrey Horrocks’ presentation is a much fuller treatment with many specific examples illustrating phonological, morphological, syntactical, and lexical trends as well as sketching the outlines of the debt of Roman literature and culture to Greek models. Horrocks, Greek, 184–98. G. Hutchinson offers a comprehensive consideration of literary and cultural interaction and the various ways that Greeks and Romans understood the relationship between the two languages. G. O. Hutchinson, Greek to Latin: Frameworks and Contexts for Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

2 The standard work remains Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages.

3 The bibliography of the study of Greek in the Renaissance is of course immense. Still foundational is Louise Ropes Loomis, “The Greek Renaissance in Italy,” The American Historical Review 13 (1907): 246–258. For a much fuller and more up-to-date survey of the situation in the early Renaissance, see N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). For focused studies of particular schools and scholars, see Federica Ciccolella and Luigi Silvano, Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

4 Horrocks states that “in the army, the legal profession, and imperial ceremonial [Latin] continued to enjoy prestige as the ‘true’ language of the Romans, and remained in use, albeit in an increasingly formulaic way, until the 6th century.” Horrocks, Greek, 196. Horrocks’ book is a synthetic, scholarly introduction to his subject, not a monograph on Latin influence of medieval Greek, and his definition of ‘use’ may be quite different from my own. I intend, of course, to demonstrate that, although not flourishing, Latin continued to be used among the Byzantines at least until the tenth century and still played a vital, if symbolic, role in state ceremonies. Aside from passing acknowledgement of the survival of a few Latin 22

shed light on this obscure aspect of East Roman culture,5 but no focused, in-depth study has appeared. Several small-scale or eclectic studies provide some insight on this vital issue, but the detailed work upon which a general survey must rest has still, for the most part, not been done.6 Among the works that attempt to fill this gap, there is Geanakoplos’ survey of interactions between the Latin West and Greek East in the period 330-1600.7

As the long timespan considered implies, Geanakoplos provides an impressionistic account of the exchange, and he is mostly concerned with charting Greek influence on

legal formulas and isolated words and phrases on coins and seals, conventional accounts of the fate of Latin in the East seem unaware of the evidence in De Ceremoniis or discount it. Agni Basilikopoulou-Ioannidou provides an example of the conventional narrative in her Εἰσαγωγή στή βυζαντινή λογοτεχνία (Athens: Ekdoseis Kardamitsa, 1984), 36–37. Horrocks echoes Basilikopoulou-Ioannidou’s account, which is substantially derived from Arnold Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).Toynbee’s account is itself derived from J.B. Bury, The Imperial Administrative System in the Ninth Century, with a Revised Text of Kletorologion of Philotheos (London: H. Frowde, 1911). This continuity of argument shows a remarkable consistency in the status quaestionis over a century of scholarship. A compressed version of this narrative can be found in Henry Kahane and Renée Kahane, “Decline and Survival of Western Prestige Languages,” Language 55 (1979): 185–86.

5 The attempt to quantify Latin’s lexical influence on Greek appears to have begun with Federico Viscidi, “I prestiti latini nel greco antico e bizantino.” (Universitá di Padova, 1944). Viscidi claimed that nearly 3,000 Latin words had made their way into Greek by the 11th century, but he provided no word list. Hoffmann’s 1989 dissertation provides a corpus of Latin words in Greek up to the year 600, which is of great use to classicists but less helpful for students of the medieval language. Herbert Hofmann, “Die lateinischen Wörter im Griechischen bis 600 n. Chr.” (Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1989). Hofmann’s list is also problematic because of certain omissions and mistakes as well as confusion and disagreement about what constitutes a “loanword.” Eleanor Dickey has attempted to lay a foundation for future discussion in Dickey, “Latin Loanwords in Greek.”

6 For diplomatic, political, and ecclesiastical history, one may point to Werner Ohnsorge, Ost-Rom und der Westen: gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte der byzantinisch-abendländischen Beziehungen und des Kaisertums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983).The most progress has been made in synthesizing the ecclesiastical relations between the churches in works such as Joseph Gill, Byzantium and the Papacy, 1198-1400 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979). Cultural, intellectual, and especially linguistic history lags far behind. At the popular level, it is still easiest to write of Byzantium’s absence, which is evident in the title of Lars Brownworth, Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization (New York: Crown Publishers, 2009).This best-selling narrative history once again focuses on the Byzantine and Greek contribution to the formation of Latin, Western culture.

7 Deno John Geanakoplos, Interaction of the “Sibling” Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (330-1600) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

23 Western theology and the Byzantine role in the Italian Renaissance. Of his 14 chapters, only one directly addresses the question of Latin influence on Byzantine culture.8 His consideration of Latin influence over the long “Byzantine Millennium,”9 including both theology and literature, necessarily lacks detail and does not address the linguistic influence and its cultural reflexes that will be the focus of this chapter.

Geanakoplos begins his chapter with the statement, “the problem of Western cultural influence on Byzantium has not hitherto been dealt with in a synthesis that covers its many facets.”10 Although his book appeared more than forty years ago, and the author promised a monograph to fill this gap in the literature,11 this statement remains essentially true today. Echoing what has been the consensus since Gibbon, whom Geanakoplos cites,12 he presents the Byzantines’ evident feeling of superiority and their inveterate conservatism to explain why Latin influence on Byzantine culture was historically so slight and consequently so little studied. He asserts that this mindset was “consistently

8 Deno John Geanakoplos, “Western Influences on Byzantium in Theology and Classical Latin Literature,” in Interaction of the “Sibling” Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (330-1600) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 95–117.

9 Geanakoplos’ range includes pre-, “classical,” and post-Byzantine cultures. I take inspiration for this phrase from Hans-Georg Beck, Das byzantinische Jahrtausend (Munich: Beck, 1994). The question of when the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire is notoriously controverted, and I will make no attempt to answer it. In referring to the period 330-1600 as the “long” Byzantine millennium, I look to Hobsbawm’s understanding of the “long” nineteenth (1789-1914) and “short” twentieth (1914- 1991) centuries. E. J Hobsbawm and Chris Wrigley, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Penguin, 1999); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 2011).

10 Geanakoplos, Interaction, 95.

11 Geanakoplos, 326, n.1.

12 Geanakoplos, 96.

expressed throughout Byzantium’s long history.”13 To explain the lack of interest in exploring the question, Geanakoplos further states, “a primary reason for this neglect is the very inferiority of Western civilization to that of the Greek East, at least until the end of the twelfth century” and “the premise that an essentially less advanced culture will normally exert little or no influence on a more developed one.”14

While the presence of a strong anti-Latin sentiment may be true for a small elite, especially those like Anna Komnene and the writers of the “Third Sophistic,” whose anti-

Latin discourse is certainly stable in the wake of the Schism of 1054 and Crusades and intensifies in the late Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods, it cannot accurately be described as representing the majority opinion.15 For reasons of not strictly historical

13 Geanakoplos, 96.

14 Geanakoplos, 95.

15 In the construction of Byzantine anti-Latin sentiment, too much has been made of Loukas Notaras’ (misquoted) quip, “better the sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat.” Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 21. For a study of the last Byzantine “prime minister” and his family’s relations with Italy, see Klaus-Peter Matschke, “The Notaras Family and Its Italian Connections,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 59–72. Matschke’s discussion of realpolitik in the late period (64-65) is particularly helpful in discerning the complicated nature of late Byzantine relations with the West. In the last 15 years, many scholars have focused on “depolemicizing” the medieval, early modern, and contemporary dogmatic debates between Catholic and Orthodox theologians and placing them in their political and cultural contexts, which predate the “Konfessionalizierung” characteristic of Christianity after the Reformation. See, for example Yury Avvakumov, Die Entstehung des Unionsgedankens: die lateinische Theologie des Hochmittelalters in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Ritus der Ostkirche (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002). See responses to this work in Andrea Riedl, “Polemik im kontext literarisch-theologischer Auseinandersetzung zwischen Ost- und Westkirche im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Themes of Polemical Theology across Early Modern Literary Genres, ed. Svorad Zavarský, Lucy R. Nicholas, and Andrea Riedl (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 129–42; Mihai-D. Grigore and Florian Kührer-Wielach, Orthodoxa Confessio?: Konfessionsbildung, Konfessionalisierung und ihre Folgen in der östlichen Christenheit Europas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). Ihor Ševčenko’s assertion that the audience for atticizing prose literature in Byzantium was extremely small and socially circumscribed should warn against generalizations about Byzantine sentiment across time and social class derived from historians such as Komnene or Psellos. Ihor Ševčenko, “Levels of Style in Byzantine Literature,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 31, no. 1 (1981): 302–3.

import, much of this characterization of Byzantines as essentially anti-Latin appears to be the product of the application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, whereby affection for

Latin culture or support of church union disqualifies one from being a “true” Byzantine.16

In the decades since Geanakoplos wrote, scholars have examined this question critically by expanding their perspective to include non-elites and non-canonical texts. They have found not only many instances of occasional, positive interaction between the two cultures but also evidence of deep and long-lasting mixing and mutual enrichment.17

Furthermore, one may question the idea that Western civilization lagged far behind the

Byzantine until the twelfth century, as any comparison of the literary output of the eighth and ninth centuries in Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish Empire against that of the

Byzantine Empire in the same period would show.18

Anticipating the work of scholars in the decades to follow, Geanakoplos identifies the fields of military science, chivalry, feudal organization, commerce, and not least

16 Some indication of the traditional view can be gained by reading Donald Nicol’s evaluation of Michael VIII and his being labelled a “Latinophron” by the more conservative elements of the Byzantine elite. Donald MacGillivray Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261-1453, 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 77ff. John Meyendorff is more explicit in establishing the dichotomy Orthodox-Latinophron in John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 93–94. See also Hans-Georg Beck, Geschichte der orthodoxen Kirche im byzantinischen Reich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 217–61. More recently, Han Lamers has studied the foundations of modern Greek identity in late Byzantine culture in Han Lamers, Greece Reinvented: Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

17 See Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Athina Kolia-Dermitzaki, and Angeliki Papageorgiou, eds., Byzantium and the West: Perception and Reality (11th-15th C.) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

18 The Latin literature of the seventh to tenth centuries produced in Britain and the Frankish Empire has been a fertile source for the discovery of medieval “renaissances” for a century. In the same period, scholars have traditionally seen a Byzantine “Dark Age” following the advent of Islam and Iconoclasm. For a more positive evaluation of Byzantine culture during this period, see Leslie Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012).

26 significantly, Roman law and administration, as areas where the Latin West could be said to have had an advantage and decisive impact on Byzantine culture.19 The fact that he decides to focus on theology and classical literature at the expense of these other fields no doubt explains why Geanakoplos finds little evidence of Latin influence on Byzantine culture. By looking at non-traditional sources, such as the writings of “Latinophrones” in the case of theology, and “sub-literary” texts, such as manuals and encyclopedias, scholars have developed a much more nuanced picture of Byzantium’s estimation of the value of Latin culture.20 It is hoped that the present study will contribute to this reevaluation of Byzantine attitudes towards Latin culture and a shared Roman heritage and that, in particular, the application of philology and the burgeoning disciplines of historical socio-linguistics and contact linguistics to this mostly unexplored field will be welcome.

Among the numerous “sub-literary” texts produced during the tenth-century is

Constantine Porphyrogennetos’ De Cerimoniis. A product of the period of political retrenchment and cultural renewal traditionally referred to as the Macedonian

Renaissance, it provides insight into the daily life and mental world of the Byzantine elite but in language quite distinct from the atticizing, high-register prose and poetry that is the

19 Geanakoplos, Interaction, 95.

20 The monographs and many articles of Nikolaos Chrissis and Nickiphoros I Tsougarakis shed new light on Byzantine attitudes towards the West. See especially Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Crusading in Frankish Greece: A Study of Byzantine-Western Relations and Attitudes, 1204-1282 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012); Nickiphoros I Tsougarakis, The Latin Religious Orders in Medieval Greece, 1204-1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). These authors characteristically use sources arising from outside of the Constantinopolitan elite. For an orientation to this developing field, see Nickiphoros I Tsougarakis and Peter Lock, eds., A Companion to Latin Greece (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

focus of most studies of Byzantine literature. Scholars have expended much energy examining the ceremonies described in that work from political, social, and ideological perspectives, as well as for what light they can shine on the archaeological remains of

Constantinople,21 but the language of the document has so far attracted little attention.22

Since Constantine VII intended De Cerimoniis to be a tool in the vital project of katalepsis,23 i.e., grasping the past and restoring it for present use, it offers the linguist unparalleled access to the language of power and culture in the middle Byzantine period.

As such, its language demands further study whose sequel will be a deeper knowledge

21 J. Bardill and M. J. Featherstone are preeminent among recent scholars using DC as a guide in reconstructing the architectural and urban settings of the many civic and ecclesiastical ceremonies described in the text. See Jonathan Bardill, “Visualizing the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors at Constantinople: archaeology, text, and topography,” in Visualisierungen von Herrschaft: frühmittelalterliche Residenzen: Gestalt und Zeremoniell: internationales Kolloquium 3./4. Juni 2004 in Istanbul, ed. Franz Alto Bauer (Istanbul: Ege Yayınları, 2006), 5–45; Jeffrey Featherstone, “The Great Palace as reflected in the De cerimoniis,” in Visualisierungen von Herrschaft: frühmittelalterliche Residenzen: Gestalt und Zeremoniell: internationales Kolloquium 3./4. Juni 2004 in Istanbul, ed. Franz Alto Bauer (Istanbul: Ege Yayınları, 2006), 47–62; Featherstone, “De Cerimoniis and the Great Palace.” Featherstone worked with G. Dagron, who was his predecessor in the field and whose Emperor and Priest remains the foundational text on the theologico-political underpinnings of the imperial office in Byzantium. John F. Haldon, Byzantine Praetorians: An Administrative, Institutional and Social Survey of the Opsikion and Tagmata, c. 580-900 (Bonn: R. Habelt, 1984), as well as Oikonomidès, Les listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles, 1972 have focused on military and organizational matters. To these may be added a variety of more specialized studies.

22 While there are many articles and books that use or allude to the Latin words and texts in DC, the only study specifically dedicated to the linguistic problems posed by the text is B. Adamik, “Zur Problematik der lateinischsprachigen Bevölkerung in Konstantinopel. Das Zeugnis der lateinischen Texte in dem Werk De Cerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae des Kaisers Konstantin VII Porphyrogenitus,” in Latin vulgaire, latin tardif. VI, Actes du VIe Colloque international sur le latin vulgaire et tardif, Helsinki, 29 août-2 septembre 2000, ed. Heikki Solin, Martti Leiwo, and Hilla Halla-aho (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 201–18. In his review of previous work, Adamik says, “Die lateinischen Texte... sind der Aufmerksamkeit der lateinischen Sprachwissenschaft lange Zeit entgangen.” Adamik, 201. Adamik’s paper deals almost exclusively with the extended text that appears in DC R74-75.

23 This word appears in Constantine’s preface (DC R4) and serves, I will argue, as a programmatic term in the encyclopedic movement he sponsored. See below, Ch. 5.7.

and understanding of the place of Latin in Byzantine culture and the role it played in the

“Macedonian Renaissance.”24

The fullest examination to date of Latin in the Byzantine Empire appears to be section “(vii) East Roman Latin” of Arnold Toynbee’s chapter on “Conservatism and

Innovation in Byzantine Life” in his massive study of Constantine VII.25 Like much else in the book, and much else that Toynbee wrote,26 this essay is more a masterfully distilled encyclopedia article than a focused exposition of the topic’s relationship with the

Porphyrogennetos, but it provides a standard narrative upon which one may hang a thesis and with which one may dispute and refine the understanding of the past. Toynbee begins27 by tracing the fortunes of Greek and Latin from republican days down to the

24 Scare quotes here serve to alert readers to the current controversies surrounding the use of the term “renaissance” in any context but the Italian. Since the early nineteenth century, historians have argued that periods of cultural renewal during the middle ages had much in common with the artistic, literary, and philosophical goals and methods of the movement that began in Italy in the fourteenth century. The return to classical models that typifies much of the art and architecture, the manuscript production and literary activity, and the mania for collection and codification that can be seen in Ottonian Frankia, Macedonian Romania, and the Fatimid Caliphate, are sufficiently analogous to the situation in Italy to warrant the concept of a general “tenth-century renaissance,” or even, as some would argue, three contemporary renaissances in the Latin, Greek, and Arabic Sprachräume. For an overview of these and other renaissances, see Warren Treadgold, ed., Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). Despite its allegedly old- fashioned or triumphalist connotation, the term “renaissance” will continue to be applied to the culture of the Macedonian dynasty in this dissertation.

25 Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 552–74. In his bibliography, Toynbee lists only three items on this topic, and the last four decades have done little to supplement this small literature. Toynbee, 710.

26 Most famous is his 12-volume A Study of History, a general history of world civilization that ranks alongside the universal histories of classical antiquity that he wished to emulate. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934).

27 Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 552–63. Toynbee’s narrative relies primarily on the work of Henrik Zilliacus, with refinements gleaned from G. Dagron. Henrik Zilliacus, Zum Kampf der Weltsprachen im Oströmischen Reich (Helsingfors: Hakkert, 1935). Zilliacus; Gilbert Dagron, “Aux origines de la civilisation byzantine: langue de culture et langue d’État,” Revue Historique 241 (1969): 23– 56.

final eclipse of Latin in the east as a living language,28 which he regards as having happened at some point in the decades following the death of Justinian I.29 Whether or not Toynbee is right in claiming that the “death” of Byzantine Latin happened before the dawn of the seventh century,30 he continues by providing a useful schema for categorizing the Latin loanwords in Greek that were current in late antiquity and the middle ages and some of which survive in the contemporary demotic.31 According to

Toynbee, the Latin that came into medieval and modern Greek consists of three strata: basic, technical or official, and ceremonial.

By basic, Toynbee means words connected to everyday life, such as σπίτι and

πόρτα, which presumably found a strong footing in the language at a relatively early date and pushed out well-established, native vocabulary.32 This phenomenon will have been

28 The terms “dead” and “living” are problematic and too often prejudicial when applied to language, and I will avoid using them in this context unless quoting the work of another scholar. For the standardized, literate register of language learned in a classroom I will employ the term “acquired,” and the colloquial and quotidian register received and molded by one’s parents and peers I will denote by “natural.” For a sensitive discussion of this issue, see Jürgen Leonhardt, Latin: Story of a World Language, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 9–10.

29 Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 567.

30 Adamik examines the evidence for the persistence of a Latin-speaking population in Constantinople after this date in his previously-mentioned study as well as an earlier article, B. Adamik, “Bemerkungen zur Problematik ‘Latein in Byzanz.’ Über die lateinischsprachigen Bevölkerung von Konstantinopel,” in Latin vulgaire, latin tardif V: actes du Ve Colloque international sur le latin vulgaire et tardif, Heidelberg, 5-8 septembre 1997, ed. Hubert Petersmann and Rudolf Kettemann (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), 69–79.

31 Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 564.

32Some illustration of the difficulties facing the lexicographer of medieval Greek can be had by comparing the entries for πόρτα in Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (from B. C. 146 to A. D. 1100) (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1870); Georgios Babiniotis, Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας, 2nd ed. (Athens: Kentro Lexikologias, 2015). Both derive the term from the Latin porta, but they provide very different accounts of its usage and meaning. Sophocles finds the earliest usage at the Council of Constantinople in 536 and tells us that it is equivalent to πύλη. Babiniotis says only that the word is medieval and gives θύρα and είσοδος/έξοδος as synonyms. Sophocles, working in a classical framework, takes the classical meaning of “gate” as standard, 30 apparent first in the spoken language. From there, it slowly infiltrated the written language, finding a home in practical documents like inventories, contracts, and shopping lists that populate the category termed by linguists Gebrauchstexte.33 When discussing the development of Greek, even its most recent chapters in the second half of the twentieth century, one must be careful to recognize the coexistence, competition, and mutual influence that various linguistic registers exerted on one another. From the twelfth century onwards, the linguistic form that would become the model for the modern, written language is well attested, while at the same time, compositions in higher registers become increasingly mannerist and remote from the spoken language. Historians of the

Greek language have traditionally called this situation diglossia.34 Language was an extremely contentious battlefield in the nineteenth and twentieth century phases of Greek nationalism, and theories of diglossia have played a large part in this often energetic controversy. Students of the history of the Greek language have inherited the dichotomy.

Due, it would seem, to the vagaries of manuscript survivals and general conservatism of written language, the division is both too late and too clean. Works such as De

Cerimoniis offer philologists a third variety of Greek that is traditional and highly

while Babiniotis, an historian of Modern (demotic) Greek, takes the word to mean “door,” which of course is also what porta meant in Vulgar Latin and its reflexes in Romance.

33 For an overview of the definition of Gebrauchstexte along with a discussion of their uses, see Eckard Rolf, Die Funktionen der Gebrauchstextsorten (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993). The stricter diglossia that obtained following the eleventh century was not much in evidence in the tenth century. The language of the period is not easy to classify as either high or low style, and the contemporary compilation literature straddles the categories of Gebrauchstext, anthology, and original literary production. These theoretical problems are treated in greater depth in the following chapter.

34 For an overview and bibliography, see Horrocks, Greek, 3–5. For the modern controversy, see Horrocks, 438–70.

prestigious, yet also functional and quotidian, albeit in the rarified atmosphere of the court in Constantinople. While it would be going too far to claim that De Cerimoniis represents anything like an unconscious record of the speech habits of the tenth-century

Byzantine elite, it provides certain evidence of the degree to which words and linguistic habits from lower registers and from other languages found their way into the language of an educated and influential class of bureaucrats, ecclesiastics, and military leaders.

In distinction to Toynbee’s “basic” terms, there exists also an official stratum encompassing the jargon of court, bureaucracy, army, and especially law,35 which semantic domains are still today active workshops of word creation.36 In his treatment of coinage, Toynbee assigns great significance to the re-latinization of legends beginning with a bronze coin jointly issued by Michael III and Basil I in 866/867 and ceasing after the reign of Evdokia, exactly two hundred years later.37 Toynbee ties this change to

Byzantine tenure of Bari and the Langobardic theme, whose conquest from the Arabs coincided with the earlier date and whose loss to the Normans with the latter. Toynbee argues that “it seems likely that there was a relation between the East Roman

Government’s Italian policy and its minting during these two hundred years,”38 but he

35 The great project of Constantine VII’s father, Leo VI, was the translation and summary of the Roman legal tradition inherited from Justinian and encapsulated in the Basilika. For a discussion of the manuals produced along with the Basilika, see Edwin H. Freshfield, “The Official Manuals of Roman Law of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries,” The Cambridge Law Journal 4, no. 1 (1930): 34–50. Given the unwieldy size of the Basilika, these manuals were the main instruments of Leo VI’s legal reform.

36 See Walter Nash, Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses, Language Library (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

37 Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 565.

38 Toynbee, 566.

does not discuss what that relation may have been. Toynbee’s final stratum, which he terms the “quaintest,”39 are the titles and formulas preserved in the empire’s ceremonial life, which will be the main subject of this chapter.

Throughout his treatment of East Roman Latin, Toynbee works to rehabilitate his subject, but his perhaps unconscious classicizing bias works at cross purposes to his stated goal.40 He also allows himself to indulge in anthropological romanticism when he describes the function of Latin in Byzantine ceremonies as being “fossilized”41 and permits the traditional picture of the Byzantines as Orientals in classical fancy dress, working sometimes elegantly but more often ignorantly and with more than a hint of superstition, to preserve their hidebound and decadent culture. The non-standard spellings found in the Latin texts of De Cerimoniis are themselves evidence of change and serve as a check to Toynbee’s depiction of stasis. To be sure, the orthography is evidence of the preservation of Byzantium’s Latin heritage, but it is also proof of its transmission and transformation, and the pathways by which these texts found their way from the “vital”

Latin Constantinopolitan culture of the fourth through the sixth centuries into Constantine

VII’s tenth-century compilation have much to tell about the continual process of creative redeployment of inherited forms whose cyclical reappearance punctuates the cultural movements of the Byzantine millennium.

39 Toynbee, 572.

40 Toynbee refers to some of these Greek uses of Latin words as “enormities” and “ridiculous.”

41 Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 572.

Toynbee provides the basis, along with the work of his forbears, Dagron and

Zilliacus, for a history of East Roman Latin.42 While these earlier accounts have given an excellent perspective of the longue durée, much still needs to be done to answer questions relating to specific periods and texts. Lacking detailed grammars,43 reliable

42 Recent work by Eleanor Dickey and Panagiotis Filos has done much to extend our knowledge of Latin influence on Ancient Greek. Their research focuses on “sub-literary” texts, such as school books and papyri that have not attracted the attention of philologists previously. Dickey, “Latin Loanwords in Greek”; Panagiotis Filos, “Τα λατινικά δάνεια και η επίδρασή τους στην παραγωγική μορφολογία της μετακλασικής ελληνικής: η περίπτωση του επιθήματος -αριος - μεθοδολογικά προβλήματα,” in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Greek Linguistics (August 30th September 2nd 2007), ed. M. Baltazani, G.J. Xydopoulos, and Anastasios Tsangalidis (Ioannina, University of Ioannina: 2009), 1224–38.

43 For many years now, there have been plans for a “Grammar of Medieval Greek,” to be published by Cambridge University Press. The research project from which it arises focuses on vernacular Greek from the period 1100-1700 and thus excludes both the Middle Byzantine period and the middle register of post-classical Greek. Many of the same problems attendant on the analysis of Medieval Latin confront the student of Byzantine Greek. After expressing doubt that a grammar of Medieval Latin would ever be written. A. G. Rigg states that “[t]he only successful enterprises in the description of Medieval Latin grammar are studies of the usage of specific authors or in limited collections of documents or texts from a particular period or region.”Frank Anthony Carl Mantello and A. G. Rigg, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 90–91. Similar statements could be made about the progress of the study of post-classical and pre-modern Greek, especially in its “middle register,” the language of DC.

34 lexica,44 or even wordlists,45 the standard narrative in part rests on shaky ground. It is therefore necessary to supplement this earlier work by analyzing evidence that has too often received cursory or impressionistic interpretation. Taking the Latin loanwords of

De Cerimoniis as the primary datum, this chapter is a first step in the project of furnishing the skeleton with at least a few of its smaller muscles and providing scholars with the resources for investigating their questions in granular detail for part of what must be, despite the previous contributions of imminent scholars, an important and often misunderstood or overlooked aspect of Byzantine culture.

In the first place, one must take the Latin of De Cerimoniis as it is, rather than as it should have been. When one accounts the testimony of De Cerimoniis as valuable evidence of transmission and phonological processes rather than as a marker of linguistic degradation, Latin appears to have been a pervasive ingredient of the expression of the highest aspirations of the state in the empire’s daily ceremonial life more than a barbaric

44 Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (from B. C. 146 to A. D. 1100), first published in 1870 and reprinted numerous times over the next 120 years, is still the handiest lexicon of later Greek, but Sophocles’ incomplete corpus and superseded methods force scholars to rely on a variety of more recent lexica, all more detailed but less comprehensive. The scope of LSJ has in the twentieth century expanded to cover the technical vocabularies of science and medicine and the peculiar forms of non-standard but still ancient Greek that have come to light through the work of archaeologists, papyrologists, and epigraphers. Early Christian and patristic literature through the seventh ecumenical council are well served by BDAG and Lampe, which both position themselves as supplements to LSJ, such that one really must have all three volumes open on one’s desk in order to trace the varieties of meaning that any one term may have. For the middle Byzantine period, we now have the mostly complete LBG, which covers the gap between Lampe and Kriaras’ massive Λεξικό της Μεσαιωνικής Ελληνικής Δημώδους Γραμματείας 1100-1669 (Thessaloniki: Hypourgeio Ethnikis Paideias kai Thriskeumaton, Kentro Hellinikis Glossas, 1968). LBG has enjoyed a positive reception, but it provides much less discussion of semantic range and few citations than LSJ. While great progress has been made in the last century, there is still need for a synthesis of the lexicographic material that has a nuanced approach to the problem of linguistic register and that bridges the divide between literary and non-literary sources.

45 Kahane and Kahane, “The Western Impact on Byzantium” still provides the most up to date synthesis of work in the field.

intrusion or a marginal influence. In order to trace the contours of this phenomenon, it is necessary first to define the semantic domain of Latin and explain its deployment in De

Cerimoniis. By taking a census of the Latin terms that appear in the text, this study supplements the juridical and military wordlists of Zilliacus and provides a catalogue of the titles and Latin realia that appear in De Cerimoniis, covering the first and last of

Toynbee’s strata of Greek Latinisms. In addition, an investigation of the phonological state of the Latinisms aides in establishing a chronology of Latin influence on Greek.

Along with in-depth study of the Latin texts scattered throughout the text, this examination of the Latinisms provides a comprehensive review of the place of Latin in an important Byzantine text, builds a foundation for further study, and points a way forward for a broader evaluation of the role of Latin in Byzantine culture generally.

2.2 A Census of the Latin Loanwords of De Cerimoniis

In the first and longest chapter of book I of De Cerimoniis, which provides the prototype of an imperial procession to Hagia Sophia,46 the event described is called a

προκένσον,47 a loan of the Latin processus. The form of the word is clearly no mere transliteration and shows signs of circuitous transmission, indicating that the term had a long history in Greek and had been to some extent nativized. At the same time,

46 The heading reads, “Ὅσα δεῖ παραφυλάττειν, προκένσου γινομένου ἐν τῇ Μεγάλῃ Ἐκκλησίᾳ, ἤτοι τάξις καὶ ἀκολουθία τῶν εὐσήμων καὶ περιφανῶν προελεύσεων, ἐν αἷς οἱ βασιλεῖς ἀπίασιν ἐν τῇ Μεγάλῃ Ἐκκλησίᾳ.” DC R3.

47 This spelling, with the postvocalic insertion of -ν- before syllable final σ, is preferred by Constantine VII. He uses the alternate form προκέσσων only once, at DC R415. The term appears also in some chronicles and among ecclesiastical writers in both forms, with the same evident preference for προκένσον.

immediately after its first use early in chapter 1, it is followed by the phrase ἤτοι...

προέλευσις,48 which is the usual Greek word for procession. This apparent need to gloss the word shows unfamiliarity with the language.49 How can the contradiction between the domesticated form προκένσον and the need to gloss it be reconciled? If the term

προκένσον were merely a highly specialized term without an independent life within

Greek, one would expect a strict transliteration, indicating the type of direct borrowing that one finds in the Latinate medical terminology of English, or the more recent but similar practice of taking Germanic terms wholesale into the language to denote concepts derived from continental philosophy and psychoanalysis.50

48 DC R6.

49 In Greek authors of an atticizing bent, such glossing serves as a rhetorical apology for sullying the purity of the Attic tongue. For direct analogues, see the prefaces to Maurice’s Strategikon and Leo VI’s Taktika. The practice is also common in Anna Komnene. Here, Constantine VII (or his scribe) intends his gloss to function as an explanation, as he does repeatedly throughout DAI, especially chapter 45, where the practice occurs three times, each time for the same term. Similar usages throughout DC are too numerous to list here, but we can be reasonably sure that they represent Constantine’s desire to clarify a difficult term rather than to gild the lily. The sheer frequency of the formula throughout Constantine’s works would surely kill whatever rhetorical force it could have had.

50 Such borrowing of technical vocabulary has both practical and social aspects. In the first place, speakers feel that a foreign word is more specific than a native word or calque could be. This often produces the phenomenon whereby the loanword has a more restricted meaning than its prototype has in the source language. In addition to serving the utilitarian purpose of denoting specific concepts, loanwords employed as technical terms often perform a rhetorical or social function. The latinate medical terminology in English famously allows staff and patients to discuss bodily functions in a “clinical” manner that would be impossible if the native vocabulary were used. The use of Latin and Latin-derived terms also plays the secondary role of demonstrating the medical professional’s expertise and erudition. Until quite recently, Latin acted in the same way in the humanities, but it has been giving way to German since the late nineteenth century. For a discussion of Anglophone reactions to Latin influence on English since the Renaissance, see Maria Geers, “A Comparative Study of Linguistic Purism in England and Germany,” in Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages, ed. Nils Langer and W. V. Davies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 99–108. For an example of a critical assessment of Germanisms in English, see Charles T. Carr, The German Influence on the English Vocabulary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), and note the date.

2.3 Methodological Problems and Considerations

The dual nature of the Latinisms of De Cerimoniis, enigmatically and simultaneously having the appearance of antiquity but bearing marks of continual refashioning, is emblematic of many aspects of Byzantine culture generally,51 and the

Macedonian Renaissance in particular.52 Taking προκένσον as a symptom of a wider phenomenon, we can begin untangling the apparent contradictions of the Latin loanwords in Greek through categorization and definition. There is a vast literature on loanwords,53 and their study forms an important subfield in the discipline of socio-linguistics. Contact linguistics and socio-linguistics are young fields compared to historical linguistics. The

51 Scholars refer to this phenomenon as mimesis. For a recent overview of the function of mimesis in this context, see the opening pages of M. Hinterberger, “Envy and Nemesis in the Vita Basilli and Leo the Deacon: Literary Mimesis or Something More?,” in History as Literature in Byzantium: Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 2007, ed. R. J. Macrides (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 187–203.The foundational work for modern discussion is Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). In the context of Byzantine studies, art and architecture have been the focus of most studies. Still, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, academic study of Byzantine literature is concerned primarily with historiography. For Byzantine literature, Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, provides the basis upon which later scholars have built.

52 Holmes, “Byzantine Political Culture and Compilation Literature in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Some Preliminary Inquiries,” 77–78 discusses the redeployment of late antique military manuals in the tenth century as a rhetorical strategy in carrying on contemporary political debate in terms of the past. In this way, Leo VI’s Taktika recapitulates Maurice’s sixth-century Strategikon, itself in part an adaptation of Vegetius’ fourth-century De Re Militari. Vegetius’ work is a curious mix of antiquarian material and information about the fourth-century Roman army with a reforming subtext. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see below, Ch. 5.

53 At the origin of modern discussions of loanwords are Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (The Hague: Mouton, 1953); Einar Ingvald Haugen, The Norwegian Language in America; a Study in Bilingual Behavior (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). For most of its history, contact linguistics has focused on the phenomena arising from the experience of individuals in contemporary immigrant communities. The early scholarship was done by Americans, so the studies that laid the theoretical framework of contact linguistics focus on speakers of Yiddish and Norwegian in immigrant communities in the Eastern United States and Midwest. For an overview of the history of the discipline, see Els Oskaar, “The history of contact linguistics as a discipline,” in Kontaktlinguistik ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung = Contact linguistics: an international handbook of contemporary research = Linguistique de contact : manuel international des recherches contemporaines, ed. Hans Goebl (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 1–12.

38 combination of the three has only been attempted recently, and not previously, so far as I have been able to determine, in the field of Byzantine Greek. Before considering the evidence of De Cerimoniis, it is necessary to define the contours of our discussion and examine the categories that scholars have used to structure their discussions of language contact.54 Language contact may occur in a bewildering variety of ways, so some explanation of the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline is necessary as a preliminary. Scholars usually divide language contact into a number of categories that affect language at the surface level or penetrate into the deep structures of syntax and grammar. The influence of spoken Greek on the structure of low Latin and its Romance reflexes is well-known,55 but apart from a few isolated examples that are difficult to demonstrate definitively, syntactical influence on Greek seems to have been limited to the Sondersprache of Roman governmental epigraphy and in literal translations of legal formulae.56 The influence of Latin on Greek at all periods was limited to the surface level of lexicon, where influence from one language to another is most frequent. While Latin

54 From its origins in the middle of the twentieth century, contact linguistics has been directed towards diagnosing and solving the type of practical problems that arise in contemporary, multi-lingual societies, especially as these problems impact the accessibility and distribution of government services and education. It is only relatively recently that the methods of contact linguistics have been joined with those of historical linguistics. English-speaking scholars have been at the forefront of this approach, and therefore most existing scholarship focuses on the influence of Norman French and Old Norse-speaking communities on the development of English in the middle ages. For a discussion of how these disciplines might be usefully combined outside of an English-speaking context but still with a contemporary, rather than historical, orientation, see Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2003), 246–59.

55 Antonín Bartoněk, “Classical and Vulgar Latin and Greek,” in Latin vulgaire, latin tardif VII: actes du VIIème. Colloque International sur le Latin Vulgaire et Tardif: Séville, 2-6 septembre 2003, ed. Carmen Arias Abellán (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2006), 81–88.

56 A.-Ph Christidis, ed., A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 797–99.

did not significantly alter the development of Greek syntax over the long term, its impact on the lexicon was deep and permanent, operating across linguistic strata and affecting the language of peasants, emperors, and litterateurs alike.

Most studies of loanwords are concerned with contemporary word coinages introduced by bilingual speakers. In discussions of language acquisition and bilingualism, scholars refer to the speaker’s primary language as L1 and the secondary language as

L2.57 Theorists of second language acquisition distinguish between a secondary language, i.e., a language used in a speaker’s locale that is not the speaker’s native language, and a foreign language, i.e., one that is not spoken in the speaker’s locale. Since this study examines language contact across a broad, diachronic context, it is impossible to determine in every case the precise status of Latin. That said, within the confines of this discussion of the language of De Cerimoniis, L1 denotes Greek58 and L2, Latin.59 Since functional Greek-Latin bilingualism appears not to have been a factor in the tenth

57 L1 and L2 properly refer to native (L1) and secondary (L2) languages in second language acquisition (SLA) theory. Through analogy, linguists now habitually use the terms in discussions of contact linguistics. In the context of lexical borrowing, L1 is the borrower and L2 the donor.

58 “Greek” is an exceedingly slippery concept. Although the term only dates to Charles A. Ferguson, “Diglossia,” WORD 15, no. 2 (1959): 325–340, the concept of diglossia has become classical in discussions of the history of Greek from the Hellenistic period up to near contemporary times but may be too tidy a dichotomy for many of the periods encompassed by that lengthy temporal span.In this chapter, “Greek” means the broad “literary koine” of the administrative and encyclopedic texts of the ninth and tenth centuries. The theoretical underpinnings of this typology will be discussed in depth in the next chapter.

59 In contrast to “Greek,” the term “Latin” has almost throughout the entirety of its history meant a specific orthographic and grammatical standard, to the extent that many authors have employed the phrase “latine scribere” to mean “to write correctly [i.e., according to grammatical rules]” rather than “to write in Latin.” For a discussion of the history of the interaction between the term “latine” and the contrasting “romanice” and “barbarice,” see Rodolfo Ilari, Lingüística Românica, 3rd ed (São Paulo: Atica, 2008), 50.

40 century, either in the East or the West,60 the problems of that species of language contact need not detain us here, except insofar as there is evidence of its having influence at an earlier period.

2.3.1 Nouns as Loanwords

The Latin loanwords of De Cerimoniis are almost exclusively nouns. This follows well-known linguistic tendencies. Nouns are the most commonly loaned words across languages.61 As verbal signs denoting unfamiliar concepts, objects, and realities, nouns loaned from donor languages serve a vital function anywhere languages and cultures come into contact. Verbs and adjectives are much more resistant to loaning, being more abstract and requiring a relatively higher degree of linguistic sophistication to borrow and adapt to the needs of L1 speakers.62 All three of these lexical groups are what linguists term “open categories,”63 i.e., relatively susceptible to addition, replacement, and

60 There is scattered but continual evidence of deep interest in and even accomplished scholars of Greek in the West throughout the early middle ages. Two famous examples are the school of Canterbury under Archbishop Theodore in the seventh century and the work of Eriugena and his circle in the ninth. In the tenth century, Liutprand of Cremona’s claims to Greek scholarship are rather evidence of the evaporation of the earlier tradition. When Constantine VII attempts to explain Latin rather than compile it, he betrays an ignorance of the language that must have been widespread if even the scholar-emperor had not sufficient leisure to acquire a deeper understanding of Latin.

61 Hans Henrich Hock and Brian D. Joseph, Language History, Language Change and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 243–46.

62 This tendency is not limited to loanwords but functions even within a language. In late Latin, many inherited verbs were replaced by denominative verbs using the formula noun + -are. Cf. Sp. questionar, Fr. questionner, and It. questionare > *quaestionare > quaestion- + -are, replacing an inherited quaerere. Contemporary English combines the Latin-derived -ate and the Greek-derived -ize in myriad ways to create new verbs from both native and loaned nouns. And in Japanese, it is common to pair the general purpose shimasu (to do) with loanwords to create periphrastic verbs.

63 Erika Hoff, Language Development (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2014), 171–72.

modification. In contrast, “closed categories” include function words such as conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns. While there is variation in what groups make up these categories on a global scale, the divisions are relatively stable with reference to

Indo-European languages and are applicable as stated to Latin and Greek.

Various motives can influence word-loaning. Foreign words often enter a language with little or no change when they denote a concept or thing that does not exist in L1.64 Loanwords are for this reason an excellent, although indirect, witness to cultural influence. A more specialized variety of this type of lexical borrowing occurs when a word with a common meaning in L2 acquires a restricted meaning in L1. Ancient examples of this include the large number of unmarked Greek words, such as βαπτίζω (to wash) and ἐκκλεσία (an assembly), that entered Latin and took on specialized, Christian meanings, to perform the Christian initiatory ritual and the assembled Christian faithful or the building in which the Christian faithful assemble, respectively.65 A modern example would be kimono, which in Japanese originally meant simply “clothing,” but in

64 See Weinreich, Languages in Contact, 56–57. Weinreich provides numerous examples from Central and Eastern Europe and the United States. His basic premise is that loanwords denoting cultural practices and artifacts are evidence of cultural “absence” among speakers of L1. So, in Weinreich’s paradigm, European settlers in America and Anglo-Saxon settlers in Britain, being relatively culturally self- sufficient, took very little, apart from placenames, from the language of the natives they encountered. From the perspective of medieval and modern Greek, this is problematic, as numerous Greek terms for basic vocabulary, such as those denoting bread, door, and house, have been replaced by imports from Latin, Turkish, and elsewhere. This problem will be discussed more fully below.

65 Christine Mohrmann produced a vast literature on Christian Sondersprache and its implications for Greek and Latin. Her ideas are available in condensed, synthetic form in Mohrmann, Liturgical Latin. For a more recent consideration of Mohrmann along with attempts to tie her ideas to speech-act theory and ritual studies, see Maura K. Lafferty, “Translating Faith from Greek to Latin: Romanitas and Christianitas in Late Fourth-Century Rome and Milan,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11, no. 1 (2003): 21–62.

42 English denotes a specifically Japanese form of dress.66 Since these linguistic phenomena are well documented across time and place,67 we would expect the same tendencies to hold true in the Latin vocabulary of De Cerimoniis.

Nouns, as the grammar school formula reminds us, can be persons, places, or things. In De Cerimoniis, the greater number of Latin loanwords are persons, or rather the titles of persons. Most of these are strict transliterations of their Latin prototypes, showing a restricted and specialized usage and a rather late borrowing. It is a commonplace of linguistics that the longer a loanword lives in L2, the more susceptible it will be to the phonological processes operative within L2.68 The most common Latin loanword by far in the first chapter of book I of De Cerimoniis is πραιπόσιτος.69 From the

Latin praepositus, its Greek form is merely a mechanical transliteration with the substitution of inflectional patterns from the Greek rather than the Latin second declension.70 Even accounting for phonological changes in both languages from antiquity

66 Due to Western influence and changing fashion, kimono means in contemporary Japanese what it does in English, i.e., an article of traditional Japanese costume.

67 Weinreich, Languages in Contact, 56–61.

68 See Florian Coulmas, Language Adaption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1– 25.

69 The vast majority (in excess of 80%) of the 1,070 occurrences of πραιπόσιτος registered in TLG are in DC. Since the remaining occurrences are found in the chronicles, ecclesiastical history, and legal texts, it seems clear that the word had little, if any, footing in literature, but a wide diffusion in the daily speech of administration.

70 Such paradigmatic adaptation between Latin and Greek is a common process that occurs in both directions. Quintillian (I.5.58-64) notes that some Latin-speakers employed the Greek declension when using Greek words, but that this caused syntactical anomalies and that adaptation was both more ancient and more Roman. Nonetheless, poets especially preferred to retain Greek inflectional endings. In Greek, outside of transliteration, adaptation was the rule, with unadapted forms exceedingly rare in both high and low registers.

to the tenth century, differences in pronunciation will have been restricted to inflectional endings, with the vowels and consonants of the stem showing parallel development and substantial identity. The Greek accent even preserves the Latin proparoxytone. The degree of conservatism is likely due to the absence of phonological difficulty that the original Latin term posed to native Greek speakers as well as the word’s specialized meaning.

A similar example is the word κοιαίστωρ,71 deriving from the Latin quaestor. In other Latin loanwords with an original u or v, De Cerimoniis prefers β to transliterate the consonantal fricative /v/. The voiced labio-velar semivowel that this letter represented in the classical period presented Greek speakers with many difficulties in pronunciation and uncertainty in transliteration. The /w/ sound sometimes was written as a prevocalic ου, as in Νερούα,72 for the Latin Nerva, but more commonly with β, as in Ὀβίδιος for Ovidius, especially as time went on and the pronunciation of Latin v and Greek β became more or less identical.73 The labial velar, /kw/, a sound unknown in Greek, presented special difficulties. Even among the speakers of Latin/Romance, the /kw/ sound was largely

71 The substitution of -οι- for -υ- is common in tenth-century scribal practice and is probably due to the collapse of the two sounds into a close front rounded vowel like Mod. Ger. ü. There is an alternative form κουαίστωρ, but it appears only six times in TLG. The silent emendation of κοιαίστωρ to κυαίστωρ by many modern editors conceals how widespread this spelling was in the middle Byzantine period. It seems that the spelling could be a hyper-correct form attempting to approximate more closely the Latin pronunciation which had been “corrupted” to κουαίστωρ sometime after the seventh century. Further research and acquaintance with surviving MSS would be necessary to establish this hypothesis on firmer ground.

72 Cassius Dio provides the earliest literary attestation for this form, but he also employs Νέρβας, which is more fully adapted to Greek phonology and inflectional habits.

73 A good example of this phenomenon is the Lat. evangelium < Gk. εὐαγγέλιον. For a full discussion, see Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, 1976, 1: Phonology:70, 226–34.

44 delabialized, producing a pure velar,74 and evidence of this phonological process is preserved in the orthography of certain Greek words. Κοιαίστωρ preserves, even in the tenth century, this somewhat clumsy classical solution to the problem of transliterating the Latin labial velar. Along with πραιπόσιτος, there appears to have been a strong cultural conservatism operative in the tenth century that favored the preservation of ancient orthography and phonology, even when the problems they posed to native Greek speakers will have favored a greater degree of adaptation involving phonological domestication and simplification.

Also included in this group of minimally transformed loanwords for titles, such as

δομέστικος and πατρίκιος, as well as a number of terms formed with the Latin agent suffix <-άριος>.75 The former examples in Latin will have identified members at opposite ends of the classical Roman social structure, the house slave and the patrician, a member of the wealthy landholders who served in the senate. According to Bury,76 both titles had become purely ceremonial by the tenth century or even much earlier. As the distance between ruler and ruled grew and became formalized in the late Roman and early

Byzantine periods, so the emperor’s household can be said to have grown to encompass

74 This and almost all the phonological processes discussed in this chapter are already evident in the late antique or early medieval Appendix Probi and are characteristic of the romance reflexes of inherited Latin vocabulary. Delabialization is more or less pervasive in Sp. and Fr., but limited in It., although the Latin quod has resulted in the delabialized forms que, que, and che in all three languages, respectively. The basic work on the Appendix is still Willem Adolf Baehrens, Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulgärlateinischen Appendix Probi (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1922).

75 For a taxonomy of Greek terms formed on the -arius suffix in the papyri, see Filos, “Τα λατινικά δάνεια.”

76 J.B. Bury, “The Ceremonial Book of Constantine Porphyrogennetos,” The English Historical Review 22, no. 86 (1907): 216. Bury’s primary interest in these obsolescent terms is the light they can shine on the compilation, composition, and relative dating of the various sections of DC.

the entire oikoumene, he the paterfamilias or despotes of the inhabited world.77 Thus the title of δομέστικος for freeborn members of the court, although perplexing from the classical perspective, makes sense from the perspective of Byzantine political culture, where these terms denoted high-ranking military commanders.

Titles ending in <-άριος> likewise originally denoted household functionaries, either freedmen or slaves.78 The term used in De Cerimoniis for these positions is the

Latin ὀφφίκια, which in late Latin had already lost its original meaning of duty or function, and had pushed out the classical honos to take on the meaning of public office.79 The titles range from the mundane, such as ὀστιάριος, porter, to the specialized and macaronic, such as πρωτονοτάριος. In general, the <-άριος> titles of De Cerimoniis belong to two semantic domains: imperial administration and the military. Belonging to the former group are the words χαρτουλάριος, σιλεντιάριος, καγκελλάριος, λιβελλάριος,

ῥεφερενδάριος, κουβικουλάριος, all late Roman offices with no domestication or phonological changes. Indeed, unlike many of the words discussed below, these terms

77 For a brief discussion of this idea, see Haldon, Warfare, State and Society, 8–9. Οf course, these ideas existed already in germ in the reign of Augustus, whose coins bore the legend Pater Patriae. For a more thorough exposition of the ideological implications of the emperor’s household and how it was supplemented by and competed with other titles and concepts such as princeps and dominus, see Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London: Duckworth, 1977). For an analysis of the formation of this ideology, see Adrian B. Marsden, “Between Principate and Dominate: Imperial Styles Under the Severan Dynasty and the Divine Iconography of the Imperial House on Coins, Medallions, and Engraved Gemstones A.D. 193–235 The Reginald Taylor and Lord Fletcher Prize Essay, 1996,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 150, no. 1 (1997): 1–16.

78 The foundation of modern study of this most productive of nominal suffixes is Emil Rudolf Zimmermann, Die Geschichte des Lateinischen Suffixes arius in den Romanischen Sprachen. (Leipzig: G. Fock, 1896). Filos investigates its influence on postclassical Greek, while numerous studies in the last century and more have traced its productive adaptation in the Romance and Germanic languages, and even outside the Indo-European group, in Finnish, and in several Asian languages. Filos, “Τα λατινικά δάνεια.”

79 Sviatoslav Dmitriev, City Government in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 125–26.

46 have retained their Latin vowel qualities, even in unaccented syllables.80 The terms

πρωτονοτάριος and σεκρετικῶν νοτάριος both show Greek modifications of originally purely Latin terms. In the first example, the prefix <πρωτο->, meaning ‘chief’ or ‘first,’ invests the holder of the title with additional honor and perhaps reflects the continuing employment of the notaries as well as their relevance to imperial administration.

Likewise, in the second example, the adjective σεκρετικῶν shows vowel reduction of the long /e/, usually transliterated with <η>, as in terms that appear elsewhere in De

Cerimoniis, with the transliteration <ε>. The suffix, <-ικος>, added to the Latin secretus, deploys a Greek solution to a convoluted linguistic problem.81 The Latin phrase a secretis, meaning private secretary, came to function as a noun, and produced a difficulty when an adjective was wanted to denote things and persons related to the office. While adding a Greek adjectival suffix to a Latin adjective creates an unclassical macaronic pleonasm, it produces a term that efficiently and unambiguously expresses its meaning.

With both examples of Greek extensions of Latin terms, the changes are likely due to the fact that the body of notaries were close to the imperial administration. Their titles were not merely honorific and were thus susceptible to influence from broader cultural change against which archaic titles were immune.

80 The collapse of the short vowels /e/ and /i/ into a single sound and its subsequent syncopation in unaccented positions are attested at least as far back as Pompeian graffiti from the third quarter of the first century AD. These phonological changes necessitated the collection of orthographic manuals such as the Appendix Probi, Cassiodorus’ De Orthographia, and book 27 of Isidore’s Etymologiae. Scholars have traditionally referred to the wider process of vocalic restructuring that produced this collapse as “The Great Merger.”

81 The Latin adjective ‘secreticus’ appears to be unattested outside of Reiske’s eighteenth-century translation of DC. For this reason, the Greek term is more than likely a coinage rather than a transliteration of the cognate Latin suffix -icus.

Reflecting their origins in the establishment of the fourth century and later,82 military terms are Latin but not classical. The words that appear in De Cerimoniis are

σπαθάριος, δρακονάριος, καβαλλάριος, κεντινάριος, and ὀργανάριος. Two of them,

σπαθάριος, swordsman, and ὀργανάριος, organist, are denominative adjectives formed from Greek words, but they are strongly attested in Latin and both have reflexes in the

Romance languages. The currency of σπαθή, sword, was so strong in late antiquity that it pushed out earlier Latin words, such as gladius and ensis and is the origin of the Italian,

Spanish, and French words for sword.83 Καβαλλάριος and κεντινάριος are late substitutions of the classical eques and centurio, with κεντινάριος showing vowel merger of short /e/ and short /i/ in a process common in colloquial and, as time went on, written

Latin.

By the tenth century, whatever practical function many of the titles once possessed had been long obsolete,84 but their bearers, as is made clear in the text of De

Cerimoniis, often retained outward signs of their office, such as the gold-hilted swords carried by the spatharii or the dragon standards of the draconarii.85 Perhaps no institution

82 For a discussion of Constantine’s reformation of imperial administration and of how he set up his court and administration in the city that would later bear his name, see Roland Delmaire, Les institutions du bas-empire romain, de Constantin à Justinien (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1995), 321ff.

83 Gladius itself is a loan from Ibero-celtic, picked up during the Second Punic War when Roman soldiers exchanged their cumbersome enses for the light and agile gladii of their adversaries. For an account of both terms and their importance in Roman society, see Edyta Gryksa, “Gladius and Ensis in the Roman Civilization,” Scripta Classica, no. 9 (2012): 81–90.

84 Vogt, Le livre des cérémonies, vol 2., 10.

85 DC R11 refers to these and other late antique military accoutrements as Ῥωμαϊκὰ σκῆπτρα, but notes that they are λέγομενα...σκῆπτρα, showing that although the name had survived, the original form and function of the objects had radically changed. For a discussion of the ceremonial objects mentioned in DC, see Rodolphe Guilland, “Études sur l’histoire administrative de l’empire byzantin: l’ordre (taxis) des maîtresʼ,” EEBS 39–40 (73 1972): 14–28; Maria G. Parani, “Dressed to Kill: Middle Byzantine Military 48 was as changed by the cataclysmic events of the seventh century as the army.86 While the details are murky and even the important parts of the narrative are still much disputed, historians recognize a gradual but ultimately radical restructuring of the Byzantine military establishment87 following the last Persian war and the Arab invasions. This contributed to a “Hellenization” of the army and created the conditions for what many historians consider the definitive end of the later Roman empire and the beginning of the

Byzantine empire.88 The retention of vocabulary nearly five centuries out of date can only be a sign of Constantine VII’s desire and the general Byzantine tendency to connect contemporary imperial style to a specifically Latin, Roman past.

Ceremonial Attire,” in The Byzantine Court: Source of Power and Culture: Papers from the Second International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, Istanbul 21-23 June 2010, ed. Ayla Ödekan, Nevra Necipoğlu, and Engin Akyürek (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2013), 145–56.

86 For the first half of the twentieth century, scholars understood this process as a heroic and almost instantaneous reform enacted by Herakleios. This view gained wide currency through Ostorgorsky’s History of the Byzantine State. Georgije Ostrogorski, History of the Byzantine State, Rev. ed, Rutgers Byzantine Series (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969). A generation after Ostrogorsky, Lemerle took an exceedingly dim view of Herakleios and his reign, and the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Paul Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin: notes et remarques sur enseignement et culture à Byzance des origines au Xe siècle (Paris: Presses universiatires de France, 1971). In recent years, a moderate equilibrium emphasizing slow but steady change seems to have been achieved. For an overview of the historiography, see Walter Emil Kaegi, Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15–16. Of primary importance are John Haldon’s numerous studies on archaeology, climate, and economics, and especially John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century the Transformation of a Culture, Rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

87 Kaegi, Heraclius, 113; Haldon, Warfare, State and Society, 83–85.

88 Clive Foss, “The Persians in Asia Minor and the End of Antiquity,” The English Historical Review 90, no. 357 (1975): 747.

49 2.3.2 The Latin Suffix -arius

As an example of a productive loaned affix, <-άριος> has scant attestation in

Greek literature.89 Many of the terms in De Cerimoniis formed with this affix are not found in literary Greek of any period, and the majority of those that are attested elsewhere appear in John Malalas’ Chronographia, a text written in a style Horrock refers to as “closely related to the language of day-to-day administration.”90 There are only three examples of -άριος in texts before Malalas: the word νοτάριος appears once each in the works of Athanasius91 and Chrysostom,92 and the word βικάριος is found once in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates Scholasticus.93 These examples all appear in contexts dealing directly with imperial administration, when the use of such a technical term was unavoidable. In literary sources outside of Malalas, terms ending in -άριος are found only in George the Monk, Michael Attaliates, and, perhaps surprisingly, in Anna

Komnene. A few examples may also be gathered from minor ecclesiastical writers from the ninth to the early fourteenth centuries.94 The citations from Michael Attaliates and

89 “Literature” here means the canon established by the editors of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and excludes the papyrological and epigraphic texts that no doubt would be much richer sources of colloquial terms and usages than conscious literary productions such as histories and chronicles, even those aimed at a wide readership, such as that of John Malalas.

90 Horrocks, Greek, 224.

91 Apologia ad Constantium Imperatorem, 22.

92 PG 52 529.

93 Socrates Scholasticus Historia Ecclesiastica, 7.12.6

94 The majority of these occur in Ephraem Aeniensis’ Chronicon. There is one example, δοχειάριος (cellarer), in the Testamentum 9.19 of Neophytus Inclusus. The meaning of the word shows both the continuing productivity of the suffix within the everyday, administrative register of the Greek language and also, in its use to denote a humble office, confirms that the term had been banished from polite letters.

50 Anna Komnene refer exclusively to military ranks and high honors within the Byzantine court, evidencing the increasingly restricted currency of Latin in Byzantine literature written in the high register in the centuries following Constantine VII. Despite this tightening of the literary language, the continued use of these terms shows that Latin, even in the eleventh century and despite the concerted efforts of the “Third Sophistic,”95 continued to be an unavoidable feature of discourse about power and government.

The substantial conservatism of terms for members of the imperial household along with the retention without modification of the word ὀφφίκια is evidence that the ideological restructuring of the imperial institution undertaken by Diocletian in the late third century was substantially intact in the middle of the tenth.96 Surviving Herakleios’ seventh century reimagining of the empire as a Christian βασιλεία,97 and himself as a

Solomonic βασιλεύς, the language of the Latin dominate of Diocletian, Constantine, and

Justinian continued to shape the concept of empire for the Byzantine elite in the last

95 Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium the Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 295–301 provides an overview of the issues of Hellenic and Roman identity under the Komneni as well as their implications for Anti-Latin sentiment arising in response to the First Crusade.While Kaldellis does not address language directly, the increasingly rare examples of -αριος nouns after the tenth century and their near disappearance after Anna Komnene from the literary record corroborates Kaldellis’ narrative. It is important to note that Western influence, if anything, became ever more apparent and pervasive, likely contributing to the increasingly chauvinistic attitude of the Byzantine literati who in asserting their “Hellenic” identity were engaging more in literary polemic and rhetoric than in expressing a widespread attitude on the part of the Byzantine people, most of whom had friendly and lucrative relationships with Westerners.

96 Warren Treadgold, Byzantium and Its Army: 284-1081 (Stanford: Polity Press, 1995), 9–14.

97 For a survey of how scholars have interpreted this change, see Alexander Angelov, “In Search of God’s Only Emperor: Basileus in Byzantine and Modern Historiography,” Journal of Medieval History 40, no. 2 (2014): 123–41. Constantin Zuckerman situates the title in its seventh-century context and traces its development through the Byzantine centuries. Constantin Zuckerman, “On the Titles and Office of the Byzantine Βασιλεύς,” Mélanges Cécile Morrisson, Travaux et Mémoires 16 (2010): 865–90.

51 century of the first millennium. While the military and governmental institutions and geographical scope of the Roman empire had changed almost beyond recognition in the six centuries that separate Constantine VII and Diocletian, such strong terminological continuity displays the strength of the late Roman ideological orientation and the

Byzantines’ desire to place their own efforts within it despite fundamental restructuring in the practical aspects of the imperial foundation.

2.3.3 Macaronic Coinages

In addition to these terms, there are a number of titles that were formed on other principles but still show a reliance on Latin and even, in some cases, argue for a deeper level of cultural interchange and cooperation between the Latin and Greek linguistic spheres than has hitherto been appreciated. Further examples of this type are ὀφφικιάλιος,

πρωτοασηκρήτης, and μαϊστωρ. Ὀφφικιάλιος looks like a purely Latin term and indeed means official, but its form is Greek. The Latin officialis, which did not have its current meaning until the post-classical period,98 is third declension, while its Greek derivative is second declension. To the Latin official- an enterprising wordsmith has added the Greek adjectival suffix <-ιος>, avoiding a troublesome i-stem and the increasingly unfamiliar paradigm of the third declension,99 while also marking the foreign word as an adjective for those Greek speakers who may not recognize the Latin suffix -alis.100

98 The term is attested as a substantive in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a rich source of popular Latin. In the republic and early empire, the equivalent term was apparitor.

99 Disuse of the third declension and remodelling into the first and second declensions is characteristic of popular registers in both Latin and Greek.

100 This process is a species of morphological adaptation, whereby a foreign word from a donor language with more or less compatible phonology and morphology is taken into L1 with slight remodelling 52

The term πρωτοασηκρήτης is interesting both for its morphology and for what it can tell about word formation in medieval Greek.101 The word derives from the Latin phrase a secretis, i.e., “(he who is in charge) of the private (affairs of the emperor).” As can be seen by the words added in translation, this title is a highly compressed example of bureaucratic jargon. The use of prepositional phrases and adverbs to denote imperial officials became habitual in late antiquity and continued on through Constantine VII’s time. A century earlier, the title ὁ κατεπάνω,102 given to the commander of important border districts, was formed by prefixing a definite article to an emphatic form of the adverb επάνω, creating something that could be termed an “articular adverb.” De

Cerimoniis uses similar constructions for the titles of several officials involved in organizing and executing the imperial ceremonies,103 showing that the category remained productive. In πρωτοασηκρήτης, -ασηκρη- has been interpreted as a root, and has been prefixed with the honorific πρωτο-. The transliteration of the long of secretum with

<η> is proof of the antiquity of the loan, as is perhaps the retention of the original Latin penultimate stress. The originally ablative plural Latin ending -is has been reinterpreted as the final two letters of the agent suffix <-της>, creating a much tidier paradigm. It is

to make the term easier to use in L1. Parallels, such as κοντουβερναλίος from Lat. contubernalis are sufficiently numerous to call this species of adaptation a regular feature of Greek-Latin linguistic contact.

101 This term is usually spelled πρωτασηκρῆτης, and is attested first in the mid-eighth century, although its origins may go back as far as Herakleios, see ODB s.v. protoasekeretis. For a description of the duties of this important secretary, see Bury, Imperial Administrative System, 97f.

102 For a brief discussion of this phenomenon, see A. N. Jannaris, “Κατεπάνω—Capitano— Captain,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 10, no. 1 (1901): 204–207.

103 Such as ὁ ἐπὶ τῆς τραπέζης. Phrasal titles of this type, like ὁ ἐπὶ τῆς διοικήσεως, i.e., finance minister, appear already in Demosthenes’ De Corona 38.

53 worth noting that such refashioning was not limited to loanwords; a second declension

κατεπάνος coexisted beside κατεπάνω throughout the medieval and modern periods of the Greek language.104 This process of remodeling shows how a Latin term could be thoroughly domesticated, becoming an unconscious member of the Greek lexicon.

Along similar lines, we note two derivations from the Latin magister: μάγιστρος and μαΐστωρ.105 The coexistence of the two forms shows multiple linguistic processes with repercussions for the influence of Latin on the medieval Greek language and

Byzantine culture at a variety of linguistic registers and social levels. In the form

μάγιστρος, we see that the Latin magister has survived the transition to Greek relatively intact. The difficulty posed by the second declension -er nominative has been removed, as in romance, by the regularization of the paradigm with a generalization of the stem from the oblique cases. With its ultimate origin in the Diocletianic and Constantinian remodeling of imperial administration and the creation of the office of magister officiorum and its subordinate magistri, μάγιστρος enjoyed a long life and exalted place in the Greek language.106

Conversely, μαΐστωρ shows the loss of the intervocalic voiced palatal, a phonological process common to both Greek and many varieties of informal Latin and

104 See Babiniotis, s.v. κατεπάνω.

105 For the various offices of μάγιστρος, see Bury, Imperial Administrative System, 29ff.

106 Although Bury, Imperial Administrative System and Kazhdan (ODB, s.v. maistor) agree that this term died out in the twelfth century, TLG reports instances in every century from the twelfth to seventeenth.

Romance.107 Given a lack of evidence and the parallel phonological developments of romance and Greek in the medieval period,108 it may be impossible to determine from which of those two language groups the first element, μαϊστ-, derives.109 Whether the form current in the tenth-century is the result of parallel or convergent development,110 it shows the broad influence a single Latin term could have on the Greek language. While

μάγιστρος in De Cerimoniis denotes a courtly dignity,111 μαΐστωρ refers to the leaders of the choirs who chant the acclamations at imperial ceremonies, and outside of this text, it

107 Magister has Romance reflexes in Sp. and It. maestro, and in Fr. maître. The palatalization, weakening, and loss of /γ/ is clear in contemporary Greek pronunciation and in popular Latin from an early date. For the phenomenon in Latin, see Ti Alkire and Carol G. Rosen, Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 35–36. For a discussion of the same phonological process in Greek, see Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, 1976, 1: Phonology:73–75.

108 Among those processes showing convergent development in Romance and Medieval Greek are the collapse of short e and short i, the loss of -n- before -s, palatalization and subsequent loss of g before e and i.

109 According to TLG, the earliest citations for μαΐστωρ are the Testamentum Salmonis and the Historia Alexandri Magni, both of which have elements that likely date to the third century. Both works, one an example of apocalyptic literature, the other a popular romance, are “sub-literary” and have unstable textual traditions. In the work of Thedosius of Alexandria, a grammarian who was likely contemporary with Constantine the Great, πραίτωρ, κουαίστωρ, μαΐστωρ are called “ἀξιωματικά,” i.e., high offices, and are used to exemplify the declension of nouns that retain -ω- in oblique cases; see Karl Wilhelm Göttling, Theodosii Alexandrini grammatica e codicibus manuscriptis (Leipzig: Libraria Dykiana, 1822), 129, 27– 29. In the entry for Κονείδης (3505), i.e., Κοννίδας, the tutor of Theseus, in the sixth-century lexicon of Hesychius, μαΐστωρ is used to gloss παιδαγωγός, presumably because μαΐστωρ was more immediately intelligible to Hesychius’ audience. The vast majority of citations for the word come from “sub-literary” texts, and DC is has the highest occurrence of the term. Despite Hesychius’ prescription, writers from all periods show a great variety of second and third (and occasionally mixed) declensional patterns and alternate between -ο- and -ω- freely.

110 That is to say, it cannot be proven whether μαΐστωρ is the result of processes internal to the Greek language operating on an original form, magister, or if it is a later loan from low Latin that may already have had a form closer to It. maestro.

111 Constantine created the magister officiorum and magister militum to weaken and replace the office of praetorian prefect, a position of considerable power created by Augustus. By the early tenth century, it had become a prestigious court title, but through the increase in the number of magistri and the passage of time, it became obsolete in the late Byzantine period. see ODB s.v. magistros and Guilland, “Études Sur l’histoire Administrative de l’Empire Byzantin: L’ordre (Taxis) Des Maîtresʼ.”

55 can mean teacher or leader more widely, or even, as appears to be the case in De

Cerimoniis, the master of a craft, as in the German Meistersinger. It is curious that the popular μαΐστωρ preserved the original meaning of the Latin magister, while the elite

μάγιστρος retained its form but became a title progressively emptied of meaning as the centuries passed.112 The word also shows that the -ter ending of magister has been reinterpreted as an agent suffix and has substituted the Greek -τωρ, resulting in a shift from the second to the third declension. The retention of the -r ending might be explained as a reflex of social conditions. The μαΐστωρες are unlikely to have referred to themselves with this term, while their subordinates can be imagined as using the word mostly in the nominative and vocative, an expression of power dynamics in the workshop, office, or guild. This may have influenced the (altered and reinterpreted) retention of the Latin ending, with the agent suffix further emphasizing the authority that

μαΐστωρες enjoyed. The μάγιστρος, as a servant of the emperor, surely would be susceptible to a more varied declension. If this is correct, then the terms, their forms, and their inflectional patterns are evidence of the relative position of the officeholders in the hierarchies they occupy.

These two terms current in tenth-century Greek demonstrate the way in which the same stem can be adopted multiple times by speakers of a language in a variety of phonological variants showing different stages of a language’s development.113

Furthermore, the existence of two loans from the same Latin term shows that Latin’s

112 Bury, Imperial Administrative System, 50–51.

113 In English, we have cantors who chant. The name of the person is Latin while the term for the song is French.

56 influence on Greek was of a considerable duration and affected the lexica of multiple linguistic registers. That the term in both its high-style and popular forms described individuals who commanded respect, authority, and a reputation for competence should caution us against generalizing too quickly about the low regard in which even educated

Byzantines held the Latin language.

2.3.4 Greek Terms for Roman Concepts

As one moves up the court hierarchy, there is a sudden admixture of Greek. The term βασιλεύς is well-known, but we also note the terms ὕπατος, ἀνθύπατος, and

σύγκλητος, all ancient calques of Roman republican terminology. When considering

Greek imperial terminology, the only significant item is αὐτοκράτωρ, the classical term for emperor, but in De Cerimoniis it is used only in acclamations as a vocative.114

Reverting to Latin, we find καῖσαρ, πατρίκιος, σινάτωρ,115 κόμης, κανδιδάτος,

μάγιστρος, βεστήτωρ, and with some changes in orthography, ἐκσκούβιτος, προτίκτωρ,

ῥαίκτωρ, and νουμέρος.116 The reasons for this mixture of Greek and Latin at the top of the hierarchy will be discussed below, and the language of acclamations is the subject of a later chapter of this study.

114 This is likely a sign of the antiquity or at least conservatism of the texts of the acclamations.

115 This spelling is standard in the main body of DC, while σενάτωρ appears only in the interpolated sections of Kletorologion of Philotheos, certainly a sign of that text’s earlier date and a witness to the currency of the Greek in other sections of DC.

116 There is a long-standing debate over whether the phrase τῶν νουμέρων should be treated as masculine or neuter plural. Since in surviving texts it only ever appears in the genitive, the question is probably unanswerable. See Philip Rance, “Noumera or Mounera: a parallel philological problem in De Cerimoniis and Maurice’s Strategikon,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 58 (2008): 121–130.

From a less exalted rank, we find mention of the βεστιοπράται, merchants who sold silk clothing and whose name is a wholly unclassical combination of the Latin vestis, garment, with the Greek πράτης, worker. Although it does not appear in De Cerimoniis, there was Greek simplex, ἡ βέστη, that means a specifically silken garment, perhaps indicating a close association between the Latin term and the dress of the imperial court.

In other words, vestis has taken on a specialized meaning, much as kimono, used in a preceding example, to describe a peculiar type of dress, a luxury good. Everyday clothes are ἱμάτια, but those of the imperial administration are vestes/βέσται(-ες).

As in the case of μάγιστρος and μαΐστωρ, the same Latin term gave rise to several loans in multiple linguistic registers. Continuing the idea that the empire is the emperor’s household (domus), which he, as dominus, manages through his domestici, late antiquity saw the establishment of a sacrum vestiarium, the emperor’s wardrobe, which in time would encompass the minting of coins and the maintenance of the imperial arsenal before eventually becoming synonymous with the treasury in general.117 In De Cerimoniis, titles connected to this institution are numerous.118 There is very little attestation for these terms outside of De Cerimoniis, and the oldest of these is only from the ninth century.119

117 It is unclear when exactly this institution came to be. See Michael F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 300-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 412–13.

118 There are 64 occurrences of forms of βεστιάριον and 48 of βεστήτορες/βεστητώρισσαι. It is interesting to note that the place keeps the -ι- of the Latin vestiarium, while the agent noun uses -η-. The more conservative orthography of the place is perhaps an indication of the novelty of the title.

119 The examples that predate DC comes from the address lines of epistles of Theodore the Studite, Cosmas Vestitor, and “Anonyous Professor,” indicating already the use of the term as a title rather than to designate a function. It is possible but unproven that the term was a creation of the Macedonian dynasty. If so, it could be an indication of their interest in connecting their family’s rule to Roman (late) antiquity.

58 Altogether, the titles in De Cerimoniis show an overwhelming preference for

Latin, and these are not merely those inherited from the Latin-speaking court of

Constantine and his successors down to Justinian. The heaviest concentration is found in the second-tier dignities, but the use of Latin extends to both more exalted and humbler positions in Byzantine court hierarchy and society more generally, affecting the titles of members of trade guilds and industries. Furthermore, a number of these titles are not antique coinages; rather they are built from Latin roots with Greek extensions on either side providing a native shell and argue for a creative application of the Byzantine Latin heritage in addition to the conservative retention of inherited vocabulary.

2.3.5 Loanwords Denoting Places and Things

In contrast to titles, loanwords for places and things in De Cerimoniis show a much higher degree of “domestication,” their forms bearing the marks of long and repeated oral transmission. Belonging to this group are such words as κουβούκλειον,

καμάρα, πόρτηξ, βήλον, and βέργα. That some of these words are hapax legomena found only in De Cerimoniis does not diminish the general conclusion that Latin terms were closely associated with the emperor and an important component of the linguistic ornament of his rulership. On the contrary, one could argue that the very restriction of these terms to items in the imperial palace gave them an aura of Roman authenticity, just as the Greek cathedra lends power and mystique to the seat, both actual and metaphorical, of a bishop or professor in contemporary Western European languages.

The sacrum cubiculum or imperial bedchamber (and the institution and officers derived

59 from it) was the very heart of Byzantine civic ceremony.120 Around this focal point revolved the many orders of dignitaries who formed the processions. It surely must have been on the lips of hundreds within the imperial court on a daily basis. The first step from cubiculum to κουβουκλείον is the syncopation of the penultimate , producing cubiclum. Although this form is not the standard found in dictionaries, it is well attested,121 and is the result of colloquial linguistic processes operative from the classical period onward.122 The addition of the Greek suffix <-είον> calques the Latin diminutive and gives it a native flavor. A similar process is at work with the forms σελλίον > sella,

βεργίον > virga, and ταβλίον > tabula. Rather than true diminutives, these forms are a morphologically-motivated native refashioning of Latin first declension feminine nouns into Greek second declension neuters.123 Although Latin first declension feminines could be brought into the Greek first declension either with <-α> or <-η>, the ending <-ιον> removes all difficulty and provides the unusual words with a paradigm that becomes more and more comprehensive as time passes. That these terms are Latin derived, refashioned according to Greek linguistic patterns, and fairly restricted to the imperial

120 Bury, Imperial Administrative System, 120–23.

121For an account of the phonological process, see Ranjan Sen, Syllable and Segment in Latin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 84.

122 Alkire and Rosen, Romance Languages, 28–29.

123 Increasing use of diminutive suffixes and subsequent deterioration of meaning is a common feature of colloquial speech. In informal Latin, also, diminutive forms also appear to have functioned as convenient circumlocutions for nouns of the third, fourth, and fifth declensions. For a comprehensive study on Greek, see Walter Petersen, Greek Diminutives in -Ion; a Study in Semantics (Weimar: R. Wagner, 1910).

60 institution shows that Latin was somehow both an archaic and vital, elite and popular source of word formation in medieval Greek.

In the remainder of the first part of De Cerimoniis, there is a greater variety of

Latin loanwords, but the titles continue to dominate. If the Latin titles can be considered to have been more or less conscious retentions of Latin, Roman vocabulary, then the wide diffusion of Latinate vocabulary in place-names and realia must have been less intentional and less obvious to the Greek speakers who used these words in their day to day lives. Latin loanwords in these two domains consequently demonstrate a much greater degree of nativization and refashioning along Greek phonological and morphological lines. Where the importation and preservation of titles was a structured process demonstrating a desire to perpetuate a particular socio-political arrangement, the presence of Latin in lower registers of the Greek language shows a more haphazard but no less interesting process at work.

2.4 A Taxonomy of Latin Influence on the Greek Language

When students think of Greek loanwords in Latin, they are likely to come first to words such as philosophia, Pantheon, and poeta, all terms loaded with the sort of cultural and intellectual prestige that many contemporary students of antiquity imagine that the

Romans accorded the Greeks. But the great mass of Greek loanwords in Latin come in the form of terms for trade goods, food, and the mundane objects of everyday life.

Contrary to one’s first impression, Greek loanwords occupy a paradoxical position in

Latin; they are markers both of the highest and lowest registers of the language.

61 While this state of affairs is perplexing at first, one must take into consideration the long and varied history of language contact between Latin and Greek. Scholars of word borrowing have introduced the concept of ‘prestige’ to account for the various types of linguistic influence and borrowing that occur in situations where two or more languages are in contact. ‘Prestige’ is the relative social standing of one language against another, and it can exist in one of three configurations: ‘substrate,’ ‘adstrate,’ and

‘superstrate.’124 The configurations of prestige are relative, rather than absolute, and can of course shift diachronically. For much of its early history, English was in an ‘adstrate’ relationship with the Scandinavian languages, i.e., speakers from both groups interacted as social equals, and there was a high degree of linguistic influence in both directions.125

From the perspective of Old and Middle English, the Celtic languages of the British natives were ‘substrate,’ while Norman French, following the conquest, was

‘superstrate.’126 In general, borrowing happens when the speakers of L1 feel a linguistic

124 Hans Henrich Hock and Brian D. Joseph, Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 261.

125 It must be stressed that the application of socio- and contact linguistic models to historical languages has been applied mostly to Old and Middle English, and for that reason, the bibliography deals overwhelmingly with medieval England. For a popular overview, see the introduction in Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, From the Viking Word-Hoard: A Dictionary of Scandinavian Words in the Languages of Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), xi–xxxvii. For extensive coverage, see Sara M. Pons-Sanz, The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). Angelika Lutz, “Language Contact and Prestige,” Anglia 131, no. 4 (2013): 94–122 takes a more nuanced view to the one prevalent in the survey literature and is eager to show that there is evidence that ON was superstrate to OE for at least part of the OE period.

126 For these reasons, the Celtic component in English is small, consisting mostly of place names, while that from French is large and pervasive, making up the majority of terms used for high culture. French was and remains a rich source of euphemism for prudish English-speakers.

62 ‘need,’127 and a language with which they are in contact provides, for a myriad of social, historical, and psychological reasons, the most convenient tool for answering that need.

It is a commonplace that the types of words that L1 borrows from L2 reflect the status of L2.128 Linguistic ‘need’ arises in various circumstances and is at its most basic when L1 lacks a term for unfamiliar locales, flora, fauna, or realia. When L2 is substrate, i.e., considered socially inferior by speakers of L1, borrowings tend to be restricted to this type. In an adstrate context, borrowings between language is much more fluid and often impacts basic lexical and morphological categories that are usually isolated from contact.

When L2 is superstrate, speakers of L1 use it most productively as a source of terms for high-prestige cultural items. As we have alluded to above and will discuss more fully below, the evidence for Latin and Greek can be used to argue for any of these configurations from the perspective of either language. In the past, Classicists and

Byzantinists alike have been all too ready to adopt a coarse and simplistic scheme that ensconces Greek as the isolated superstrate, repeatedly pillaged by an impoverished Latin that had nothing to offer in return.

In order to understand why this generalization has been so often made, it would do well to sketch the history of Greek influence on Latin. Greek culture reached Latin in prehistory, probably first through Etruscan intermediaries, and then through direct contact with the Greeks of Southern Italy. These early contacts furnished Latin with many terms

127 The concept of ‘need’ in situations of language contact is difficult to define in a universally acceptable way. Chaos appears to play a not insignificant role in language contact, but it is neither easy to analyze nor to conceptualize.

128 Hock and Joseph, Language History, 2009, 262.

63 for trade goods.129 As Rome’s influence grew to the South and the East, it was shaped more and more by a world thoroughly Hellenized but also politically sclerotic and, to a certain extent, culturally hidebound. Despite the wide currency of Greek philosophy and its attendant terminology, the penetration of the Greek language into spheres of Roman life in contexts of high culture was neither as broad nor as complete as one would expect.

Although Horace was correct in asserting, “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio,”130 the Romans were assiduous in calquing the terminology of those artes.131 In high register Latin, it cannot be said without qualification that Greek was ever superstrate.

At lower registers, Latin and Greek were promiscuous, with Greek’s influence on

“Vulgar”132 Latin being so thorough that at least one scholar has conceived of Romance as being a rationalization of Latin along Greek lines.133 In Christian Latin, the special biblical and liturgical registers of Greek among the eastern brethren was certainly a

129 R. G. Coleman, “Greek and Latin,” in A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.-Ph Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 792–93.

130 Ep.II.i.156-7.

131 Cicero’s enthusiasm for Greek, apparent in his letters, was something of an anomaly among Romans of his class. In general, Latin rhetorical and grammatical terms are calqued, not borrowed.

132 If we do not write ‘vulgar,’ should we prefer ‘sermo plebeius,’ ‘popular,’ ‘non-standard,’ or, as J. N. Adams has suggested, ‘informal?’

133 This idea, like the idea that Middle English is a Romance creole, is often felt to be true by scholars of Romance linguistics but difficult to demonstrate scientifically. For an early argument against this sentiment, see E. H. Sturtevant, “Concerning the Influence of Greek on Vulgar Latin,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 56 (1925): 5–25.

linguistic superstrate, but even here, literary men such as Tertullian134 worked to confine

Greek to the day-to-day work of the Church and make theology a Latin preserve.135

The answer to whether Greek was substrate, adstrate, or superstrate in relation to

Latin is, “it depends.” In the daily life of the bilingual or near bilingual working classes of Rome’s cities and ports, Greek had the status of adstrate throughout the Mediterranean basin, with influence evident not merely in specialized lexical environments but even apparent in quotidian vocabulary and at deep morphological and syntactical levels.136

Among Rome’s educated elite, a more or less severe linguistic purism is evident throughout the classical period. Except in informal writing or when defining terms,137 classical usage preferred calquing or circumlocution to adoption.138 The context of

Christian Latin was complex, and shows signs of Greek being superstrate, adstrate, and substrate at different times, probably tracking the reach of the new faith into ever higher

134 For a careful exposition of what scholars have made of Tertullian’s contribution to Latin theological terminology, see René Braun, Deus Christianorum, recherches sur le vocabulaire doctrinal de Tertullien (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), 10–17.

135 We have already mentioned the adoption of Greek terms to denote the Christian mysteries, but we should note too the words episcopus, presbyterus, diaconus, and canon, all, of course relating to Church governance. In theology, on the contrary, we find trinitas, salus, and resurrectio. Later, there would be some limited and mostly unsuccessful attempts to substitute antistites and sacerdos for episcopus and presbyterus, showing that even in the mundane, daily functioning of the Church, Latin purism could manifest itself.

136 In the fourth-century travel memoir of Egeria, a nun from Hispania, the extreme western extent of the Roman Empire, one finds the expression cata + acc. meaning “every,” a clear derivation of the Greek usage κατὰ + acc. and the ancestor of Mod. Sp. cada.

137 Greek terminology is somewhat frequent in technical treatises on the liberal arts, literature, and philosophy, but it is often accompanied by a variation on the apologetic “ut Graeculi aiunt.”

138 David Sedley provides a comparative study of how Lucretius and Cicero accommodated technical terminology in their presentations of Greek philosophical ideas. David Sedley, “Lucretius’ Use and Avoidance of Greek,” Proceedings of the British Academy 93 (1999): 227–46. For a broader view, see G. O. Hutchinson, Greek to Latin.

65 and more linguistically conservative Roman social circles. Such diachronic development is much more complicated than the caricature mentioned above can comprehend.

If the situation in Latin requires nuanced sensitivity to the social and historical factors surrounding language contact and relative prestige, it should not be surprising that discussion from the perspective of Greek would benefit from a greater degree of precision and a more encompassing consideration of the evidence. As we have seen, the influence of Latin on Greek has not been well-studied, and the standard narrative presents influence in that direction as having been minor and for the most part culturally irrelevant. Given the classicizing biases of most existing scholarship on Byzantine language and literature, this perspective is unsurprising. Focusing mainly on the work of representatives of the Second and Third Sophistics, such scholars have found little to no evidence of Latin linguistic influence and, in the content of the high register literary works they study, they find a strong anti-Latin bias coupled with an assertion of

Hellenism. These works present, either implicitly or explicitly, learned linguistic purism, or so-called “Atticism,”139 as a programmatic feature of the performance of Hellenic identity.

While it is true that the Greek literature produced under the influence of Atticism shows almost no Latin influence,140 this phenomenon must be considered an aspect of

139 Scholars have traditionally split Atticism into earlier “rhetorical” and later “grammatical” varieties, but this categorization has recently been challenged in Neil O’Sullivan, “‘Rhetorical’ vs ‘Linguistic’ Atticism. a False Dichotomy?,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 33, no. 2 (2015): 134–146. Ancient and medieval atticzing authors understood good style to consist both of using approved forms and avoiding those deemed unacceptable. Under both criteria, Latin terms had small claim to a place in the lexicon of polite discourse.

140 But even here, atticizing authors cannot wholly avoid Latinate titles.

rhetorical strategy rather than of linguistic isolation. The “view from the ground” reveals quite a different picture. Since the second century of our era, self-consciously literate

Greek has at intervals adopted a posture of rigorous but occasionally inept linguistic purism. Scholars have advanced various theories141 to explain the reasons behind the occasional eruption of this tendency in Greek letters, but it is sufficient here to say that tenth-century Byzantium, despite its self-conscious projects of cultural renewal,142 was rather innocent of Atticism.

In reviewing the Latin vocabulary of De Cerimoniis, we noted large concentrations of loanwords in political and military titles, in place-names, and in realia.

There is some difficulty in applying the tripartite calculus of prestige in each of these semantic domains. With regard to realia, the evidence points to a broadly adstrate configuration between the two languages. One can note many redundant borrowings, which often points to a desire among speakers of L1 to increase the dignity of their language by employing L2 terms for items already well served by the native lexicon. But these terms have been for the most part not merely adopted but have undergone a uniform process of morphological adaptation while retaining, more or less, the phonology of L2.

Strictly adstrate borrowings are unlikely to appear unless speakers of L2 form a large

141 For a survey, see Lawrence Kim, “Literary Heritage as Language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic,” in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. Egbert J. Bakker (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), 468–82.

142 In chapter 4, we will consider why Atticism played no great part in the Macedeonian Renaissance.

67 minority or plurality with speakers of L1, and this situation had not been true of

Constantinople for many centuries by the time of the compilation of De Cerimoniis.143

Several scholars have studied the question of “Byzantine Romance” during the period when the empire and the City still had sizeable Latin or Romance-speaking populations,144 and the picture that emerges is largely of equal prestige in “on the ground,” with chauvinistic opinions increasingly prevalent as one ascends rungs on the literary and social ladders.145 The Latin loans for the realia that appear in De Cerimoniis are unsurprisingly limited to terms dealing with imperial ceremony. Without a comprehensive examination of the evidence from the seventh through tenth centuries, it is dangerous to generalize about the rates of retention of these adstrate Latin loans. Here, it suffices to note that the semantic domain of imperial ceremony is of precisely the nature that tends toward conservatism and fossilization.

Taking the term σελλίον as a representative example, it is clear from context, although not from existing lexica,146 that the term was marked in Greek with some imperial, or even a specifically “Roman” flavor that the Latin sella lacked. According to

143 See Bertrand Hemmerdinger for some indication of the fate of Latinity in Constantinople in late antiquity. B. Hemmerdinger, Les Lettres Latines à Constantinople jusqu’à Justinien, vol. 1, 1966, 174ff.

144 Henry Blumenthal and Renée Kahane, “Decline and Survival of Western Prestige Languages,” Language 55, no. 1 (1979): 183–198 provides a brief resumé.

145 One can imagine coteries of Constantinopolitan Latins and Greeks, respectively steeped in Vergil and Homer, remaining aloof from the high culture of the rival linguistic community while using the koiné or vulgar tongue in their day-to-day affairs. Such a complex system of social arrangements makes analysis difficult. To use a more recent example, just because a British imperialist might be able to speak Hindi with his domestic servants would not necessarily make him a scholar of Sanskrit.

146 LSJ, LBG, and Triantafyllides all define σελλίον as the equivalent of ‘seat,’ noting only that the term is a diminutive form of σέλ(λ)α.

68 the corpus of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, outside of the grammarians, the lexicographers, and De Cerimoniis, σελλίον appears only in John Lydus, John Kinnamos,

George the Monk, Sylvester Syropoulos, the Patria, and some anonymous hagiographical works. In these works, the term designates not merely a (small) chair, but specifically a chair used by a Roman government official. This process of borrowing is analogous to the English grand, which in French simply means “large,” but as loanword means something like, “large and impressive or luxurious.”147 Despite its humble diminutive and its exclusion from higher register of language, the term σελλίον was an important instrument in setting the stage for a Romano-Byzantine imperial ceremony. A similar case could be made for βῆλον, and for many of the other terms enumerated above. It is clear then, that even in the semantic domain where one would most expect to find linguistic need or adstrate status, the borrowing, or at least their later retention, of Latin terms into Greek was motivated by a Greek perception of Latin superstrate prestige.

In the history of Greek treatment of Latin titles for government officials, there is a strong division along republican and imperial lines. In general, Greek calques comprise the vocabulary describing officials and institutions of the Roman Republic, while straightforward adoptions and even a few coinages using L2-derived morphology serve to identify those of the empire. The bipartite structure of Greek vocabulary for Roman governmental terminology provides an abbreviated history of the relative prestige of

147 “Grand Jury,” “Grand Vizier,” and “Grand Poobah” all have an additional, governmental connotation, perhaps not too different from the Greek use of Latin terms.

69 Greek and Latin in the East. The republican vocabulary,148 encompassing terms for the consuls, proconsuls, the senate, and various other offices, is made up of calques and loan shifts,149 attested in many cases for the first time in Polybius. Polybius had a great respect for the political arrangements of the Romans, but the hegemony of Hellenic culture in the second century BC along with his stated purpose150 of explaining Rome to the Greek world surely influenced his avoidance of Latin terminology in his excursus on Roman government. For the next four hundred years or so, this Greek vocabulary for Roman officialdom became a daily part of the lives of Greek-speaking Romans in the East. With the transition from republic to empire, the term αὐτοκράτωρ was used to calque the Latin imperator. Until the end of the third century, Greek held the balance, but Diocletian’s bureaucratic reforms and ideological refashioning of the empire along with the establishment of a new capital in the East and the importation of large numbers of Latin- speaking dignitaries grafted a new branch onto the old stock of Greek "officialese."These conditions resulted in an explosion in the number of Latin titles in Greek until

Herakleios’ famous assumption of the name βασιλεύς.

148 The standard work on this topic is Hugh J. Mason, Greek Terms for Roman Institutions: A Lexicon and Analysis (Toronto: Hakkert, 1974).

149 Calques are a specialized form of loan whereby a word is borrowed through a one-for-one substitution of L1 morphemes in place of those of L2. Although uncommon in Mod.E., calques are traditional in German and were quite frequent in OE. To give one example, the German Aus|gabe calques the Latin e|ditio, with the component morphemes in both languages meaning “out-giving.” Loan shifts occur when a term in L1 receives a new meaning through the influence of L2. An example in English is the use of “head” to designate primary authority, a loanshift built on analogy with Fr. chef.

150 I.4. For a discussion of Polybius’ endeavors in this regard, see Andrew Erskine, “Making Sense of the Romans: Polybius and the Greek Perspective,” Dialogues d’histoire Ancienne Supplément 9 (2013): 115–129.

70 What then, do we make of Constantine VII’s titular lexicon? The word σινάτωρ in either of its variant spellings is hardly attested outside of Constantine VII’s writings.

Along with the archaizing inclusion of αὐτοκράτωρ, Constantine VII is engaged in the creation of a more comprehensive idea of the Roman Empire, one that encompasses the republic, the principate, the dominate, and the βασιλεἰα. Scholars have noted that the

Byzantine Senate finally lost the last vestiges of its real governing power in the reigns of

Basil I and Leo VI, becoming more a ceremonial class than a functioning institution.151

The appearance of the term σινάτωρ in the next generation could be seen then as both a consolation prize for the now powerless class and as an instrument in Constantine VII’s recovery of Romanitas.

We opened our discussion of Latin loanwords in De Cerimoniis with προκένσον, which, along with μένσαι and ἀδμενσουαλίος, has an odd <ν> inserted before <σ>. We contrasted this innovative spelling with the transliterations with minimal paradigmatic adaptation that is, as a rule, were observed for Latin titles in Greek. While the sudden appearance of <ν> might be explained through some meandering, internal phonological process in Greek, the activity of a (semi-) intelligent scribe provides an answer that is both easier and more likely. From a very early date, Latin speakers reduced the consonant cluster to ~~,152 producing spelling errors that schoolmasters spent the next~~

~~151 Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 324.~~

152 Cf. the spelling COSVL for consul, which was traditional in epigraphy but foreign to literature. Binder identifies this spelling as hypercorrect, but argues that it is due to processes internal to Greek. She also says that the phenomenon is limited to the terms πρόκενσον and σένζον (sensus). Vera Binder, Sprachkontakt und Diglossie: lateinische Wörter im Griechischen als Quellen für die lateinische Sprachgeschichte und das Vulgärlatein (Hamburg: Buske, 2000), 243.

~~millennium attempting to correct. These schoolmasters and their students not infrequently produced hypercorrect153 forms, no fewer than three of which appear in the Appendix~~

~~Probi.154 Anglophone scholars have often viewed the prescriptions of the Appendix and similar literature as attempts to alter pronunciation,155 but linguists working within the~~

Romance Sprachraum recognize them as mere orthographic interventions, ironically not unlike the situation of Modern English, where pronunciation and graphic system have been out of synch for many centuries, and teachers must be constantly vigilant against the innovative spellings of their pupils. It seems clear, then, that this superfluous <ν> is a symptom of reliance in the imperial court on glossaries containing hypercorrect forms.

Hypercorrection is, in the main, a result of the desire to appear learned rather than an outcome of actually being learned. It is therefore unsurprising, although perhaps uncharitable, that at least one scholar has taken these spellings as signs both of the

Macedonian Renaissance’s vitality and its superficiality.156 Whatever the truth of that charge, Constantine Porphyrogennetos’ use of hypercorrect forms of Latin terms is a sign of his broader program of reclaiming and restoring Byzantine Romanitas.

153 “Hypercorrection” is an orthographic phenomenon whereby writers introduce improper anomalous spellings through analogy with other phonologically anomalous spellings. These gaffes are usually merely sources of mirth, such as “kight” for “kite,” but in some cases, they become established and standardized, as in “whole,” which historically was never sounded with a voiced labio-velar semivowel, and so was in no need of the restoration of an initial /w/.

~~154 formunsus, Herculens, and occansio for formosus, Hercules, and occasio. See Baehrens, Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulgärlateinischen Appendix Probi, 95–97.~~

~~155 W. D. Elcock, The Romance Languages, ed. John N. Green, Rev. with a new introd. by John N. Green (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 29.~~

~~156 Binder, Sprachkontakt und Diglossie, 237.~~

~~72 Although evident in De Cerimoniis and its associated military treatises, this movement towards Latin Romanitas cannot be said to have begun with Constantine~~

~~Porphyrogennetos or even with the Macedonian dynasty. In an exchange that has become famous and taken as emblematic of Byzantine attitudes towards Latin culture,157 Michael~~

III told Pope Nicholas I that he considered Latin to be a “barbarian and Scythian tongue,” prompting a stern reproach from Rome, questioning how the emperor of the Romans could be ignorant of Latin. This may have inspired a short-lived reintroduction of Latin legends on Michael III’s seals, which were retained until early in the reign of Basil I,158 the founder of the Macedonian dynasty. The assertion of Byzantine Romanitas becomes not just a component of cultural renewal and reclamation in the wake of an iconoclasm, either real or imagined, but also a reaction to Frankish and Papal polemics about the ownership of Roman identity. If Constantine was following in the footsteps of his dynastic predecessors, his contribution to the reclamation of Byzantine Romanitas was certainly quantitatively and qualitatively more important, drew on deeper sources, and was sustained for a much longer period of time.

157 This exchange of letters seems to have been brought to scholarly notice in Ihor Ševčenko, “Three Paradoxes of the Cyrillo-Methodian Mission,” Slavic Review 23, no. 2 (1964): 228. From there, it has passed into the tralacticious discourse of Byzantine-Latin relations in myriad scholarly and popular works. Ševčenko’s immediate purpose in making the quotation was to illustrate the Byzantines’ generally negative evaluation of the expressive power of languages other than Greek, but other scholars have used Michael III’s words as exemplary of a constant bias against Latin language and culture throughout the Byzantine millennium.

158 For a discussion of the lead seals of Michael III, see “Michael III (856–867) — Dumbarton Oaks,” Exhibit Item, accessed February 22, 2019, https://www.doaks.org/resources/online-exhibits/gods- regents-on-earth-a-thousand-years-of-byzantine-imperial-seals/rulers-of-byzantium/michael-iii-856201367. For a further discussion of Latin on imperial coins in this period, see Philip Grierson, Byzantine Coins (London: Methuen, 1982), 176–77.

73 From this perspective, the encyclopedic literature of which De Cerimoniis is an important part and the Macedonian Renaissance more generally were not only aimed at repairing a real or perceived breach in Byzantine culture after Iconoclasm, but also played a part in a wider geopolitical struggle over the inheritance of Rome, and an attempt to return to the sources of Roman power and synthesize them with a millennium of evolution. Far from mere window dressing, the Latin loanwords of De Cerimoniis were an integral and intentional component of the mise-en-scène of imperial ceremony and show one aspect of the process by which Byzantines preserved, appropriated, and applied their Latin heritage and the place of the Latin language as a marker of Byzantine

~~Romanitas in the tenth century.~~

~~74 CHAPTER 3~~

~~RHETORICAL UNRHETORIC: DE CERIMONIIS BETWEEN “TECHNICAL~~

~~GREEK” AND THE MIRROR OF PRINCES~~

~~3.1 Introduction~~

The division of medieval Greek into two main varieties, high and demotic, and two corresponding literary traditions, Hochsprachliche Literatur and Volksliteratur, excludes many texts written in the middle register, which it has become increasingly common to denote as Schriftkoine.1 Neither an Umgangsprache nor a highly elaborate, classicizing register, the Schriftkoine is nonetheless a stable register based on a lengthy tradition resting upon the examples of conventional models and rhetorical strategies that evolved over centuries.2 The avowed simplicity of texts written in Schriftkoine have contributed to their marginal presence in discussions of the history of the Greek language and of post-classical Greek literature. On a case by case basis, the simplicity of the linguistic register positions texts written in Schriftkoine as the nonchalant scribblings of a busy professional who wishes merely to make important information accessible to like-

1 For a general discussion of the problems of classification that the student of Medieval Greek must confront, see Notis Toufexis, “Diglossia and Register Variation in Medieval Greek,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 32, no. 2 (2008): 203–217.

2 H. Eidener, “Tou Ptochoprodromou,” in Byzantinische Sprachkunst: Studien zur byzantinischen Literatur gewidmet Wolfram Hörandner zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Martin Hinterberger, Elisabeth Schiffer, and Wolfram Hörandner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 65ff.

75 minded individuals,3 without the artifice and pretension of a well-polished literary product. When assembled in series, the language used by these authors across more than a millennium reveals that they share a common literary topos, similar terminology, and kindred rhetorical strategies. Despite their claims to be providing the bare facts in bare, practical language, the authors of treatises on architecture, siegecraft, and tactics participated in a richly articulated literary tradition.

Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis continued this tradition in the tenth-century, forming a link in a chain that reached back more than a thousand years and continued into the following centuries. By placing his text within this tradition, Constantine VII not only describes how things are; he also makes normative judgments about the way things should be. His rhetoric is all the more effective because of its lack of adornment and its assumption of the quiet voice of objective description. This literary tradition, which may be called “technical Greek,” enabled Constantine VII to make De Cerimoniis more than the compilation of obsolescent protocols that some modern commentators have seen in his work. Through the refashioning of old material, Constantine recapitulates a traditional form of literature that had its origins in Greek antiquity and become progressively both

~~Roman and Christian. His synthesis of these various cultural strands provides insight into the motivations driving the production of compilation in the tenth-century as well as~~

3 The modesty expression found in what scholars term Gebrauchstexte and Fachliteratur invite the ascription of an almost unconscious or slapdash approach to the composition of these works. While this intuition may be valid for contemporary literary productions, it is improper to transpose this evaluation to the works of Byzantine authors. Byzantines understood that even Gebrauchstexte conformed to particular generic conventions, which could include a humble linguistic register and the intentional departure from the syntactical and lexical norms of Atticized Greek.

~~76 Constantine’s view of his contribution to the work of his father and grandfather, the emperors Leo VI and Basil I, and in Roman longue durée.~~

Some indication of scholars’ traditionally low regard for the literary qualities of technical Greek can be gleaned by consulting the introductions to critical editions of manuals, almost the only place where we may find evaluations of the stylistic rather than historical aspects of these texts.4 In the judgment of George T. Dennis, a prolific editor of

~~Byzantine military treatises,5 the technical manuals present no particular mysteries. Of this class of literature, he writes:~~

Byzantine military writers, just like their modern counterparts, made no effort to write in an imaginative or sophisticated manner. In fact, they explicitly tell us that they have made no pretense of fine writing, of producing literary masterpieces… Intended for practical use, it is written in a straightforward and generally uncomplicated Greek.6

~~This evaluation of the literary merit of Byzantine as well as ancient military treatises is a commonplace, and it illustrates two major misconceptions about the nature of these~~

4 In recent years, a new generation of scholars has begun to question these value judgments based on language and the command of classical Greek grammar. At any rate, the distinct styles used by Leo VI and Constantine VII for their prefaces, which are generally written in a classicizing, high style, and their manuals show that they were capable of deploying a variety of registers aligned with generic conventions and rhetorical intent. We ought to recognize that the middle register is itself a literary convention and a rhetorical vehicle rather than an indicator of a lack of training or sophistication. See for example John Earl Joseph, Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 63–64; Stephen Colvin, “The Greek Koine and the Logic of a Standard Language,” in Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present, ed. Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 33–45.

5 Dennis produced editions and translations of Maurice’s Stretegikon and Leo’s Taktika, the two largest and most famous of all surviving Byzantine military treatises. George T. Dennis and Ernst Gamillscheg, Das Strategikon des Maurikios (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981); George T. Dennis, Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); George T. Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010).

~~6 Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI, xiii.~~

77 treatises. In the first place, there is the assimilation of Byzantine technical writers to their contemporary successors. The notion that Greek, Roman, and Byzantine encheiridia should be understood to follow the same literary conventions and have the same goals in sight that modern manuals do is an assumption in need of correction and nuanced discussion. This category error has caused numerous difficulties in interpretation and has inspired the collective opinion of centuries to pass a negative judgment on the practicality of what “should” be a practical genre of writing.

In the second place, it is certainly true that “they explicitly tell us” what their stylistic preoccupations, or lack thereof are, but the very explicitness of this formal and conventional apologia, repeated in much the same words across centuries by a variety of writers in both Latin and Greek constitutes a generic tag that positions works of this type in a literary tradition, the aims of which, because concealed by seemingly unadorned language, must be carefully extricated. Like the language of the Bible, which in the minds of many of the best educated early church fathers, was like gold covered in lead, the esoteric meaning hidden by a plain exterior.

Also similar to the Bible, these military treatises must, or at least can, be read at a variety of levels by a variety of audiences. That the treatises often fail to provide the specific, technical details that contemporary scholars expect of them is evidence that they aim at something else, rather than that their authors were in every case ill-informed, armchair generals.7 While it is true that these manuals were “intended for practical use,”

~~7 Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Knopf, 1989), 47–48.~~

the term “practical” needs nuanced discussion if we are to understand why experienced soldiers who “ought to have known better” were for many centuries in the habit of commissioning philosophers and men of letters rather than scientists and technicians to write tactical manuals, and why, in later ages, when emperors themselves assumed the authorial voice, they produced books that modern scholars call tactical manuals but that contain more about the cultivation of moral virtue than about the precise angle that a formation of soldiers assumed in an oblique march.

In the third place, we should question the contention that the language of the technical treatise is, as a rule “straightforward and generally uncomplicated.” Study of this language shows that it constitutes a peculiar linguistic register with its own conventions. These conventions remain stable down the centuries and, with some modifications, operate across languages in both Latin and Greek. By the end of the fourth century, something like a synthetic, “Roman tradition” had arisen from the earliest practical manuals written in Greek, and this literary form would persist into tenth-century

~~Byzantium and beyond. In addition to the establishment of a particular jargon, termed~~

“technical Greek” that one might argue arises naturally from the discussion of matters of interest to a restricted class, like army officers, this language also has surprising points of contact with philosophical and theological Greek that, when contextualized with the aims described above, become comprehensible as signs along the path that mark these treatises not so much as technical manuals in the modern sense but rather as encheiridia in the ancient sense, that is, as manuals for life.

~~79 3.2 Technical Greek, Schriftkoine, and the Encheiridion~~

It was once fashionable to refer to the huge mass of tenth-century Byzantine literary production as “encyclopedism.” Due to a lack of terminological precision and the inability to form a consensus about what constitutes an encyclopedia, the term

“compilation” has become more common in recent years.8 The term compilation straddles the space between manual and encyclopedia makes some progress towards solving an old problem of categorization. While it does provide a fairly objective description of the form of these works, the term “compilation” does not explain how they might relate to one another and aim at a common goal. A similar problem attaches to the term “manual,” which, as usual, has a more restricted meaning in modern languages than it did in ancient or medieval Greek and Latin.

The question of whether a manual describes an objective or ideal state is pertinent to anyone who has ever experienced difficulty in assembling furniture or setting up technological gadgetry. The encheiridion,9 of which the Latin manuale is a calque, is itself an ambiguous term, meaning in the first instance dagger, i.e., a handy tool of first

8 For a discussion of the current state of the art, see Jason König and Greg Woolf, eds., Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18–19. In the same volume, Magdalino gives an overview of the phenomenon of the Byzantine compilation literature, and Németh provides a close study of Constantine VII’s Excerpta. Paul Magdalino, “Byzantine Encyclopaedism of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries,” in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Jason König and Greg Woolf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 219–31; András Németh, “The Imperial Systematisation of the Past in Constantinople: Constantine VII and His Historical Excerpts,” in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Jason König and Greg Woolf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 232–58.

9 The term entered Latin through Greek in late antiquity. It remained a popular title for works of compilation until around the year 1000. Erasmus resurrected the term for his 1501 Encheiridion Militis Christiani, and since that time it has been used to describe reference works, some small, and some, like the famous Denziger, of prodigious size.

and last resort useful both for accomplishing the daily tasks of mundane life and of preserving life in the moment of direst need. The manual, the short book that fits in the hand, is in fact a metaphorical extension of this primary meaning. Already with the name of the literary form, there is a rhetorical playfulness that conceals a much deeper and subtler intent than the ostensibly practical aims that the genre has conditioned its readers to expect.

Although not exactly a match, the ambiguity of the term encheiridion is akin to the rhetorical device known as apophasis or praeteritio, or the literary strategy termed priamel, both of which wink at the reader in making a scantily veiled implication that is obvious and yet still concealed. One must practice linguistic therapy when using the terms “technical” and “practical” to refer to the style and content of these works in general, since these terms have a far more restricted meaning in English than they do in

~~Greek.~~

The ambiguity introduced by the term encheiridion to describe such texts along with its double association with philosophy and Fachliteratur/Gebrauchstexte are essential components of the rhetorical presentation of the genre and influence the language in which these works are written. In the absence of traditional terminology, the term technical Greek seems apt to describe this sub-register of Schriftkoine. Techne has a broad enough semantic range in Greek to comprehend both the details of a discipline and the discipline itself, and the adjective technical seems therefore to be apt for describing this form of the Greek language.

~~81 The encheiridion in both pagan and Christian contexts was closely aligned with~~

“practical” philosophy as opposed to “theoretical” philosophy,10 which overlap with but are not identical to ethics and metaphysics.11 The most famous encheiridion of antiquity was surely that of Epictetus, whose stoic philosophy found a hearty reception among

~~Christians and whose concise yet pithy style recommended him as a master for busy men of affairs.12 The work became a classic almost instantly and was read with enthusiasm by~~

~~Marcus Aurelius, whose literary output was to a great extent inspired by Epictetus’ philosophy.13~~

There is then already in the second century a close association between practical philosophy, the genre of the encheiridion, and the imperial office. The emperor is an executive, and while he may be assumed to have knowledge of theoretical philosophy, he fulfills his office in leading men and inspiring them to virtuous action. In this, he plays something of the role of a teacher, which later tradition will transform into Christos

~~Didaskalos,14 and which Constantine VII’s father, Leo the Wise, embodied in his~~

10 The distinction, perhaps most famously evoked by the embroidered letters Π and Θ on Philosophia’s garment in Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae 1.1.4, between πρακτική and θεωρετική is ancient and a frequent topos in both Greek and Latin literature. See Joachim Gruber, Kommentar zu Boethius de consolatione philosophiae (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), 63–65.

11 For a history of this distinction and the peculiarly “Roman” appeal of practical philosophy, see Walter Nicgorski, “Cicero and the Rebirth of Political Philosophy,” The Political Science Reviewer 8 (1978): 63–101.

~~12 For editions and discussions of the Christian versions of Epictetus’ Encheiridion, see Gerard Boter, ed., The Encheiridion of Epictetus and Its Three Christian Adaptations (Leiden: Brill, 1999).~~

13 For a brief discussion of Epictetus’ influence on Marcus Aurelius as well as his later reception, see A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002); Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

14 For the history of the concept, see Oleh Kindiy, Christos Didaskalos: The Christology of Clement of Alexandria (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2007), 124–98. For a wider discussion of the role of the teacher in early Christian tradition, Kindiy points to Ulrich Neymeyr, Die christlichen 82 sermons.15 By the tenth-century, the emperor as philosopher king has transformed into the emperor as theologian, while the old model remains under the new vestment, as it were. Even though there are very few Roman emperors in antiquity and the middle ages whom we can number among the great authors, philosophers, and theologians, the tradition inaugurated by Marcus Aurelius and renewed by Leo VI had reflexes in later centuries with the near-emperor Nikephoros Bryennios and John Kantakouzenos, who ended his life as a monk and wrote what many consider to be one of the greatest works of late Byzantine historiography.16 While the later tenth and early eleventh century are marked by the successes of dynamic solider-emperors, the claim of Leo VI to theological sophistication increased the prestige of the imperial office and enlarged its realm of competence. In a sense, such a movement towards omnicompetence is already apparent in Julius Caesar’s scientific reform of the calendar, a generation before historians begin speaking of the office of emperor.17 The drive of Roman statesmen not only to authorize

~~Lehrer im zweiten Jahrhundert: ihre Lehrtätigkeit, ihr Selbstverständnis und ihre Geschichte (Leiden: Brill, 1989).~~

15 See Shaun Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886-912): Politics and People (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Theodora Antonopoulou, The Homilies of the Emperor Leo VI (Leiden: Brill, 1997). The simultaneous publication of these two studies has done much to bring an increased focus on Leo VI’s literary productions and his role as author and theologian. Leo “the Wise” could be imagined as a Christian philosopher king, an imitation and emulation of Marcus Aurelius.

16 For Bryennios, see Leonora Alice Neville, Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 194– 203. For Kantakouzenos see Donald MacGillivray Nicol, The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of John Cantacuzene, Byzantine Emperor and Monk, c. 1295-1383 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 134–60.

17 For the power and authority that accrued to Caesar through his claim to control time itself and therefore history, the seasons, and tax schedules, see D. C. Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 196–97. Feeney also shows how conquered peoples’ adoption of the Julian calendar led to the formation of Roman identity and how the preservation of that calendar in the subsequent conquest of the old Roman empire by new peoples helped to maintain a sense of Roman order in the middle ages. Feeney, 210, 140.The disagreements and compromises 83

~~but to embody knowledge, law, wisdom, and theology is therefore in some sense even older than the imperial office.~~

~~None of Constantine VII’s works attain or attempt to reach the heights of Leo~~

VI’s stylistic sophistication or theological subtlety; he rather writes in the older mode in an environment less exalted than the afterglow of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy,”18 but nevertheless redolent of the imperial tradition. Constantine VII’s aims at restoring Roman order rather than Christian Orthodoxy, but behind his statements, there are indications that he is coaxing his reader to higher things, though he insists that his work is merely practical.19 In this, he is continuing the encheiridion tradition, exoterically proclaiming a plainness of style and practical purpose that conceals an esoteric call to renew the empire and restore kosmos to the basileia.

We see both Constantine’s low style and high purpose in the prooimoia to his works. The importance of the prefaces to imperial legal codes has long been recognized, and the prefaces of Constantine VII prove to be a similarly rich source for studying the self-understanding and projection of the imperial ideal of a learned Byzantine emperor. In several places, Constantine VII pairs an apology for his lack of stylistic artistry with presentation of the most profound and highest matters of statecraft. For this reason, his works, especially De Cerimoniis, have received limited attention as literary witnesses to

since the seventeenth century and continuing today between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox and Protestant churches on using the Julian or Gregorian calendars shows the enduring importance of the reckoning of time in negotiating authority and identity.

~~18 See Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm.~~

~~19 DC R5.~~

the imperial ideal.20 As we shall see in the course of this study, Constantine VII’s low style, and even the stereotyped apology he makes for it, are literary topoi, essential components of the tradition of technical Greek and the imperial authorization of knowledge.

A further aspect of Constantine VII’s stylistic posturing is his movement towards the goal of mimesis of the past-as-it-should-have-been. The texts, stage direction, and authorial voice of De Cerimoniis are not therefore antiquarian but rather idealized versions of the best Roman tradition. Though the (real or imagined)21 corruption of the recent past always forms the basis for Constantine VII’s axis of comparison, his goal is not merely to recreate what has been lost but to re-present and perform it in a more perfect way.

~~3.3 The Origins and Development of Fachliteratur~~

There appears to be no consensus concerning the proper name of the genre of works produced in antiquity that deal with subjects such as hunting, medicine, military science, horsemanship, and the like. In their articles on Xenophon, whose works represent in many cases the earliest surviving examples, the two most widely cited reference works, Der Neue Pauly and The Oxford Classical Dictionary use the terms

20 This is generally true with the important exception of DAI, which has been recognized as an important although largely invisible source of imperial self-understanding. See Ihor Ševčenko, “Re- Reading Constantine Porphyrogenitus,” in Byzantine Diplomacy: Papers of the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990, ed. Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992), 167–95.

~~21 Chapter 5 investigates the “founding myth” of the Macedonian dynasty and Constantine VII’s vital role in its formation.~~

~~Lehrschriften and “technical treatises,” respectively. Neither work defines these terms nor contains an article under those titles, although Pauly treats the subjects under the heading~~

Fachliteratur. Without opening a complex discussion of the problems attendant in reconciling the divergent terminologies of English, German, Greek, and Latin, it is important to note here that the divisions of knowledge and human activity are different in different languages as well as across time and space. Just as pre-modern historians had quite different aims and methods than do their modern successors, so too the writers of manuals produced literature that does not align with the expectations of contemporary readers and scholars whose attempts to fit these artifacts of another time and place into a framework foreign to the culture that produced them.

For these reasons, De Cerimoniis must be contextualized both as an example of the middle Byzantine manual genre and as an exponent of a tradition with origins much further in the past. And since Constantine VII wrote in Greek but as a Roman, the context from which the Byzantine manual arises has at least these two great streams of influence, in addition to the further problem of the pagan tradition of practical philosophy along with its Christian reception. All of these ingredients, simmered over centuries, produce a rich stew with complex flavors, as each layer mixes with those around it. For both practical and aesthetic reasons, it seems wiser to appreciate the cultural artifact in all its complexity than to damage its savor by attempting to simplify.

The concern for preserving culture is ancient and universal, and works whose aim is to record the techniques and wisdom of past ages are, from the immemorial antiquity of the Sanskrit Rg Veda to the late ninth century Old High German Merseberg Charms, among the earliest literary remains in any language. Their poetic form both encouraged

86 that they would be remembered and that their “text” would remain relatively stable despite the vagaries of oral transmission, with formal meters acting as a conservative check on the inevitable march of phonological processes. In Greek, there are of course the didactic poems of Hesiod, which as monuments of Greek literature, are younger only than the Homeric epics. Already in Hesiod, there is the drive not only to record what works but to form character and opinion.22 All such survivals must necessarily frustrate the contemporary social historian who seeks to uncover the mundane details of archaic life but is checked at every turn by the editorializing voice of the author, who wishes to project a transcendent ought into the future rather than record a contingent was that existed in the past.

This tendency grows more pronounced in subsequent centuries, as the moral, philosophical, and even quasi-religious purposes of didactic poetry become explicit in the writings of the Pre-Socratics. In this period, the search for the arche of all things led to the systematization and specialization of knowledge and the development of discrete disciplines but not, significantly, to their professionalization in any modern sense. In the movement from archaic to classical Hellenic culture, there is also the elaboration of prose literature, which expounded wisdom and techne in a literally more prosaic way, with the hexameters of old replaced by the set-piece dialogue, which imitates the lively atmosphere of the symposium but remains fictive. In these works, the emphasis is once

22 Works and Days, which is ostensibly an agricultural almanac, is in fact a compendium of moral teaching. For some discussion of “Hesiod the educator,” see Stephanie Nelson, “Hesiod,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 331–43. One must look further back to find a fuller examination: see C. Smiley, “Hesiod as an Ethical and Religious Teacher,” Classical Journal 17 (1921): 514.

again on the isolation of ideal states of being, on how things should be rather than how they are, so that in reading a Socratic dialogue, one may have much fodder for the contemplation of that which is militarily excellent, without coming any closer to knowing precisely how military excellence was instantiated in the individual experience of the hoplite, how much his gear weighed, or how much food and water he could expect to consume during a day’s march while on campaign.23

Another passage from “Hellenic” to “Hellenistic” coincides with the articulation of a literary genre that for the first time resembles the kind of works that one can reasonably assume a modern person means to denote by the term “technical treatise.”24

Then as now, the precise parameters of this genre were vague, with rhetoricians only recognizing history and oratory as clearly defined prose genres.25 Along with this generic ambiguity, it is striking that already by the fourth century, there was a distinction between

23 Although Hanson stresses the closeness of the classical authors to military experience resulting from the Peloponnesian War and the long period of political instability that followed, he is frustrated that the military writers and historians do not provide detailed descriptions of battle. He finds art, archaeology, the lyric poets, and the plays of Aristophanes to be better guides to the practice of ancient warfare than any surviving treatise. Hanson, The Western Way of War.

24 Already in the Hellenistic period, there is the emergence of the “problem of Rome,” which will dominate Greek thought and letters from Polybius onwards. The Greek historiographical tradition from that moment forward centers on Rome rather than Athens, Sparta, or Alexander. We can then already in the second century BC begin speaking of “Roman Greek.” After an exhaustive examination of the evidence, Gruen lays out his conclusions of how Greeks and Romans negotiated the melding of their two cultures. Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 728–29. Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Hellenistic Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 467–80 speaks about the development of technical literature in the Hellenistic period and its (at least to contemporary students) odd preoccupation with ethics.

25 See Ax Wolfram, “Typen antiker grammatischer Fachliteratur am Beispiel der römischen Grammatik,” in Antike Fachtexte: Ancient technical texts, ed. Thorsten Fögen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 117–20.

88 “esoteric” and “exoteric” writings.26 While these terms are redolent of mysticism in contemporary parlance, they denote simply that there were different ways of writing for audiences within and outside of a particular discipline. Just as a contemporary introductory textbook eschews the specialized jargon of a comprehensive technical manual, so the short works composed for general readers stress their practicality, immediate applicability, and seek to draw in and hold the attention of readers with an easy but inviting style, quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle.27

This is not to say that the odor of mysticism is entirely artificial; the disciplines and trades in many pre-modern societies resemble secret societies, protected by exclusive rituals, distinctive dress, and obscure ways of speaking.28 Just as the ancient Athenians provided each of the bureaucratic divisions of their citizenry with a mythical genealogy and thereby united political, social, and geographical proximity to something approaching ethnic identity,29 so the professional societies and guilds of the ancient and medieval

26 Here I mean the terms to be taken literally, ie “inner” and “outer,” which is similar to but not identical with “private” and “public.” It is a strange trick of history that although Plato and Aristotle composed works of both kinds, the esoteric teachings of Plato have perished along with the exoteric works of Aristotle. This circumstance has given modern readers the impression that Plato had no doctrine, only a method, and that Aristotle is a dry and colorless writer. Hutchinson and Johnson’s digital reconstruction of Aristotle’s lost Protrepticus is causing a reevaluation of that writer’s rhetorical and literary merit “Protrepticus: A Reconstruction of Aristotle’s Lost Dialogue,” accessed February 28, 2019, http://www.protrepticus.info/.The most recent sign of a renewal of academic interest in the “esoteric” Plato is Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Socratic Ignorance and Platonic Knowledge in the Dialogues of Plato (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018).

~~27 Lucr. 4.22.~~

28 The argot of professional criminals as well as the jargon of different professional classes have long attracted scholarly attention. For a theoretical framework for discussing the issues, see Peter B. Hukill and James L. Jackson, “The Spoken Language of Medicine: Argot, Slang, Cant,” American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 36, no. 2 (1961): 145–48.

~~29 See S. D. Lambert, The Phratries of Attica (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).~~

~~worlds, and no less the Byzantine systemata and somateia described in the Book of the~~

~~Eparch,30 sought to unite the mechanisms of professionalization to a complex web of spiritual and political identities.~~

All of this contrasts markedly with modern expectations about what constitutes an objective or scientific exposition of a technical field of knowledge or of the concrete practices, progressively more efficient as time advances, that form the basis for a profession. In the technical literature of antiquity, we find precepts instead of data, presented in a style that seems to obscure as much as it reveals.31 The writers of these treatises were not merely erecting barriers to entry for those who would join their profession (although that seems to have been a likely motivation);32 they were also enforcing a discipline of close reading and meditation that inculcated particular ways of thinking and perpetuated group consciousness. The military establishments of many nations continue this tradition in calling their curricula “doctrine” and the methods by which they form civilians into soldiers “indoctrination,”33 terms that in almost any other

30 See Gilbert Dagron, “The Urban Economy, Seventh-Twelfth Centuries,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Charalampos Bouras (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 393– 461; Taxiarchis Kolias and Maria Chroni, Το Επαρχικόν Βιβλίον Λέοντος Σ΄ Του Σοφού (Athens: Κανάκη, 2010).

31 Obscurantism has been a constant feature (or temptation) of technical writers from antiquity to the present day. For a discussion of “Hermetic style,” see Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 135– 36.

32 For a discussion of how ostensibly “practical” texts in the alchemical tradition served moral purposes, see Arthur Greenberg, From Alchemy to Chemistry in Picture and Story (Hoboken: Wiley- Interscience, 2007), 51–54.

33 According to the U.S. Marine Corps, “doctrine is the institutional vetting and compilation of fundamental principles including tactics, techniques, procedures (TTPs), and terms and symbols by which 90

~~contemporary context are associated with the least desirable forms of instruction and educational outcome.~~

Although explicit, external boundaries between classes and professions have been largely eliminated or at least are considered highly undesirable in contemporary western societies,34 the military continues to make use of distinctive dress, secret handshakes, peculiar language opaque to outsiders, and a hierarchy of titles that not only divide warriors from civilians, but also the air, land, and sea services from one another and even different units in the same branch. That these “impractical” aspects of life in the military have not been eliminated despite the inter-service rivalries they engender because commanders recognize the significant positive effect that rites de passage and group identity have on morale, unit cohesion, and combat efficiency.35 Clearly, there is more to making a soldier than the mere communication of technical information. Where many social groups, most notably the academy and the religious clergy, have largely abandoned these distinctive markers as an outward signal of their increasing professionalization, the military remains deeply attached to initiation and tradition.

~~Now, as in ancient Greece and Rome and in the Byzantine Empire, this initiation is accomplished both in theory and in practice, by telling and showing recruits what and~~

~~Marine Corps forces guide their actions through training, education, and operations. U.S. Marine Corps, “MARADMINS Number: 070/18,” 2018.~~

34 The heavily latinate speech and white lab coat of the medical professional are perhaps the last holdouts in a world where nearly all professionals have adopted the dress and social patterns of those in business.

35 The U.S. Army has recently brought back its World War II-era “pinks and green” after more than a decade of requiring all personnel (even office workers) to wear combat fatigues at all times. The previous regime, which sought to foster common feeling between officers and enlisted as well as between those at home and in the field was found to be a less than effective means for maintaining morale.

how to think and act. Reduced to series of stereotyped movements and sentiments best exemplified by parade drill, which Plato considered to be a type of ceremonial dance,36 this indoctrination trains the body and the mind to react according to example. While contemporary writers are perhaps more sensitive to the dangers and abuses inherent in such an educational regime, pre-modern thinkers found the ordered discipline of military culture to be an almost irresistible metaphor for discussing the ideal polity.37 In contemporary political discourse, which tends to focus on economics, the nature of pre- modern thought can be obscured. Furthermore, the interests of political philosophers, which for several centuries now have centered on democratic, republican regimes, tend to elide the period between Aristotle and Machiavelli, which was dominated by oligarchic and monarchic regimes.38 Since the texts produced in this period play no role in the standard narrative, not a few professional political philosophers feel comfortable stating that these regimes produced nothing original or of value.39 Scholars inevitably have the tendency of finding precursors to contemporary notions in the past with an almost unavoidable confirmation bias that excludes evidence contrary to what they hope to find.

36 For a discussion of relevant passages in the Republic and the Laws, see Daniel Dombrowski, “War Dances in Plato,” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 17, no. 2 (1985): 53–55.

37 For a discussion of the phenomenon of “thinking with war” in antiquity, see Harry Sidebottom, Ancient Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16–34; Andreas A. M. Kinneging, Aristocracy, Antiquity, and History: Classicism in Political Thought (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 143–45.

38 For a brief history of the discipline of political philosophy and the changes in curricula over the past century, see Harvey Claflin Mansfield, A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001).

~~39 See Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 1–9.~~

92 The desire to construct a tidy genealogy and a preference for discovering original genius rather than documenting the elaboration of a stable tradition distorts the past by focusing on texts that in their own day may have presented a minority opinion. To use a dogmatic metaphor, one is left with an excellent account of the history of heresy that lacks the framework of orthodoxy.40 To remedy this situation, one needs to examine texts that were widely read and used. Just as a student of American popular psychology would be better served by leafing through a magazine at the checkout counter of a grocery store than by reading the collected works of Sigmund Freud, so the student of Hellenistic, Roman, and

Byzantine practical philosophy must search for evidence in texts that, although popular in their day and for many centuries afterwards, have fallen into obscurity. Because these texts occupy a very small place in narratives of classical and medieval literature,41 it is necessary to trace their development and argue for their importance. Such an examination will set the stage for a more thorough appreciation of Constantine VII’s aims in producing his ceremonial handbook, as well as of the larger cultural projects of ninth- and tenth-century Byzantium.

40 Peter Gay, the influential historian of the Enlightenment, makes the claim that the essence of “modernity” as a cultural and philosophical phenomenon is heresy. See Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), especially 3-5.For the radicalism of the Enlightenment against older narratives of its classicism, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

41 Lesky and Conte, the current standard histories of Greek and Latin literature, both refer to these texts as “scientific writings” and judge them harshly on this basis. Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (London: Methuen, 1966), 216ff; Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 387ff.

~~93 3.4 Marching Back to Xenophon: A Literary Anabasis~~

While his inclusion on the syllabus of many courses of intermediate Greek insures that his name remains current, Xenophon occupies a place in the third class, both as an historian and as a philosopher. Although it is almost certainly true that over the last 2,500 years, people have spent more time reading Xenophon than they have Plato, Aristotle,

Herodotus, or Thucydides, this multi-faceted writer attracts very little attention.42 For tracing the origins of contemporary political thought and historical craft, this focus is quite proper, but for understanding the “majority tradition” of pre-modern thought, scholars should look at texts with more popular appeal. While one may regret that the great mass of people have always and likely will always prefer manuals and anthologies to deep study of primary sources, one must admit that such works are a better guide to the common opinion and basic knowledge of past ages than the erudite treatises of original thinkers. While we proclaim our love of the auctores, we must be sensitive to the utility of the scriptores. If it is true that Constantine VII’s works spring from a stable tradition, that tradition must have exemplars and conventions. With his interest in precept, his straightforward language, and his focus on compiling and codifying tradition rather than systematic theorizing, Xenophon is the earliest example and likely progenitor of technical

~~Greek. An examination of the nature of his works and their language therefore illuminates those of Constantine VII.~~

~~42 Tim Rood, “Xenophon’s Changing Fortunes in the Modern World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon, ed. Michael A. Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 439ff.~~

For both the historiographical and the manual traditions, Xenophon provides an excellent example of what these traditions actually were, rather than what modern scholars hope they might be.43 While contemporary opinion favors Thucydides’ search for causes, antiquity preferred Xenophon’s style of history, which focused on providing virtuous examples from the past worthy of emulation or reprobation in the present.44

Xenophon’s purpose was avowedly moral rather than scientific, his piety conventional rather than skeptical, and his philosophy imminently practical rather than theoretical. In matters of style, too, Xenophon’s straightforward prose contrasts sharply with the tortured and often opaque syntax of Thucydides.45 In the modern period, Xenophon serves largely to introduce students to “standard” Greek prose style, but in periods when readers valued robust Atticism, Xenophon was both praised and condemned as a paragon of ἀφέλεια. In recent decades, evaluation of Xenophontic style has become more positive, as some scholars detect that the naïve surface may conceal irony, humor, and deep moral insight.46 In short, Xenophon’s ἀφέλεια may be a rhetorical device, an instance of

~~“rhetorical unrhetoric.” To see this style in its purest form, not only must we lower ourselves from the lofty heights of Herodotus and Thucydides to cavort with the lowest~~

~~43 For an account of Xenophon’s reception in the modern period, see Tim Rood, “Xenophon’s Parasangs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 (2010): 51–66.~~

44 Xenophon had many imitators, most famously Caesar. Both authors have served for centuries to introduce beginning students of the classical languages to literature. By contrast, Thucydides seems to have been more often admired than read, and the number of those who wrote “Thucydidean” history in antiquity and the middle ages is quite small.

~~45 See Vivienne Gray, “Xenophon’s Language and Expression,” in The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon, ed. Michael A. Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 226–27.~~

~~46 See John Lombardini, The Politics of Socratic Humor (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 95–97.~~

~~95 member of the fifth-century historiographical trinity, but we must also leave behind the~~

Hellenika and search for Xenophon’s philosophy among the hay, leather, and grain sacks of his “technical” writings. Just as On Horsemanship claims to be about obtaining, caring for, and getting the most out of one’s horse (about which it does give excellent advice) but is in fact a component of Xenophon’s vision for the ideal gentleman,47 so ἀφέλεια is the vector by which Xenophon’s moral philosophy penetrates the un-philosophic mindset of children and men of affairs.

~~Already in Xenophon, many of the generic conventions of what will become~~

“technical Greek” have been established. The moral purpose dominates over the presentation of historical facts in the ostensibly biographical Education of Cyrus, and of practical information in avowedly “technical” minor works, such as The Art of Hunting,

~~The Art of Horsemanship, and The Cavalry Commander.48 Most historians and classicists in the last two centuries have focused on determining whether the specific advice that~~

Xenophon gives on matters such as horse breeding is sound, and on this account, he has been to provide practical and applicable principles, even if his accounts of farming and household management do not provide as much detail as contemporary economic historians would prefer.49 In the traditional scholarly framework, Xenophon’s ἀφέλεια

47 See Adam Schulman, “What Is a Gentleman? An Introduction to Xenophon,” in The Arts of Rule: Essays in Honor of Harvey C. Mansfield, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Sharon R. Krause, and Mary Ann McGrail (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 3–22.

~~48 Delebecque provides a résumé of these passages L’art de la chasse (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1970), 12.~~

49 For discussion of the various interpretive frameworks that have been applied to Xenophon and that represent a newer approach more interested in his influence on later intellectual history than on the reconstruction of concrete social realities in ancient Athens, see Steven Johnstone, “Virtuous Toil, Vicious Work: Xenophon on Aristocratic Style,” Classical Philology 89, no. 3 (1994): 219–240; Laurence D. Nee, 96

~~and seemingly limited interest relegate his works to the industry of only the most earnest students of ancient history rather than of literary scholars and philosophers.~~

Although Xenophon’s minor works continue in the main to attract the attention of social and economic historians rather than of philosophers and ethicists, the protreptic subtext of his supposedly “practical” treatises has long been recognized, if not particularly emphasized.50 The term “practical” is likely to be misunderstood unless defined as precisely as the evidence allows, for the term is not intended to denote a branch of philosophy completely devoid of theory, nor should it be taken to mean

“pragmatic” in the sense of a brand of philosophy that is rather loose in defining its theoretical basis. For the ancients as well as the Byzantines, there could be no contradiction between the theoretical and the practical.51 A sure knowledge of the former insured the proper functioning of the latter.

Among the most famous and beautiful representations of this idea comes in the first prosa of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, in which Lady Philosophy descends upon a lamenting Boethius.52 She seems to the desperate man at once to tower

~~“The City On Trial: Socrates’ Indictment of the Gentleman in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus,” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 26, no. 2 (2009): 246–270.~~

50 For a discussion of recent scholarship positioning Xenophon’s writings as protreptic, see James Henderson Collins, Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 31–32. Collins rejects the existence of “protreptic” as a genre in the fourth century, but he believes that Xenophon’s use of “admonition” was an important element in its formation.

51 See Charles Burnett, “The Transmission of Science and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge World History, ed. B. Z. Ḳedar and Merry E. Wiesner, vol. 5, Expanding webs of exchange and conflict, 500CE- 1500CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 339–58 for a discussion of the relationship between ancient “wisdom traditions” and the medieval sciences.

~~52 De Cons. 1.P1.~~

over him and yet to be approachable at a human scale. The garment she wears is embroidered with the Greek letters pi and theta, which commentators have long understood to represent the two branches of philosophy, praktike and theoretike.

Boethius’ Lady is clad in a seamless garment, where theory and practice, woven together, cannot be isolated from one another. The two branches form discrete disciplines but within a framework that holds the two in tension without allowing either to dominate.

The terminological problem of “practical” philosophy mirrors deeper, theoretical problems. It is a general opinion, shared by some academics, that contemporary scholarship is rather too concerned with theory.53 On the other hand, public discourse in many western societies seems rather too concerned with application and practice without theory.54 The outcome for ancient and medieval manuals is that academics do not study this literature because it is not explicitly theoretical,55 and the public does not read it because the purported subject of the treatises seem remote and irrelevant. The success of a recent book series from a prestigious academic press and a burgeoning middle-brow interest in Roman and Stoic philosophy are hopeful signs that the time may have come for both audiences to reexamine “technical literature.”56

~~53 For a frank discussion of these issues from a somewhat curmudgeonly perspective, see Warren Treadgold, The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, 2018.~~

~~54 See Nicholas Tampio, Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).~~

55 See Donald Nicol, “Byzantine Political Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought: C. 350 - c. 1450, ed. James H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 49–80; for a critique, see Oakley, Kingship, 44–67.

56 Princeton University Press has had great success with its popular series “Ancient Wisdom,” which gives the Cicero brothers’ works titles such as How to Win an Election and How to Run a Country. Philip Freeman, ed., Quintus Tullius Cicero: How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern 98 Although the social or economic historian as well as the experimental archaeologist will continue to be frustrated by the “impracticality” of much of this literature and lament that the “technical” literature lacks the concern for precise measurement and quantification that define its contemporary epigones, the intellectual historian may find a great deal about the popular consensus or synthesis that appears to have been rather stable from Hellenistic times up to the end of the Eastern Roman empire almost two thousand years later. For the great mass of even well-educated readers in antiquity and afterwards, such manuals provided what they regarded as a tried and true philosophy, sufficient for those without the leisure to read Plato and Aristotle.57 For all the modern interest in reading the sources and constructing genealogies, it is important to consider what past cultures actually read and valued when constructing accounts of ancient philosophy or Byzantine political theory. While it may disappoint scholars searching for novelty or originality, the reconstruction of this “majority opinion,” like the accounting of “majority texts” in the lower criticism of the past centuries has tended to obscure the real and construct an ideal, to present a text that should have been read rather than to present and contextualize the text that was, in fact, read. While both approaches remain valid, the time is perhaps ripe for a reevaluation of “practical” philosophy and the

~~Politicians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Marcus Tullius Cicero: How to Run a Country an Ancient Guide for Modern Leaders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).~~

57 Harrold Tarrant, “Platonist Curricula and Their Influence,” in The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism, ed. Pauliina Remes and Svetla Slaveva-Griffin (London: Routledge, 2014), 21–22 provides a consideration of the importance of “catechetical” works, such as Porphyry’s Isagoge in late antique education. That the large number of commentaries and glosses on this work in both the Greek East and Latin West tend to suggest that few students made it much beyond the “introduction” in their philosophical education is a matter of no small significance for the historian of culture.

99 rehabilitation of the literature that acts as its medium. Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis is certainly a ceremonial manual, but at a deeper level, it functions as exposition of the emperor’s understanding of his rule and his empire. For Constantine VII, ritual performance reflects and enacts an order that is both heavenly and Roman.

Understanding himself as extending the work of his ancestors, his ceremonial precepts both reform and perform a polity whose stages are the imperial palace, the Great Church, diplomatic legations, and the battlefields on which Roman soldiers reenact an eternal victory. Constantine VII’s philosophical vision is both practical and theoretical as his temporal reference is both historical and eschatological.

The distinction between the two branches concerns both their object and their presentation. The object of theoretical philosophy is knowledge, that of practical philosophy, action.58 Contemporary philosophical instruction focuses on the former almost to the exclusion of the latter probably due to the prestige that accrues the examination and explication of complex theoretical models (theories about theories) that originated in France in the mid-twentieth century and have come to dominate scholarly discussion of the humanities in the English-speaking world in the ensuing decades.59 In this context, the idea that scholarly discourse might escape from the ivory tower and

~~58 See Walter Nicgorski, Cicero’s Practical Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 242ff.~~

59 See Alan O’Connor, “The New Left and the Emergence of Cultural Studies,” in British Marxism and Cultural Studies: Essays on a Living Tradition, ed. Philip Bounds and David Berry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 52–56 for a discussion of the formation of the New Left in the mid-twentieth century and its influence on the development of cultural studies in Britain and the United States. For a more extended treatment, see Dennis L. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

100 affect wider affairs is commonly met with horror or bemusement.60 These tendencies have reduced “practical” philosophy to the level of “self-help” in contemporary culture and contribute to the neglect of this literature, which constitutes a sizeable portion of the literary remains written in both Latin and Greek, and which provide access to the

~~“common sense” of bygone ages, even if they did not contribute to the advancement of any number of narratives of the development of “Western Culture.” By repairing Lady~~

~~Philosophy’s garment and re-synthesizing these strands that have become isolated, we come closer to understanding the mentality of tenth-century Byzantium and of the role of~~

~~Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis in recovering, establishing, and projecting a particular ideal of Roman imperium.~~

~~3.5 From Xenophon to (East) Rome: The Formation of a Roman Tradition~~

~~More explicit forms of practical philosophy developed in the period following~~

Xenophon. Isocrates, whose death in 338 BC coincided with Philip of Macedon’s final defeat of Athens, founded the genre of Fürstenspiegel, or “Mirror of Princes,” with his oration Ad Demonicum.61 This appeal to Demonicus, an aristocratic youth living in a

60 Ancient historian Neville Morley’s article, “Thucydides and Contemporary Politics: A Syllabus” in the online review Eidolon traces the genealogy of the recent obsession with Thucydides in political circles. The author says that Thucydides is more productively used as grist for gender theory than for providing insight into contemporary international relations. But why not both? If Thucydides can and certainly does provide insight into ancient Greek notions of masculinity that can usefully inform contemporary discussions, why not international relations? Many academics seem to be selectively historicist. Neville Morley, “Thucydides and Contemporary Politics: A Syllabus,” Eidolon, September 1, 2017.

61 For a recent overview of the issues with an up-to-date bibliography, see Suze Wilson et al., eds., Revitalising Leadership: Putting Theory and Practice into Context (New York: Routledge, 2018), 6–10. The classic study of the Carolingian tradition is Hans Hubert Anton, Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karlolingerzeit (Bonn: L. Röhrscheid, 1968). For a look at the Byzantine tradition as a whole, see 101

monarchy (most likely Cyprus),62 to be a μιμητής of the good.63 Isocrates professed himself uninterested in the debates of the philosophers and was instead concerned with right conduct.64 His focus on rhetoric and right action in place of systematic dialogue and knowledge of the good gained him the opprobrium of Plato’s Socrates and the ignominious name of sophist.65 Generations of classical scholars have criticized

Isocrates’ practical philosophy,66 but his works were popular through the early nineteenth century, often accompanied by the later Greek-speaking Roman philosophers Epictetus and Empiricus Sextus, who imitated Isocrates distinctive “gnomic” style, a mixture of maxim, commonplace, and precept that later generations found inspiring and useful.67

~~Isocrates’ ideal was in many ways the prototype of Cato’s vir bonus dicendi peritus,~~

Kōnstantinos D. S. Paidas, Η θεματική των βυζαντινών κατόπτρων ηγεμόνος της πρώιμης και μέσης περιόδου (398-1085) (Athens: Grigori, 2005).

62 The best study in English is still the introduction to Isocrates, Isocrates: With an English Translation, trans. George Norlin and Larue Van Hook, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928).

~~63 Ad Demonicum 3~~

~~64 Antid. 284.~~

65 For a discussion of Plato’s attitude towards Isocrates as exemplified in the Phaedrus, see William S. Cobb, The Symposium and The Phaedrus: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 169.

~~66 R. C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos (London: Macmillan, 1893), 83.~~

67 See Gutas’ foreword to Denis Michael Searby, The Corpus Parisinum: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text, with Commentary and English Translation: A Medieval Anthology of Greek Texts from the Pre-Socratics to the Church Fathers, 600 B.C.-700 A.D (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) for a discussion of the Corpus Parisinum and the gnomologic tradition. Paolo Odorico, Il prato e l’ape: il sapere sentenzioso del Monaco Giovanni [and testi: Florilegium Marcianum litterarum ordine dispositum; sententiae a Joanne Georgida Monacho collectae] (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenchaften, 1986) treats the tradition with a special emphasis on its development in the middle Byzantine period.

~~102~~

~~which, repeated by Seneca and Quintillian, would form the basis of the Roman gentleman.68~~

The tradition that Isocrates inaugurated came to be known as paraenesis or exhortation and was closely associated with protrepsis,69 which in the form of Cicero’s lost Hortensius, was the catalyst for St. Augustine’s “conversion” to philosophy.70 In each case, the addressee of these works is a well-to-do youth who by birth and upbringing is destined to rule. In early examples, the author is able to speak directly to his audience, but as time goes on and there is a shift towards monarchic polity, the style becomes more gnomic and objective.71 They present themselves as repositories of wisdom rather than as tools for learning critical thinking, their contents better memorized than questioned. In both form and content, the genre has repelled scholars of the last two centuries from devoting much attention to them, but the situation in the previous eighteen centuries was almost the mirrored opposite.

Insofar as Fachliteratur aims to instruct its readers in the correct way of doing something, whether that is commanding an army, building a siege engine, or conducting a state ceremony, it shares with paraenesis the goal of inspiring right conduct. Like

~~68 Cato Fr. 14, Quintillian Inst. 12.1, and Seneca Controv. 1. pr. 9.~~

69 For the connection between the two genres, see L. G. Perdue, “The Social Character of Paraenesis and Paraenetic Literature and Social Functions of Moral Instruction as Acts of Protrepsis (Conversion), Socialization and Legitimation,” Semeia, no. 50 (1990): 5–39.

70 Augustine refers to this event in both Conf. 3.4.7 and De Beata Vita 1.4. For an examination of the role of protrepsis and parainesis in the Confessions, see A. Kotzé, “Protreptic, Paraenetic and Augustine’s Confessions” (Entomological Society of Canada, 2011).

71 The development is reminiscent of the emergence of “polite” forms of address in Western European vernaculars, where formally third-person singular or second-person plural forms come to have the semantic force of second-person singulars.

103 paraeneses, technical manuals or Fachliteratur usually had an explicit addressee, often a well-to-do youth or man of affairs. As the addressee of paraeneses became the king or emperor, so the addressee of Fachliteratur came increasingly to be the sovereign rather than the high-born adolescent.72 The literary telos and outward form of paraenesis and

~~Fachliteratur are similar enough that, if they do not quite warrant to be classed as the same genre, they both deserve regard as exponents of practical philosophy.~~

In later centuries, the two forms become inextricably intertwined, and through processes of compilation, adaptation, and abridgment, come to form one of the most popular genres of late antique and medieval literature. To give one example of how complicated the afterlife of a Hellenistic technical treatise can be, we may examine the work of the mathematician and engineer Philo of Byzantium,73 whose lived in the third century BC. His Mechanike Synaxis appeared in various forms over the next millennium and half in his hometown,74 which in the interim become the capital of the Roman

~~Empire. The Synaxis is an encyclopedia of sorts that begins with a general introduction to mathematics and includes all the divisions of ancient engineering. Among these are the~~

~~Belopoeica, the making of artillery, and the Poliorcetica, on siegecraft, which along with~~

~~72 This is evident already in Isocrates’ Ad Nicoclem. Vitruvius’ De Architectura and Apollodorus of Damascus’ Poliorcetica are addressed to Augustus and Hadrian, respectively.~~

~~73 The most extensive study is Yvon Garlan, Recherches de poliorcétique grecque (Athens: École franćaise d’Athènes, 1974).~~

74 For a discussion of the complex textual edition, which includes translations and adaptations into Arabic, see Anette Schomberg, “Ancient Water Technology: Between Hellenistic Innovation and Arabic Tradition,” Syria, no. 85 (2008): 119–128.

~~104~~

~~the works of Hero of Alexandria, formed the basis of knowledge of these fields in~~

~~Byzantine times.~~

The earliest surviving manuscripts of these authors date to the 11th century, well after the period here under review, but they appear in mediated form in the tenth-century work of “Hero of Byzantium,” thought by the editor to be a pseudonym, perhaps in imitation of two ancient forbears.75 Though the work is certainly derived from Philo and

Hero, it is in the main an adaptation of the Poliorcetica of Apollodorus of Damascus, a first century author who addressed his manual to the Emperor Trajan.76 Even though his work is heavily indebted to authors writing a millennium and more before his own time,

~~“Hero of Byzantium’s” manuals do not merely repeat the lore of the ancients. His work includes references to recent developments, such as Slavic variations of the classical~~

Roman tortoise.77 Mapping the influence from one author to another and establishing their chronological sequence and priority in this closely woven textual tradition is certainly beyond the scope of the present study and may even be impossible, especially if one were to add the numerous Arabic and Latin translations and adaptations that were produced in antiquity and the middle ages. It is enough here to state that these works contributed to the establishment of something like a stable tradition that included

75 For “Heron of Byzantium’s” reliance on ancient sources, see Sullivan (2000): 5-8. Denis Sullivan, Siegecraft: Two Tenth-Century Instructional Manuals (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2000), 5–8.

76 For a discussion of Apollodorus’ life and Nachleben, including the tale, reported in Dio 69.4, that he was put to death after criticizing Hadrian’s architectural taste, see David Whitehead, ed., Apollodorus Mechanicus, Siege-Matters: Poliorkētika (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010).

~~77 Sullivan, Siegecraft, 59–66.~~

~~105~~

~~standard topics and evolved a particular style and order of presentation, one that passed into Latin and the Roman tradition and one field of the knowledge of those whose business it was to make war.~~

It should be noted that war-making was according to the popular tradition of practical philosophy discussed above, among the noblest pursuits in human affairs.78 This fact certainly influenced the seemingly haphazard textual tradition of these writers of mechanica. Although Philo of Alexandria’s Synaxis included books on machines suited for times of peace, it is only the books on war engines and siegecraft that have survived.

~~This surely reflects the Byzantines’ inherited interest in the art of war-making as well as the relatively higher importance of siege warfare in the period after the eclipse of a~~

~~“Western Way of War” that focused on decisive infantry battle.79~~

Philo’s work, which is known for its odd insistence on providing careful measurements,80 nevertheless includes an apologia for the inadequacy of a quantitative knowledge of his subject. Measurements, he tells us, even when carefully made, are subject to error, and the smallest error made in each measurement will in the end add up

78 Harry Sidebottom provides an excellent account of the pervasiveness of military metaphors in Greco-Roman culture in his chapter “Thinking with war,” Sidebottom, Ancient Warfare, 16–34. For a consideration of this phenomenon in late antiquity, see Andrew Fear, “War and Society,” in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare Volume 2. Rome from the Late Republic to the Late Empire, ed. Philip A. G. Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 426–29.

79 Victor Davis Hanson’s examination of hoplite warfare in classical was once considered revolutionary but now is the standard narrative against which a new generation of scholars strive. Hanson represents an older tradition of positivist historians who were concerned with reconstructing the experience of battle, while most recent scholarship has focused on the social aspects of warfare, where questions of ideology are much more important. Hanson, The Western Way of War.

~~80 James G. DeVoto, Philon & Heron: Artillery and Siegecraft in Antiquity (Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1996), 2.~~

106 to a large error and a poorly functioning machine.81 Far better, then, to absorb the principles of engineering and to apply those principles to each situation as it arises. Even this most quantitative of Greek technical writers positions himself as a praeceptor. Those inspecting his book should not expect readymade recipes that cannot fail; rather they will find that Philo’s work forms the mind and the morals of the one who reads it.

The Greek manual tradition through the tenth-century can therefore be understood as a synthesis of technical instruction and moral exhortation. These two strands were from the very beginning united, with the primary aim of forming their readers into virtuous actors, if not necessarily learned philosophers, and only secondarily attempting to provide specific solutions applicable to immediate problems. The literature focuses on abstracting general principles that may be applied in diverse situations. The goal is the handing down of wisdom rather than the building up of knowledge, the traditio of that which is known to work well rather than that which is systematically and rationally coherent. The technical information and apparent pragmatism of the manuals is in fact a sort of rhetorical exercise in misdirection intended to lure unsuspecting and practical readers to the reform of their souls and the cultivation of their inner selves.

Understanding the technical manual as in some way an introduction to philosophy, a protrepsis or paraenesis, rather than an exposition of a discipline, goes a long way towards clearing up the obscurities that plague contemporary scholars who attempt to contextualize and explain them.

~~81 Belopoiika 2. Philo ascribes this sentiment to Polykleitos the sculptor, whose gnomai are recorded by Pliny and Plutarch.~~

~~107 The lines of transmission for this tradition from Hesiod through Xenophon and~~

~~Epictetus and the more clearly “technical” writers of the Hellenistic period to the~~

Byzantines are clear, but one cannot speak of a purely Greek tradition in the Byzantine context. The Byzantines were according to their own way of thinking Romans,82 and it is important to keep this in mind, especially in the context of the tenth-century, well before the articulation of Neo-Hellenic identity and in the midst of the great geo-political struggle for the ownerships of the legacy of Romanitas. Epictetus, Sextus Empiricus,

Marcus Aurelius, and a host of less famous writers of technical treatises, although they wrote in Greek, represent a specifically Roman tradition of practical philosophy in the age before the Second Sophistic.83 Although much has been made of the increasing division of Roman unity in late antiquity along ethno-linguistic lines, it is important to stress that the periodic outbreaks of Atticism and Hellenism that modern scholarship has named “Sophistic” were reactionary movements of generally short duration and limited effect outside an intellectual elite.84 The tradition against which the Hellenists were

~~82 See Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium the Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, 45ff.~~

83 For the idea of Plutarch as a Greek-speaking Roman author, see C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Philip A. Stadter, Plutarch and His Roman Readers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

84 For a discussion of the term and its reception, see Ryan C. Fowler and Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas, “A Prolegomenon to the Third Sophistic,” in Plato in the Third Sophistic, ed. Ryan C. Fowler (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 1–25. The existence of a third sophistic as a literary movement is becoming recognized, but many historians wonder whether it had much effect outside of a small elite. Romilly James Heald Jenkins, Byzantium and Byzantinism, Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1963) places the articulation of Hellenic identity as late as Gemistos Plethon in the mid-fifteenth century, although he is careful to note that the memory of the “Roman” (i.e., Byzantine) Empire and its Orthodox Church continued to form the basis for “Greek” in the centuries between the fall of Constantinople and the early nineteenth century.

~~108 reacting was of course Romanitas, which had numbered among its proponents not a few authors who wrote in Greek. There is in addition to this the Latin literature of~~

~~Constantinople, which was quite vibrant in the late fourth and throughout the fifth centuries.85 Both phenomena upset the tidy division of ancient literature into Greek and~~

Latin and argue for an appreciation of “Roman” literature, regardless of the language in which it is expressed.86 Some account, therefore, of the Latin manual tradition and its possible or likely reflexes in the Byzantine world are therefore necessary.

~~3.6 From Greek to Latin and from Latin to Greek~~

~~The clearest link between Byzantium and this tradition is Vegetius’ Epitoma Rei~~

~~Militaris.87 Although the exact dating of this work is controversial, scholars generally agree that it was composed in the last quarter of the fourth century after the Battle of~~

~~Adrianople in 378.88 Narratives of Rome’s decline and fall invariably cite the failure of~~

85 For the question of Latin in early Byzantium, see Sviatoslav Dmitriev, “John Lydus’ Knowledge of Latin and Language Politics in Sixth-Century Constantinople,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 111, no. 1 (2018): 63–69.

~~86 The contrasting bindings of Latin and Greek titles in both the Loeb and Teubner series are the most visible and familiar signs of this division.~~

87 The renewed interest in this unjustly neglected author is exemplified in Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Epitoma rei militaris, ed. Michael D. Reeve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Christopher T. Allmand, “Vegetius’ De Re Militari: Military Theory in Medieval and Modern Conception,” History Compass 9, no. 5 (2011): 397–409.

88 Milner accepts the by-now traditional reckoning that the Epitoma was written in Constantinople during the reign of Theodosius I. Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, ed. N. P. Milner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), xxv–xxix. Charles is highly suspicious of early dating and an eastern origin. Michael B. Charles, Vegetius in Context: Establishing the Date of the Epitoma Rei Militaris (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007). Despite Charles’ objections, according to Allmand, the traditional date remains the “majority opinion.” Allmand, “Vegetius’De Re Militari,” 1. Whatever the precise date and location of composition, it is probable that the entire manuscript tradition of Vegetius’ Epitoma derives from the edition of “Fl. Eutropius’” produced in Constantinople in the year 450. See Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Epitoma rei militaris; Allmand, “Vegetius’De Re Militari.” The early Greek 109 the Roman army in this battle, which occasioned the death of the Emperor Valens, as the beginning of the irreversible decline of Rome’s power.89 Many scholars see the cataclysm as the inspiration behind the composition of the Epitoma, which was commissioned by a

Roman emperor, most likely Theodosius, whose rise to power followed immediately upon the disaster at Adrianople. The fall of Adrianople, the city that controlled the western approach to the capital, sent a shock through Constantinople and occasioned an outpouring of military literature, including in addition to Vegetius’ work the famous

~~Notitia Dignitatum and the less well-known De Rebus Bellicis.90 All three works were cherished in late antiquity, the middle ages, and the renaissance as precious records of the~~

Roman military tradition, they are best know today for having frustrated historians looking for the sort of objective information that would lead to a scientific account of how fourth-century commanders kept boots on the ground.

Perhaps seeing that something had been lost at Adrianople and feeling the need for consolidation, the late fourth and early fifth centuries were a productive time for the composition of compendia of various sorts, not unlike the phenomenon of the so-called

~~“encyclopedism” of the tenth century. Eutropius the epitomizer of Livy and another favorite of medieval readers was resident in Constantinople and possibly a contemporary~~

~~translation of Vegetius’ Mulomedicina provides further evidence of the importance of Constantinople in ensuring his legacy.~~

89 For the battle and its aftermath, see Martinus Johannes Nicasie, Twilight of Empire: The Roman Army from the Reign of Diocletian until the Battle of Adrianople (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1998), 246ff.

90 These two treatises accompany one another in the manuscript tradition. See Marcellin Berthelot, “Sur le Traité De rebus bellicis, qui accompagne la Notitia dignitatum dans les manuscrits,” Journal des Savants 0 (1900): 171–77; Concepción Neira Faleiro, La notitia dignitatum: nueva edición crítica y comentario histórico (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2005), 62.

~~110~~

of Vegetius.91 Eutropius composed his Breviarium for the emperor Valens, a man who had risen to the purple from the ranks and needed to absorb the history of his empire quickly.92 The works of Eutropius and Vegetius frame Valens’ doomed reign, founded on the renewal of a proud history and followed by a call to reform the military and return to the ways that were the foundation of Roman power.

Eutropius’ Breviarium found a receptive audience throughout the empire, and its fall in the west did nothing to dampen its popularity there. It remained the schoolboys’ history of Rome until it was replaced by Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum in the nineteenth century and at intervals inspired continuators like Paul the Deacon and Landolfus Sagax to bring it up to date.93 Like Priscian’s huge Latin grammar, much of the West’s early medieval school curriculum emanated from Constantinople rather than Rome.94 The full implications of the eastern origins of western Latin learning have not been worked out.

~~Even less well known are the possible survivals of this Latin tradition in Constantinople~~

91 Although a number of manuscripts of Vegetius bear the subscriptio of “Fl. Eutropius,” and scholars have often been tempted to identify the author of the Breviarium with editor of the Epitoma, such an identification introduces intractable problems of chronology. See Michael D. Reeve, “The Transmission of Vegetius’s ‘Epitoma Rei Militaris,’” Aevum 74, no. 1 (2000): 246. In the absence of a direct link between the Breviarium and the Epitoma, we can assert that both works were produced near contemporaneously in the same city by men of the same class.

92 For this interpretation, see H. W. Bird, ed., The Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita of Eutropius: The Right Honourable Secretary of State for General Petitions: Dedicated to Lord Valens, Gothicus Maximus & Perpetual Emperor (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), ix.

93 For Paul the Deacon’s Historia Romana and Landolfus’ Historia Miscella, see Alan Cameron, “The Epitome De Caesaribus and the Chronicle of Marcellinus,” The Classical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2001): 326.

94 One could also mention Cassiodorus and Theodore of Canterbury, whose influence on Western education was incalculable. The process by which Latin learning passed from Constantinople to Rome and thence to England to be brought back to the Continent in the following centuries is complex and still too little appreciated.

~~111~~

in the following centuries.95 Although the availability of Vegetius in the East after the putative disappearance of a Latin-speaking community there may be doubted,96 Eutropius enjoyed two different Greek translations, one almost contemporary, dating to about 380, and another in the sixth century.97 The coincidence of the Greek translations with transformative periods in Roman and Byzantine history are evidence of the periodic outburst of nostalgia in response to crisis. The existence of these translations shows that the desire to return to the glory days of the Roman Empire and the belief that such a return could be effected or at least inspired by a study of the past was not limited to the empire’s Latin-speaking residents.98

The links between Vegetius and Eutropius are not merely temporal and geographical but also stylistic and thematic. Eutropius’ Breviarium consists almost wholly of descriptions of war written in a deliberately simple style. This ensured the popularity of his work for 1,500 years and set the parameters for estimations of Rome’s greatness for generations of students. It could be said that the thesis of the Breviarium is that Roman glory and was established, increased, and maintained by success in war.

95 Fergus Millar, “Linguistic Co-Existence in Constantinople: Greek and Latin (and Syriac) in the Acts of the Synod of 536 C.E.,” Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 92–103 addresses the place of Latin in sixth-century Constantinople.

96 The disappearance of such a community is usually identified with the seventh century, but there is evidence to suggest the continuing presence of Latin-speakers, or at least students of Latin, throughout the Byzantine millennium.

~~97 Paeanius and Capito Lycius. The 380 date of Paeanius’ translation is especially suggestive of a link to Adrianople.~~

98 The second half of the fourth century was the heyday for the production of manual histories such as Eutropius Breviarium and saw the composition of similar works by Aurelius Victor, Ps. Aurelius Victor, and Festus.

~~112 Through translation, Eutropius would serve later generations of Romans in times of need, as the citations in the tenth-century Suda and in the work of the Palaelogian scholar~~

~~Maximos Planoudis show. It was therefore an essential repository of Romanitas whenever Romans wished to remind themselves of who they were.~~

Eutropius’ Breviarium could be described as an “historical manual,” and encheiridion historikon, which served a similar purpose to the technical treatises. It is at once a compendium of basic facts and a protreptic or paraenetic call to mimesis or aemulatio of the Roman past.99 Once again, simple language and authorial apologia conceal a deeper moral purpose. The works of Eutropius and Vegetius work in tandem, the former providing the context for the latter’s “practical application,” yet both are manuals, conforming to the stylistic conventions of that genre while simultaneously establishing the exoteric expectations of their audience and concealing an esoteric exhortation.

~~H. W. Bird, whose edition of the Breviarium has become standard in the English- speaking world, describes the work as having three separate but complementary aims. 100~~

The first, “to provide a simple, succinct and readable account of Roman history.” The audience in the first instance was the Emperor Valens, whose low birth and meteoric rise to power gave him little time to study Roman history. Bird sees the Breviarium as an essential part of quickly acculturating a rough and tumble Valens, reared in the barracks

99 On emulation, see Bird’s introduction to The Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita of Eutropius, ed. and trans. H. W. Bird (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), xxxv. Bird is citing Bohumila Mouchová, Studie zu Kaiserbiographien Suetons. (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1968).

~~100 Bird, Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, xviii–xxv.~~

113 and fresh from campaign, and preparing him to collaborate with a sophisticated, proud, and still powerful senatorial class. Bird argues that at a deeper level, the Breviarium, by focusing on war, proclaiming its honor, and providing examples of the virtues and vices of various holders of the imperial office, has also the purpose of offering “implicit advice.” Bird also sees a third argument, in favor of waging an aggressive war against the

~~Persians and for maintaining or extending the powers of the Senate.~~

~~Of these three, the second is most relevant to the discussion of the genre and style of Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis. Citing Eadie and Dufraigne, Bird compares~~

~~Eutropius’ style favorably against the “rapid and rudimentary” language of Festus and the~~

~~“involved and pretentious” style of Aurelius Victor, his contemporaries and generic rivals.101 For Bird, this makes of Eutropius a diligent recorder of facts but not a writer of~~

“[h]istory in the grand manner.”102 Despite his earlier discussion of Eutropius’ implicit purposes, Bird here seems to reduce the Breviarium to its explicit and primary function of providing the ignorant with a bare outline of Roman history. It is true that many and probably the majority have read the Breviarium with exactly this object in view, but they were all to some extent inspired by Eutropius’ examples and led to consider his identification of Rome’s glory with its military prowess as normative. This has no doubt contributed to the formation and perpetuation of certain ideas about the constitution of

~~Romanitas down the centuries.~~

~~101 Bird, Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, li. See also E. Malcovati, “I Breviari Storici Nel IV Secolo,” Annali Fac. Lettere Filosofia Magistero Cagliari 12 (1942): 23–42.~~

~~102 Bird, Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, liii.~~

~~114 While Eutropius’ third motive, that of influencing the contemporary foreign policy of the Roman Empire would have been irrelevant to posterity in the West~~

(although not, one would imagine, to later generations of Byzantines whose focus was nearly always fixed on the empire’s eastern border), it is nonetheless a type of esoteric paraenesis. In both his general narrative and in his recommendations for dealing with the

Persians in the wake of recent contractions in Rome’s eastern domains, Eutropius’ structures his argument around examples of virtue and vice aimed at reforming the present and future rather than at recording the past.

Although Eutropius’ title, magister memoriae, indicated his employment in the imperial scrinia as reformed by Diocletian,103 it is also indicative of the role he played for subsequent generations as one of the primary shapers for what Roman history was and what lessons were to be derived from its study. Many of the features of his work that contemporary scholars consider vicious were in fact the virtues that commended him to so many generations of readers. Among these, Eutropius’ moderation in style, length, and depth is the chief reason for his success. Festus was too short and Aurelius Victor’s style too difficult and too limited by its exclusion of the republican history of Rome.104 By keeping to the middle, Eutropius produced a work with broad and lasting appeal. Bird suggests that another reason for the unpopularity of Aurelius Victor was his tendency to

~~103 R. W. Burgess, Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian Chronography (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999), 76.~~

104 Festus’ work is approximately one quarter the length of Eutropius’. Eadie (1967) and Dufraigne (1975) Studies of the styles of Festus and Aurelius Victor are included in Sextus Rufus, The Breviarium of Festus, ed. John William Eadie (London: Athlone Press, 1967); Sextus Aurelius Victor, Livre des Césars, ed. Pierre Dufraigne (Paris: Belles lettres, 1975).

~~115 interrupt his narrative with “moralizing interjections.”105 Whether or not readers found~~

Aurelius Victor’s explicit moral purpose repulsive, it seems clear that Eutropius’ gentler, implicit approach was the more successful. Both children and those in power dislike being told what to do. Showing them what to do by means of emulation is surely a more effective rhetorical posture, however unadorned or unself-conscious it may appear.

~~It is Eutropius’ presentation of models of virtue and vice in Roman history that most resembles the later projects of the Macedonian Dynasty, especially Constantine~~

VII’s Excerpta. In both cases, historiography aligns with the Roman concept of aemulatio, which would become in Byzantium mimesis, with a change in religion inspiring an elevation of the concept from practical to theoretical philosophy and a subsequent theologization related to the iconoclastic controversy. In the works of

Eutropius, Vegetius, and Constantine VII, one can trace a straight line from historical example, through military drill, to court ceremony. Like historical exempla, ceremony shows both how things are (i.e., it is performative) and how things should be (it is an idealized ritual action).

~~Although without the discovery of new evidence it is impossible to demonstrate the continuing, direct influence in the east of Vegetius after the edition of his work in~~

Constantinople in 450, it is instructive to examine the Epitoma as an example of the genre of military treatise that would have a long history in Byzantium, especially during the years before, during, and after the reign of Constantine VII. According to its editor, N. P.

~~Milner, two features of the Epitoma were responsible for its great popularity in the~~

~~105 Bird, Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, lvi.~~

116 middle ages and its relative neglect in the modern period: its moral purpose and its lack of specificity. In fact, Milner argues, the practice of extracting III.26, the “General Rules of Warfare” and including it in contemporary manuals of war shows that one of Vegetius’ chief attractions was that he provided a means of “inculcating the basic principles in unspecific form which could be adapted to serve a great variety of military situations.”106

As Milner shows, already in the sixteenth century, scholars attempting to reconstruct the development of the Roman military were frustrated by Vegetius static portrait of Roman virtue.107 Scholarly work on the Epitoma in the second half of the twentieth century generally made great strides in placing Vegetius’ treatise within its late Roman context and in establishing the text’s debt to previous writers through meticulous

Quellenforschung,108 but the moral and philosophical content of the text, arguably the chief reason for the long and vigorous reception it enjoyed, had excited little if any scholarly interest until the appearance of Allmand’s study in 2011. This is also true of

Vegetius’ style, which, like that of Eutropius, is generally accounted as simple, unpretentious, and innocent of rhetoric.109 Both of these aspects of the Epitoma are essential for understanding its place as a literary product operating within a specific set of

~~106 Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Vegetius, xiii.See also Milner’s extensive footnote.~~

~~107 Flavius Vegetius Renatus, xiv.~~

~~108 For an exhaustive account, see Michael D. Reeve, “Notes on Vegetius,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, no. 44 (1998): 182–218.~~

109 Against this view, see Catherine Holmes and Judith Waring, Literacy, Education and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond (Boston: Brill, 2002). Holmes documents the importance of prose rhythm in Vegetius.

~~117~~

~~generic conventions, however distasteful moralizing and the glorification of war are to contemporary palates.~~

~~Eutropius makes his moral purpose clear in his preface when he states that in addition to presenting a brief narration of Roman affairs for the emperor, he also provides~~

“quae in principum vita egregia extiterunt, ut tranquilitatis tuae possit mens divina laetari prius se inlustrium virorum facta in administrando imperio secutam quam cognosceret lectione.”110 Here Eutropius suggests that the emperor has already followed the glorious example of his predecessors, but one can recognize this as a praeterited argument that the emperor should follow these examples in the future. Once again, present or future behavior is retrojected into the past, even when discussing nearly contemporaneous events. This is a sign both of the etiquette required when addressing the emperor, which mandates that the emperor not be addressed directly (tranquilitatis tuae… mens divina) and that any counsel be given by implication, and of the philosophical tradition of virtuous emulation. By writing that the emperor has already followed these examples

~~(prius…secutam quam cognosceret lectione), Eutropius is able to present his moral instruction as an exhortation to continue what has been done rather than as a demand to reform behavior.~~

Additionally, the phrase that ends the preface, a position of prime importance according to classical rhetoric, is redolent of the Platonic notion of anamnesis and the later, and in Eutropius’ day not fully elaborated Christian notion of mystagogy, by which a person knows and acts according to the true, the good, and the beautiful before the

~~110 Brev. 1.2.~~

118 meaning of these ideas becomes explicitly understood by the intellect through direct instruction. The emperor’s ingenium, his innate disposition, has already led him to behave as he ought; it remains only for him to unite this good with great examples of

Roman history. All of this should leave little doubt that Eutropius’ Breviarium is more than an exercise in abridgement for presenting the bare facts to those beginning their study of Roman history. It is rather a handbook for behavior, even of practical philosophy, founded in the past but directed towards the present and future.

~~Neither of the Greek translators of the Breviarium translated this preface, which unfortunately makes tracing the influence of this strand of practical philosophy difficult.~~

A few of Eutropius’ more telling episodes in his catalogue of virtues and vices illustrate the proper way for an emperor to conduct himself and also establish a semantic domain around which discussion of Romanitas revolves. In particular, Eutropius upholds

~~Augustus and Trajan as models who established and restored the Roman empire.111~~

~~Against these, Eutropius gives Nero and Domitian as the greatest examples of vice in~~

~~Roman history.112 When discussing Domitian, Eutropius directly compares him to Nero,~~

Caligula, and Tiberius, who established the archetype of the “bad emperor.”113 Far from being a direct translation, as in much of the rest of Breviarium, the Greek version here provides a much more forceful and philosophically suggestive judgement: οὔτε τοῦ

111 Brev. 7.9 for Augustus and 8.2 for Trajan. For Augustus, key verbs are floruit and adiecit. For Trajan, we have recepit, diffudit, and reparavit. With the iterated re- prefix and a constant backward glance, Eutropius positions Trajan as a second and better Augustus.

~~112 Brev. 7.14 and 7.22.~~

~~113 Brev. 7.22, Neroni aut Caligulae aut Tiberio similior quam patri vel fratri suo.~~

~~119 πατρὸς οὔτε τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ μιμησάμενος οὐδέν. The triple negative is hard to render into~~

~~English, but it suffices to mention here that it serves to emphasize the extent to which~~

~~Domitian failed to engage in a mimesis of his glorious relatives, Vespasian and Titus. For~~

Eutropius imitation of exemplars is a key organizing principle of history and learning to identify what behaviors are worthy of emulation is one of the chief lessons to be derived from its study. This lesson is stated all the more strongly in Greek than in Latin.

Like Eutropius, Vegetius’ Epitoma has enjoyed a long afterlife. Allmand’s study of the reception of Vegetius in Western Europe has for the first time told this long and complex story is a comprehensive way. While he traces the influence of the Epitoma through a bewildering number of manuscripts, vernacular versions, and early modern adaptations, Allamand’s treatment of Vegetius’ Byzantine Nachleben is limited to three sentences early in his introduction and a footnote.114 Allmand’s narrative provides more details than Milner’s even briefer discussion,115 suggesting that Cassiodorus may have been the man who brought Vegetius’ Epitoma to the West. It is important to stress these continuing links between the two halves of the Roman world, which despite their separate languages and divergent cultures, maintained a commitment to preserving and recapitulating their common Roman inheritance. While we cannot hope to provide a comprehensive account of Vegetian echoes in Greek literature, it will be instructive to

~~114 Allmand (2011): 3 and 49. Allmand, “Vegetius’De Re Militari,” 3, 49.~~

~~115 Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Vegetius, xxxii.~~

~~120~~

~~examine the General Rules, which, based on manuscript evidence, Allmand says was the most popular section of the Epitoma.116~~

While no translation of Vegetius into Greek is extant, the General Rules were incorporated in adapted form into the emperor Maurice’s Strategikon, written in Greek around the end of the sixth century.117 Maurice’s use of the Epitoma suggests that there was already a Greek translation in circulation or that the Latin tradition in Byzantium was still strong in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. In the Greek translation, there is something like a process of making the implicit moral purpose of the treatise take the form of more explicit philosophical instruction. Already in the Greek title of Maurice’s adaptation of Vegetius, γνωμικά, there is a shift from the Latin regulae, from the hard and fast rules of military life to the timeless principles of command.118 In English, Milner has rendered Vegetius’ Latin as “general rules for war,”119 while Dennis gives Maurice’s

Greek as “Maxims.”120 While the meaning of these two words are somewhat related, one wonders why Maurice did not use κανών, which is a direct calque of regulae in both its concrete and metaphorical senses.

~~Although he was removed from Maurice by several centuries, Photios was closely associated with the cultural projects of the Macedonian dynasty, and his lexicon provides~~

~~116 Allmand, “Vegetius’De Re Militari,” 334. They often circulated excerpted from the rest of the treatise.~~

~~117 For the date and context, see Dennis and Gamillscheg, Das Strategikon des Maurikios, 28–42; Dennis, Maurice’s Strategikon, xvii–xviii.~~

~~118 Strat. VIII.2.~~

~~119 Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Vegetius, 108.~~

~~120 Dennis, Maurice’s Strategikon, 83.~~

~~121~~

insight into how words were understood in his own day, even if it cannot be taken to capture precisely the meanings terms would have had in the seventh century. Photios provides the following definition for γνώμη, the noun from which the adjective γνωμικά derives:

γνώμη· ποιά τις διάθεσις. καὶ γνώμων· ὁ συνετός. λέγεται δὲ καὶ γνώμων τι μηχανικόν, καὶ δὴ και τι σχῆμα γεςμετρικόν. καὶ διοπτρικοῦ μέρος, καὶ δὴ καὶ ἀστρονομικοῦ. ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ ἐν τοῖς γνωμικοῖς ὀργάνοις μάλιστα λαμβανόμενον.121

Photios’ primary definition, “a sort of διάθεσις,” leads to Aristotle’s definition of this term as “ἡ τοῦ ἔχοντος μέρη τάξις.”122 The gnomic style says what a wise man does, but it does not command the reader to follow the example. This is a type of implicit command, like the impersonal necessity formulae of De Cerimoniis, which ostensibly state objectively what is done and thereby imply what ought to be done.

~~The differences between Vegetius’ original and Maurice’s adaptation demonstrate certain transformations of mentality and contrast the laconic Latin prose with the ampler~~

Greek. One of Vegetius’ most famous and most gnomic regulae is his argument in favor of nurture against nature: Paucos viros fortes natura procreat, bona institutione plures reddit industria.123 In Greek this becomes: Ὀλίγους ἡ φύσις ἀνδρείους ἀνέδειξεν,

~~ἐπιμέλεια δὲ καὶ γυμνασία χρήσίμους ἀπέδωκεν. Στρατιῶται κάμοντες μὲν ἐπ᾽ἀνδρείᾳ~~

~~προκόπτοθσιν, ἀργοῦντες δὲ νωθεῖς τε καὶ ἀσθενεῖς μᾶλλον ἐδείχυησαν, ὅθεν~~

~~121 Christos Theodoridis, ed., Photii Patriarchae Lexicon (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982), 364–65.~~

~~122 Metaph. 1022b1. Photios goes on to associate γνώμη with mirrors. The importance of mirrors in the Macedonian concept of order is discussed at length in Ch. 5.~~

~~123 Epit. 3.26.12.~~

122 φροντιστέον μὴ άργεῖν τούτους.124 The first clause is essentially a word-for-word translation, with the word order substantially unchanged and preserving the rhetorically significant first position for paucos/ὀλίγους. The remainder of the passage is a sort of gloss, that not only more fully explains the positive content of Vegetius’ regula but also tells the undesirable outcome of not following his advice.

The Greek impetus to philosophize is further illustrated by Maurice’s maxim 31, which has no equivalent in Vegetius: “Βουλεύου μὲν βραδέως, ἐπιτελεῖ δὲ ταχέως τὰ

~~δόξαντα.”125 This is a quotation from Isocrates’ Ad Demonicum 34, whose importance for the history of protreptic has already been discussed. Once again, Maurice has glossed this~~

γνώμη: “τῶν γὰρ πολεμίων ὀξὺς ὁ καιρὸς καὶ οὐδὲ μιᾶς ἀνεχόμενος ὑπερθέσεως.”126 By uniting gnomic wisdom to the immediate needs of the military commander, the

~~Strategikon functions both as a guide for life and a manual for war.~~

The first of Maurice’s maxims is an admonition for the commander to be a pious man and friend of God, beginning his preparations for battle with prayer.127 Some have seen in this a Christianization of the Roman military ideal in the face of constant conflict with the Persian Empire that took on an increasingly religious character.128 While this

~~124 Strat. 8.2.9.~~

~~125 In Norlin’s version, “Be slow in deliberation, but be prompt to carry out your resolves.”~~

~~126 Dennis renders this as “In war opportunity is fleeting and cannot be put off at all.” Dennis, Maurice’s Strategikon, 85.~~

127 Πρὸ τῶν κινδύνων ὁ στρατηγὸς θεραπευέτω τὸ θεῖον· θαῤῥῶν γὰρ ἐν τοῖς κινδύνοις ὡς πρὸς φίλον αὐτῷ τὸ θεῖον τῆς ἱκεσίας ποιήσηται. Strat. 8.2.1.

128 For the general phenomenon, see John F Shean, Soldiering for God: Christianity and the Roman Army (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 302–5. For its specific form at “the end of antiquity,” i.e., the reign of Herakleios, see J. Ferber, “Theophanes’ Account of the Reign of Heraclius,” in Proceedings of the First Australian Byzantine Studies Conference: Canberra, 17-19 May 1978, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael 123 may be true to a certain extent, the language and emphasis of Maurice’s maxim, which appears to be original, is quite similar to the first of the Disticha Catonis, the late antique compendium of good behavior that served to as an introduction to Latin letters for 1,500 years. Its importance for the Roman tradition was, like Eutropius, recognized by

~~Maximos Planoudis, who translated it as part of his project to bring Latin learning and perhaps something of the romanitas antiqua to Byzantium in the thirteenth century.129~~

The first of the so-called “monosticha Catonis” is even clearer in its religious content with its simple admonition, “itaque deo supplica.”130 Leaving aside the question of whether the “d” should be capitalized and the subordinate question of whether the word “deo” should be taken in a monotheistic or polytheistic sense, it is interesting to note that Maurice has used τὸ θεῖον rather than the expected and more Christian τὸν θεόν.

~~This could point to an ancient source for Maurice’s sentiment, or it may be a stylistic attempt to establish an archaic, “Roman” milieu.~~

The gnomika of Maurice’s Strategikon illustrate well certain stable features of the style of “technical Greek.” In the first, Maurice presents a gnomic general, ὁ στρατηγός, and uses a third-person imperative, θεραπευέτω. The effect of this imperative is to establish a register that is at once both legal and divine, like the “thou shalt not” of the traditional English rendering of the Ten Commandments but with the added complication

~~Jeffreys, and Ihor Ševčenko (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 1981), 32–42.~~

~~129 Nigel Guy Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (London: Duckworth, 1983), 230ff.~~

~~130 Schmitt speaks of the place of Cato in Byzantine culture, including Planoudis’ translations. Wolfgang Schmitt, “Cato in Byzanz,” Klio 48 (1967): 325–34.~~

~~124~~

of the religious archaism mentioned above. Neither the German nor English translations capture these stylistic features, surely for the purpose of facilitating the reader’s comprehension and the making an idiomatic translation into a modern vernacular.131

~~While these goals are admirable, they have the effect of confirming the idea that technical~~

~~Greek constitutes a simple, straightforward register. The third-person imperative and the archaic religious diction ought to produce something that sounds like a mixture of Moses and Hesiod.~~

Other such features present in the gnomika are the use of the infinitive as a circumlocution for the second-person imperative,132 the gnomic inf. + καλόν formula,133 which has the force of an imperative (for who would wish to do something κακόν?), the use of the first person plural to blur the line separating the reader (commanded) and the author (commander) when advice is given,134 the gnomic ὁ + noun or participle,135 and the ascription of agency to abstractions, of the sort “godliness is close to cleanliness.”

~~Among Maurice’s 101 gnomika, only six directly address the reader, and half of these use~~

~~βουλεύου, which echoes the quotation of Isocrates, reinforcing the generic kinship of protrepsis and technical manual.136 The translator of Vegetius’ passive periphrastics has~~

131 They have respectively, soll/shall and Gott/God. The translations of Dennis and Gamillscheg, who collaborated on the edition of Maurice for the CFHB, are close enough to be almost calques of one another. Dennis and Gamillscheg, Das Strategikon des Maurikios.

~~132 Maurice Strategikon 8.2.3 ἐξάγειν~~

~~133 Maurice Strategikon 8.2.4~~

~~134 Maurice Strategikon 8.2.5, Greek, 8.2.6 πρὸς ἡμᾶς~~

~~135 Maurice Strategikon 8.2.8 part., 8.2.11, the general.~~

~~136 The word can be found in maxims Maurice Strategikon 22, 23, 27, 34, 81, and 87.~~

~~125~~

~~deployed nearly every possible strategy for answering Greek’s lack of a gerundive, and this collection could serve well as a stylistic manual on how to give advice to a superior.~~

Although Maurice’s γνωμικά closely rely on the regulae of Vegetius and bear the marks of having been originally recorded in Latin, many other stylistic features, such as the reliance on δεῖ + inf. constructions and -τε- participles can be traced further back to

Aeneas Tacticus in the fourth century BC. Aeneas Tacticus was perhaps a contemporary of Xenophon,137 but his treatise on siege works, the earliest to survive, is quite different from the more explicit moral instruction one finds in the didactic works of Xenophon.

We see already present in Aeneas Tacticus are the “gnomic style” that will become fundamental to technical Greek. Aeneas Tacticus begins his treatise with a lengthy and rhetorically rich genitive absolute, gnomic in its use of indefinite quantity,138 and sententious in its authoritative judgment. A series of future more vivid conditional sentences establish Aeneas Tacticus’ account of the general progress of siege warfare as the necessary outcome of a predictable and stable process. He follows this with a conclusion whose word order reveals rhetorical and philosophical force: “τοὺς οὖν ὑπὲρ

~~τοσούτων μέλλοντας ἀγωνίζεσθαι οὐδεμιᾶς παρασκευῆς καὶ προθυμίας ἐλλιπεῖς εἶναι~~

~~δεῖ.”139 It is significant to note that Aeneas Tacticus was a practitioner, a veteran of the nearly constant warfare that plagued the Greek world in the fourth century BC and~~

137 See Robin Lane Fox, The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 70. For further discussion of the identity of Aeneas, see Kai Brodersen, Stadtverteidigung: Poliorketika, 2017, 7–11.

~~138 Aeneas Tacticus Proem. ὅσοις, ἄν τὶ σφάλμα.~~

~~139 Poliorcetica. Pref.~~

~~126 probably a general, and yet we do not find in him a style that is devoid of rhetoric or philosophy.~~

From Aeneas Tacticus, we see the development of a “Roman” Greek tradition in the works of Asclepiodotus and his successors. Asclepiodotus, about whom very little is known, has been called “the earliest among the later tacticians,”140 and therefore exemplifies an important period of transition in the history of technical Greek. By the 1st century BC, when Ascelopiodotus wrote, military matters had become a subject of interested study and learned speculation for philosophers and men of letters, and treatises that dealt with these topics were no longer in the main composed by veterans. In the wake of Rome’s rise to Mediterranean hegemony, opportunities for Greeks to distinguish themselves on the battlefield largely vanished. Instead, they became clerks, administrators, and men of letters, close enough to power to influence the powerful but never able to exercise it.141

Through the second century AD, the association of military treatises with men of leisure able to devote themselves to the cultivation of letters grew stronger. The best example of this trend is surely Arrian of Nicomedia, today primarily known as the historian of The Anabasis of Alexander.142 As the title of his most famous work

~~140 Charles Henry Oldfather, ed., Aeneas Tacticus, Asclepiodotus, Onasander, trans. Charles Henry Oldfather et al. (London: Heinemann, 1923), 231.~~

~~141 Josephus is a good example of a learned “Greek” captive who came in defeat to serve his Roman masters.~~

142 For Arrian’s life, literary models, and influence, see Pamela Mensch and James S. Romm, eds., The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander: Anabasis Alexandrou (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).

127 demonstrates, Arrian had a conscious program of imitating Xenophon, going so far as to produce works on hunting in addition to his histories and tactical manuals.143 In addition to this work on military history and science, Arrian assiduously compiled the teachings of his master, the stoic philosopher Epictetus.144 The shorter of these compilations, the

~~Encheiridion, though little read today, is one of the most influential texts written and~~

~~Greek. In his union of the technical and the practical, Arrian was the model of the Roman gentleman in what many consider to have been its greatest period.~~

As in many other fields, this tradition suffered eclipse in the third century, but it was revived in the fourth, primarily in Latin, and continued into the sixth century with writers such as Boethius and Cassiodorus.145 While contemporary scholars tend to denigrate this literature produced by leisured dilettantes, Boethius himself in De Musica argued that the educated judge is better able to appreciate music than the trained performer,146 and if the goal of musical study is to inculcate a sense of order, he may have been right.

143 Phillips and Willcock provide nearly the only scholarly account of this work produced in the last century and a half. A. A. Phillips and Malcolm M. Willcock, Xenophon & Arrian, On Hunting (Kynēgetikos) (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999).

144 For an evaluation of “Arrian the philosopher,” see Hendrik Selle, “Dichtung oder Wahrheit – der Autor der epiktetischen Predigten,” Philologus - Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption 145, no. 2 (2001): 269–290.

145 Cassiodorus’ Institutiones built the framework upon which the early medieval curriculum was built. Boethius had intended to produce a complete series of textbooks on the liberal arts, but only finished his De Arithmetica and De Instiutione Musica before his execution.

~~146 De Institutione Musica. Pref.~~

~~128 3.7 Rebuilding the Roman Tradition of Technical Greek~~

~~As is the case with Byzantine culture generally in the period ca. 650-800, there is a lack of continuity in the production of Fachliteratur in the period following Maurice.~~

The military disasters of the seventh century, the decreased resources of the empire, and the establishment of an environment hostile to the majority of intellectuals surely discouraged the production of encheiridia just as much as these factors contributed to the interruption of the writing of literary history, the construction of churches, and the composition of epic and liturgical poetry.147 The absence of new encheiridia during a time when contemporary scholars imagine that the need for such compendia of practical knowledge was most acute reinforces what has already been said about the authorial and generic conventions of ancient Fachliteratur, which contrasts so boldly with modern expectations of what a technical treatise should be. The authors of such treatises were almost never, as we have seen, practitioners. Even when they were, the manuals they wrote were mediated through an established literary tradition. This produced the appearance of sameness, anachronism, and stagnation, for which they have been criticized for much of the last half millennium. But such criticisms do not recognize that, as in the case of “Hieron of Byzantium,” the old form conceals much that is new.

~~Conformity to ancient canons, using the right linguistic register, and even making the same apologia for a humbler style than one would find in Kunstprosa,148 were all~~

~~147 The renewal of these fields in the late ninth and early tenth centuries has been the impetus from recognizing a “Macedonian Renaissance.”~~

~~148 Maurice, Leo, and Constantine VII make almost identical defenses of their use of a humble style and the inclusion of foreign and technical terms.~~

~~129~~

strategies deployed to foster the appearance of stability and thereby, in some way, to bring it about in reality. Once again, literary mimesis re-presents contemporary innovations as being in substantial continuity in the past, or even as being restorations of what has been lost. There is a certain radicalism in the Byzantine re-appropriation of its

~~Roman past that better resembles recapitulation than recreation, a desire to restore sentiments and modes of thinking than concrete realities.~~

The approach of the early Macedonian emperors to the technical tradition they inherited is best understood as a synthesis of several pre-existing models. Just as Arrian, the Roman gentleman sought to imitate Xenophon, so the Latin writers of the fourth and fifth century were re-presenting Arrian. Likewise, the Macedonians sought to emulate

~~Maurice, who was himself looking back two centuries to Vegetius and Eutropius. By the tenth-century, the scholar-soldier-gentleman was a well-established type with a complex pedigree.~~

Although primarily known for his legal and theological writings, that Leo, like his son Constantine, never went on campaign certainly does not mean that he was disinterested in war or was wholly focused on the works of peace.149 Leo VI studied

~~Maurice intensely throughout his life, producing two works substantially derived from the Strategikon. The first of these, which has been published under the title Leonis VI~~

~~Sapientis Problemata,150 was the work of his youth and has attracted very little scholarly~~

~~149 See Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886-912), 168.~~

~~150 Alphonse Dain, ed., Leonis VI Sapientis Problemata (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1935).~~

130 attention.151 It is couched in something like the form of a dialogue and resembles to a great degree a doctrinal catechism, in a strict question and answer format apparently arranged for ease of reference and memorization. The Problemata are preserved in a single manuscript, which is unfortunately mutilated, leaving the beginning of the work and whatever programmatic preface it may once have had, lost to history. Leo organizes his questions into logoi, each of which center on a particular theme.

The form of some of these questions indicate that Leo already in his youth had established the intellectual habits that would earn him the epithet “the Wise” after his death. The second question of logos Β´, τί ἴδιον στρατηγίας, uses the language of

Aristotle’s Categories, probably mediated through Porphyry’s Eisagoge, to discuss the properties of strategy. The definition that Leo finds in Maurice explains what exactly is the domain of strategy. The immediately following problema asks, τί τέχνης πολεμικῆς

γνώρισμα. The two questions together show that young Leo was already making a subtle distinction between “strategy” and “the art of war,” and that he had developed an understanding of the philosophical categories of τί ἴδιον and γνώρισμα.

~~Most people who have studied ancient philosophy are familiar with the primary~~

~~Aristotelian distinction, traditionally rendered in English by the Latin genus and species.~~

~~This is similar to but not identical with Aristotle’s metaphysical distinction between essence and substance. According to Porphyry’s Eisagoge, which served in both the~~

~~Latin West and the Greek East as an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, τί ἴδιον (Lat. proprium) is an accident that is of the essence but is not the essence. Aristotle’s own~~

~~151 Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886-912), 168.~~

131 example is that of “risability,” Greek, the capacity for laughter that all human beings possess but that nevertheless does not, in itself, make them human. The γνώρισμα of a thing, on the other hand Again, where one would expect a “simple, unadorned style” one finds a complex, philosophically tinged diction. The following problema is even more explicitly philosophical, with its use of ἀποδεικτέον and κάλον. The first word is a -τε- adjective of the sort that is quite common in De Cerimoniis and calques the Latin gerundive in technical Greek. The word also is closely related to the Platonic doctrine of appearances and their relation to underlying transcendentals, of which τὸ καλόν is, along with the good, and the true, one of the canonical trinity of instantiations of the One (or later, the Christian God). The answer that Leo provides to his question is a clear indication of his support for the mimetic style of leadership that is found, as we have seen, both in Platonic theoretical and Roman practical philosophy. This contrasts to some degree with the style of Leo’s later and much more famous Taktika, which the emperor intended to be read by (or to) his generals for their instruction.152

If the Problemata was something like the private notebook that Leo kept from his study of his illustrious predecessor’s Strategikon, the Taktika was his synthetic presentation of his gleanings for the practically minded and less well-educated officers of his army. We can therefore trace to some extent the process by which Leo gained theoretical knowledge and how he chose to present that to an audience interested in practical philosophy.

~~152 Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI.~~

~~132~~

Leo got his knowledge of military affairs from intense study rather than on the battlefield, but it is possible that in the eyes of his contemporaries, this would have been more to his credit than his shame. There is a growing appreciation of the importance of moral factors in warfare generally, and even some discussion that in the ancient and medieval world, given the relatively even technological standing of belligerents, it was more important than material or logistic factors.153 That they fought for a philosopher king who could deliver highly wrought homilies at the Great Church may well have been more inspiring to the tenth-century Roman than being led by an unlearned but battle- hardened soldier general.

The question of authorship when dealing with the encheiridia whether they deal with explicit paraenesis, medicine, engineering, or military matters, is difficult to define.154 Byzantine literature’s strong focus on mimesis and its consequent deemphasis of originality upsets one of the major canons of modern literary study. The text of Leo’s

~~Taktika is represented by three manuscript families.155 The second of these, which~~

~~George T. Dennis took to be a sort of paraphrase or alternative recension, is headed by~~

~~Cod. Ambros. B. 119 sup.,156 a tactical miscellany of the early second half of the tenth~~

153 Fernando Echevarría Rey, Ciudadanos, campesinos y soldados: el nacimiento de la polis griega y la teoria de la revolucion hoplita (Madrid: Polifemo, 2008) discusses the problems of applying modern notions of “technological determinism” to ancient warfare, which, mutatis mutandis, apply equally to medieval warfare.

154 See Pizzone (2014) for studies of the problem of authorship in studying anonymous literature of the Middle Byzantine period, see Aglae M. V. Pizzone, The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature: Modes, Functions, and Identities (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).

~~155 Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI, x–xii.~~

~~156 For details, see Carlo Maria Mazzucchi, “Dagli anni di Basilio Parakimomenos (Cod. Ambr. B 119 sup.),” Aevum 52, no. 2 (1978): 267–316.~~

133 century, i.e., during the reign of Constantine VII. It is a sibling or daughter of “the authentic text,” exemplified by Mediceo-Laurentianus graecus, 55, 4, which was kept in the imperial library and would have been the text that Constantine VII read during his periods of study. While it is less useful for the constitution of the text as it left Leo’s (or his amanuensis’) pen, the Ambrosian manuscript provides insight into how such a text was used by its intended audience. The Ambrosian manuscript is more “practical,” in the modern sense, than the Mediceo-Laurentianus. Its linguistic register is lower than that of the authentic text, and its arrangement is more chaotic.

~~Many scholars regard the Taktika of Leo VI as a “re-edition” of Maurice’s~~

Strategikon,157 citing its direct quotation of the earlier work in many places and a substantial similarity in organization. Why one should regard the two manuscript families of the Taktika discussed above as recensions of the same work, but the Taktika as something distinct from Maurice’s Strategikon and not merely a recension of it, is a question with no easy solution. Dennis, in his edition of the Taktika states that the various manuscript families do not fit into clear genealogical relationships, with that deriving from the Ambrosian manuscript being so heavily adapted that it constitutes a paraphrase.158 Further, he states that material from the Taktika appears in some 88 manuscripts down to the sixteenth century.159 None of these, of course, provide material useful for Dennis’ task of critically reconstructing the original text of the Taktika, but

~~157 Antonopoulou, The Homilies of the Emperor Leo VI, 10; Kazhdan, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 2008; Haldon, Warfare, State and Society, 110; Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI, ix.~~

~~158 Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI, xii.~~

~~159 Dennis, xii–xiii.~~

~~134 they do show the continuing interest in the ancient wisdom the book was thought to contain. Detailed study of these manuscripts would no doubt reveal what parts of the~~

~~Taktika later centuries thought most useful in their own circumstances, but that is a task for students of reception rather than textual editors.~~

The Taktika, if considered a recension of the Strategikon, becomes an occasionally trustworthy witness to the earlier text that can be safely ignored due to the fortunate survival of manuscripts of the Strategikon, a somewhat rare example of an early work whose later reformulation did not doom its exemplar to oblivion.160 Continuing in this fashion, the Strategikon is itself a recension of Vegetius’ Epitoma, which derives from Cato and a number of other ancient Roman military writers, so that each successive iteration is a corrupted form of an original text originating some two centuries before

~~Christ and persisting in some form through the eighteenth century of our era.161~~

On the other hand, one could claim that each excerpt, paraphrase, translation, and adaptation of this material constitutes a separate literary work, and one then would be left with a bewilderingly complex library of more or less related texts, each requiring its own share of detailed, critical attention.162 Both models seem too rigid to capture the elusive

160 It is a truism that the existence epitomes and compilations tends to discourage the copying of the longer works from which they derive. Cf. Constantine VII’s Excerpta Historica, which is in many cases the only witness for the historians it excerpts.

161 Allmand begins his story in the fourth century and ends essentially with Machiavelli at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but he does glance back to see where Vegetius came from. Allmand, “Vegetius’De Re Militari.”

162 This was the approach of Andrieu’s edition of the Ordines Romani, which, although it was the product of massive labor and erudition, is, along with the Harvard Servius, an example of applying Lachmannian analysis too rigidly to a very messy textual tradition. Michel Andrieu, Les ordines romani du haut moyen âge (Louvain: Spicilegium sacrum lovaniense bureaux, 1931).

~~135~~

~~relationship that exists among these texts and manuscripts, but which the term tradition, left undefined, admirably comprehends.163~~

While it may appear that Leo VI was merely copying his predecessor who in turn was repeating what centuries of military thinkers had already written, one should be sensitive to the subtle ways in which Leo and the Macedonians in generally made the tradition their own, an effective instrument for presenting their vision of a recovered and reimplemented Roman tradition. Although she does not examine the Taktika in depth in her study of the homilies of Leo VI, Theodora Antonopoulou comments that “[t]he military and legislative works of Leo are not devoid of literary merit. It has been observed that in the Novels’ rhetoricity is more important than real legal thought, and the language is full of metaphors, rhetorical figures, and references to rhetorical texts, which give the legal text the character of parainesis and preaching.”164 For this reason, examining the form of these works is as important, or even more important, than the is the content for explaining their literary and social purpose.

As we have seen, the General Rules, in both their Latin and Greek forms, are a type of practical philosophy, far more popular and influential than any of the stratagems or specific instructions for commanding, moving, and supplying an army that Vegetius,

Maurice, and Leo included in their military treatises. The continuing value for medieval readers of ancient military lore was not the antiquarian material that it preserved but the moral instruction that it provided. Their long afterlife in both Latin and Greek, especially

~~163 For a brief, scholarly discussion of the nature of tradition, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).~~

~~164 Antonopoulou, The Homilies of the Emperor Leo VI, 19.~~

~~136 in the work of Leo VI, shows the renewal of interest in the “Roman Way” as mediated through late antique manuals that would only become stronger in the reign of Constantine~~

~~VII.165 The trick of the Macedonian dynasty was to fill old wineskins with new wine, to master the art of presenting innovation while preserving the appearance of stability.~~

~~Some indication of the stability of the literary tradition in which they worked can be seen in its definition of the “first duty” of a commander. In Xenophon’s Cavalry~~

Commander, that which is πρῶτον χρῆ166 is sacrifice to the gods. Xenophon says that such piety confers divine favor on the commander, his friends, and his state and is the best means for ensuring that the thoughts, words, and actions of the commander are in accord with divine will. Onasander, almost 700 years later uses much the same words in two places to stress the importance of maintaining divine friendship and especially of its necessity as a preliminary to battle.167 Christianized, this duty of the commander to seek divine favor for his men is mirrored in the works of Maurice and Leo. The first of

~~Maurice’s gnomika is that the commander should worship God before exposing himself to danger, so that he may be sure of God’s friendship when danger strikes.168 In the~~

165 The encyclopedia of equine medicine known as the Hippiatrika presents a similarly rich (or convoluted) textual and reception history, with twists and turns leading back and forth through Greek and Latin versions. In his “Two Notes on the Hippiatrica,” Fischer discusses the connection of Vegetius’ Mulomedicina to the Hippiatrika and one of its major late antique sources, Pelagonius. K. D. Fischer, “Two Notes on the Hippiatrica,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 20 (1979): 371–79. For the Hippiatrika’s place in tenth-century Byzantine culture, see Anne Elena McCabe, A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine: The Sources, Compilation, and Transmission of the Hippiatrica, Oxford Studies in Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 260–62.

~~166 PH 1.1.~~

~~167 See Strategikon 5 and 10, especially 10.26.~~

~~168 Πρὸ τῶν κινδύνων ὁ στρατηγὸς θεραπευέτω τὸ θεῖον·~~

137 second constitution of his Taktika, “On the Qualities Required in the General,”169 Leo takes the Christianizing impulse a step further, framing these sentiments in explicitly theological terms couched in almost liturgical language.170 In the next two paragraphs,

Leo shifts to a homiletic, exhortatory style, addressing the general directly and arguing that he keep the love of God before his eyes always as his primary concern.171 He closes this second constitution with an account of command that implicitly combines the antique notion of emulation with the Christian idea of sanctification, both of which propose that one should live a life based on the imitation of models and thereby become a model for others.172

~~In this use of explicitly Christian language, it is significant that Leo breaks with the tradition of indirect command that we have seen is a key generic marker of “technical~~

Greek.” Leo’s use of the vocative times with the second person singular imperative stands in stark contrast with the usual style common to Hellenistic and Roman manuals, but it is in keeping with the paraenetic style of Basil I’s 66 Chapters,173 which Leo’s father wrote (or had written by Photios) when Leo was a prince. In this work, the second person singular imperative is used throughout, as well as direct address and the use of

~~169 Tak. 2, Περὶ τοῦ οἷον εἶναι δεῖ τὸν στρατηγόν~~

170 The proem begins with an invocation of the Trinity with language shaped by the Sign of the Cross and the Creed: Ἐν ὀνόματι τοῦ Πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ Υἱοῦ καὶ τοῦ Ἁγίου Πνεύματος, τῆς ἁγίας (3) καὶ ὁμοουσίου καὶ προσκυνητῆς Τριάδος, τοῦ ἑνὸς καὶ μόνου ἀληθινοῦ Θεοῦ ἡμῶν, Λέων, ὁ εἰρηνικὸς ἐν Χριστῷ αὐτοκράτωρ, πιστός, εὐσεβής, ἀεισέβαστος, (5) αὔγουστος. In Tak. 2.21, Leo ends his discussion of the ideal general with a prayer.

~~171 Tak. 2.22-23.~~

~~172 Tak. 2.32.~~

~~173 This text has not been edited or studied in some three centuries.~~

138 second person singular pronouns. This language positions the work as a dialogue, with subjective appeals to virtuous action, rather than the (ostensibly) objective narration of principles that we have seen are typical of the “technical Greek” of the manuals. In contrast to the first-person plurals we have noted above, there is also in the 66 Chapters the frequent appearance of the first-person singular pronoun and its associated verbal forms. The frequent appearance of ἐγώ is particular striking, as its use is emphatic, further positioning the work as an intimate communication between father and son. The appearance of the emperor as author or interlocutor, whether it is a fact, a literary device, or something in between, like the collaboration of contemporary politicians with ghostwriters, presents a new facet of the imperial office, one not seen before, and characteristic of the early Macedonians.

~~The “I” of Basil I’s 66 Chapters is absent alike from Epictetus’ Encheiridion, its~~

~~Christian adaptations, and the manual literature. It is somewhat present in Marcus~~

~~Aurelius, and clear also in the proem and first chapter of Constantine VII’s De~~

~~Administrando Imperio, which not coincidentally is addressed to his son.174 Marcus~~

Aurelius’ celebrated book of maxims and memorable sayings presents itself as something like the emperor’s private commonplace book, and modern scholarship has not upset this picture. Likewise, the editors of De Administrando Imperio consider it to have been something like a “top secret” manual of diplomacy and point to its scanty manuscript

174 The first words of the proem are, Υἱὸς σοφὸς εὐφραίνει πατέρα, καὶ πατὴρ φιλόστοργος ἐπὶ υἱῷ τέρπεται φρονίμῳ. The father-son dialogue continues in this frame throughout the work.

139 tradition as evidence of the small size of its intended and actual audiences.175 In each of these cases, the imperial “I” appears in the context of a more or less private communication not intended for wide publication. In the prooimia of the Byzantine law codes and of Justinian I, as well as in Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis, the first-person plural, that is the “royal we,” dominates. This marks the “I” literature as something special, and it is significant that only three of the very few works that claim direct imperial authorship use the first-person singular, and all were written by three successive generations of the Macedonian dynasty. That this “I” and the use of direct address of the reader appear in their works seems to be something like a family tradition. These stylistic features connect the emperors’ works to the parainetic and homiletic traditions and therefore must go some way towards explaining why Leo VI and Constantine VII had reputations for learning and wisdom, both philosophical and theological.

While the main body of De Cerimoniis lacks the emphatic direct address of Leo’s writings, Constantine declares his moral purpose in the preface and in the three treatises appended to the manual in the only surviving manuscript. The particular place of that preface in the cultural project of Constantine VII and the Macedonian dynasty more generally is the subject of the next chapter. The relationship of the three appendices to De

~~Cerimoniis proper, and indeed, of the first and second books of De Cerimoniis to each other, is a vexed interpretive and editorial problem.176 These appendices center on~~

~~175 See Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, ed. Gyula Moravcsik and Romilly James Heald Jenkins, New, rev. ed. (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967).~~

~~176 John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35.~~

~~140~~

preparing the army for an expedition under the command of an emperor, and thus their inclusion among the mass of ceremonial instructions that make up De Cerimoniis has been a source of consternation for modern scholars.177

The first, which Haldon calls Text A, is a simple listing of the camp sites or stations at which the army on campaign should stop and what officials should join the army at each step of the journey. The second, Text B, is an historical account of how

Constantine I and Julius Caesar managed their own campaigns, with precise discussion of how and when they took their meals, among other matters. The third, Text C, is much closer in form to Book I of De Cerimoniis and uses the same necessity formulas that show a concern for prescribing what ought to be done rather than with describing what is done.178 While the three together may upset the expectations of the modern scholar as to what should be considered the subject of a ceremonial manual, it is not difficult to imagine that the first and shortest treatise was intended to set the scene for what follows.

As we have seen, the outward similarities, and for Roman tradition, the spiritual identity, of a general on campaign and a general in a triumphant procession are enough to unite this disparate material. The stational procession of the general, or later, the emperor, is

177 However the three treatises precisely relate to DC and the rest of Constantine’s oeuvre, in general it seems that they represent a sort of thematic halfway point between two types of taxis, the military and the ceremonial. Stylistically, we see the impersonal, objective style of De Cerimoniis flowing into the explicit hortatory style of his father’s treatises. Perhaps Bury was correct in identifying these three short pieces as leftovers from the editorial processes from which DC and DAI arose, with scribes uncertain of the destination of these scraps.

~~178 As elsewhere in Constantine VII’s works and to a lesser extent technical Greek in general, the δεῖ/χρὴ + inf. formula is the chief organizing principle of the text.~~

~~141 one and the same whether it takes place in the City or in the field, and it, in some mysterious way, both commemorates past victories and foreshadows the eternal victory.~~

While scholars have focused on the logistical importance of the stational route described in Text A, it is important here to note that the ceremonial aspects of mustering could be just as important. If one keeps the essentially moral purpose of much of ancient and medieval Fachliteratur in mind, it is easy to subsume this brief description of camp sites into the overarching but imperfectly executed framework of De Cerimoniis.

Practically minded commentators may argue that ensuring a sufficient supply of water and food is much more important than the fulfillment of any ceremonial duty, but according to the ancient military tradition and the experience of modern strategists and effective commanders, soldiers can go without and perform superhuman deeds if morale is high.179 For the tenth-century Byzantines, this meant performing the millennial ritual of

~~Roman victoria.~~

~~Text B consists of two sections of approximately equal length. The first purports to record the manner in which Constantine I prepared to go on campaign, while the~~

179 The Eastern Front of the Second World War presents examples both for and against the power of morale and materiel. No number of special awards or resurrected heraldry could make up for the Wehrmacht’s logistical problems and manpower shortages that became acute already in 1942 and never really recovered. But the power of historical mimesis was not lost on Stalin, who after months of defeat in 1941, brought back tsarist-era “Guards” designations and banners for units that had distinguished themselves in the field. Along with his revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, such moves helped Stalin transform the conflict from a showdown between Nazism and Bolshivism into a “Great Patriotic War” to save the Motherland from foreign invaders. For an analysis of how such “honorifics” worked alongside material improvements in the Soviet army to increase combat effectiveness, see Aaron Glantz, How America Lost Iraq (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2005), 144–46. For insight into what one writer calls the “mobilization of tradition,” the rehabilitation of Orthodoxy and tsarist trappings, see R. J. Overy, Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow (New York: TV Books, 1997). In historical and contemporary “counterinsurgency” conflicts, such as the Vietnam War and the United States’ engagement in Afghanistan, the power of “soft factors,” such as news coverage, ideology, and even social media, have been revealed to be force multipliers in asymmetric warfare.

~~142~~

second claims to be an account of Julius Caesar’s conduct on campaign.180 Although modern scholars have again focused on questions of dating, descent, and the operations of a somewhat inept editorial hand, they have not considered the rhetorical or philosophical importance of this text. Unlike De Cerimoniis and technical Greek generally, text B is written almost entirely in the past tense and claims to be an historical document. It provides examples rather than precepts. Ascribing a certain taxis kai akolouthia to glorious predecessors implies a duty to engage in mimesis or aemulatio.

~~Text C forms a bridge between the “top secret” manuals of statecraft, De~~

~~Administrando Imperio and De Thematibus and the “public” compendia, like De~~

Cerimoniis. Both present features of “technical Greek,” and in the several recensions that the unique manuscript of De Cerimoniis preserves,181 one can almost see the progression from one form to the other taking place. Text C mostly consists of the gnomic descriptions common to Fachliteratur with headings punctuated by the particle δέ.

Within the longer sections, impersonalizing formulae, such as μετὰ το + inf., εἰ δέ, ὅτε δέ, and ὀφείλει δέ interleave with the necessity formulae χρή, δέον, and ἰστέον to present a de-historicized account of how an imperial expedition should be conducted. At the beginning and end of the main body of C, Constantine VII has added a preface and concluding remarks in which he directly addresses his son, Romanos, as he does in DAI.

180 There are reasons to doubt the identity of the emperors as B reports them. Haldon believes that the procedures detailed correspond to a much later date and that the editor of B has substituted the names of these famous Roman leaders to cover over the names of Isaurian emperors, a sort of damnatio memoriae for those the Macedonians regarded as responsible for Iconoclasm. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 45–46.

~~181 If, as seems likely, text A and B were earlier drafts of material incompletely incorporated into C.~~

143 Constantine says that after much searching, he located a treatise on imperial expeditions composed by the magistros Leo Katakylas during the time of his father, Leo VI.182 While he found the contents praiseworthy, Constantine states, echoing a metaphor he uses in the preface, that Katakylas’ style made his subject appear “in the footprints of a phantom.”

The negligent style obscured the sense and was not equal to the dignity of the subject. In particular, Constantine complains of Katakylas’ barbarisms, solecisms, and errors in syntax, that he was “μούσης Ἑλληνικῆς ἀμέτοχος.”183

Haldon documents instances of “stylistic upgrading” in the two surviving recensions of material that appears in C.184 The changes are relatively minor and consist of atticizing orthography, the substitution of the genitive for the accusative after prepositions when classical usage would require it, and the introduction hyperbaton. In the absence of additional evidence, it is impossible to discover to what extent Constantine

~~VII remodeled Leo Katakylas’ text. The sequencing formula mentioned above are in keeping with usage in De Cerimoniis, and contrast with the historical style of B.~~

In addition to normalizing Katakylas’ text, Constantine’s chief contribution to C are the proem and concluding remarks. The proem begins with words reminiscent of a monastic rule and recalling his father’s homilies.185 Constantine refers to himself as

~~Solomon and explains that the work arises out of the great φροντίς that he has applied.~~

~~182 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 95–96.~~

~~183 Haldon, 96, ln. 30.~~

~~184 Haldon, 48.~~

~~185 Ἄκουε υἱέ, λόγους πατρός σου, Σολομῶν σοι παρακελεύεται. Haldon, 94.~~

144 This term is one of great importance for the religio-political role of the emperor and figures in the prefaces of many Byzantine legal works.186 The emperor’s concern in this case has been directed at achieving τῶν πραγμάτων γνῶσις and explication τῶν

ἀναγκαίων. The editor has rendered these last two as “a knowledge of practical affairs” and “affairs of state.” These translations could be derived from the context, but the terms have of course much wider connotations. In the absence of modifiers, it could be argued that what Constantine intended to direct his son’s attention towards virtuous actions and those things that are metaphysically necessary. Reducing these often philosophical terms to the merely mundane level of the affairs of state seems too limiting. Returning to themes seen throughout his works, Constantine argues for the importance of εὐτολμία and εὐταξία, which the editor, using military language, renders as “courage” and

~~“discipline,” but which in the context of Constantine’s other writings, have much wider, even cosmic, significance.~~

Showing once again that these appendices are drafts, Constantine’s concluding address to his son is followed by an historical appendix that is somewhat clumsily linked to the preceding material, as if its first part had been intended to end the book and that the discovery of new material required a hasty transition to stitch a brief historical account to what had been a tidy description of procedures. Constantine stresses the need for the emperor to know all things, to be ignorant of nothing and to exercise σπουδή in

~~186 See Herbert Hunger, Prooimion: Elemente der byzantinischen Kaiseridee in den Arengen der Urkunden (Vienna: In Kommission be H. Böhlaus Nachf, 1964).~~

~~145~~

researching what has come before.187 He wraps Katakylas’ treatise in a vision of the imperial duty that equates courage and knowledge and stresses the need for applying the lessons of the past to present action.

~~With the addition of this moral framework, Constantine’s intervention in~~

Katakylas’ work amounts to “generic upgrading,” analogous to the “stylistic upgrading” scholars have long recognized in the atticizing recensions of earlier works in a period slightly later than that of the Porphyrogennetos.188 In adopting the homilary tone of many of his father’s works, Constantine seeks to reconnect the broken tradition of practical philosophy, to repair the bridge between works of technical and moral instruction. His inclusion and remodeling of historical material in C, whether it was intended for De

Cerimoniis or some other unknown work, shows Constantine’s concern for imposing a theory of exemplary emulation on a work of “merely” technical interest. If Haldon is correct in assuming that in text B, the names “Constantine” and “Julius Caesar” have been pasted over those of Isaurian emperors,189 it seems that the need to ascribe a practice, even of a relatively recent period, to a glorious predecessor was strong in the tenth-century. Although Constantine VII appears to disavow this attempt at censorship,

~~187 Haldon here translates προσηκόντων as “necessary,” but could it not be better rendered as “precedent?”~~

188 See Høgel, Metaphrasis for metaphrasis in hagiography. For non-hagiographic literature, the wordlists in Herbert Hunger and Ihor Ševčenko, eds., Des Nikephoros Blemmydes βασιλικὸς Ἀνδριάς und dessen Metaphrase von Georgios Galesiotes und Georgios Oinaiotes: ein weiterer Beitrag zum Verständnis der byzantinischen Schrift-Koine, Wiener byzantinistische Studien ; Bd. 18 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986), 255–304 remain foundational. For the Byzantine understanding of the phenomenon, see Daria D. Resh, “Toward a Byzantine Definition of Metaphrasis,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 55, no. 3 (2015): 754–787.

~~189 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 42.~~

~~146 he is careful to note that the order for imperial expeditions has the approbation of his ancestor Basil, even if it does derive from the Isaurians, who wandered far from the~~

~~Orthodox faith.190~~

These works Leo and Constantine produced and the styles they used are components of a general cultural movement to establish the holder of the imperial office not only as a military victory and living source of law, but also as a learned authority, a sort of arbiter of knowledge as well as the chief guardian and interpreter of the Roman tradition. Paul Magdalino has called this largely successful movement of the second and third Macedonian emperors “knowledge in authority.”191 Magdalino argues that sophia was an attribute often claimed by emperors and that became an essential rhetorical or performative component of the imperial persona. In contrast, attempts by emperors to put their sophia into practice and interpose themselves in philosophical or theological matters usually resulted in their embarrassment and their condemnation by later generations.192

~~Only two emperors, according to Magdalino’s interpretation, escaped this general fate:~~

~~Leo VI and Constantine VII. In his study of the literary work of these two learned men,~~

Magdalino focuses on their shared concern for legal codification, as well as their peculiar fields of interest: theology for Leo and history for Constantine. While he does mention the Fachliteratur produced under both men, Magdalino is more interested in what it reveals about the emperors’ views of history than the specific aims of the works that

~~190 Haldon, 97.~~

~~191 Magdalino, “Byzantine Encyclopaedism of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries,” 189–209.~~

~~192 Magdalino singles out Justin I and Michael II as examples of emperors whose refusal to play the part of sophos damaged the legitimacy of their rule. Magdalino, 189.~~

~~147~~

modern scholars place under this rubric.193 But it is important to note that the taxis enshrined in both Leo’s Taktika and Constantine’s De Cerimoniis also served as instruments of asserting and performing their authority over their subordinates, whether in the field or at court. Indeed, an emperor who was not only the source of law, a subtle philosopher, an inspiring preacher, and an accomplished historian, but also learned in medicine, military tactics, economics, and ceremony would be a sovereign close both to

~~God and his subjects, able to bridge the divide between the mundane and cosmic orders and to provide a synthesis of theoretical and the practical.~~

That Leo and Constantine were able to play this role so well is surely an important component of the positive reception they enjoyed after their deaths and the strong legitimacy that they were able, almost uniquely in Byzantine politics,194 to claim and maintain for their line. As Magdalino suggests, their performance in many ways can be said to have passed from the realm of rhetorical posturing and to have been realized in actuality. The style of Leo and Constantine, even in their most avowedly practical works, is never absent of the move toward the theological or the philosophical, and in the case of

~~Constantine, there is always, as Psellos recognized, a concern for rhetorical language.195~~

~~The two emperors stay within the conventions of the millennial tradition of Greco-Roman~~

~~Fachliteratur while adding the sometimes explicit flavor of the fiery preacher and the scholarly philosopher. The authority of the emperor is thus extended, especially in the~~

~~193 Magdalino, 207–8.~~

~~194 In Byzantium, the dynastic principle was often proclaimed but rarely realized. See Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 34–35.~~

~~195 Historia Syntomos 102.~~

148 reign of Constantine VII, to include nearly all facets of culture and knowledge. Their works preserve features of the traditional language of “technical Greek” while remodeling it in ways that befit the dignity of a sovereign author rather than the careful circumlocution necessary when writing for a sovereign audience. The changes are subtle, and the mimetic impulse is strong, so the innovative features of this imperial modification of “technical Greek” are, like the esoteric, philosophical subtext of Fachliteratur, elusive unless one is careful to look for them. Nevertheless, these changes are important for both the development of Byzantine letters and the theory of the imperial office. In a way that by no means replaced the Augustan, Diocletianic, Constantinian, Justinianic, or Heraclian models of rulership, the Macedonian contribution to Fachliteratur and “technical Greek” brought the emperors into fields they had never before occupied. Whatever the circumstances of their composition, the works the Leo and Constantine wrote or to which they gave their names present the emperors as authors and authorities. The theory of practice flows from the emperor’s knowledge of a subject; it is no longer commissioned by him or offered to him by a loyal and learned subject. Once again, even in these treatises and compilations on diverse, practical matters, the Byzantine impulse for creative mimesis, for innovation through imitation, is evident. In ways that will become more apparent in the next chapter, Leo and Constantine were able to domesticate this least exalted literary form and use it as an instrument in their movement to restore order and establish the imperial office as the origin and arbiter of that order.

~~149 3.8 Morale, Practice, and Eternal Victory~~

The reconfiguration of technical literature and technical Greek along the lines of practical philosophy and a certain linguistic esotericism is in keeping with both the ancient and medieval “consensus” and with recent reevaluations of the importance of moral, rather than military factors in determining victory on the pre-twentieth century battlefield. Over the past century, military history has become more and more a story of the dominance of technology in warfare, with humankind engaged in a never ending arms race from the stone age to the present day.196 This model, which emerged shortly after the failure of élan, courage, and colorful uniforms to ensure victory in the face of mustard gas and machine guns during the first world war, explained well the evolution of warfare and the dominant modes of strategic thinking during the “short twentieth century.”

In the last quarter century, a changing geo-political landscape has occasioned drastic changes in the ways wars are fought and the end of “conventional warfare,” the type of highly organized, state run, and multi-year exercises in absolute war best exemplified by the Second World War. Strategic planners now confronted with the reality of warfare in the twenty-first century have been forced to elaborate new theories of counter-insurgency and asymmetric warfare to replace the old model of uniformed, national armies fighting campaigns and battles to gain military objectives while following

196 The “Military Revolution” of the modern world is not without its critics, as Parker and Addington acknowledge in the prefaces to the second editions of their books. Larry H. Addington, The Patterns of War since the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 266ff; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, 2nd ed.. (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Frank Jacob, The Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe: A Revision (New York: Palgrave, 2016).

~~150 the rules of international conventions.197 The difficulties encountered by both the United~~

~~States and the Russian Federation in the low-intensity and unconventional conflicts that have plagued their military establishments in the last two decades.198~~

The changed circumstances have unsurprisingly inspired historians to reexamine the relative weight they assign to material and moral factors in their explanations of the military success or failure of past cultures.199 Advances in archaeology have revealed that for most of its history, the Roman Empire, whether in its ancient or medieval phases, did not enjoy a significant technological advantage over its enemies.200 While there are some who still see in the hoplite’s bronze panoply, the Macedonian sarissa, or the Carthaginian elephant as unassailable superweapons, whose possession was sufficient to win the day, a more nuanced understanding of the role of “soft factors” or “social technologies” in warfare is emerging. In this view, the total wars of the twentieth century in hindsight

~~197 See David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (Carlton North: Scribe Publications, 2010), 29ff.~~

198 Despite overwhelming logistical and technological superiority, the US suffered an embarassing defeat in Vietnam, and the USSR’s efforts Afghanistan met with failure and contributed to the fall of the Soviet government. In the twenty-first centuries, these countries have continued to fight unpopular and asymmetric wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chechnya.

199 Keegan established a new way of doing military history that looked at the “experience of battle” from the soldiers’ perspective. John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (New York: Viking, 1989). Keegan’s case studies were Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, but Hanson applied his methodology to classical Greece, and Lendon encompassed the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Hanson, The Western Way of War; J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).With so much attention paid to the common soldier in the past decades, the time may be ripe to examine ancient and medieval leadership.

200 The development of military technology was fairly static in the iron age and outside of a few exceptions, such as the stirrup, technology rarely gave a belligerent an advantage, as novelties seem to have been incorporated by both sides rather quickly. And this was by no means a new phenomenon. The Roman army was originally organized into phalanges, a formation learned from their Greek neighbors to the south. By the third century BC, the time of the Second Punic War, the Roman legionary carried a Spanish sword, a Gallic helmet, and a Celtic shield.

~~151~~

appear more and more to have been anomalies rather than the telos of the previous millennia of military technological development. In its place, there is a growing appreciation for the remarkable stability of something like a warrior ethos throughout the centuries and its close connection to religion, art, ceremony, and philosophy.

In his study of “battles of the gods,” Everett Wheeler speaks of the Roman soldier’s “need for religious experience.”201 The private solider, as well as his commander, firmly believed in his “reliance on divine aid” in winning the day.202 To prove the prevalence of religious thinking in antiquity, Wheeler quotes Cicero ascribing

Roman victory to its dedication to traditional piety,203 and he provides numerous examples of Roman emperors and Hellenistic kings asking for or giving thanks for divine aid in battle, not without apparent genuine religious feeling or practical military outcome.

Wheeler states that the idea that the Roman army was somehow secularized in the late republic and that religion only becomes a dominant factor after Constantine is based on a too narrow reading of the extant literature. Furthermore, he says, “modern skepticism of divine intervention in military operations enjoys the privilege of hindsight and little appreciates the perceptions and feelings of participants in the actual events.”204 A deeper reading of the literature and especially the mass of archaeological evidence that indicate a

201 E. Wheeler, “Shock and Awe: Battles of the Gods in Roman Imperial Warfare, Part I,” in L’armée romaine et la religion sous le Haut-Empire romain: actes du quatrième Congrès de Lyon (26-28 octobre 2006), ed. Catherine Wolff and Yann Le Bohec (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), 225–67.

~~202 Wheeler, 227.~~

~~203 Wheeler, 229.~~

~~204 Wheeler (2006): 231. Wheeler, 231.~~

~~152 high degree of religiosity during this period help recover the lived experience of soldiers rather than repeated conclusions derived from the highly polished literary products of their commanders.~~

At least as far back as Onasander, commanders have recognized that “soldiers are far more courageous when they believe they are facing dangers with the good will of the gods[.]”205 Whether or not contemporary historians believe in a higher power, they must recognize that soldiers and commanders did, and that his belief had a practical impact on their combat effectiveness. A lack of sympathy with the belief of past ages should not cause scholars to dismiss the action of commanders in purely functional terms as cynical exercises in moral manipulation. One must remember that Machiavelli’s Prince and Art of War were revolutionary documents that made their break with the past explicit. It would be a mistake to underestimate the novelty of Machiavelli and project his lack of piety onto the princes of previous centuries.

And the mass of doctrines that make up the encheiridion tradition, whether one prefers to call it ideology or philosophy, in a similar way had an objective, if not precisely measurable, effect on the success of princes, armies, and states. Through a period of almost two thousand years, a robust tradition of practical philosophy was articulated in peculiar forms of Greek and Latin that became identified with the Roman

Empire and, in a special way, the emperor himself. Repeated and transformed down the centuries, it nonetheless constituted a stable tradition, capable of passing on a mentality and identity to soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, and emperors, all of whom saw themselves

~~205 Onasander 10.26.~~

153 as heirs tasked with maintaining and extending Romanitas, whether on the battlefield or at court. It is from this perspective that one should approach Constantine VII’s book of ceremonies. It was no less a manual of tactics than his father’s, and in its own day, it represented an effort to bring order and renewal to the Roman Empire through the pious imitation of the language and practice of the past. This imitation allowed Constantine VII to project an image both of his family and of his empire that shaped and continues to shape perceptions of Byzantium in arguably its last century of greatness.

~~154 CHAPTER 4~~

~~ANAMNESIS AND TYPOLOGY IN THE ACCLAMATIONS OF DE CERIMONIIS~~

~~4.1 Introduction~~

ὁμογλώττους ἐν πίστει τοὺς ἀλλογλώσσους ἑλκύσῃ…ἡ χαρὰ καὶ ἀνέγερσις τῶν Ῥωμαίων. May...the joy and exaltation of the Romans draw those who speak different languages to speak the same language in faith.1

So ends the third acclamation recited by the Blues at their reception of the emperor on Pentecost. The feast of Pentecost, with its focus on the gathering of nations and the divine establishment of a universal dominion, provided a ready-made occasion for the public presentation and ritual enactment of an apostolic empire headed by a divinely appointed emperor. Like much else at Byzantium, the celebration of Christian feasts produced a complex amalgam of classical, biblical, and Christian elements. Each of these components served to remind the people and the emperor of their past and define the direction of their future mission.

~~The study of acclamations and processions has produced a literature deep in insights into their ideological and sociological aspects,2 but little attention has so far been~~

~~1 DC R59.~~

2 The best study in English is Gregory S. Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), which brings an interdisciplinary approach informed by insights from ritual studies and musicology to the factual foundation provided by German surveys of the central twentieth century.

155 paid to the linguistic, rhetorical, and ritual features of the texts themselves. Furthermore, past scholars have tended to focus on the survival of classical and pagan features or on the practicalities of Byzantine public ritual rather than on the function it performed and the influence it had on its contemporary milieu.3 A close study of this textual evidence shows an undoubted continuity with acclamations going back at least as far as the Roman

~~Republic, but it also reveals a hitherto ignored or undetected yet deeply Christian sensibility, imbued with liturgico-typological resonance, and owing at least as much to~~

~~Christian liturgy as to pagan ritual.~~

In the case of acclamations, Byzantine mimesis was no mere aping of the past, but rather effected a baptism of the inherited glory of Rome.4 The purist tendencies of classical aesthetes of many centuries have characterized the resulting synthesis as a confusing congeries, but in their contemporary context, the acclamations are an integral and well-crafted component of the rediscovery and restoration of taxis undertaken by

~~Constantine VII.5 These acclamations, chanted at stations spanning the width of~~

3 The “rubricist” tradition is well represented by Francophone scholars, among whom the most notable are Vogt, Le livre des cérémonies; Nicolas Oikonomidès, Les listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles, Monde byzantin (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1972).

4 For the image of baptism and its role in the Christian tradition as establishing cosmic order, I am indebted to Kilian McDonnell, The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan: The Trinitarian and Cosmic Order of Salvation (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), 60–63.

5 For the importance of taxis in Byzantine political thought, see Hélène Ahrweiler, L’idéologie politique de l’Empire byzantin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975), 133–41.Ahrweiler considers taxis (order) to be, along with oikonomia, one of the two fundamental concepts in Byzantine thought. In her interpretation, taxis is mostly the province of political power, and oikonomia of the ecclesiastical. But taxis is important in theology, too. See Adam G. Cooper, The Body in St. Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57–64.That the word is multivalent and used in both political and theological discourse is a hinge in the argumentation of this chapter.

~~156~~

Constantinople by various corporate groups,6 year in and year out following the liturgical calendar as well as at the greatest state occasions, gave the emperor, the people, and the church opportunities to assert and perform a complex Roman and Christian identity that was embedded within a narrative that united salvation history with the mission of the

~~Roman polity.~~

~~A complete account of the acclamations would require an examination of the urban geography of Constantinople, a thorough anthropological study of Roman and~~

Greek religion, a theological exposition of Byzantine liturgy, and a consideration of various theories of Byzantine political ideology. It would also necessarily consider the evidence diachronically and make generalizations to encompass the Byzantine millennium. Although such a study would no doubt be useful, within the confines of the present chapter, the aim is, sine ira et studio, to examine how each of the aforementioned factors impact the current discussion, but to focus chiefly on the texts themselves as they appear in De Cerimoniis, with special attention paid to their linguistic, rhetorical, and literary qualities. The question of the various textual layers present in De Cerimoniis as well as the problems of performance, i.e., whether De Cerimoniis was intended as an inspirational sourcebook or a practical manual, are less important here than the text’s function as an idealized portrait of imperial ceremony in the service of Constantine VII’s wider cultural project.

~~6 DC R5-35 gives the prototype of the imperial procession from the Palace of Blachernae in the Northwest to Hagia Sophia at the extreme eastern tip of the peninsula.~~

~~157 4.2 Historical Orientation~~

The origins of Greco-Roman acclamations, like much else, are to be found in the ancient Near East.7 In these earliest records, the acclamations already served functions both religious and political. Charlotte Roueché defined an acclamation as, “the expression, in unison, of wish, opinion or belief, by a large gathering of people, often employing conventional rhythms and turns of phrase.”8 In antiquity, such expressions could be heard in rituals, at games, and in deliberative bodies, but it is their use to honor individuals that is the best attested and consequently the most studied. Given the fleeting nature of performance and the often improvised nature of texts,9 it is unsurprising that what must have been a pervasive feature of public life in antiquity has been imperfectly preserved, and that those examples that particular individuals, whether emperors or local grandees, had an interest in setting down in stone or writing, make up the bulk of our evidence. In these acclamations for individuals, there is a mixture of the political and the religious, and, as Roueché points out, a ritualistic linking, through the use of epithets and comparisons, of the acclamatus with an historic or divine personage.10

7 Theodor Klauser, “Akklamation,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt, ed. Franz Joseph Dölger et al. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1950).

~~8 Charlotte Roueché, “Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire: New Evidence from Aphrodisias,” The Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 181.~~

9 Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome, 177, but see Serena Connolly, “Constantine Answers the Veterans,” in From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: Later Roman History and Culture, 284-450 CE, ed. Scott McGill, Cristiana Sogno, and Edward Jay Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–115.

~~10 Roueché, “Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire,” 182, citing Livy 5.49.7, where Camillus is identified through acclamation with Romulus.~~

~~158~~

Roueché’s account is historical, and she is not concerned with teasing out the theoretical implications of such an identification. Nor, generally, have her successors been, whose interest has primarily been the function of acclamations in Roman and

Byzantine political economy. In particular, these studies stress the ways that emperors used acclamations as an instrument to claim and gain legitimacy and how the people exploited these occasions for material gain, to make requests, to air grievances, or even, in extreme cases, to rebel and attempt to depose a ruler.11 Such interpretations present acclamations as at worst, a cynical performance intended to maintain the appearance of the participation of the Senate and people in government, and at best, an atavistic preservation of republicanism in the deep structures of the Roman state.

While the elaboration of the historical development of acclamations and their function in imperial political culture have been well and usefully explicated, their religious and specifically liturgical features have not yet attracted the interest of scholars.

When discussing Byzantium, it is important to keep in view the polysemous both/and aspects of East Roman culture: Roman and Greek, Classical and Christian. Likewise, when examining cultural phenomena as complex as imperial ceremonies, one ought to acknowledge that such events could be occasion for both cynical power plays and genuine expressions or at least hopeful intentions of the harmonious pursuit of common goals by the collected people, rulers, and clergy of Byzantium. While avoiding an interpretation that would reduce these occasions to mere economics and politics, I seek to

~~11 Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome, 101ff.~~

~~159 build on such an understanding to gain perspective on the transcendent yearnings of which the acclamations and processions they accompanied were an expression.~~

~~4.3 The Problem of Byzantium: Analyzing a Synthesis~~

~~Recently, Byzantine acclamations have been at the center of an innovative and controversial interpretation.12 Relying on the earlier work of Herbert Hunger,13 Anthony~~

~~Kaldellis’ Byzantine Republic seeks to move discussion away from conceptions of~~

Byzantine polity as being primarily a theocratic court beholden to an absolutist priest- king and towards a vision of essential continuity with the Roman, republican past in which the deep structures of popular sovereignty continue to function in an obscure but still efficient manner. Kaldellis refers to two strands in Byzantine political culture, one

“Roman, republican, and secular” and the other “late Roman, metaphysical, and...Christian.”14 In order to awaken the community of Byzantinists from the bedazzling vision of liturgical kingship, Kaldellis states that the Christian element must be

~~“demoted,” and the republican features made to dominate discussion and understanding of political institutions and ideology in what he prefers to call the “Medieval East Roman~~

~~Empire.”15~~

12 The publication of Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015) prompted John Haldon to write a long and thoughtful review:; John F. Haldon, “Res Publica Byzantina? State Formation and Issues of Identity in Medieval East Rome,” Byzantine And Modern Greek Studies 40, no. 1 (2016): 4–16.

~~13 Hunger, Prooimion.~~

~~14 Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, xii.~~

~~15 Anthony Kaldellis, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–4.~~

~~160~~

~~In his review of Kaldellis’ work, John Haldon praises the book as a corrective16 but he wishes that Kaldellis’ terminology had been more strictly defined. He commends~~

Kaldellis’ explication of how East Romans understood their polity, but he wishes to found the discussion on the “social-economic aspect,” which he believes is the basis of any ideological or cultural reflexes in Byzantine polity. Haldon does not discuss

Kaldellis’ desire to deemphasize the Christian element in that culture and appears to take such a demotion as given. Insofar as Haldon finds fault with Kaldellis, it is due to different conceptions of how secular political institutions function rather than to a difference of opinion on the (un)importance of religion in those institutions.

With two highly influential historians in essential agreement about the secular nature of Byzantine politics, it seems that the demotion and perhaps eventual eclipse of the Christian element in favor of the ancient, Roman, and secular element is inevitable.

While the attention that Kaldellis has drawn to important continuities in East Roman political ideology is necessary to prevent an interpretation of Byzantine polity that would diminish or extinguish these features in taking the theocratic claims of court ideology too seriously as representative of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, he has gone too far in minimizing the Christian and religious elements of that polity. The demotion of these elements relies on two assumptions: that the polity of the Roman republic was secular, and that the Christian element in Byzantine culture was accidental rather than essential.

~~We ought to interrogate each of these assumptions in turn and propose an alternative, synthetic model of Byzantine polity, as seen in the acclamations of the Book of~~

~~16 Haldon, “Res Publica Byzantina?,” 7–8.~~

~~161 Ceremonies, that presents both of Kaldellis’ elements as essential members of an organic whole that forms a framework for religious, political, and cultural activity.~~

Such a framework, which understands civic ceremonies primarily as rituals rather than as political, social, or economic instruments, must necessarily be understood as polysemous, performative artifacts that gave voice to competing and seemingly contradictory ideological strands. In this conception, the acclamations become the ceremonial locus where the Byzantines – emperor, church, and people – reconcile republican, imperial, and biblical conceptions of polity in continuity with a classical, pagan past and look forward to the fulfillment of their eschatological hope of incarnating the Christian kingdom of God on earth.

Some indication for how to proceed may be gleaned from Phil Booth’s work on reconciling competing epistemologies in late antiquity.17 Against Haldon’s claim that changes in medical practice were driven by a political opposition between those who supported natural/rational (pagan/secular) solutions to the Roman empire’s crises and those who favored supernatural/antirational (Christian) solutions, Booth argues that cultural development is mediated, and that late antiquity is not marked by a rapid abandonment of one system and its replacement by another, but rather that the two systems somehow come together and coexist. The suffering body, whether human or politic, was understood as subject to disturbances both natural and supernatural in origin.

~~17 Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 67–69.~~

~~162~~

~~The existence of both types of causes in a single etiological framework, whether or not it seems consistent to contemporary scholars, was according to Booth, an historical fact.~~

~~In a similar way, if one wishes to grasp the Byzantine understanding of acclamations, reductionist analytical frameworks must be discarded and replaced by an~~

“additive” model. Rather than seeing the history of Byzantine or Roman polity as the succession of discrete stages (republic, principate, dominate, basileia),18 or as the preservation of antique forms heavy-laden with the merely ornamental elaboration of centuries, we posit that culture develops in such a way that later developments do not replace or cancel out but rather complement their predecessors.

~~4.4 Theoretical Background~~

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, history and linguistics were dominated by a stemmatic, Darwinian model of change.19 In biology, the strict evolution of dots into other dots in a hierarchy punctuated by straight lines has been replaced by a model that sees species as consisting of variant populations moving across a spectrum.

~~We now see this change, which originated in the positive sciences, moving into history, linguistics, and even manuscript studies.20 In certain ways, this change was anticipated~~

18 This “stair-step” approach to Roman political history is sufficiently widespread to be termed the “standard narrative.” While I do not discard the conventional periodization, I think it is important to treat the historian’s addiction to change and revolution and to highlight continuities.

19 For a summary history of these developments and an account of attempts to apply new methods to old material, see Robert O’Hara and Peter Robinson, “Computer-Assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis,” in The “Canterbury Tales” Project Occasional Papers, Volume I, ed. Norman Blake and Peter Robinson (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 1993), 53–74.

20 Historians of the early Middles Ages tend now to refer to the end of classical antiquity and the rise of Christianity and Islam as a series of “transformations” in contrast to earlier models of decline and fall or dark age and renaissance. In the case of textual criticism, there are productive but so far inconclusive 163 already in the nineteenth century when certain scholars felt the reduction of human development to a tidy progression of economic and material factors to be inadequate.21

~~We therefore seek neither a revolutionary model that presents novelties arising from radical and often violent breaks with the past, nor an archaelogism that privileges the original as the only.~~

~~In the first place, we must ask to what extent the practice of acclamations, which are at the heart of current discussions of Byzantine polity,22 can be described as “secular.”~~

The idea that the political institutions and practices that Byzantium inherited from Rome can be called secular merely because they are not Christian needs to be questioned. If these acclamations are in origin religious, then the notion of the “liturgification”23 of imperial ceremonies needs to be reconfigured as the Christianization of rites that were already quasi-liturgical.

In their recent book on the changes affecting East Roman society in the iconoclastic period, Brubaker and Haldon in making generalizations rely on scholarship dealing with developments in early medieval Italy, citing the comparative dearth of archaeological evidence and scholarly attention for contemporary Byzantium.24 The

discussions on how to leverage increased access to manuscripts and advances in computer processing to produce a more comprehensive account of textual history than a traditional critical edition can offer.

21 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Henry Newman, Arnold Toynbee, and Christopher Dawson were especially strong in their emphasis on the roles played by religion and culture in history.

~~22 Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, especially 44ff.~~

~~23 McCormick, Eternal Victory, 132; Leslie Brubaker and John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680-850): A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 617.~~

~~24 Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680-850), 617.~~

~~164~~

scholar who seeks to situate De Cerimoniis in a liturgical or ritual context is in an analogous situation. Although the textual evidence is not lacking,25 there are few studies that treat Byzantine ceremonial from the perspective of ritual or religious studies. Instead, the literature that exists is primarily interested in considering socio-economic and political questions. In so far as it draws on ritual and liturgical scholarship, this study contributes to widening the discussion and bringing the theoretical models developed for medieval western ceremonies to bear on the texts of the Byzantine Book of Ceremonies.26

If Kaldellis considers much of the work on Byzantine ceremony to be a dream, he may have been influenced by Kantorowicz’ characterization of political ritual as “the magic thicket of prayers, benedictions, and ecclesiastical rites”27 whose sacred precincts the professional medievalist is from time to time obliged to violate in search of the promethean fire that will illuminate some aspect of the “political, institutional, or cultural

25 Primary sources in excellent annotated editions include Michel Dubuisson and Jacques Schamp, eds., Des magistratures de l’État romain (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2006); Bury, Imperial Administrative System; R. J. Macrides, Joseph A. Munitiz, and Dimiter Angelov, eds., Pseudo-Kodinos, the Constantinopolitan Court: Offices and Ceremonies (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2013). For the late eighth and early ninth century context, see Oikonomidès, Les listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles, 1972.

26 I have learned much from the fundamental studies of Percy Ernst Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Erneuerungsgedankens vom Ende des karolingischen Reiches bis zum Investiturstreit, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962); Percy Ernst Schramm, “Sacral Kingship and Charisma,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (1963): 357–360; International Congress for the History of Religions, The Sacral Kingship / La Regalità Sacra: Contributions to the Central Theme of the 8th International Congress for the History of Religions, Rome, April, 1955 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Selected Studies. (Locust Valley: J. J. Augustin, 1965); Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), and Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae; a Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), as well as the nuanced theoretical work of Janet L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon Press, 1986).

~~27 Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae, vii.~~

~~165~~

~~history of the Middle Ages.” For Kantorowicz, much of whose scholarly work was produced in the 20 years following 1938, during which he, a German Jew, was in exile in~~

~~America,28 there was an unsurprising suspicion of political ritual, which he described in~~

1946 as “the indispensable vehicle of political propaganda, pseudo-religious emotionalism, and public reacknowledgment of power.”29 Despite this skepticism about such rituals’ ability to be genuine expressions of public feeling, Kantorowicz did recognize that, “[i]n the ancient world, there was no split between the holy and the profane.”30

It is difficult to square Kantorowicz’ imputation of a “pseudo-religious” aspect of political ritual with the apparent absence of “secularity” in the ancient world. Either there is some fundamental difference between ancient and modern societies that allows for “the secular” when discussing modern and contemporary cultures but makes it inappropriate for pre-modern or traditional societies, where religion is presumed to dominate, or either the transcendent, religious aspect of culture is and always has been a dream, or the secular is in turn the dream of modernists, which they are continually retrojecting into their discussions of past (and present) societies.

28 Norman Cantor provides a highly influential but tendentious account of Kantorowicz and his relationship with Schramm in “The Nazi Twins,” chapter 3 of his Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. Morrow, 1991).

~~29 Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae, x.~~

~~30 Kantorowicz, vii.~~

166 The meaning of secularity has been usefully delineated elsewhere,31 and it suffices here to paraphrase an influential twentieth century thinker in remarking that religion buries its undertakers.32 Perhaps now with the passing of time and with cooled passions, however much we may consider them to have been instruments of false religions, we can no longer believe that the rites of modern political theories inspire pseudo-religious feeling. The feeling was (or is) genuine, as was the belief in the ideology, as the tragic catalogue of war and genocide that makes up the twentieth century proves. There is some reason to expect that even with great efforts to replace or reinterpret “the religious” as “the secular,” the same impulses arise and produce similar cultural forms and institutions.33

~~4.5 A Way Forward~~

If now, we are deprived both of the distinction between secular and religious as well as of the expectation that the thread of Byzantine political ceremony can be tidily separated into its individual strands, how ought we to proceed? Janet Nelson’s

31 Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007) is among the best and most thorough treatments. .In particular, his chapter “Religion Today,” 505-535, examines the state-atheism (a sort of established religion?) of twentieth century authoritarian regimes, the curious religious renewal in contemporary Russia (but not, generally, in former Warsaw Pact countries), and the elaboration of ostensibly “non-religious” spiritualities.

32 In the conclusion to The Unity of Philosophical Experience (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938), 246, his reflection on the history of philosophy, Gilson notes that in spite of the development of various reductionist disciplines over the last 800 years, “philosophy always buries its undertakers” (emphasis original).

33 Bruno Latour discusses what he sees as the inner contradictions of modernity in We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Latour’s treatment of religion is particularly insightful 32–35.

167 comparative study of ruler-making in Frankia and Byzantium in the early medieval period provides a useful model.34 In her discussion of the Byzantine inauguration rite, she confronts and criticizes a tendency among scholars to split the whole into components.

Dividing lines are usually drawn between two polarized “blocs”: military and civic, republican and imperial, popular and elite, secular and religious, and so on. Nelson states that such an approach “is useful so long as the integration of these blocs is stressed, rather than any contradiction between them.”35 While not denying the increasingly Christian character of Byzantine inauguration rites from the seventh century onwards, Nelson disagrees with her predecessors in arguing that “[t]he coronation was constitutive in the sense that it was part of the process which as a whole (emphasis original) legitimised co- emperor and ‘new’ emperor alike, a part which... can be labelled ‘dispensable’ only at the risk of some artificiality, not to say anachronism.”36 The power of a ritual to erect what sociologists call a “plausibility structure” derives from the totality of its ceremonies and is not reducible to any particular element.37 If one must think in terms of antinomies, it

34 Janet L. Nelson, “Symbols in Context: Rulers’ Inauguration Rituals in Byzantium and the West in the Early Middle Ages,” in Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon, 1986), 259–81.

~~35 Nelson, 261.~~

~~36 Nelson, 267.~~

37 A plausibility structure is a “system of meaning,” like the Christian liturgy, from which signs derive their meaning and in which they operate to direct human thought and action. For the origin of the term and its importance for the sociology of religion, see Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966); Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy; Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967). For critical responses to Berger, see Robert Wuthnow, Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspectives on Religion in Contemporary Society (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992); Eliot R. Smith and Diane M. Mackie, Social Psychology (New York: Worth Publishers, 1995).

~~168~~

~~seems just as likely that their amalgamation produces hybrid vigor rather than suffers from degrading contamination.~~

Nelson issued a strong challenge to the scholarly community but seems to have been little regarded. Even in her own work, she reinforces dichotomies as she tries to conceptualize the various parts of early medieval East Roman inauguration rites. Nelson is careful to distinguish between two possible methods of answering the question “why” a certain rite looks the way it does. Borrowing from anthropology, she focuses on the function of the rite, while as a historian, she seeks to provide a “philo-genetic,”38 i.e., a genealogical account. In her mise-en-scène, Nelson provides a brief summary of the development of Roman political ideology from the republic to the early middle ages and identifies the fourth century, with the twin impetuses of Constantine’s conversion and his establishment of a New Rome in the East, as the decisive moment when Hellenistic or oriental theories of divine kingship were revived.39 She argues that the West’s commitment to republican ideology rather than the vagaries of manuscript traditions is the reason why evidence for imperial inaugurations from before that time in the East and from the West in general is lacking. In her view, these rites become increasingly religious

38 Nelson, “Symbols in Context,” 260, nn.4; 283. The spellings “philo-genetic” and “philogenetic” are improper but appear to have been fairly widespread in scientific publications in English from the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, the spelling was used in the English translation of Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 7th ed. (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), specifically throughout Freud’s thirteenth lecture, “The Dream,” where the phrases “philogenetic antiquity” and “philogenetic inheritance” appear with some frequency. Freud, 167–79. I can only imagine that the spelling entered anthropology by means of this vector and thence made its way to ritual studies. In the interest of maintaining consistency, I will not substitute the spelling “phylogenetic” for Nelson’s “philo- genetic.”

~~39 Nelson, “Symbols in Context,” 262.~~

~~169 from the fourth century until the seventh century, when they coalesced into a basic structure.~~

~~In the midst of this discussion, Nelson rightly criticizes Teitinger’s conception of~~

“liturgification” as being too neat and that he was wrong to conflate “Liturgiesierung” with “Verkirchung.”40 Nelson’s point is that the increasing use of churches for imperial ceremonies does not come at the expense of the “secular,” but rather at the expense of sites that were already religious but not Christian, such as the Hippodrome.41 While making this claim, she is careful to point out that undoubtedly antique, Roman, and pagan ceremonies, such as shield raising, cannot be understood as being purely military but were themselves religious rituals. In treating the function of these rites, she demonstrates their simultaneous development and their vital roles in forming an organic whole that includes the emperor, the people, and the church, and gives each member of the polity a part to play in uniting the sacred and profane elements of the life of the state.

And yet, even with these nuances, Nelson’s commitment to giving a “philo- genetic” answer to the question “why” introduces certain distorting features to her interpretation. Arguments from silence are always dangerous, but it seems safer to me to allow that whatever inauguration protocols existed before the Christianization of Roman ceremony were lost rather than that they did not exist. Medieval Christians had few qualms about palimpsesting or otherwise repurposing obsolete bibles and liturgical

~~40 Nelson, 263–64, n. 21.~~

41 Here Nelson relies on the work of Alan Cameron, who emphasized the ritual aspects of the ostensibly civic and athletic ceremonies of the Hippodrome. See Alan Cameron, Porphyrius: The Charioteer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

170 books,42 let alone outdated ceremonial manuals in an increasingly foreign language and representative of religious and political opinions no longer in vogue. It stands to reason that it is just as likely that the evidence for these rites was lost in the cataclysms that rocked the West throughout the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries and consumed the contents of imperial archives and public libraries, whose size we know to have been massive but have nevertheless left little or no primary evidence for their existence.43

Kantorowicz may have been the first to raise questions about the textual problems facing the student of these rites. He devotes a considerable portion of one his chapters to discussing the interrelation of imperial and ecclesiastical ceremonies.44 Kantorowicz maintains that due to the nature of the evidence, untangling and setting in a neat genetic relationship the connections between “secular” and religious rites is a difficult and perhaps intractable problem. Despite these admissions, Kantorowicz argues that “it is nevertheless very likely that” Frankish (i.e., imperial/secular) forms were chronologically prior and that their presence in Roman (i.e., papal/religious) ordines shows the reliance of

~~Rome on Frankia.45 Even in his discussion of a tightly knotted manuscript tradition, it~~

42 Bernard Bischoff, Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Dáibhí Ơ Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11. Among the more famous examples of a palimpsested Bibles is Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a sibling of Codex Alexdrinus and Codex Vaticanus, and one of the most precious of the ancient uncial witnesses to the text of the New Testament. In the twelfth century, it was overwritten with texts from St. Ephrem the Syrian, which were by no means rare.

~~43 For the difficulties inherent in reconstructing such collections, see Filippo Coarelli, “Substructio et Tabularium,” Papers of the British School at Rome 78 (2010): 107–132.~~

~~44 Kantorowicz calls this phenomenon “papal laudes imperialized” and “imperial laudes papalized” Laudes Regiae, 129–46.~~

~~45 Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae, n. 57 and 58.~~

~~171 seems that a powerful, implicit ideology drives Kantorowicz’ account of the genetic relationship.~~

~~The standard narrative that Byzantine Herrschaft represents a revival of~~

Hellenistic kingship is problematic for a number of reasons. To paraphrase Peter Brown’s contention about the end of antiquity,46 the divinization of the rulers of the Roman polity is “always earlier than you think.” The fact that various historians point to the reigns of

Heraclius, Constantine, Diocletian, Augustus, and Caesar all as having been the decisive turning point away from Roman republicanism (which is implicitly secular) towards an orientally-derived form of emperor worship should be sufficient to demonstrate how convoluted the question is. Were it granted that Augustus’ deification of Caesar and the subsequent apotheosis of members of the ruling family was an importation from the East, it would still be difficult to maintain that after 400 or 700 years of such cult practices, that

~~Christianization represented something truly innovative in lending a religious character to civic ceremonies. These facts make it difficult to preserve the idea that the West (or in~~

Kaldellis’ conception, the East) maintained an ideology of a secular, republican state, even if we are willing to accept the by no means unproblematic assertion that the republicanism of Rome was secular.

~~Not long after the appearance of Nelson’s comparative study of inauguration rituals in the early medieval East and West, Simon Price examined the funeral rites of~~

46 For a consideration of Brown’s impact on the field as well as the oft-quoted anecdote about the beginning of the middle ages, see Jamie Kreiner and Helmut Reimitz, Motions of Late Antiquity: Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society in Honor of Peter Brown (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016).

~~172~~

~~emperors from Augustus to Constantine.47 Price argues that the phenomenon has been mostly ignored by historians and that both scholars and the wider public regard it with a~~

“modern, cynical attitude.”48 Price calls into question the whole idea of the Hellenistic origins of the emperor cult with his discussion of the Greek historian Herodian’s extensive and wondering excursus on the strange Roman phenomenon of imperial apotheosis. Price demonstrates that the imperial funeral rites which encapsulated the apotheosis of the emperor were a synthesis of ancient cult practices and the ceremonies accompanying the passing of a Roman noble. The emperors from the very beginning were using preexisting, traditional forms to present themselves and their predecessors as

“virtuous noble[s] and... god[s] in the making.”49 Furthermore, Price notes that it was not unheard of, even in republican times, for the senate to grant divine powers and titles to living persons, and that the models for such “divinizing” procedures were Romulus and

Hercules, the former the founder and first king of Rome, and the latter, the focus of one of the most ancient cults in the city.50 Lastly, for reasons that will become clear below, it is useful here to note that the ceremony by which the emperor was deified was termed consecratio.

47 Simon Price, “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, by David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 56–105.

~~48 Price, 56.~~

~~49 Price, 104.~~

~~50 Price, 73.~~

~~173 All of this discussion of funeral rites might seem out of place in a study of~~

Byzantine acclamations, but one must remember that acclamations were always the sequel to the passing of one emperor and formed the core of the rite de passage that marked the transfer of power following the interregnum. As such, they form the background for inaugural acclamations and discussions of their religious nature should take notice of this fact. One important function of the whole structure of these rites is to blur the distinction between emperors and to preserve the appearance of continuity, which was especially important in a system that generally envisaged the office being vacated only upon the death of its occupant. It is therefore difficult and perhaps unproductive to detach inaugural acclamations from this context, which were undoubtedly religious, even though in origin neither imperial nor Christian.

~~4.6 Procedure and Definition~~

~~Given this complexity, it seems best, at least in the present study, to sidestep the~~

~~“philo-genetic” answer and to focus rather on the functional aspects of (East Medieval)~~

~~Roman acclamations. In the first place, we ought to know what acclamations are and examine how we come to know this. While nothing like the Ordines Romani or De~~

Cerimoniis has survived from prior ages, inscriptions and chance survivals that ancient historians found notable for one reason or another make it possible to form some idea of what Roman inaugurations were like.51At the most basic level, an acclamation is

51 For a listing of this evidence, see Aldrete’s notes to pages 101-105 of Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome, 187–88. Mary Beard provides an excellent theoretical discussion of some of problems facing would-be interpreters of the closely related phenomenon of triumphs in chapters 2 and 3 of her The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

~~174 addressed to someone, makes a hopeful exhortation or an apotropaic prohibition,52 makes requests, delivers praise, and usually includes a polychronion53 as an essential ingredient.~~

Each of these components can of course be deployed in parody, and it is these exceptional cases that have attracted the most attention both from ancient authorities and from scholars. One must therefore look at things from oblique angle to uncover the norms and standard, unreflective account of the ceremonies that underlay and informed their performance in antiquity and the middle ages.

Returning to Roueché’s interesting but undeveloped discussion of the acclamations as performing a linking between contemporary individuals and historical or mythological personages, one is struck by a similar, societal movement evident in the acclamations attested in De Cerimoniis. A keyword in this discourse is basileia, the translation of which poses some difficulty. Like basileus, which most are tempted in the first instance to translate as “king,” basileia has a range of complimentary but distinct meanings. Never used to describe the (classical) Roman emperor, the term basileus alone encompasses the priestly, royal, universal, and eschatological dimensions of the office of the leader of the Romans. Basileia could mean empire or kingdom, denoting either or both the land ruled by the collective body of Roman law and institutions, or those institutions themselves. It could also mean the Old Testament kingdoms of Israel and

~~Judah as well as the New Testament’s Kingdom of God. These meanings are well~~

~~52 M. Hinterberger, Phthonos: Mißgunst, Neid und Eifersucht in der byzantinischen Literatur (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2013), 53–54.~~

53 This is the term for forumulae such as ad multos annos, πολλὰ ἔτη, or mŭnogaja lěta that in in various liturgical languages still form a not insignificant part of Christian public ritual.

175 understood and uncontroversial. Furthermore, the employment of both basileus and basileia as instruments in the christening of Eastern Roman political institutions is a commonplace among scholars of Byzantium.54 It suffices here to remark that allusion and polysemy is an inherent feature of both terms, and it was either a happy accident or, more probably, a masterful stroke of ideological fashioning, that they entered East Roman political discourse and began shaping notions of the emperor and his empire from the seventh century onwards.

More elusively, basileia can mean the Herrschaft of the basileus. Herrschaft is one of those excellent words whose meaning is perfectly clear in German, but whose semantic domain is split among several English words and phrases. It could perhaps be adequately defined as the abstract embodiment of the totality of the means by which a ruler rules. Such a concept encompasses both hard factors, such as material culture and state institutions, as well as soft factors, such as ceremony, language, and ideology. Since this single term encompasses a wide range of meanings, it performs a valuable service and has gained a foothold in English, at least among scholars of pre-modern political structures.55

~~The eliding ambiguity of basileia, it could be argued, is also a feature of ceremonial language and of ritual more generally. Roueché, Price, and Beard all refer to~~

54 Evangelos K. Chrysos, “The Title ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ in Early Byzantine International Relations,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 32 (1978): 29–75. See also The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), s. v. basileus.

55 See Melvin Richter, “The History of the Concept of Herrschaft in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” in The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58–78.

~~176~~

the religious character of Roman public ceremonies and give attention to the actions performed during the rites, but they do not focus much on the language and the part it played in making the rites efficient. Beard does quote some ancient authorities on the origins of the Roman triumph, but she uses these examples primarily to emphasize the temporal dislocation of the writers from the events they describe and the near impossibility of excavating anything like a genuine account from a mass of myth, rumor, and hearsay. One of the most interesting of these examples is Suetonius’ explanation of the word tri-umphus as representing the participation of the three castes of classical

~~Roman society in the ceremony.56 While a contemporary philologist would characterize~~

Suetonius’ etymology as an ex post facto imposition, the student of ritual must take it seriously as a functional explanation of a mysterious rite. Whatever its origin, for at least some members of first-century Roman society, the triumph was precisely a unified action of a tripartite social group that united the divine and the political.

That many of those contemporaries understood the triumph to have been founded by Romulus and each occurrence to have been a reenactment of the primitive ceremony is also significant.57 The triumphator is, in some sense, Romulus himself. The historians who have written on these ceremonies acknowledge these aspects but are not concerned to explain how or why the ceremony worked its magic, i.e., why it was neither merely a pageant or a political instrument but rather a ritual that actually accomplished something real, at least in the minds of its participants. While some progress has been made on this

~~56 Beard, The Roman Triumph, 52.~~

~~57 For a discussion of the classical Roman understanding of Romulus’ connection to the triumph, see Beard, 8–9 and 67–68.~~

177 front recently, especially with the concept of “ritualization” and an emphasis on the often fuzzy boundaries that separate “rituals” from “ceremonies,” historians of Roman culture and students of Christian liturgy mostly keep to themselves.58

~~4.7 Anamnesis: Historical and Eschatological~~

When discussing ritual actions that make present and actualize the subject of a rite, students of Christian liturgy customarily employ the word “anamnesis.” In contemporary terms, anamnesis is a performative speech act whereby a character, object, or event is made present and efficient. In his still foundational study, Crichton explains that rites center on a mystery, which exists in the historical order. The celebration of the rite looks “back to the past which it interpreted and on to the future.”59 For Crichton, it is important that, although it rests on a historical basis, a rite is not concerned with the event

~~“as past,” but rather as a mystery that “has to be experienced as present.” The function of the rite in this conception is to make the past and the future present now.~~

In the early history of Christianity, situating the events of salvation history, both past and future, in a typological system that simultaneously anticipated and fulfilled itself recursively in the ritual life of the church was a major preoccupation of preachers and

58 Beard discusses some of the innovative work being applied to Roman ritual but confesses herself “not so much concerned with definitions as a symbolic, social, semiotic, or religious activity.” Beard, 58.Although Beard’s study brings traditional historical methodology into contact with these newer approaches, she is fundamentally concerned with charting how ritual served to assert and reassert Roman military power. Beard writes that the only clear division between ritual and nonritual action “is the fact that participants think of what they are doing in ritual terms and mark it out as separate from their everyday, nonritual practice.” It still remains to be explained how such immaterial or subjective realities as ritual impacted behavior in the ancient and medieval world.

~~59 J. D. Crichton, “A Theology of Worship,” in The Study of Liturgy, ed. Cheslyn Jones, New rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14.~~

~~178~~

teachers. Many have argued that this understanding of rite as anamnesis has roots in ancient Jewish practice,60 and some would locate such notions even further back in time and posit that anamnesis is at least an implicit feature of rites in general.61 It is only in the centuries following our period, and especially in the West, that the urge to explain systematically precisely how these processes work came to produce a positive sacramental theology.62 We are, therefore, once again forced to follow an indirect approach in recreating the thoughts that played in the minds of acclamatus and acclamatores in tenth-century Byzantium.

Perhaps because scripta manent, and the “stage directions” of a ceremony as much as of a play are subject to considerable variation and interpretation, even when written down, it is the texts of the liturgy that have most attracted interpreters over the last millennium. Among those texts that have been especially important in the development of the theory of anamnesis, we may point to “Lamb of God.” This text, which was inserted into the Roman Mass by the “Greek Pope” Sergius around the beginning of the eighth century.63 Originating in the Gospel of John,64 this title of Christ

~~60 Bruce T. Morrill, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000), 176–78.~~

~~61 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), 123ff.~~

~~62 For an overview of these developments, see James T. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist, Second ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 94–122.~~

~~63 For a discussion of the political and religious context in which Pope Sergius made this addition, see Andrew Eknomou, Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 222-224.~~

64 Jn 1:29. The Greek phrase is Ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ and the Latin, Agnus Dei. It is repeated in the Gospel of John and is a major preoccupation of the book of Revelation, which has been a source of much of the liturgical and artistic symbolism of Christianity.

179 is at once an assertion and an argument. Classical logic considers common discourse to be inherently enthymemic, i.e., consisting of syllogisms with one of its component premises omitted. In both its biblical and liturgical settings, the phrase “Lamb of God” is a declaration that demands assent. In either context, the utterance of the phrase performs the act of demonstrating rather than arguing. This is nowhere clearer than in the brief dialogue in the Roman Rite that immediately precedes communion and begins “Ecce,

Agnus Dei” In three words, the rite identifies the body of Christ with the consecrated host, ties Christ to Old Testament sacrificial types and with an eschatological future, while making all of these present now. At the level of ritual and popular piety, such assertions are sufficient to encompass a wide variety of meaningful topoi, summarizing salvation history, making prophetic promises, and providing the germ for entire schools of contemplation and theological reflection.

Once the phrase leaves its native context, either biblical or liturgical, it becomes grist for discursive analysis. Over the millennia, the phrase “Lamb of God” has given rise to numerous and competing strands of Christology and was itself a summation of sorts of multiple Old Testament episodes and their attendant systems of symbols and interpretations.65 If one were to attempt to put the identification of Jesus Christ as the

~~Lamb of God into syllogistic form, it might look something like this:~~

~~A lamb is a sacrifice acceptable to God. Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God. Therefore, Jesus Christ is a sacrifice acceptable to God.~~

65 Robert Cummings Neville provides a brief discussion of the multiple Old Testament prototypes of the “Lamb of God” in his Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13–14.

~~180~~

For various theological schools, such an explanation is sufficient and serves as the foundation for multiple theories of sacrifice, atonement, and redemption along with their christological and soteriological reflexes. Such has been the practice in Western

~~Christianity at least since the late eleventh century with the origins of scholasticism.66~~

In contrast to this method of analysis, an earlier strand of the Christian contemplative tradition stressed the interlacing of types and antitypes in an eternally expanding system of signs. In such a practice, “Lamb of God” participates in a narrative of salvation history, prefigured in the old covenant, fulfilled in the new, and prophetic of a future, final consummation. In this conception, the process by which lambs became acceptable sacrifices rather than the proposition that they are acceptable, is of primary importance. The multiple prototypes of the “Lamb of God,”67 confusing or problematic to the theological expositor, are for the celebrant and congregation of a liturgical act a useful, and perhaps purposefully ambiguous, shorthand that expresses a threefold but simultaneous identification for the community of faith. In the Roman Rite, the aforementioned “Ecce,” which immediately precedes communion, recalls Pilate’s “Ecce homo,” bringing to mind the Passion and identifying the host that the priest holds and the people see with the body of Christ sacrificed on Calvary, while the “Agnus Dei” points

66 For an account of this historical development of theories of the atonement and their reception in Western culture, see J. C. Tuomala, “Christ’s Atonement as the Model for Civil Justice,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 38, no. 1 (1993): 221–255. Pre-scholastic reflection on these issues runs from the New Testament, through the Liturgy of St. Basil, and the fathers before the beginnings of its systematization in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.

67 In particular, the scapegoat of Lev. 16 and the Paschal Lamb of Ex. 12 have been productive sources of contemplation for centuries. Closer to our discussion, there is an identification of Christ with Isaac in Anglo-Saxon art. The association was so strong that it inspired the famous, grammatically- ambiguous phrase wudu bær sunu in the Old English Genesis A (2887b). While far from Byzantium, such examples from art and poetry show the pervasiveness and essential unity of Christian typological thought.

181 backward, identifying Christ with a variety of prototypes and with the entire sacrificial system of ancient Israel, carefully elaborated over hundreds of years of historical, narrative, and theological development. The affective power of the “Ecce” is further strengthened by its sequel, “qui tollit peccata mundi,” whose present tense serves to obliterate temporal distinctions of past, present, and future, and whose ritual context conditions the congregation’s supplications.

~~So far, these examples have come from the Latin West rather than the Byzantine~~

East. This is because western theology from the twelfth century onwards developed a systematic, sacramental theology.68 As with so many theological questions that were provoked by controversy, the western focus on eucharistic theology arose from a difference of opinion in a ninth-century Frankish monastery and thereupon encouraging the definition of heresy and orthodoxy.69 In the East, despite its preoccupation with

Christological and Trinitarian controversies, there has never been much dispute over the nature of the Eucharist.70 This had led to a wealth of liturgical catechesis but a dearth of systematic treatises on eucharistic theology. One searches in vain for the sort of “formal

~~68 See Edward J. Kilmartin and Robert J. Daly, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), 127–54.~~

~~69 See Jean-Paul Bouhot, Ratramne de Corbie: histoire littéraire et controverses doctrinales (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1976).~~

70 With the exception of the questions of the epiclesis and the use of azymes, which became classical components of the discourse of East-West schism in the centuries following 1054. Nothing like the highly detailed, divergent, and systematic accounts of the precise nature of the Eucharist produced during the Protestant Reformation have arisen in Latin-Greek (or Catholic-Orthodox) dialogue.

~~182~~

~~affirmations” upon which one could build a comprehensive account of Byzantine conceptions of anamnesis.71~~

~~Amongst the earliest eucharistic doctors is the mysterious (Pseudo)-Dionysios the~~

Areopagite.72 In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the author arranges all of reality into a cosmic order whose existence becomes clear most especially in the context of liturgical celebration.73 This treatise was regarded during the Middle Ages as having quasi- apostolic authority, because it was thought to have been written by Paul’s disciple mentioned in Acts 17. For that reason, it was broadly influential in both east and west, especially in liturgical commentaries.

71 Bornert laments, “La question du symbolism et du réalisme eucharistique est un problème qui a été soulevé à propos de saint Maxime plus qu’il n’a été pose par celui-ci… les affirmations formelles sont rares et que, par consequent, il faut expliquer une pensée implicite.” Les Commentaires byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1966), 117. Such questions, it seems, were never asked by Byzantine writers and, thus, never answered.

72 For an orientation, see William K Riordan, Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagite (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008). For a critical edition, see Beate Regina Suchla and Adolf Martin Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990). For translations and commentary, see Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, eds., Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (London: SPCK, 1987). For an extensive commentary with special reference to Pseudo- Dionysius’ reception, see Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

73 The work follows the Celestial Hierarchy, which stresses in its second chapter the importance of symbols in the analogical approach to divine knowledge and its third chapter how it is fitting and proper that celestial essences are arranged in a hierarchy and transmit divine illumination in an unbroken chain from God to human beings. Pseudo-Dionysius’ works are more like visions than treatises. The assertions they contain have formed the basis for later, more systematic theological reflection, and connections to Byzantine political and ecclesiastical thought are numerous. Kazhdan probably underestimates the Dionysian influence on later Byzantine thought. People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Center for Byzantine Studies, 1982), 89– 91. If it is true, as Kazhdan believes, that Pseudo-Dionysius’ emphasis on hierarchy had limited appeal for the average “homo byzantinus,” the same cannot be said for the Byzantine élite, whose daily lives DC was intended to regulate and order. Nadine Schibille argues for considerable Dionysian influence on Byzantine aesthetics and the concept of mimesis in Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Aesthetic Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 6–9.

183 Separating the Christian from the Platonic in the Corpus Dionysiacum and interpreting to what extent the works contained therein constitute a rapprochement between the two traditions or something else entirely has occupied scholars for quite some time, and few matters are settled.74 What can be said is that the Celestial Hierarchy, although problematic from the perspective of later Orthodox tradition, established the genre of liturgical commentary for subsequent writers, most of whom, in sometimes admittedly superficial ways, acknowledged their debt to the reputedly apostolic author.

~~The focus on light as a metaphor for knowledge, and the idea that ritual action unites the mundane and the celestial through mimesis, has certain echoes in the preface to De~~

Cerimoniis as well as throughout the tradition of Byzantine philosophy. That these echoes are so widespread makes it difficult to argue for direct influence on any one author or work, but perhaps that is an indication of the success of the Corpus

Dionysiacum and the futility of attempting to isolate the Platonic from the Christian, the philosophical from the theological, and the Roman from the Christian. At any rate, later writers can be said to have corrected Pseudo-Dionysius in emphasizing “a christocentric salvation history and eschatology and the belief in sacramental realism within the corporate reality of the church.”75 If one were to replace the word “church” with basileia,

74 See Rosemary A. Arthur, Pseudo-Dionysius as Polemicist: The Development and Purpose of the Angelic Hierarchy in Sixth Century Syria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2016), 1–42. For an examination of the development of the Dionysian tradition, especially in the Latin West, see Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1978).

~~75 Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence, 124.~~

~~184~~

~~one would be very close indeed to the notion of anamnesis presented in the acclamations of De Cerimoniis.~~

~~In the East, the most successful representative of the Dionysian tradition in the centuries before Constantine VII was the Mystagogia of St. Maximos the Confessor.76~~

Maximos makes his debt to Pseudo-Dionysios clear already in his preface and cites him throughout the remainder of the work.77 The Mystagogia has significant but understudied connections to late antique, neo-platonic political philosophy, which is itself an almost ignored but vitally important component of Byzantine political thought.78 While the work is complex, it is relatively short, and three of its themes seem particularly applicable to

~~De Cerimoniis: synthesis of contraries, mirror as metaphor, and reciprocal signification.~~

Furthermore, two features of Maximos’ preface find particular resonance with similar themes in Constantine VII’s own preface to De Cerimoniis: the importance of ceremony, and its ability to transform reality. In perhaps his most effusive expression,

~~Maximos states that “…the beaming ray of ceremonies, once grasped, becomes understood in proportion to them and draws to itself those who are seized by this~~

76 Translation of Maximos here and below come from Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). The Greek text of the Mystagogia can be found in Raffaele Cantarella, ed., La mistagogia, ed altri scritti (Florence: Edizioni “Testi cristiani,” 1931), 122–214. Following Cantarella, I cite column numbers from PG.

~~77 Maximos cites Dionysius in his introduction and conclusion and in his discussion of mirrors and reflection. Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, 184; 213; 206.~~

78 For Maximos’ role in christianizing neoplatonic notions of divinization along with its cosmic and political ramifications, see Dominic J. O’Meara, Platonopolis Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 31. 185 desire”79 Maximos, in describing the contemplation of his predecessor, which he considers to have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, explains that one who, like his teacher and the Areopagite who both through long experience and divine illumination is able to pass on what he has learned “…like a mirror which is not obscured by any stain of the passions, [having] the power of both understanding and speaking about things which others could not perceive…”80 This reflection of heavenly reality in the rites of the

~~Church and its power to educate are just as essential to understanding Constantine VII’s approach to civic ceremonies as they are to Maximos’ liturgical theology.~~

Leaving aside Maximos’ lengthy discussions of metaphysics, it suffices here to say that he divides reality into a series of opposites, the highest level of which are the categories intelligible/incorporeal and sensible/corporeal. According to Maximos, through the liturgy, uniquely, this dichotomy is reconciled, and all of reality achieves unity and finds its place in the cosmic order.81

…all things combine with all others in an unconfused way by the singular indissoluble relation to and protection of the one principle and cause. This reality abolishes and dims all their particular relations considered according to each one’s nature, but not by dissolving or destroying them or putting an end to their existence.

79 δι’ ὧν συμμέτρως αὐτοῖς ἡ παμφαὴς τῶν τελουμένων ἀκτὶς κατανοουμένη καθίσταται γνώριμος καὶ πρὸς ἑαυτὴν κατέχει τοὺς πόθῳ περιληφθέντας. Myst. Proem (661A). Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, 184.

80 Maximus the Confessor, 185. καὶ τὸν λόγον ἑρμηνευτὴν ἀκριβέστατον τῶν νοηθέντων· καὶ ἐσόπτρου δίκην ὑπ’ οὐδεμιᾶς κηλίδος παθῶν ἐμποδιζόμενον, ἀκραιφνῶς τὰ ἄλλοις μήτε νοηθῆναι δυνάμενα. Myst. Proem (661C).

81 Maximus the Confessor, 186. πάντων πᾶσι κατὰ τὴν μίαν τῆς μόνης ἀρχῆς καὶ αἰτίας ἀδιάλυτον σχέσιν τε καὶ φρουρὰν ἀφύρτως συμπεφυκότων, τὴν πάσας τε καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι κατὰ τὴν ἑκάστου τῶν ὄντων φύσιν θεωρουμένας ἰδικὰς σχέσεις καταργοῦσάν τε καὶ ἐπικαλύπτουσαν, οὐ τῷ φθείρειν αὐτὰς καὶ ἀναιρεῖν καὶ μὴ εἶναι ποιεῖν, ἀλλὰ τῷ νικᾷν καὶ ὑπερφαίνεσθαι, ὥσπερ ὁλότης μερῶν, ἢ καὶ αὐτῆς αἰτία τῆς ὁλότητος ἐπιφαινομένη, καθ’ ἣν ἥ τε ὁλότης αὐτὴ καὶ τὰ τῆς ὁλότητος μέρη φαίνεσθαί τε καὶ εἶναι πέφυκεν, ὡς ὅλην ἔχοντα τὴν αἰτίαν ἑαυτῶν ὑπερλάμπουσαν. Myst. 1 (665A).

186 Rather it does so by transcending them and revealing them, as the whole reveals its parts or as the whole is revealed in its cause by which the same whole and its parts came into being and appearance since they have their whole cause surpassing them in splendor.

~~This is the core of Maximos’ teaching not only of how liturgy functions, but also of how~~

God relates to creatures, how meaning works, how unity may be found in diversity, how causes and ends become one, and how the past and future unite to form a present that comprehends “myriads of differences” in a “universal relationship.”82

Throughout the individual chapters that follow a lengthy preface, Maximos engages in an analytical method that can be termed reciprocal signification. In his first chapter, he argues first that the church (i.e., the building), is an image of man, before arguing that man is also an image of the church, identifying architectural divisions with body parts.83 Thereupon, he says that the Church (i.e., the institution) is an image of God.

At the very end of the Mystagogia, Maximos will explain how the Church and its liturgy include the faithful and the world in the process of theosis, where God and man unite, and that-which-is-made-in-His-image becomes divine.84

~~Throughout, Maximos seems determined to upset any attempt at analysis at the expense of synthesis. He provides more of a framework than can be gleaned from~~

~~Dionysius’ ecstatic vision, but he does not provide a conceptually articulated account of how this process works. While one can lament this, one must be content with what~~

~~82 Maximus the Confessor, 187. τὴν τὰς πολλὰςκαὶ ἀμυθήτους περὶ ἕκαστον οὔσας διαφοράς. Myst. 1 (667B).~~

~~83 Maximus the Confessor, 186–95. Myst. 1-5 (664C-684A).~~

~~84 Maximus the Confessor, 206–13. Myst. 24 (701A-717D).~~

187 Maximos gives us: insight into the formation of the Christian mentality. His work had wide diffusion and a long reception history in both Greek and Latin.85 That the Latin tradition of Maximos starts near the beginning of the tenth century and with imperial sponsorship is surely a sign of the popularity of Maximos’ Mystagogia in the East.86 As an iconodule martyr with strong connections to Old Rome, Maximos’ appeal to the

Macedonian dynasty and Constantine VII will have been strong.87 The verbal and conceptual echoes we find between the prefaces to the Mystagogia and De Cerimoniis should come as no surprise. One ought, then, to regard the Mystagogia and the wider tradition in which it participates as important sources for uncovering the sometimes implicit and surely never fully theorized account of the means and end of ceremony in

~~Constantine VII’s manual.~~

~~85 Bornert, Les Commentaires byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle, 123–25.~~

86 The Corpus Dionysiacum arrived in the West by means of a manuscript sent by Michael II to the court of Charlemagne. Two generations later, Charles the Bald commissioned Latin translations of Maximos’ Dionysian commentaries. For further details, see Deno John Geanakoplos, “Some Aspects of the Influence of the Byzantine Maximos the Confessor on the Theology of East and West,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 38, no. 2 (1969): 153–55. For an extensive study of the manuscript tradition and influence of Maximos in the West and the career of his translator, Anastasius, see Bronwen Neil, “A Critical Edition of Anastasius Bibliothecarius’ Latin Translation of Greek Documents Pertaining to the Life of Maximus the Confessor, with an Analysis of Anastasius’ Translation Methodology, and an English Translation of the Latin Text” (Ph.D. diss., Australian Catholic University, 1998).

87 For Maximos’ reception in Byzantium, see Andrew Louth, “Maximus the Confessor’s Influence and Reception in Byzantine and Modern Orthodoxy,” ed. Pauline Allen, Bronwen Neil, and Andrew Louth, 2015, 502–4. Louth identifies Photios as the first Byzantine to engage deeply with Maximos’ works. From there, it would not be difficult to argue for the influence of maximian thought on the Macedonians, given the close association of Photios with several of the works produced under the names of Basil I and Leo VI.

~~188 4.8 The Return to Rome~~

Like the republican triumphator Camillus who, in Roueché’s example, is acclaimed as “Romulus ac parens patriae, conditorque,”88 the “Lamb of God” is not here invoked but rather declared. The use of the nominative and in many other places both in civic acclamations and in Christian liturgy,89 is common enough to constitute a regular feature of the stylistic conventions governing such compositions and performances. It is also striking that verbs are in these cases frequently absent. Although one might expect

“es” or “est,” i.e., “you are” or “he is,” their absence produces a further level of ambiguity that serves to obscure the distinction between or even to synthesize the acclamatus with his prototype. The predicate is obvious, but the subject, left unstated, is susceptible not so much to multiple interpretations as to multiple significations. The omission of the verb does not cause those who utter the declaration to select one from a limited number of options but rather to extend the semantic value of the utterance to cover the range of meanings permissible within the system of signs. The more invested one is in a system, whether it is the salvation history of Israel and the Church or the

~~88 Roueché, “Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire,” 182, quoting Livy 5.49.7.~~

89 From the ordinary of the Roman Mass, one can point to the Dominus Deus Sabaoth and the Sanctus. For a discussion of the Roman setting of early Christian hymnic and acclamatory practice, see Michael Stuart Williams, “Hymns as Acclamations: The Case of Ambrose of Milan,” Journal of Late Antiquity 6, no. 1 (2013): 108–34. For its continuation in the medieval west, see Uta-Renate Blumenthal, “‘Laudes Regiae:’ in Praise of Kings: Medieval Acclamations, Liturgy, and the Ritualization of Power,” in Procession, Performance, Liturgy, and Ritual: Essays in Honor of Bryan R. Gillingham, ed. Nancy Van Deusen, Bryan Gillingham, and Nancy Van Deusen (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2007), 83–118, along with; Bernhard Opfermann, Die liturgischen Herrscherakklamationen im Sacrum Imperium des Mittelalters (Weimar: Böhlau, 1953). Notably these studies focus on the politicization of religious ritual rather than the religious aspects of political ritual.

~~189~~

~~narrative of the rise and extension of the imperium of Rome, the broader will be the semantic range and the more complex the web of correlative types.~~

~~The imperatives that often follow such declarations therefore are directed at multiple addressees who, by means of the declaration, become one. In the case of the~~

“Lamb of God,” the host, an apparent disc of unleavened bread, is for the believer a present and incarnate instantiation of Jesus Christ, who was and is and is to come, and who fulfills and completes the multiple, prefiguring blood sacrifices of pre-Christian culture.90 In a similar manner, the acclamatus of a Roman civic ceremony not only undergoes comparison to an historical personage or god, but in some atavistic sense, becomes him.91 It is difficult to determine whether the functional overlap between the stylistic conventions of Roman civic ceremonies and Christian liturgy indicate a genetic connection or merely parallel development, but the similarities in any case are striking.

In the example above, it is clear that the participants in the ceremony expect that their language is not so much conveying information as performing actions. This is a commonplace of Christian sacramental theology.92 In the fully developed western system,

90 The transformation of the idea of sacrifice in early Christianity is well illustrated by the English word “blessing,” which in Old English and Common Germanic meant to spatter with the blood of a freshly slaughtered victim.

91 Although contemporary anthropologists find much that is problematic in his work, Frazer’s treatment of sacrifice and of magical impersonation, accomplished through the use of masks and vestments, remains influential, perhaps due more to the works such as Wells’ Outline of History and Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, which popularized Frazer’s notions about primitive religion. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, 4th ed. (New York: Collier, 1922); C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, 1st American ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957).

~~92 See David Brown, “A Sacramental World: Why It Matters,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 609ff.~~

190 a sacrament is understood as consisting of form, ie words, and matter. The utterance of a formula accompanied by a proper disposition and matter, effect the identification of the eucharistic elements with the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In a similar way, the acclamation of the Roman people in some mysterious way makes a citizen or general into an imperator or basileus and, explicitly in the ancient pagan triumphs, a sort of temporary god.93 This process of divinization had deep roots in the Greek world, perhaps originating in the memorials of heroes who became gods when the community established shrines and offered worship in their honor. The Hellenistic kings, taking the regalia and ceremony of the oriental kingdoms they conquered,94 also began to demand proskynesis from their subjects and subtly became living gods. And, as we have seen, by whatever means they got there, such processes were already deeply embedded in Roman culture in the republican period.95 In each case, it was the authority of the man, his Herrschaft, won through prowess, luck,96 or some combination of the two, that put him in a position to demand worship, but it was the people, in agreeing to offer worship, who made him a god.

With the conversion of Constantine and the resulting Christianization of Roman institutions, the church had to find some way of reconfiguring the traditional prerogatives of an office that for centuries had conferred on its occupant the rights of a divine high

~~93 Beard, The Roman Triumph, 85–92.~~

~~94 Brill’s New Pauly, s.v. diadema.~~

~~95 Price, “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors,” 103–5.~~

~~96 McCormick, Eternal Victory, 11–13.~~

~~191~~

priest. As is well known, Constantine demanded and received the title isapostolos,97 setting the stage for a millennial conflict in the West and less frequent but still intense contests between Church and State in the East.98 What unfolds throughout Roman history, and here I mean Roman in the widest possible sense, is a dialogue between the strongman who takes power and the community that has the right to confer legitimacy and define its limits.

We have already seen how historians have sought to understand public ceremonies as expressions of social and economic structures and mediating instruments for the regulation and distribution of power. Attention has recently turned to the use of acclamations in particular as a quasi-democratic instrument that served both to elect an emperor and to recall him through a process of “de-acclamation.”99 Even if these interpretations are granted validity, there is the further problem of understanding how a triumphator, imperator, or basileus can, once crowned, anointed, and acclaimed, cease to be what he has become, even when he no longer occupies his office. The fact that acclamations could function in exceptional cases in a certain way does not cancel out competing theories. It rather brings attention to the contest between rival or even complementary interpretations. The rites themselves, as rites, sought to foster inclusive

97 For general background, see Ostrogorski, History of the Byzantine State, 2. For a specific discussion of the title, see Jonathan Bardill, Constantine, Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 373, 392.

98 The first chapter of An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), which is entitled “Europe and the Theologico-Political Problem” provides a masterful summary analysis of these issues. In the reign of Constantine VII, the controversy of the tetragamia was still fresh and had been preceded by iconoclasm, and the long christological struggles that produced the Henotikon.

~~99 Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, passim. This is perhaps the most controversial thesis advanced in The Byzantine Republic.~~

192 interpretations and produce social harmony. We ought therefore to be cautious in arguing that any one component is characteristic of the whole, or that a genuine core is concealed by a surrounding pulp of extraneous material.

~~For this reason, it is worthwhile once again to examine the process by which the~~

Byzantines made their emperor and what their ritual understanding of that process might have been. On the one hand, there is a man who is but a man. He requests legitimacy from some representative body or bodies in the polity, is granted it, and then fulfills the function of his office. On the other hand, this process, despite the fact of infrequent de- acclamation, creates a tertium quid, the emperor, who is both more than the man and rises above the polity. How can two lesser things create something greater than themselves?

When faced with such problems, cultures have historically had recourse to the divine. At great milestones, birth, marriage, death, and, significantly for us, ordination, human beings have sought to consecrate the mundane and somehow make it participate in the life of a higher reality.

Like the Ecce, the rites by which lovers become spouses, children become legitimate members of the community, and individuals become capable of mediating between gods and men, seek to transform the humane through elision with the divine.

The continuity of rulership between a king and his successor is a good example of the ontological claims of acclamation and its associated rites. Through acclamation, a man does not so much become an emperor as have his being changed into or joined to the state of emperorness. The English phrase, “The king is dead! Long live the king!,” derived from French and with analogues in most Western European languages, succinctly

~~193~~

expresses this paradox.100 At the passing of one sovereign and the accession of the next, this phrase, making use of ambiguous paradox, expresses the continuity of rule and the identity of man and office. The phrase also blurs the interregnum and works against the creation of a “state of exception.”101

~~Answering how this change was effected is best accomplished through recourse to developed, theological frameworks and comparison to practices inherited from the~~

~~Roman, pagan, past. The chief danger of this theological approach, which it shares with~~

~~Marxist, Straussian, and similar reductive methods, is that it will channel a sea of possible meanings into a single, mainstream interpretation. Since from their origin in~~

Rome through their elaboration in Byzantium the acclamations represent a fundamentally religious phenomenon, one that does not preclude but rather encompasses the political and juridical, a theological and ritual framework seems the best tool for deepening appreciation for them, if not for achieving a definitive understanding of their meaning and function.

From a liturgical perspective, one can understand coronation, especially once it became Christianized with the addition of anointing and an identification of the sovereign with his Old Testament prototypes, as a sacramental. In many Christian traditions,

100 Nelson, “Symbols in Context,” 260–62 discusses some of the problems attendant on ensuring succession and attempts to solve them through the inauguration of the successor during the lifetime of the regnant in both the East and the West.

101 Huntington and Metcalf provide an analysis of the “rites de passage” that accompany the death of sovereigns in their Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121–83. For the application of the theories of Agamben and Schmitt on the “state of exception” to Byzantine polity, see Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 85–88, 96.

194 sacramentals are understood as practices, objects, and rituals that share in and bring to mind the greater sacraments or mysteries of which they are a part.102 In the West, holy water has myriad uses as a reminder of baptism. In the East, where the division between sacraments and sacramentals is not defined and all are included in the category of mysteries, many thinkers consider life itself to be something like a liturgy.103 In the fully- developed sacramental system of the West, rituals such as baptism and ordination are thought to effect an ontological change on the baptized or ordained.104 The coronation ceremonies of European sovereigns, which include anointing and vesting, are analogous to ordination. With the increasing distinction between Church and State in the West from the year 1000 onwards along with the growth of absolutism, which emphasized the sovereign’s independence from the Church and sole reliance upon God for his dignitas, the sacramental aspect of kingship has become obscured and the origins of “the secular” have been retrojected deeper and deeper into the past, with liberal thinkers having a habit of identifying all monarchies with absolutist ideology and all historical polities as beset by the same political struggles that dominated European politics from the Reformation

102 For the contemporary Roman Catholic understanding of sacramentals, see CCC 1667-1673. In the Christian East, the distinction between sacraments and sacramentals is less distinct. While the eastern concept of “mystery” may apply to a potentially unlimited variety of ways that God may communicate with human beings, there is broad agreement that there are seven “principal mysteries,” which align with the now traditional, western canon of seven sacraments.

103 For modern Orthodox approaches to sacramental theology, see Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil: An Orthodox Christian Experience of God (Chesterton: Conciliar Press, 2007); Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973).

~~104 CCC 1228 and 1582.~~

~~195 through the nineteenth century.105 Stepping aside from these preoccupations, we may attempt to recover the more complex and essentially liturgical understanding of~~

~~Herrschaft that the medieval world inherited from antiquity and worked to Christianize in a project that lasted a millennium.~~

~~4.9 Recovering the Byzantine Theory of Acclamation~~

One of the chief difficulties in making generalizations about Byzantine political thought is that many scholars feel that it does not exist. The standard narrative posits an unreflective, static, and untheorized body of ideas that was inherited from the Hellenistic kingdoms, given a Christian interpretation in the fourth century, and remained largely unchanged throughout the Byzantine millennium.106 Such narratives, slowly going out of fashion with reference to the medieval West, exert much influence on those both within and outside of the discipline of Byzantine studies and discourage fine-grained research and nuanced approaches to the evidence. This evidence is fairly extensive,107 but it is often characterized as being little more than a mass of self-conscious rhetorical exercises that is remarkable chiefly for its lack of originality and a cringing desire to please those in

~~105 Manent traces this trajectory throughout his work and gives a summary of the development from Hobbes to Rousseau An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 93–94.~~

~~106 Nicol, “Byzantine Political Thought,” 55–57.~~

107 Past scholars have focused on the surviving “Mirrors of Princes,” written for the instruction of members of the imperial household, surviving letters and orations addressed to sovereigns, a small corpus of political satires, and the prooimia of imperial legislation and compilation literature. This last source has been most famously examined in Hunger, Prooimion.

~~196~~

~~power. So understood, these works constitute “a genre, rather than a tradition of thought.”108~~

More and more, scholars have come to appreciate that this account of Byzantine political thought is an oversimplification. Continental European scholars present a much more nuanced account that explains how, despite an adherence to inherited forms and apparent uniformity of content, changes are significant enough to earn the name

“development.”109 Continuity of genre and style, in the written word as much as in iconography, disguise the deployment of new ideas in old vesture.110 The articulation of the doctrine of translatio imperii and the renewed emphasis of romanitas in the tenth- century are instances of this phenomenon.111 That external continuity conceals such developments should rather excite our admiration than inspire indignation at the

~~Byzantines’ lack of originality. To theorize would be to highlight novelty. That~~

~~Byzantines did not, apparently, theorize, does not mean that they did not think.~~

~~The discovery of the development of Byzantine political thought from such uncooperative witnesses is a subtle business. But, in the tenth-century compilation~~

~~108 Nicol, “Byzantine Political Thought,” 56.~~

109 Hélène Ahrweiler’s L’idéologie politique de l’Empire byzantin was among the first to present this more balanced view. Dimiter Angelov’s Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium (1204- 1330) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) shows how within certain unchanging parameters, Byzantine political thought showed a high degree of adaptability and flexibility, especially in the later period. For a recent discussion of the status quaestionis, see P. Magdalino, “Forty Years on: The Political Ideology of the Byzantine Empire,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 40, no. 1 (2016): 17–26.

110 Hunger, “On the Imitation (Mimesis) of Antiquity in Byzantine Literature”; Hans-Georg Beck, “Res Publica Romana: Vom Staatsdenken der Byzantiner,” in Das byzantinische Herrscherbild, ed. Herbert Hunger (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 379–414.

~~111 Nicol, “Byzantine Political Thought,” 59.~~

~~197 literature, there is evidence that, while still implicit, tells us how the Byzantines enacted their political thought, or at least how they thought one ought to do so. De Administrando~~

Imperio, Constantine VII’s manual of statecraft, with its unadorned style, apparently small circulation, and practical aim, has proven a useful source of such reflection for many scholars.112 De Cerimoniis, is cast in a similar mold and gives a detailed explication of one of the chief instruments of Byzantine statecraft.113 If such works do indeed grant more direct access to Byzantine political thought, they are still indirect and untheorized.

~~The approach must be oblique and progress made through association, analogy, and assumption. We are left with plausible or even probable conclusions, while the thing itself remains enigmatic.~~

Even in the absence of clear, programmatic statements to that effect, it is clear that coronations and other similar accession ceremonies modelled themselves on ordination rites and kept alive ancient conceptions of the priest-king. The fact that the

~~Romans, at least to our knowledge,114 never produced anything like the rich tradition of~~

~~Christian sacramental theology to explain their own rites, should not prevent us from~~

~~112 Preeminent among these are Romilly Jenkins’ De Administrando Imperio, vol. 2: Commentary (London: Athlone Press, 1962); Ševčenko, “Re-Reading Constantine Porphyrogenitus.”~~

113 As an indication of how highly Constantine VII regarded ceremony, among those things which the Byzantines are never to grant the barbarians in diplomatic negotiations, DAI gives equal weight to Greek fire and imperial vesture. In the reception of legations, DAI stresses the need for proper ceremonial. DAI 13.

114 There is considerable difficulty in discussing Roman religion and consequently conflicting interpretations of by anthropologists. This is due to limited surviving texts, the hostile witness of Christians, and the ambiguous nature of archaeological evidence. See Christopher Smith, “The Religion of Arachaic Rome,” in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 33–36.

~~198 attempting to draw out the assumptions implicit in their ritual practices and of those of their Eastern, Medieval successors.~~

As theologians worked to make explicit the implicit meanings of their ecclesiastical rites, there could not but be an instinct to understand the office of the sovereign as being something like that of a priest or bishop. Because ordination is a sacrament, the Christian tradition has understood the clerical state as a perduring, ontological category.115 In a similar and widespread way, the sovereign was no mere officeholder. It is for this reason and not merely for the political danger that they engendered, that deposed kings and emperors had to be killed, mutilated, or forced to enter the monastic state.116 Of the three, death is the most obvious, but tellingly not the most frequently sought option, especially in Byzantium. Apparently inspired by Old

Testament conceptions of ritual purity, mutilation rendered a sovereign ritually unfit to perform his duties.117 Reduction, or rather elevation, to the monastic state, created a canonical rather than a physical impediment. In either case, it was necessary to alter the being of the emperor, and this alteration was made necessary because of his quasi-

115 Among early sources for the development of this doctrine, Augustine’s interactions with the Donatists and other groups in North Africa are perhaps the most important. The language employed here is scholastic, which of course comes from a much later period.

116 The example of Richard II will perhaps be the most familiar to English-speaking readers of Shakespeare’s history plays. Relying on late medieval traditions, Shakespeare developed a narrative of pre- Tudor England that doomed Richard’s usurper to leprosy and England to defeat in France and civil war at home. The “original sin” was the deposition and murder of an anointed sovereign.

117 For the influence of Old Testament imagery on Byzantine imperial ideology, especially its rising prominence through the reign of Herakleios, see Claudia Rapp, “Old Testament Models for Emperors in Early Byzantium,” in The Old Testament in Byzantium, ed. Paul Magdalino and Robert S. Nelson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010), 175–97.

199 ordained status as a particular manifestation of Alter Christus, Christus Rex.118 Although later theological reflection would reject the rites of king-making as a species of ordination, it never lost its status as a consecration, which rather than being a Christian imposition had been an inheritance from republican Rome.119

In both the East and the West such conceptions, blurry and untheorized though they may have been, resulted in the application of these solutions to the problems surrounding a deposed emperor from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries. The frequency of the Byzantines’ recourse to mutilation and forced conversion to the monastic state shows that the old Roman theory of acclamation and de-acclamation had been elaborated with a surrounding medium of semitically-inflected, Christian ritual precepts. But rather than a contaminating influence or a distracting appendage, the rites, words, and signs from all of these sources worked together and complemented one another to synthesize a Christian, Roman concept of basileia.

118 In the West this claim was made most forcefully in the so-called “Norman Anonymous.” For a discussion of the two “Christi” in this text, see George Huntston Williams, The Norman Anonymous of 1100 A.D.: Toward the Identification and Evaluation of the so-Called Anonymous of York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 131–32. Francis Oakley, The Mortgage of the Past: Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance (1050-1300) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 15–41.The deep roots, broad distribution, and long life of the concept of the “priest-king” and its reception in religious and political thought are examined at length in Jean Hani, La royauté sacrée du pharaon au roi très chrétien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); see also Oakley, Kingship.

119 Price, “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors” is particularly concerned to demonstrate the essentially religious character of pre-Christian (and pre-imperial) Roman ceremonial.

~~200 Central to both Pagan and Christian understandings of legitimate authority was the old Roman term dignitas.120 According to Balsdon,121 dignitas and auctoritas were~~

“very closely linked, the one static, the other dynamic.” Relying mainly on Cicero, the chief theorist of Roman republicanism, Balsdon states that power rests with people, auctoritas with the senate, and dignitas with the individual statesman. The legitimate exercise of the people’s power occurs by means of the auctoritas of the senate, to which the dignitas of senators entitles them. Greek writers had considerable difficulty in rendering these last two terms into their language and used ἀξίωμα for both.122 Balsdon uses the example of Caesar to show how in the last century of the republic, the Romans themselves became confused and somewhat anxious about the distinction. Dignitas, which signaled both a conqueror’s military prowess and a nobleman’s traditional qualities of culture, intellect, and prudence, likewise coalesced so that the possessor of one, at least notionally, became endowed with both. Historically, of course, the sword proved mightier than the pen, but even so, the successors of Caesar were concerned to shore up their claims to auctoritas by patronizing culture and monopolizing military glory.123

~~120 Christian Gnilka, “Dignitas,” Hermes 137, no. 2 (2009): 190–201. Gnilka focuses on the word’s extended uses in fields such as art and architecture.~~

~~121 J. P. V. D. Balsdon, “Auctoritas, Dignitas, Otium,” The Classical Quarterly 10, no. 1–2 (1960): 45.~~

~~122 Balsdon, 44.~~

123 Starting with Augustus, whose reliance on Agrippa to subdue his enemies and Maecenas to find and foster artistic talent demonstrate how a sovereign could use the deeds of his lieutenants to burnish his own image. Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

201 In the later history of Greek engagement with Roman political structures, the two words ἀξία and ἀξίωμα became synonymous and, tracking Latin usage, came to encompass a wider and wider but still technical range of meanings.124 As discussed previously, the Latin terms honos and officium were already invading each other’s semantic domains in the late republic and early empire, encouraging a certain confusion between abstract concepts and political office, or, at a later date, with titles that were once tied to the occupant of a particular office.125 In this milieu sorting out whether dignitas makes one worthy of holding office, or holding office confers dignitas is likely an unsolvable problem.126 It seems that over time, as emperors became more and more sharers in a type rather than individuals,127 the latter theory came to predominate, insofar as the indirect evidence provided by art and practice indicate.

~~124 For extensive references, see Kriaras, Λεξικό της Μεσαιωνικής Ελληνικής Δημώδους Γραμματείας 1100-1669.~~

125 Gnilka, “Dignitas,” 197–99 traces the development of dignitas, officium, and munus as terms indicating ritual actions, as in the English phrase “divine office,” which means the Christian liturgy of the hours. Once again, we see the inseparability of denotation and connotation and of secular and religious aspects of Roman governmental terminology.

~~126 A similar problem confronts the interpreter of Vergil’s “messianic” eclogue, which appears in places to be a Latin paraphrase of Isaiah.~~

127 There is an extensive literature on the increasingly unindividuated “portraits” of the emperors from the third century onward, from which time it seems that stereotyped depictions of bearded generals provided a symbol of unity in the midst of a tumultuous crisis. On this phenomenon, see Mark Hebblewhite, The Emperor and the Army in the Later Roman Empire, AD 235-395 (London: Routledge, 2017), 48–50. After the crisis had passed, emperors from the fourth century onwards retained many of the iconographic features, such as the heavenly gaze and hieratic postures, that became familiar in late antique and early medieval art. Julia “the Apostate” famously sported facial hair, which some have seen as an attempt to capitalize on the association of beards both with the solider emperors and philosophers of the pagan past. Eric R. Varner, “Roman Authority, Artistic Authority, and Julian’s Artistic Program,” in Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian “the Apostate,” ed. Nicholas Baker-Brian and Shaun Tougher (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), 184–87. For theoretical approaches to this transformation of representation, see Jelena Bogdanovic, ed., Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium (Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis, 2018).

202 In order to assemble something like a theory of emperor-making, we must take an indirect approach. In perhaps equal measure to many Byzantinists’ aversion to developing a liturgical understanding of East Roman polity, contemporary theologians are largely uninterested in examining the imperial and royal underpinnings of ecclesiastical polity and the Christian sacramental system.128 Just as the Byzantine political philosophy has received little attention, so the theology of ordination has inspired much less scholarship than baptism and the eucharist. Despite this, it seems that it is precisely in ordination that the Roman and Christian sources of Byzantine thought come together.

If it is true that the development of theology proceeds not from systematic reflection but rather from the practical definition of orthodoxy against heresy, it should not be surprising that eastern Christian clergy of whatever theological persuasion did not write much of a theoretical nature on ordination. Unlike the west, controversies concerning the sacramental system of the Church and its necessary connections to the clergy have never been hotly contested. Even in the west, questions and answers on these matters did not excite much theological reflection until the sixteenth century. Our sources for the theory of ordination are therefore neither particularly eastern nor particularly ancient. Outside of a few lines in scripture and early examples of what would become canon law, the sources are ritual or liturgical.129 Bradshaw, whose work on the topic is

128 Margaret Barker’s Temple Themes in Christian Worship (London: T & T Clark, 2008) is indicative of a recent surge of interest in positioning Christian worship in the context of the temple cult of ancient Israel, but the specifically Roman features of early Christianity have been mostly eclipsed since Odo Casel’s theories went out of fashion decades ago.

129 The handiest exposition of this material is in Paul F. Bradshaw, Rites of Ordination: Their History and Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013), 82–105. Many medieval theologians believed 203 fundamental, argues that despite their wide textual variance, the sources present “a common ritual pattern.”130 This pattern includes the presentation of the ordinand and his pronouncement of as “axios” by the people, a prayer that God will supply him with the faculties he needs to carry out the duties of his office, prayers by the people and the consecrating bishop, the sign of the cross, the exchange of a ritual kiss, the celebration of the Eucharist, and, in the case of a bishop, the “tradition insturmentorum,” or the handing over of the symbols of office to the ordinand.131 Many of these features are present also in the rite for the coronation of an emperor as described in De Cerimoniis,132 and the resemblance between these two forms of inauguration is strong enough to argue that the two rites spring from a common mentality, if not from a common source. Dagron has provided a reconstruction of the tenth-century rite of coronation, essentially an expanded and glossed version of the ceremony described in De Cerimoniis.133 With his usual candor, Dagron says of the ceremony that, “it is all very disappointing” and as “valuable chiefly for the critique it inspires.”134 Dagron had wanted evidence for the reconstruction of a Byzantine theory of secular or civic power, and instead Constantine VII has left him

~~that it was at the tradition instrumentorum rather than at the anointing or laying on of hands that ordination occurred.~~

~~130 Bradshaw, 83.~~

~~131 Bradshaw, 83.~~

~~132 R191-95; V2,1-5.~~

~~133 Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 54–55.~~

~~134 Dagron, 55.~~

~~204 with a bare account of a ceremony he considers to have been wholly taken over by the~~

~~Church.~~

Perhaps what Dagron was looking for never existed, or at least was not of interest to Constantine VII. If one does look at the structure of the rite, one sees not only similarities in structure but direct verbal echoes. For instance, both the ordination and the coronation center on the pronouncement of the candidate as “axios,”135 and both have the repetition of the polychronion, the ancient acclamation for the Roman emperor. The word

“axios” (lat. dignus) has a curious connection with the anaphora of the eucharistic liturgy and its analogue in the Roman Rite, the Preface. During this prayer, which precedes the celebration of the Eucharist proper, the celebrant makes a series of proclamations and then invites the people to approve of his statements, which they do with the word axion/dignum. Thereupon, the choir chants what the triple acclamation “Holy, Holy,

~~Holy,” which in Latin is called the Sanctus, and in Greek bears the significant name, epinikios hymnos, or “hymn of victory.”136~~

Dagron notices the chanting of the Sanctus, but he does not attempt to connect it with a wider liturgical understanding of the rite. He is more interested in charting how the word “agios” came to be closely associated with the imperial office and, in his view, came to mean something like “legitimate,”137 and in itself not so different from Kaldellis’

~~135 To further illustrate the difficulty of untangling Roman from Christian influences on the formation of the rites, I remark that the Lamb is acclaimed as “axios” in Rev. 5.~~

~~136 For a discussion of the connection between the Byzantine Triumph ritual and epinikia, see McCormick, Eternal Victory, 195–96.~~

~~137 A note to Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 55 directs the reader to a discussion of the use of the term on 155-156.~~

205 interpretation of the meaning of the pair “axios/anaxios.”138 While Dagron is certainly correct that granting or withholding the title “agios” to a Byzantine emperor has something to do with his legitimacy, he seems rather to underestimate the ritual importance of the term. When he does discuss it, he links “agios” to unction and an Old

Testament of kingship, arguing against any particular Christian meaning for the term. In the context of the tenth-century ceremony described in De Cerimoniis, there can be no connection to unction, since this practice appears to have been adopted from the West sometime after 1204.139 That the Sanctus appears so closely tied to the practice of acclamation, the proclamation axios, and the act of consecration,140 whether of the eucharistic gifts or of a new emperor, is surely sufficient to argue that the term had also a

~~Christian meaning in the rite of coronation.~~

So far, we have given some indication of how knotty the problem is and how we must be content with finding resonances rather than proving formal descent. At any rate, for the middle Byzantine period, in the case of both the ordination of clergy and the rite of coronation, what evidence we have is ritual. To discover what the theology of ordination was in the first millennium, scholars must analyze rites rather than treatises.

138 See Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 135 and 149. For a critique of Kaldellis, see Nicholas Matheou, “City and Sovereignty in East Roman Thought,” in From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities, ed. Nicholas S. M. Matheou, Theofili Kampianaki, and Lorenzo M. Bondioli (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 50–59.

~~139 See Ruth Macrides, “Trial by Ordeal in Byzantium: On Whose Authority,” in Authority in Byzantium, ed. Pamela Armstrong (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 33–34.~~

140 Dagron’s point of view is particularly surprising in light of the fact that a little later in his discussion, he refers to the “cheirotoneia” of the emperor, which he is careful to translate as “consecration.” Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 57.

~~206 Likewise, to understand how medieval East Romans understood the office of the emperor, Byzantinists must look at ceremonies rather than positive statements.~~

In the relatively small literature devoted to ordination in general one finds little concern to situate the “data,” that is the textual witnesses that have down to us, in their historical context. When writers, whether ancient or modern, look outside of the Christian tradition, they seek to find continuity with Jewish worship.141 While this emphasis has fostered a tradition of typological reflection over the centuries, it perhaps has diminished or occluded the Roman dimension of early Christian worship.142 Especially in contemporary discussions of the early church, the Roman empire is constructed as

“other,” an antagonist and persecutor.143 For the many early Christians who called themselves Romans, and especially for those in both east and west who became Christian in the fourth century or later and continued to identify as Roman long after most

141 For example Alceste Catella, “L’evoluzione dei modelli rituali della liturgia di ordinazione,” in Le liturgie di ordinazione: atti della XXIV Settimana di studio dell’Associazione professori di liturgia, Loreto (AN), 27 agosto-1 settembre 1995 (Roma: CLV-Edizioni liturgiche, 1996), 17 positions the New Testament and Jewish/Old Testament background of the rite but does not discuss the Roman background.

142 Students of the history of Christian liturgy have focused on the connections between the practice of the ancient synagogue while those more interested in symbolism look towards the temple. Both approaches sidestep the question of the Roman setting of early Christian worship. In the early twentieth century, Odo Casel helped to found what he termed Mysterientheologie, and sought to identify certain aspects of Christian worship with ancient mystery cults, but his approach has attracted comparatively few followers in the years since his death. For his work and its reception, see Gozier, André. Odo Casel, Künder Des Christusmysteriums. Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1986.

143 Barker, Margaret. Temple Themes in Christian Worship. London ; New York: T & T Clark, 2007.49-50 discusses the difficulty in early Christian thought of untangling the relationship between Jerusalem, Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and the New Jerusalem in the context of the destruction of the temple and the highly symbolic language of Revelation. The question of Rome as persecutor becomes especially problematic after Constantine’s conversion and with the contests over the Roman past that raged at Rome and in Constantinople for the remainder of the fourth century. For them it was probably impossible to settle on just one set of meanings, identities, and loyalties, and it must be the same for students of these questions today. At least in the minds of imperial propagandists, by the early seventh century at the latest, the Roman Empire had become synonymous and coterminous with Christendom.

~~207~~

~~contemporary historians would recognize the end of that empire, this animosity towards~~

~~Rome would surely be perplexing. But they, doubtless unconsciously, remained Romans after their baptism, and went about baptizing Romanitas just as surely as they Romanized their Christianity.~~

The rites of “election,” whether of a Christian priest or of a Roman emperor, have enough resemblance to be said to follow “a common ritual pattern.” In the absence of evidence, it is probably impossible to work out the sort of “philo-genetic” account that

Nelson described, but the resemblance in both words and actions between the two rites is too close to be coincidental. Without bothering overmuch with questions of priority, it suffices to say that the rite of coronation in De Cerimoniis and the ordination rites of the

Christian church are the products of a process of mutual enrichment, whereby ritual actions, political concepts, philosophical notions, and theological doctrines have been stitched together to form the texture of middle Byzantine ceremony.

~~And yet, we still desire more clarity than a catalogue of similarities could provide.~~

Bradshaw warns against “applying to the rites a completely Western and anachronistic sacramental theology.”144 But if we want some theoretical precision, we have no choice but to look for a later and western thinker whose thought, we hope, will not be completely alien to that of tenth-century Byzantium. In Peter Lombard’s treatment of the sacraments in book four of his Sententiae, he provides something like the first systematic exposition of ordination in the Christian tradition.145 Peter Lombard draws on a wide

~~144 Bradshaw, Rites of Ordination, 87–88.~~

145 At least as far back as Jerome, understanding Christian orders as being fulfillments of and in continuity with the clergy of the Jewish temple had been common. (Ep. 146.2) So already, there is the elision of the Roman in favor of the Semitic. This is like the donation of Constantine, which famously 208 variety of scriptural, patristic, and legal authorities, and his work became foundational for later scholastic theology. As such, the Lombard represents something like the middle term between the apologetic and didactic theology of the first millennium and the theoretical and systematic theology of the following centuries. Given a dearth of

Byzantine models,146 we must rely on a Western thinker to present an account of ordination that still breaths the air of the fathers in a milieu where scholasticism is still nascent and the schism between East and West has not entered into the discourse and identities of the Christian faithful.

Peter Lombard’s most recent editor, Giulio Silano, situates the Lombard’s treatment of sacred orders as trinitarian, sacramental, and founded on a typological understanding of the Old Testament.147 Such a framework does not take into account the specifically Roman milieu that Peter Lombard’s repeated use of terms like dignus and officium produce; and yet, this is no doubt an accurate reflection of Peter Lombard’s way of thinking. All humans suffer from confirmation bias, and the Christian mind has been

attempts to appear Roman but mistakenly casts the emperor’s retinue as temple priests and oriental satraps derived from Old Testament accounts. Further, Jerome states that “You see then that the blessedness of a bishop, priest, or deacon, does not lie in the fact that they are bishops, priests, or deacons, but in their having the virtues which their names and offices imply.” (Contra Iovinianum 1.35.) This is essentially identical with the understanding of the power of offices and titles to confer dignitas that we observed in an ever-increasing way from the Roman republic through the imperial period.

146 Yury Avvakumov, “Sacramental Ritual in Middle and Later Byzantine Theology: Ninth- Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 249–66. Avvakumov speaks about the problems in producing a (neo)scholastic account of Byzantine sacramentology but shows that the Byzantines themselves were reluctant “to engage in constructing an academic sacramentology.” As in the case of Byzantine political philosophy, it is not that there was no thinking; it is just that their thinking was less systematic than students of western theology and philosophy suppose it should have been. And yet, the urge for us to systematize remains strong.

~~147 Giulio Silano, ed., The Sentences, Book 4: On the Doctrine of Signs (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), xxxviii–xliv.~~

209 trained to think in liturgical and scriptural terms, just as many historians have difficulty seriously considering aspects beyond the social and economic. That the Lombard’s theory of sacred orders may have been unconsciously Roman does not make it less Roman. In fact, that both the Lombard and his modern editor do not remark on it is a good argument for the thorough domestication of Roman governmental structures and concepts as essential elements of ecclesiastical polity.

~~Peter Lombard’s theory is briefly that a cleric is chosen by lot,148 receives tonsure to mark his passage into the clerical state, and receives dignity, office, and power from~~

God which then becomes indelible and independently operative. This is not so different from the Roman and Hellenistic theories of election by tyche/felicitas.149 In fact, it aligns well with Bradshaw’s account of ordination, the rite of coronation as described by

~~Constantine Porphyrogennetos, and Kaldellis’ discussion of the Byzantine theory of elective monarchy.150 This last term is problematic because the term χειροτονία used for~~

~~“election” in classical Greek means “election” and in medieval and contemporary~~

~~Christian usage “ordination.”151 To say that χειροτονία is what makes a man into a cleric~~

~~148 The Lombard cites the book of Acts through Isidore, “Mathias electus est sorte.” Sent. 4.3.~~

149 For the development of the concepts sacramentum, virtus, and felicitas from the first to fourth centuries with special reference to the imperial office, see Paul Stephenson, Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor (New York: Overlook Press, 2010), 73–74.

~~150 For Kaldellis’ understanding of basileia, see Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 114.~~

151Paul F. Bradshaw, Ordination Rites of the Ancient Churches of East and West (New York: Pueblo Publishing, 1990), 34 argues that the ambivalence of the term inspired the elaboration of the rite. Significantly, he draws a parallel to the use of ordo and ordinare in the Latin west. For the development of this terms, see Pierre van Beneden, Aux origines d’une terminologie sacramentelle: ordo, ordinare, ordinatio dans la littérature chrétienne avant 313 (Louvain: Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense, 1974). Pierre van Beneden, “Ordo. Über den Ursprung einer kirchlichen Terminologie,” Vigiliae Christianae 23, no. 3 (1969): 161–176.

~~210~~

or into emperor does not clear up whether one is speaking of the democratic process of voting or of the hieratic practice of laying on of hands. Even if we accept that something like “election” is meant in either context, we be wary of ascribing a present understanding of democracy to a past culture. Bradshaw cautions that,

The important place accorded to the election of a candidate for ordination in early Christianity should not be understood as pointing to some notion of the ideal of democracy, nor, at least at first, to the principle that congregation had the right to choose its own ministers. Nor was it seen as in any way opposed to the divine calling of a minister, but on the contrary it was understood as the means by which God’s choice of a person for a particular ecclesiastical office was discerned and made manifest. As both patristic writings and the prayers in the rites themselves make clear, it was always considered that it was God who chose and ordained the ministers through the action of the church. There was thus no dichotomy between actions “from below” and “from above.152

~~The election and acclamation ratify a choice already made in Heaven. Vox populi, vox dei.~~

Perhaps the spilling of one category into the other is intentional Peter Lombard goes so far as to refer to the tonsure, the first stage of clerical ordination, as a royal coronation,153 and he was by no means alone in interpreting the rite in this manner. The difficulty that both the Roman-Hellenistic theory of kingship and the Christian theory of ordination encountered was in explaining how lesser beings could create a greater, i.e., how the ruled could confer the right to rule on their ruler. In the later, Western tradition,

~~152 Bradshaw, Rites of Ordination, 83–84.~~

~~153 “corona regale decus significat”~~

211 the sacraments were understood as being instruments of “dispositive grace.”154 In this conception, a sacrament, offered by human hands to human beings, channels the divine and puts the recipient in the proper disposition to receive grace while acting as the medium through which the grace is communicated from the divine to the human.155 There are many instances even in classical Latin where dignitas is used as a synonym for natura and proprietas.156 It seems even more fitting then, that the rite should serve as the tertium quid that bridges an otherwise insurmountable divide, making emperors, kings, and priests out of common men by supplying them with dignitas and altering their natura.

~~The concept of dignitas is central to Peter Lombard’s discussion of ordination.~~

The words dignus, digne, decet, decus, indignus, and indigne appear frequently, as do terms such as rex and regere.157 Christians are wont to place this discourse in the typological framework of Melchisedech, temple worship, and the royal priesthood of

Jesus Christ, but they miss the Roman background that provides the terminology for the discourse. Peter, though a medieval Christian and a Lombard, writes about the authority and legitimacy of the clergy in antique, Roman terms. Nor is this phenomenon limited to the Latin West. Even today, during the ordination rite in Eastern Christian churches, the congregation acclaims the ordinand as axios. Precisely the same word is used by the

~~154 Charles J. Cronin, “The Causality (Dispositive) of the Sacraments,” American Ecclesiastical Review 25 (1901): 33–46, esp. 42-43.~~

~~155 In scholastic terms, these two acts are understood as working ex opere operantis and ex opere operato, respectively.~~

~~156 Gnilka, “Dignitas,” 195–96.~~

~~157 Sent. 4.24.~~

212 people to greet the emperor on his taking of power in De Cerimoniis.158 It would be highly tendentious to attempt to untangle the relationship and decide if here we have the liturgification of an imperial ceremony or the imperialization of an ecclesiastical rite.159

What does seem certain is that in the context of the Christian Empire, there was parallel development and mutual enrichment in the ceremonies of both Church and State, the elements of which would be less meaningful if removed from their synthetic relationship.

In returning to the coronation described in De Cerimoniis, it is striking that the emperor is referred to as βασιλεύς before he is crowned, and that throughout this chapter,160 Constantine VII or his compiler uses the terms δεσπότης, αὐτοκράτωρ, and

αὔγουστος indiscriminately. Furthermore, the emperor is referred to as νεοχειροτόνητος, which the English translators render as “newly appointed,” but that in the context of coronation of course could mean “newly elected” or “newly consecrated,” depending on which of this multivalent term’s meanings best suit an interpreter’s favored discourse. In both cases, there is a perhaps intentional interruption of expected temporal relationships.

Calling the emperor an emperor before his crowning implies that the coronation, at least in the mind of the author of De Cerimoniis, is a recognition of an already existing state rather than the process whereby the state is enacted. The piling up of near synonyms from across the history of the Greek language along with this temporal dislocation has the

~~158 DC R191-196~~

159 The Book of Revelation, a late first-century work already regarded in the second century as being written by John the Evangelist, is replete with liturgical descriptions that bear resemblance to both the ecclesiastical and civic rites of later times.

~~160 DC R191-196.~~

~~213~~

effect of blurring the succession of events. The adjective νεοχειροτόνητος is interesting both semantically and syntactically. In an ecclesial context, the same word would be translated “newly ordained.”161 The –τος ending, often confused with the so-called

“Greek gerundive” in –τέος, can function as perfect passive but often connotes possibility or futurity.162 Even in a meta-ritual text, such as De Cerimoniis, distinctions between the eternal and the temporal along with the civic and ecclesial fade into the background.

Returning to mundane time, the action of the rite, though still in the church, shifts to the people. They now proclaim the emperor as ἄξιος and then continue with a series of acclamations. If one were to permit some anachronism and import later, western, scholastic conceptions of consecration into the tenth-century Byzantine milieu, it appears that axios is the word that effects the change and makes a man into an emperor.

Whenever and however the process of emperor-making began, it is now indisputably over, and the emperor, crowned by God’s own hand in the person of the patriarch, having received the obeisance of civil and military elites, and the approbation of the people, assumes his place at the head of this and all future ceremonies.

How does the utterance of ἄξιος create this new state of affairs? In recent times, words that perform a function have been termed speech acts.163 Speech acts can be mundane or sublime and play a key role in ritual language. The traditional English

~~161 Cf. χειροτονία, the word for Christian ordination.~~

~~162 Cf. Smyth, § 471-2.~~

163 J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard Univ. in 1955 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) is the classic in the field and has given rise to a rich tradition of scholarship.

214 marriage service provides a ready example with the short phrase I do, which, when uttered by two consenting and unimpeded adults, results in their sacramental transformation into spouses. After this ceremony, the state has the newlyweds perform a second, inaudible speech act when they sign their marriage license, and they become legally entitled to the rights, duties, and privileges of the married state.

~~A question immediately arises as to whether utterances actually do something.~~

Are they merely ceremonies, empty rituals that are quaint survivals of a more primitive time that have somehow retained a footing in an age of disenchantment? Is all human action economic, taking shape within social hierarchies, and any claims to spiritual cause and effect mere ideological posturing? For many scholars, it would seem so. But even in the most secular civil marriage proceeding, ritual considerations are paramount. The theatrical mise-en-scène of the courtroom, the ritual procession and acclamation of the bailiff, and even the vestments of the presiding judge are not simply window dressing but are essential features of the enactment of a ceremony that has real legal consequences, affecting the distribution of wealth and power of both the individuals involved and society as a whole.

Although it is impossible to measure materially the difference between a single person and a married one, it is indisputable that the invisible action of the ritual speech acts that result in the married state, whether performed in a church or a courtroom, have real and measurable effects. In his preface to De Cerimoniis, Constantine VII says that his goal is to recover taxis by using ceremony to restore orderly government and human

215 flourishing to his empire.164 It seems that it would be difficult to settle quantitatively whether Constantine was successful, but at least one scholar has pointed to the increase in the celebration of triumphs and of imperial ceremonies in general in the decades following Constantine’s reign as evidence of the success of the project.165 It is probably impossible to make a quantitatively verifiable link between the great military success and economic expansion that Byzantium enjoyed in the following century and this restoration, but their coincidence suggests that ritual taxis and military nike had something more than an accidental relationship.

~~4.10 From Inauguration to Acclamation~~

The rites that were the means of this restoration consisted of actors, costumes, music, actions, locations, objects, and texts that operated together to form a totality that can no longer be reconstructed. The individuals are dead, the melodies have perished, the vestments and props have vanished, and the sites have been destroyed, repurposed, or still await excavation. Only the texts remain in something like their original form. And among the texts of De Cerimoniis, the acclamations are the lengthiest and most frequent, providing fairly immediate access to one important aspect of Byzantine ceremonial life.

~~Ritual language is conservative, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility,166 but its~~

~~164 DC R5.~~

~~165 McCormick, Eternal Victory, 175.~~

166 This extreme linguistic conservatism in ritual contexts is widely distributed across time and place. One could point to the archaic prayers of the Roman flamines, traditional Japanese norito, the Latin of Kyushu’s hidden Christians, or the devotion of some contemporary evangelical Christians to the preservation of Elizabethan English in prayer and scripture translation.

~~216 continual and regular repetition encourages the addition of new meanings and the shifting of old ones. For these reasons, the acclamations offer a privileged window into how the~~

~~Byzantines practiced mimetic renovation and made language a tool in the service of uniting Christian and Roman as well as emperor and people.~~

As literary documents, the acclamations follow a standard form. The one indispensable ingredient is the polychronion, the wish for long life that is in Latin ad multos annos and in Greek appears as πολλοὶ χρόνοι, πολλὰ τὰ ἔτη, or some variation thereof. Cheerleaders or κράκται lead the people or λαός in an antiphonal performance that is repeated in triads. Very often, such performances are preceded by forms of the

Trisagion and the Gloria, which emphasize the threefold structure of the acclamation as a whole. There follow the acclamations “This the great day of the Lord” and “This is the day of salvation for the Romans,” which pass from the cheerleaders to the people three times. There may then be various favors asked either of God or the emperor, a brief narrative or declaration, and then an expression of purpose that takes the form of an abstract noun followed by “to/for/of the Romans.” In the case of the coronation, this abstract noun is σύςτασις, the Greek equivalent of the Latin concordia,167 a massively important concept in Roman political theory and here expressing the notion that the crowning rite has resulted in and will continue to work towards bringing harmony to the ordines that make up Roman society.

167 For the importance of concordia in Roman politics, see Carlos F. Noreña, Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 132–35.

217 Within this structure, there are variations on the theme. At the birth of a porphyrogennetos,168 a question and answer dialogue replaces the strict call and response.169 The leaders ask what the day portends for each member of the Byzantine elite, both individuals and corporations, and the people respond, “a good day for victories!,”170 tapping into an old stream of Roman imperial theory.171 The leaders make a challenge in each case, and the people respond with appropriate prayers for each class.

The participation of the people is insured in this way, and the requests, which may have been for bread, spectacles, or tax relief in antiquity have been transformed into prayers for the strength of the rulers and the army and the stability of the state. The people no longer make requests of the emperor but rather of God. The imperial and the Christian features are closely united, and old practices are made to serve new ends.

An additional layer of elaboration is evident in the acclamations for the various feasts of the church year, which also have a clear, threefold structure. The quote from the acclamation for Pentecost that opened this chapter is the conclusion and is directed at the future. It was preceded by a paraphrase of the biblical narrative and a description of its liturgical commemoration.172 The usual typological structure of OT-NT-Eschaton is shifted temporally forward, so that the historical event is now NT, the present is the

~~168 DC R216-217.~~

~~169 One is reminded of the Preface/Anaphora dialogue, mentioned above.~~

~~170 νίκαις καλὴ ἡμέρα~~

~~171 McCormick, Eternal Victory, 388–96.~~

~~172 DC R59.~~

218 liturgy, and the future is the work of the Roman basileia. Without abandoning the OT, this revision adds an additional layer of referents onto the traditional structure and works to identify the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God.

Throughout these explicitly liturgical acclamations, the present tense dominates, bringing all temporal references together in a single event. De Cerimoniis splits each acclamation into a number of δοχαί, or receptions, i.e., locations along a processional route where different groups greeted the emperor and his entourage. At the first, the cheerleaders proclaim the theme for the day, which for the Nativity is a brief summary of the literal or historical sense of scripture: “ἀστὴρ τὸν ἥλιον προμηνύει ἐν Βηθλεὲμ

Χριστὸν ἀνατείλαντα ἐκ παρθένου.”173 This summary is followed by a formulaic polychronion interlaced with the various titles of the emperor and the frequent repetition of the word Ῥωμαίων,174 once again emphasizing the synthesis of the Christian and imperial elements of the ceremony. At each subsequent reception, the acclamations become more dogmatic and interpretive, using apophatic titles such as ἀμήτωρ and

ἀπάτωρ, which are a common feature of Greek theological style.175 But in these complex reflections on the mystical import of the scriptural event, the people are not left out. They ask for God’s protection of the ἀγία βασιλεία in language with pronounced demotic

~~173 “A star in Bethlehem foreshadows the Sun, Christ rising up from a virgin.” DC R35.~~

174 The use of these titles with the formula “of the Romans” represents a revival of Roman Greek political terminology in response to Frankish claims to Romanitas (cf. ODB, p. 413). This revival is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.

~~175 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1973), 26.~~

219 features,176 showing that these processions were occasions for linguistic as well as social synthesis. In the third reception, the incarnation is associated with redemption from sin, which is a Gospel precept, and in the fourth, that sin is generalized to the sin of Adam, picking up a strand of Pauline theology.177 Passing through the traditional senses of scripture and moving from Gospel to Epistle, it is tempting to see the structure of the acclamation as being something like a homily, a liturgy of the word progressively enacted outside the church as the emperor makes his way through the city. At the sixth reception, before Hagia Sophia, there is complete recapitulation of the mystery of the Nativity that positions Mary as the New Eve, explains the incarnation and redemption and makes the people “σύμφοιτοι γεγόναμεν τὴς θείας αὐτοῦ κληρονομίας.”178 There follows again the imperial polychronion.

On the emperor’s return to the palace by a different route, the acclamations more explicitly unite the day’s mystery with the action of the basileia in the present. As before, it is the fourth reception that presents the climax of the route and offers the fullest explanation of the day’s activity. Here the cheerleaders pray that God will bring all the lands of the oikoumene under Roman rule so that they may, like the Magi, offer diverse tribute to the basileia.179 De Cerimoniis presents the acclamations for the rest of the church year in a much abbreviated form, but they follow the same formula, with the third

~~176 σας, lacking an accent.~~

~~177 1 Cor. 15:22.~~

~~178 DC R38. This is a free adaptation of Rom. 6:5.~~

~~179 DC R40.~~

220 or fourth reception offering a two part exposition that begins with an account of a scriptural event, unites it to its liturgical commemoration, interprets it dogmatically, explains its significance prophetically, and asks God to make it present and efficient in the present for the exaltation of His basileia and that of the Roman people. In effect, the ceremonies on these days link times and places together into a single present through anamnesis. And it is the acclamations, which stretch across the city, that provide the interpretive key that brings the polity together linguistically, dogmatically, historically, and socially and unites the imperial and Christian claims of New Rome in a nuanced system of liturgical and typological resonance.

~~Although some of the “secular” ceremonies in the long section that follows the material for the church year lack both acclamations and the well-developed~~

Christianizing synthesis that characterize the ceremonies for these feasts, liturgical and typological resonance is evident in many of those events in the public life of the emperor that are not directly connected to the church year. For instance, the acclamations for the nuptial crowning of the emperor and empress invoke the Wedding at Cana as the prototype of the emperor’s nuptials and conclude with a prayer that just as Christ brought forth miraculous wine, which brought joy to the people and made manifest God’s power, so God will satisfy the expectation of imperial offspring, born in the purple, the color of wine.180 The appointment of government functionaries are unsurprisingly lacking in the imperial acclamations that mark ceremonies involving the emperor and his family, but the directives for where the ceremonies should take place, what prayers said, and what

~~180 DC R196-201.~~

~~221 ritual actions participants should perform clearly indicate that these Roman, civic occasions have been verkircht if not liturgiesiert.~~

~~If Dagron is right in dating the protocols of chapters 62, 63, and 65 to the reign of~~

Constanine VII,181 then their return to the typological interpretation of basileia found in the acclamations for the church year is an indication of the Porphyrogennetos’ desire to unite all things in Christ. In these chapters, one finds a novel literary form, the trilexion, a three-line hymn that interleaves with a polychronion to form an acclamation.182 In the protocol for the commemoration of the emperor’s accession day, the trilexion proclaims that God will “ἀξιώσει” the emperor so that he may rule the Roman people for a hundred years and celebrate “τὴν παροῦσαν ἡμέραν τῆς ἀὐτοκρατορίας.”183 Shifting God’s granting of dignitas to the future while referring to a past event as present elides the temporal dislocation of the accession and its commemoration, renewing the God-given legitimacy of the emperor. By design, there is no clear division between civil and the religious, each an indispensable component of “ἡ ἔνθεος βασιλεία.”

~~What must be among the two most traditional sections of De Cerimoniis, those dealing with the Hippodrome and with secular ceremonies,184 continue in the same~~

~~181 Gilbert Dagron, “Quelques remarques sur le cérémonial des fêtes profanes dans le De ceremoniis,” Travaux et mémoires, 2010, 241.~~

182 This genre appears to be uniquely attested in DC. Jacques Handschin, Das Zeremonienwerk Kaiser Konstantins und die sangbare Dichtung (Basel: F. Reinhardt, 1942), 51–52; Herbert Hunger, Das byzantinische Herrscherbild (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 273; Nikos Maliaras, Die Orgel im byzantinischen Hofzeremoniell des 9. und des 10. Jahrhunderts: eine Quellenuntersuchung (Munich: Institut für Byzantinistik und Neugriechische Philologie der Universität, 1991), 75–76.

~~183 DC R280-283.~~

~~184 DC R303-385.~~

222 trajectory. These events described in these protocols were arguably the most important and explicit annual enactments of the Byzantines’ romanitas, with the Hippodrome acting as a locus of both its memory and performance. The Hippodrome, like the Circus

Maximus in Rome, was, with its proximity to the emperor’s palace, its numerous treasures brought from around the world, and its function as the meeting place of the emperor, the people, the senate, and the military, at the center of Byzantine political consciousness and the articulation of a particularly Roman polity.185 Constantine VII recognized its importance and installed or renovated the “Walled Obelisk” there near the

Serpentine Column, which in his day would have brought the oldest and newest monuments of the Hippodrome together in a vision that united Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Christian Empire in a single ceremonial space.186 In these ceremonies, the concentration of Latin words and phrases is relatively high, and pagan and military features are more prominent.187 And yet, even in these contexts, the emperor is repeatedly compared to David,188 as he blesses the people by making the sign of the cross over

~~185 See Gilbert Dagron, L’hippodrome de Constantinople: jeux, peuple et politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).~~

~~186 For the “walled,” or “built” obelisk of Constantine VII, see Sarah Guberti Bassett, “The Antiquities in the Hippodrome of Constantinople,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 87.~~

187 See, for instance, the acclamations for a victory of the charioteers, where the emperors are greeted with such epithets as Ouranios and Olympios, and the focus is on victory over the barbarians ( DC R310-340). Later in the same chapter, God is also called τὸ θεῖον, and there is an explicit linking of the victory of a charioteer with the triumph of the army and the flourishing of the “City of the Romans,” none of which would be out of place in pagan Rome.

~~188 DC R322, R368.~~

~~223~~

them,189 and the demes are accompanied by an army of cross-bearers.190 Even something as mundane as the replacement of a lame horse becomes a Christian ritual,191 complete with the tolling of church bells and the sounding of a monastic gong.

~~The clearest indication of this Christianization is found in the protocols for~~

Lupercalia, a most ancient Roman feast that was abolished in Rome under Pope Gelasius but retained in Constantinople to mark the closure of the Hippodrome season and the beginning of Lent.192 At the climax of the protocol for this festival as described in De

~~Cerimoniis, the demes invoke the emperor as a second David and compare him to St.~~

~~Paul, an apostle who both proclaims the faith and repels the arrows of foreign peoples.193~~

In the most Roman context possible, the emperor is proclaimed as embodying Davidic kingship and as bringing the gospel to the peoples of the earth by both word and deed. It would be difficult to find a stronger symbol of the Byzantine theory of basileia than this.

~~Rather than being a place where the institutional life of pagan Rome is best preserved, the~~

~~Hippodrome is the most prominent showcase of the thorough Christianization of imperial victory ritual and the identification of orthodoxy with the mission of Rome.194 It is the~~

~~189 DC R344.~~

~~190 DC R324.~~

~~191 “ἀκολουθία,” DC R333-4.~~

192 For an account of Gelasius’ condemnation of the festival, see William M. Green, “The Lupercalia in the Fifth Century,” Classical Philology 26, no. 1 (1931): 60–69. For a different account and details on the festival in Constantinople, see T. P. Wiseman, “The God of the Lupercal,” The Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): 1–22.

~~193 DC R368.~~

~~194 DC R332.~~

224 pagan element rather than the Christian that appears to be window dressing, an archaic but necessary reminder of the pagan past of the Christian present that has not been destroyed but rather perfected by its baptism.

According to the acclamations of Constantine VII’s tenth-century compilation, the mission of Rome was apostolic. The emperor worked with the people, the army, the senate, and the Church to spread the basileia throughout the oikoumene, uniting diverse peoples in single faith and empire. The ceremonial life of tenth-century Byzantium, whether imperial or ecclesiastical, was a synthesis of Christian and Roman elements that worked to obscure or obliterate distinctions in time and place and to actualize the religious and civil functions of the emperor. Anamnesis was the chief means by which this synthesis was achieved. The speech acts that feature prominently in acclamations, whether Roman, Byzantine, pagan, or Christian, make multiple arguments simultaneously and their words, through an intentional ambiguity, embody a range of meanings. Acclamations therefore were a highly efficient means of expressing at times disparate or even seemingly contradictory religious and political ideas in a way that produced outward unity and reconciled contraries in the present while also linking past, present, and future. The acclamations made Byzantines actors in a narrative that not only accommodated their Roman and Christian identities but made them essential parts of a seamless whole that situated their basileia both in Roman history and in the divine economy. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of Byzantine political culture, we ought to conceive of a long-term process of additive cultural development that does not attempt to reduce a complex phenomenon to its components and claim that one single strand is essential and the rest merely ornamental, vestigial, or ideological. Rather, like

225 the Roman triumphs and Christian sacraments that provided their context, the acclamations used spiritual or intellectual means to achieve real and sometimes measurable ends, enacting taxis and working towards the exaltation of the Romans and the manifestation of the kingdom of God.

~~226 CHAPTER 5~~

~~THE MACEDONIAN RECOVERY OF ORDER~~

~~5.1 Renaissance or Recovery?~~

The term “Macedonian Renaissance” was once widely used to describe the cultural movement, in its various legal, literary, artistic, and architectural expressions, that occurred during the reigns of emperors Basil I, Leo VI, Constantine VII, and their successors (867-1056). Scholars now take issue with both “Macedonian” and

“Renaissance.” The first is problematic because these emperors had only shadowy or even fabricated links to Macedonia.1 The second is even more controversial, because scholars cannot agree on what the term “renaissance” ought to mean.2 The problem of

~~“renaissances before the Renaissance” has plagued historians of late antiquity and the~~

1 The Macedonian origin of the dynasty was important for its ideology and its historical claims to legitimacy, but the name derives from the Byzantine theme rather than the ancient kingdom, which was historically distinct and geographically remote. This did not, of course, stop the Macedonians, whom modern historians agree were ethnically Armenian, from exploiting this tenuous connection to argue for their descent from Alexander the Great.

2 In English, the two standard surveys of the period, from both historical and historiographical perspectives, are Paul Magdalino, “The Distance of the Past in Early Medieval Byzantium (VII-X Centuries),” Settimane Di Studio Del Centro Italiano Di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 1999, 115–47; Treadgold, Renaissances before the Renaissance. Romilly James Heald Jenkins, Byzantium; the Imperial Centuries, A D 610-1071 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); and Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus remain foundational, but they suffer from their endorsement of a “classical” Gibbonian narrative of decline and generally low evaluation of Byzantine culture, always in comparison to the Roman culture that preceded it and the humanist, Western European culture that followed it. There has been so much debate recently that it would be difficult to identify any one perspective as representative of the “standard narrative.”

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middle ages for nearly a century,3 and, since various parties have vested interests either in establishing or destroying the uniqueness of the “real” Renaissance,4 these debates are certain to continue for the foreseeable future. Such debates are embedded in deep seated meta-narratives that have determined cultural and political discourse for centuries and continue to form the basis for the contemporary definition of identities and the demarcation of battle lines in scholarly debate.5 Despite this, there remains the objective reality of the material and literary expansion that took place in Byzantium in the last half of the ninth and first half of the tenth centuries. In an effort to avoid some of the problems that come from using the traditional terminology and to come closer to understanding the Macedonians’ cultural project in its own terms, this chapter examines the words and concepts used by three generations of emperors and how the language of order and recovery was established and transformed from an attempt to gain legitimacy and defame predecessors into a comprehensive project of making the Byzantine Empire an earthly reflection of the heavenly Kingdom of God. De Cerimoniis becomes the

3 The first “renaissance before the renaissance” to gain some currency was the 12th century renaissance, proposed by Haskins, whose monograph of the same title was published in 1927. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). For the east, the pioneering work of Paul Lemerle established the idea of “Byzantine humanism” and still awaits a synthesizing successor. Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin.

4 Those determined to restrict the term “renaissance” to the cultural movement that began south of the Alps in the late fourteenth century propose various criteria to explain why earlier movements are not proper renaissances. For Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860), they were insufficiently Italian. For Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin], they lacked sufficient devotion to classical literature. For Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 1st ed.. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), they do not breathe the spirit of cultural humanism.

5 Common pairs in these ongoing debates which can be heard at the popular, semi-learned, and academic levels are “faith and reason,” “secular and religious,” “modernist and traditionalist,” etc.

~~228 crowning glory of a Macedonian “Recovery” that begins with law and the military and culminates with a performance of taxis that realizes what it intends to emulate.~~

Surviving material evidence for the tenth-century expansion of culture has been comprehensively studied by art historians. Their focus on icons, churches, and manuscript illuminations that remain above ground has established that there was a renewed interest in “classical” (yet another highly contentious term) motifs coincident with the reigns of these emperors.6 Byzantine archaeology, for a variety of reasons, remains comparatively underdeveloped, but there are indications that evidence for many untold stories remains to be uncovered, and that such evidence would go a long way in changing our perception of the “Byzantine Dark Ages,” as has happened with the history of the early medieval west.7 In contrast, when scholars examine the literary production of the same time period, they struggle to find a unifying concept or even a term sufficient to encompass what appears to be a loose collection of disparate texts, united merely by their contemporaneity.8 Despite many attempts, coherent, systematic classification remains elusive.9 It is often impossible to develop a terminology that cleanly applies to every

~~6 Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art, Second ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 130–42.~~

7 For a well-documented and nuanced view of an early medieval “dark age,” see Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. the introduction and Part IV. Wickham stresses continuity in international networks and urban life. For a relatively up-to-date view that focuses on the archaeological evidence and very real lack of literary sources for the history of early medieval England, see Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Michael J. Decker, The Byzantine Dark Ages (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) presents a concise summary of the debate over the “Byzantine Dark Ages” and discusses the value of terms like “transformation” and “decline.”

~~8 See Holmes, “Byzantine Political Culture and Compilation Literature in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Some Preliminary Inquiries.”~~

~~9 See Magdalino, “Byzantine Encyclopaedism of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries.”~~

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member of a proposed class, and the would be systematizer often risks contradiction by colleagues who find the inevitable exceptions. A safer path, then, is to describe not how things were but rather how they were thought to be. The writings of Constantine VII and his glorious predecessors fortunately provide indications of what they thought of their empire, their rulership, and the place of the literary projects they sponsored within those broader subjects. They used the terms “analepsis” and “katalepsis,” both of which may be translated as “recovery,” yet which have a subtle, but important, difference in meaning, to describe their work. This language of recovery is central to the self-understanding of the

~~Macedonian dynasty and provides a keyword around which their disparate cultural projects gather. In order both to avoid contemporary debates concerning the definition of~~

~~“renaissance” and to recover an essential component of the thought world of Constantine~~

~~VII, it is necessary to examine the writings composed by or at the behest of the~~

~~Porphyrogennetos and his ancestors. Thereby, the work of three generations creates a narrative of loss, recovery, and finally, emulation, that species of imitation that surpasses its exemplar.~~

While it may seem overly bold to claim that a single word from Constantine VII’s preface to De Cerimoniis provides the interpretive key to a cultural movement that spanned two centuries, the emperor’s testimony in that same preface makes clear that he not only saw the recovery of ceremony as important or useful but as something necessary, the chief work of his reign and his primary contribution to posterity. In the context of Constantine VII’s other writings and with the background of those of his ancestors, it is clear that De Caerimoniis and the renewal of ceremony that Constantine hoped his ekthesis would direct were for him the ultimate expressions of a movement

230 towards the recovery of order, the mos maiorum, and Romanitas, the foundation for which had been laid almost as soon as the crown was laid on his grandfather Basil’s head and which his pious father, Leo the Wise, worked to strengthen and elaborate.

As is the case with Byzantium in general, there is unfortunately no tidy, systematic exposition of Macedonian political philosophy. As Hunger recognized,10 what indications of an official Byzantine “ideology” or political philosophy there are can be most fruitfully gleaned from the emperors’ prefaces to the works they commissioned or wrote, especially in documents from the fourth century onwards.11 For the scholar, this means looking for philosophy — at least the fairly unsystematic, “practical” philosophy discussed previously, in what seem to modern eyes to be unlikely places: law codes, textbooks, and the amorphous “compilation” literature. In the prooimia, there are precious indications of imperial intent that, whether or not the texts they precede actually accomplished their stated goals, give accounts of what the emperors actually thought, or at least what they wanted others to think, about their purpose and destiny. From the prescriptive definitions of legal codes, one may likewise derive how the emperors understood important terms or wished them to be understood. Such authoritative

~~10 Hunger, Prooimion, 15–18.~~

11 Hunger focuses on documents stricto sensu rather than the “literary” works (ghost-)written by emperors and of course is more interested in the period after the foundation of the new capital in the east. But many scholars have now recognized the germ of that which received later elaboration already in Augustus’ reign and earlier. For these earlier centuries, programmatic texts have largely disappeared, and scholars must be content with numismatic and archaeological evidence.

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~~interpretations helped to establish a “legal culture” that in many cases was far more important than the actual letter of the law.12~~

~~5.2 The Formation of a Narrative~~

In the reign of Constantine VII there is a very real and quantifiable explosion of literary and scribal activity.13 Although the extent to which the eighth and ninth centuries represent a “Dark Age” in the history of Byzantine letters is a matter of controversy,14 it is important to note that Constantine VII and his predecessors believed that it did. By the time of Constantine VII’s birth in 905, there had already been more than a century of concerted polemic, and the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” over Iconoclasm was well- established as an “historical” fact. Many scholars are too quick to dismiss the “settled narrative” of this period as propaganda or myth, using the latter term to mean a false and religiously-motivated story. An older and less pejorative meaning of myth is “a narrative that explains.” While it is surely important to employ subtle methods and nuanced interpretations in dealing with the often highly polemical literature of these centuries, we go too far if the black and white depictions of the main actors merely reverse their colors rather than producing the grayish muddle of a human story bereft of divine intervention

~~12 Zachary Chitwood, Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4–7.~~

~~13 Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism, 121ff.~~

14 For several decades now, historians of late antiquity have been urging the use of terms like “transformation” and “migration” instead “decline and fall” and “barbarian invasions” when describing the crises that faced the Roman empire from the fourth century onwards. Peter Sarris, “The Early Byzantine Economy in Context: Aristocratic Property and Economic Growth Reconsidered,” Early Medieval Europe 19, no. 3 (2011): 304 provides a good example of this historiographical school.

232 or communication with transcendent realities. But such a story, even if it truly represented what really happened, would have been of no interest to Constantine VII. As we have seen, his vision of kingship and empire was deeply embedded in a narrative that encompassed the geographical, historical, and spiritual extent of “Orthodox Romania.”15

If the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” can be described as something of a “Year 0” for tenth century Byzantines, accounting for the origins of the Macedonian dynasty remained an immediate problem. The founder, Basil I, was a near barbarian of obscure family who came to the purple through a brazen act of murder. His son, Leo VI, experienced a series of marital misfortunes, resulting in the “Tetragamy,” the most acute constitutional crisis in Byzantine history. While the narrative of iconoclasm and orthodoxy could be safely assumed, the claim that Macedonian legitimacy rested on something more stable than kratos and bia needed exposition. Although there were intimations of the form that this narrative would take already in texts promulgated in the reigns of his predecessors, it only with Constantine VII that the delineation of the narrative becomes explicit.

~~Implicit in any narrative of recovery is a preceding period of loss. The Triumph of~~

~~Orthodoxy established its narrative by reestablishing the veneration of icons after a period when such veneration was outlawed and the icons themselves had been destroyed.~~

Practically this resulted in new forms of piety that had profound effects on popular devotion, learned theology, and the architecture and furnishing of churches. In not a few cases, the rededication of churches in atonement for iconoclastic impieties resulted in the

15 See Anthony Kaldellis, Ethnography after Antiquity Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 173–87 for the history and meaning of this term.

~~233 installation of icons intended (or claimed) to replace destroyed images that had never existed, engaging in a form of innovation through imitation that scholars term mimesis.~~

This move is not just illustrative of Byzantine cultural history, but of cultural development in general. When a society attempts to “recover” the past, it is faced with a multiplicity of pasts, each presenting itself as archetype that can be exploited for present purposes. Although Aristotle defined human beings as “rational animals,” it seems that in determining the course of cultural development, negotiating social arrangements, or driving political movements, arguments that embed themselves in narratives are much more persuasive than those that rely on syllogisms alone. The thinking of modern no less than ancient and medieval political philosophers is therefore steeped in myth and the attempt to recover a pristine, prelapsarian state of affairs. Famous examples of such political myth include Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s differing accounts of the state of nature,

Marx’s stateless society, and more recently, Schmitt and Agamben’s account of states of exception and emergency. Kaldellis has challenged scholars to rethink the characterization, according to Kazhdan, of the Byzantine empire as an “absolutist regime.”16 While his work has provoked a wide variety of responses, it has generally encouraged scholars to recognize the danger of reading Hobbesian or Marxian accounts of state power into the history of a medieval polity. Kaldellis may well do the same in his

16 See discussion of Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic; Kazhdan, People and Power in Byzantium in Chs. 1 and 4. Kaldellis has challenged but certainly not unseated the generally Marxian consensus that Kazhdan represented. Some see Kaldellis’ characterization of Rome and Byzantium as stages in the unbroken development of an essentially democratic polity as projection or the irruption of Straussian political theory. Given the “esoteric” nature of such discourse, it will surely be many years before any very definite answers are found to the questions posed and the answers given in Kaldellis’ work.

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use of Agamben and Schmitt to bolster his notion of a “Byzantine Republic.”17 If he has not gotten any closer to an objective account of the functioning of the Byzantine state than his predecessors, he has at least challenged settled opinion and reopened discussion.

~~In any case, as will become evident, the Macedonians themselves engaged in the construction of a political myth that certainly functioned to claim and retain legitimacy.~~

Constantine VII’s reign is evidence that, whatever the sincerity or short-term goals of its progenitors, the foundation myth of the Macedonian dynasty had become an important and strongly held component of the narrative that the Byzantine élite, and it would seem, at least some of the people and even of the empire’s enemies, believed and continued telling.18 Concomitant with the fashioning such narratives is the exclusion of competing narratives, the narrowing of allowable narratives, and the identification of the narrative with its masters. Such was the case when the restoration of icons closed the era of ecumenical councils and answered, at least in the minds of some, the last important theological questions.

~~Scholars have come to appreciate this constant backward glance, the Roman aemulatio and the Byzantine mimesis, as characteristic of ancient and medieval culture.~~

~~One outgrowth of the reevaluation of iconoclasm has been the recognition that the~~

~~Isaurian dynasty, who were traditionally identified as the patrons of the destruction of icons were not merely issuing a negative prohibition but were themselves engaging in the~~

~~17 Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 96ff.~~

18 See DAI 13. For the far-flung prestige of the imperial title, see Julia Crick’s table of the royal styles of mid tenth-century English kings, some of whom called themselves basileus. D. G. Scragg and Julia Crick, “Edgar, Albion and Insular Dominion,” in Edgar, King of the English, 959-975: New Interpretations (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 162.

235 attempted recovery of the decorative program found in Constantinian basilicas.19 Their golden age then was the century that saw the legalization and triumph of Christianity, the establishment of the City, and the first of the Church’s great councils.

~~5.3 Seeking Models and Emulating Types~~

~~As has become traditional in the history of Byzantine studies, this insight into the~~

Isaurians’ motivations emerged from the close study of art and architecture; and its implication for literary history has not yet been worked out. In a similar way, scholars have begun to see the influence of Justinian’s buildings on the art of the Macedonian era.20 The “restoration” that followed the usurpation of Basil was, like those of his predecessors, a movement to consolidate power and renew society cast in the forms of a far-off but celebrated “golden age.” Thus the architects of the Byzantine “revival” of the ninth century sought to dress their movement in the rhetoric and ornament of the sixth century, widely considered a watershed by modern historians, and, arguably, by the

Byzantines themselves. Justinian was the last Latin emperor, the last to rule over something like an undivided oikoumene, the great lawgiver, a subtle theologian, a hymnographer, and, perhaps most importantly, regarded by the Byzantines as the second founder of their city. Although the first church in Constantinople called Hagia Sophia

19 Hagia Irene in Istanbul has long been of especial interest, since experts cannot agree if its stark furnishing is a legacy of iconoclast aesthetics, a survival of its original, Constantinian decoration, or a “restoration” of that decoration. For the apse and an account of the scholarly debates surrounding it, see Leslie Brubaker, John F. Haldon, and Robert G. Ousterhout, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca.680-850): The Sources; an Annotated Survey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 19–24.For the rhetorical posturing obscuring the original meaning of such decoration, see Henry Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 46–47.

~~20 Maguire, Nectar and Illusion, 111–12.~~

~~236 was built and rebuilt in the fourth century, the completely new structure erected by~~

Justinian and celebrated by Procopius have ensured that posterity gives credit to Justinian alone.21 Nor were these points lost on the Franks, the great rival of the Byzantines in the contest to claim Romanitas. Historians of the Carolingian and Ottonian renaissances, as well as those who would withhold that term from the cultural renewals of those eras, have long noted that for these northern imperatores romanorum, rebuilding the empire was less about appropriating Constantinian or Augustan Rome than Justinianic Ravenna. The imperial chapel at Aachen, in many respects a copy of the basilica of San Vitale in

~~Ravenna, is the best proof of this.22~~

~~Justinian was perhaps the last man whose claims to universal dominion either the~~

Franks or the Byzantines could point to as having been at least partially realized. By reclaiming his mantle, the Franks gained the East and the Byzantines the West, at least in the geography of the mind. As the geopolitical dialectic unfolded, both groups sought to revive the late-antique traditions of luxury manuscript production and the monumentality of the last century of undisputed Roman political unity. In the Frankish domain, there was even the first great flowering of western interest in the Greek language and Eastern

21 Procopius’ adulatory De Aedificiis focuses on Justinian’s building projects. Justinian’s reconstruction, often on a more magnificent scale, of the monuments built by Constantine but lost in the Nike riots, made him to later generations the second founder of the City. Joseph D. Alchermes, “Art and Architecture in the Age of Justinian,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, ed. Michael Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 355–66; Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 83–112.

~~22 W. Eugene Kleinbauer, “Charlemagne’s Palace Chapel at Aachen and Its Copies,” Gesta, 1965, 2–11.~~

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theology.23 As discussed earlier, there was less enthusiasm on the part of the Byzantines for the reception of Latin culture from the West. To take from the West would be to admit that something of value had been preserved there, which would ill accord with the

Byzantines’ diplomatic posture towards the Franks.24 Justinian, as a Latin who was resident in Constantinople and reigned therefrom, could provide them with the necessary archetype. And the archetypical aspect most suitable for Byzantine emulation was that of the lawgiver.

~~The legacy of Justinian is complex,25 but without much controversy, one can call his codification of Roman law his most enduring and important legacy. The Digesta,~~

Institutiones, and Novellae that make up what posterity calls the Corpus Iuris Civilis form the basis of the legal tradition of continental Europe and that of the countries that its early modern nation states colonized. It has been argued that this legacy is the single most important inheritance that the modern world has received from antiquity.26 In the West,

~~23 The complex history of the reception of Ps.-Dionysius in the West is among the more famous episodes of this period. See Gabriel Théry, Études Dionysiennes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932), 101–42.~~

24 From the Byzantine perspective, Frankish presumption began early. Already in the late fourth century, the Merovingians ran afoul of imperial authorities when they minted golden coins, an imperial prerogative. For our period, a major source of contention was title by which the Charlemagne and his descendants were to be known, since the Byzantines wished to reserve the title basileus for their sovereign alone. See Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 300-1450, 396. Hendy quotes Procopius De Bello Gothico 3.33.5-6, where he shows his disapproval of the Frankish practice by (inaccurately) asserting that not even the Persians dared to mint gold coins.

25 He is variously regarded as a saint, a mass murderer, a tyrant, and a culture hero. In many contemporary academic contexts, it seems that it is his depiction in Procopius’ Anecdota that predominates. For an overview of the historiographical problems, see Michael Maas, “Roman Questions, Byzantine Answers,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, ed. Michael Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–27.

26 For a discussion of the role of Roman law in establishing contemporary concepts of European or “Western” unity and its influence in areas formerly colonized by Europeans, see Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

238 this legacy is the result of intensive scholarly activity beginning around the year 1100. In the East, the roots are deeper but do not extend all the way to Justinian, for in the East, too, vital contact with Justinian’s code was lost for some time and only reestablished with great labor under imperial patronage. Basil I, the first of the Macedonian emperors, took up this task, which his son completed and his grandson revised.27 Even more important still are the prooimoia, or prefaces that offer the emperors the chance to define terms and translate the Roman past, both linguistically and culturally, into the present. These definitions testify to the image of rulership, empire, and government that the emperors wished to promulgate. In a more technical way, the translations of Justinian’s Latin into

~~Greek during the reigns of Basil and Leo provide evidence of how Roman concepts became naturalized in the East.28~~

The editions, compilations, and handbooks produced during these two reigns were not simply translations. They were attempts not merely to restate the law, but to “purify” it.29 In the definition of the proper sphere of the emperor provided by Epanagoge, a handbook ordered by Basil but likely written by Photios, the code explains that one of the emperor’s chief duties was the analepsis of powers that had over the course of time devolved to other authorities.30 The codification and purification of law aided the emperor in this “taking back” of the powers and dignities that were rightly his.

~~27 See Chitwood, Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056, 16–22.~~

~~28 Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 13–14.~~

~~29 Peter Pieler, “Byzantinische Rechtsliteratur,” in Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, ed. Herbert Hunger (Munich: Beck, 1978), 445ff.~~

~~30 Epanogoge Titulus II.~~

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~~Significantly, such purification not only involved the suppression of “outmoded” canons, but also the falsification of legal precedents in order to claim powers the emperor “ought” to have.~~

One of the most common uses of the past has been to justify innovation in the present through citation of precedent, real or imagined.31 Such movements are common enough in world history to approach something like a “universal law.”32 They rest upon a narrative that claims for its actors the power to bring renewed vigor to a society grown old and decrepit or true religion to a people become impious. Whatever their claims, the outcome of these efforts cannot be the restoration of any preexisting historical situation, the details of which have been obscured or obliterated by the passage of time. Rather, what is accomplished by the best of these periodic attempts to drink from the source is the creative re-appropriation and reapplication of past forms to the problems of the present. It is the recovery of wisdom, a meditation on a genius, and the desire to actualize an ideal rather than the reenactment of specificities. These narratives require an impersonal force against which to deploy their ideal. In the metanarrative of modernity, we see enlightenment battling the dark powers of obscurantism. In the Macedonian

31 One is reminded of the famous cases of the Donation of Constantine, the False Decretals, and Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, which relied on Arthurian legend to assert that England had ever been an empire and that its sovereign was the rightful head of its church. See the introduction to Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, ed. and trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2004), 193; Laura Beck Varela, “Authorship in Early Modern Jurisprudence,” Quærendo 47, no. 3–4 (2017): 252–277; Eric Knibbs, “Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals,” Speculum 92, no. 1 (2017): 144–183.

32 Francis Oakley, who employs the term “universal law” in his monograph Kingship sees examples ranging from the Aztecs and Olmecs to the Turkish Padishah and Caliph and the emperors of Tang China. The so-called Meiji Restoration in late nineteenth century Japan is an excellent modern analogue, whereby the modernizers of Japan sought to create a centralized state by “restoring” powers to the emperor which he had never held at any point in Japanese history.

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period, we note the great care and resources poured out in the Neo-Justinianic legal project. For their metanarrative, the great impersonal force was disorder and their ideal, order.33 And the weapon of first recourse in this great battle was law.

~~5.4 Vita Basilii and the Recovery of Order~~

Lawlessness therefore, was the Macedonian conception that characterized the rule of their predecessors. A narrative, of decline into lawlessness necessitating restoration and revival, although perhaps not explicitly understood by Basil and Leo, is implied in the prefaces they wrote or commissioned. Constantine VII explicitly rationalized such a narrative in the historical works he sponsored, namely the Vita Basilii and Genesios’

~~Regum Libri IV. The Vita Basilii is a panegyric, not without literary pretensions or merit,~~

“written” by the emperor himself,34 while Genesios’ effort represents something like a primer that provides a schematic outline of the hundred years that separated the early tenth century from the earlier tradition of historiography represented by Theophanes.35 In

~~Genesios, the career of the iconoclastic emperors begins with the reign of “the impious~~

~~33 Unfortunately for those who appreciate conceptual clarity, many Greek and Latin words can be rendered by this pair of English words. The two most common in our period taxis and ataxia.~~

34 Constantine’s involvement could range from deeply interested direction to actually taking pen in hand. Whatever the precise nature of the composition, it surely represents his point of view and his attempt to promulgate an official narrative. See the introduction to Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, The Book of Ceremonies; with the Greek Edition of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn, 1829), xxiii; for further information, see Ševčenko, “Re-Reading Constantine Porphyrogenitus.”

35 For for an evaluation of the secondary literature, see Warren Treadgold, The Middle Byzantine Historians (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 31ff., esp. n. 103. See also Apostolos D. Karpozilos, Βυζαντινοί Ιστορικοί και Χρονογράφοι (Athens: Ekdoseis Kanaki, 1997), 315–30.

~~241 and mad Leo [III],” whose rise to power was accomplished by a craven act of treachery.36~~

~~It is important here to note that betrayal itself is less a factor in the characterization of~~

Leo than his impiety and insanity. After all, Basil I could be charged with disloyalty. But according to the long tradition of Roman political thinking, loyalty is only due a legitimate ruler, and not a tyrant like Leo III or Michael III.37

In the absence of any clear, legal claim to legitimacy, VB instead makes a series of disparate but coordinated arguments both to establish Basil’s dignity and Michael’s lack thereof. Chapters 2-27 provide a résumé of Basil’s early life and Michael’s descent into profligacy. The first chapter of this section claims for Basil a glorious bloodline that includes Alexander the Great and the Arsacids, a dynasty that had deep roots in Persia and brought Christianity to Armenia.38 By constructing this elaborate genealogy for

Basil, VB situates him in the millennial dialectic between East and West that was central to both Byzantine and Persian visions of ecumenical empire.39 Basil’s reputed Armenian heritage connects him to an influential but problematic ethnic minority that, situated in the geographic middle of these two great powers, often played a mediating role between them. VB also explains the presence of Basil’s Armenian forbears in Macedonia, who

~~36 Preface and chapter 1.~~

~~37 For conceptions of legitimacy in the late Roman Empire, see Atkins (2018): 34-36.~~

~~38 VB 2. More on Arsacids~~

39 The tradition starts, of course, with Herodotus. For a recent overview of the issue in late antiquity and the early Byzantine period, see Matthew P. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

~~242~~

kept their line pure and unsullied,40 as being the result of Heraclius’ invitation, connecting Constantine VII’s grandfather with the commander of the Roman army in the last great war of antiquity.41 With this brief excursus, Basil’s bloodline is rooted in the deep meta-narrative of Greek Romanitas.

~~In the next chapter, VB stretches a branch from the Arascids to Empress Irene, the architect of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” by having Maiktes, Basil’s grandfather, marry~~

Irene’s granddaughter. In the next generation, Basil’s father, strangely but tellingly left unnamed, marries the reputed descendant of Constantine the Great. Basil, the issue of this glorious union, displays in his infancy certain prodigies that portend his future office.

Chief among these is a “purple border around his swaddling clothes,”42 recalling both the toga praetexta and suggesting that Basil was by divine intervention made a porphyrogennetos, which the ideology of certain imperial dynasties (but not of Roman legal theorists) considered the one, unassailable claim to legitimacy.43 Even if Basil’s ascent was legally irregular, this account of his origins suggests that he was genetically destined to play a great part in the unfolding history of the Roman empire.

~~The second component of VB’s account of Basil’s early life is the role of piety and providence in the lives of the future emperor and his family. When Adrianople is~~

~~40 ἀσύγχυτον τὸ γένος. This claim is curiously undermined in VB 4, which speaks of “on occasion perhaps forming bonds of marriage with local inhabitants.”~~

~~41 See Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 226ff.~~

~~42 Ševčenko’s translation of περὶ τὰ σπάργανα πορφύρεα βάμματα.~~

~~43 ODB, 1701.~~

243 captured by the Bulgars, Basil and his parents are taken into captivity, where they preserve the purity of their faith and convert many of the heathen, making them anticipate the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius by a generation. The young Basil continues to display signs of his future greatness while meeting the great actors of history. VB explains the frequency and repetition of these signs as the work of God: “Providence wished to reveal with all clarity that this was happening not as a mindless accident of chance, but by Divine Foreknowledge... In such a way does God always, well before great events , introduce certain symbolic intimations of what is to come.”44

Despite God’s apparent election of Basil, no one recognizes his potential. VB explains that this is due to his birth in a “family of simple and humble people.”45 In words that recall the Gospel, Basil learns virtue and reverence from his father and from God and needs no “Cheiron” or “Lycurgus.” These mythological culture heroes, the tutor of

~~Achilles and the lawgiver of Sparta, are clearly meant to represent the high culture of~~

Hellenic-Greek antiquity and the literary traditions that inform the Byzantines’ way of thinking. Basil’s virtue is endowed by nature and God and honed in the experience of rural life and his early entrance into manhood, necessitated by the death of his father and his assumption of household leadership. Basil is a “natural” man and does not need the refinements of culture. Like Christ, he is of noble lineage, but born in obscurity, marked by signs, but unseen by the many, untutored, but wiser than the masters. With this narrative background and subsequent elaboration that includes further dreams and visions

~~44 VB 5.~~

~~45 VB 25-27.~~

~~244~~

that confirm Basil’s election, VB attaches the Macedonian dynasty to authorities higher than law and culture. In the sequel, Basil is ineluctably drawn from the rural obscurity of his second Nazareth (where his widowed mother prays constantly on his behalf) into the houses of great men in the City.46

Having established Basil’s genetic destiny and divine election, VB moves to undermine the legitimacy of the emperor Michael by impugning his character in the harshest possible terms. In anecdote after anecdote, VB presents Basil’s simple, manly virtue in contrast to the corrupt effeminacy of Michael. As many have noted,47 this account is not without the suggestion of homoeroticism. It is perhaps an attempt to present Michael’s role in the two men’s relationship as that of an effete predator and paper over what some contemporaries whisperingly insinuated was a consensual and mutual affair. Whether or not their naughtiness was in fact high on the list of grave sins,

VB uses this narrative strand to present Michael as embodying an archetype for which the long tradition of Greek literature and Roman law reserved their strongest opprobrium. In addition to this insinuation,48 VB explicitly denounces Michael as a spendthrift addicted to luxury,49 susceptible to the phthonos that brought out the worst of court life,50 unable to exercise effective control over his subordinates, deaf to the advice of good counsellors,

~~46 VB 10.~~

~~47 Tougher, The Reign of Leo VI (886-912) provides examination of the issue as well as its treatment by historians in the twentieth century.~~

~~48 VB 21 refers to “παρανόμους βακχείας καὶ ἔρωτας” in a praeteritio.~~

~~49 VB 27.~~

~~50 For the historical context of the term and its meaning in Byzantine thought, see Hinterberger, Phthonos.~~

245 and vain and cowardly on campaign. All this is followed by an eight chapter discursus that presents a “vita et mores” portrait of dissolute living, the wastage of imperial resources, and impiety.

At the end of this crescendo-ing catalogue of evil living, VB recounts three occasions on which Michael engaged in blasphemous mock liturgies with a flatulent clown and a group of twelve pseudo-apostles. These outrages occurred both in public and at the imperial palace and resulted in Michael being blessed by Patriarch Ignatios and cursed by the empress mother. In VB’s narration, Micheal has given himself over to

“insane ravings,” the product of a “deranged mind,” which his mother considers is reprobate and now wholly directed to “τὰ μὴ καθήκοντα,” conduct unbefitting his office.51 In VB, it is the desecration of divine service and the contamination of imperial dignity that finally dissolves taxis and Michael’s legitimacy. VB presents these incidents, rather than any military defeat or political disaster, as the catalyst that drives Michael to ruin and endangers the empire.

~~VB now has Basil attempt to counsel the emperor to save him from his fall.~~

Significantly, Basil tells the emperor that the court has lost the support of the “three estates”: the City, the Senate, and the Church.52 This is a subtle reminder of the unstated but efficient legitimizing mechanisms at the heart of Byzantine political practices.53 In return, Michael isolates Basil from the court and tries to have him killed. When that

~~51 VB 23.~~

~~52 VB 24. “παρά τε τῆς Πόλεως πάσης καὶ τῆς συγκλήτου βουλῆς, καὶ παρὰ τῶν ἀρχιερέων θεοῦ...”~~

~~53 For parallels, see Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 103.~~

246 scheme fails, Michael attempts to repent, but soon plunges into drunkenness and squanders the imperial revenues on entertainments that, VB continually reminds us, are both impious and damaging to the imperial dignity.

It is surely significant that two of the occasions narrated in this section describe imperial investiture, one, the mock ordination of Michael’s jester, Groullos, as patriarch, and the other, of Basilikinos, as an imperial colleague. Both narrations are concerned with the vestments used in these ceremonies, and enumerate from head to toe the imperial insignia, carefully cataloguing their colors, textures, and qualities.54 Even after Michael’s death and Basil’s accession, VB has reason to make a third catalogue, this time of the precious treasures, gold-embroidered vestments, and gold plate that Michael had melted down in order to finance his “misuse”55 and entertainment. The care expended on these descriptions witnesses to both Constantine VII’s great love for the specificity of the ceremonial tradition and his revulsion at their degradation. These sections illustrate the narrative potential of descriptions of ceremonies and evoke a perverted and corrupt state of affairs. Although it might seem that these details are mere antiquarian flourishes, their rhetorical function is to make Michael’s abuse of beauty and order all the more apparent and severe.

~~Contemporary scholars may have trouble appreciating why the misuse of a garment or a satirical parody of a hymn could so disturb Constantine, but it is clear that~~

~~VB presents these incidents, whether they actually happened or were invented, as the final~~

~~54 VB 21 and 25~~

~~55 VB 29, “ἀποχρήσασθαι.”~~

247 and most egregious examples of imperial misconduct in Michael’s reign. Without the explicit connection to morality found in VB, Constantine VII shows the same care for vesture in De Cerimoniis with the frequent lists of paramenta and the concern for proper staging and costuming that is evident in the directives for the various ceremonies. In DAI,

Constantine devotes no small portion of his treatise to discussing what sorts of vesture are to be granted and withheld to the representatives and sovereigns of foreign powers.56 That ambassadors habitually made these requests and that the Romans just as frequently denied them suggests that Constantine’s respect for these insignia was not mere punctilious pretension. The crowns and robes of the emperor and his officials possessed real power and had to be guarded as among the most effective weapons in the Roman diplomatic arsenal. In DAI, only Greek fire is similarly so jealously guarded as a precious state secret. In this context, VB’s horror at Michael’s abuse of vesture, as well as

~~Constantine VII’s deep concern for ceremony, becomes comprehensible.~~

Propriety and dignity are central to Constantine’s concern for “that which is worthy of imperial σπουδή,”57 and their recovery are the inspiration for his own movement of cultural renewal. In his conception, it will take decades to repair the damage done by Michael’s disastrous reign, and Constantine VII’s restoration of imperial ceremony will be the crowning achievement of the two-fold movement of the

~~Macedonian emperors to restore Byzantine society.~~

~~56 DAI 14.~~

~~57 DC R3, the inscription to the Proem.~~

248 Central to narratives, both ancient and modern, of decline, restoration, and state formation are concepts such as “the state of nature,” “the dark age,” and “the state of exception.”58 This tendency is evident also in VB and the Macedonian metanarrative as a whole. Michael, depicted as a drunk guilty of the worst vices and as a tyrant with no concern for the law, inaugurated a period of “disorder,” which the Macedonians would spend their reigns putting back in order. The most apparent outward expression of

Michael’s inward darkness was his reprobate irreverence towards ecclesiastical and imperial ceremony. When Michael’s extravagance became unbearable, “good men” were compelled to replace him. VB presents the empire as having been in dire economic straits at the end of Michael’s reign, a state of affairs brought on by his extravagance. It is interesting that VB ascribes the action of these “good men” not to the economic situation itself, but to their outrage at his despoiling of churches and monasteries and fear that his hubris would continue growing if unchecked. As far as VB is concerned, for these worthy men, Michael’s crimes were impiety, extravagance, and unbecoming conduct rather than incompetence and mismanagement.

Immediately after his acclamation as emperor, Basil establishes at one stroke his humility and divine election by invoking Christ the King and offering himself to God’s service.59 Basil’s first political action upon assuming the purple is to attempt to remedy the empire’s disastrous financial situation. He accomplishes this by “deviat[ing]

~~58 Hesiod and Ovid provide the most famous examples in classical literature. See note 15 above for modern examples.~~

59 VB 28. The narrator claims to provide ipsissima verba: “Χρίστε βασιλεῦ, τῇ σῇ κρίσει τὴν βασιλείαν δεξάμενος, σοὶ καὶ ταύτην καὶ ἐμαυτὸν ἀνατίθημι.”

249 somewhat from an overly strict construction of the law,”60 showing that he considers himself and his subjects’ well-being to be above the law. He then performs his first ceremonial act, processing to Hagia Sophia and providing a donative to the people out of his own funds.61 Beyond currying favor with the people and to a certain degree ensuring their dependence on him, this occasion came about because Basil “strove right from the start... to appear worthy of the greatness of [his accession].”62 Appearance is as important as reality. In fact, the one in some sense establishes the other. Michael’s undignified behavior undermined his legitimacy and thereby, that of his rulership, the imperial office, and the empire itself. The ceremonies, vesture, and processions, when abused, as with

Michael, cause scandal and endanger the politeia. When used correctly, they ennoble and exalt the participants, and, as we have seen, make the Kingdom of God present on earth and effect a concordia of the ordines, reconciling opposites, synthesizing narratives, and crossing the threshold that separates the mundane from the heavenly. Basil continues his renewal by humbling the proud, uplifting the poor, placing good men in high office, and restoring spirit and vigor to those who had lost hope.63 Basil cares both for the body and soul of his people, and he considers giving them something to live for his first duty.

~~This political foundation myth has so far worked to delegitimize Michael and legitimize Basil as individuals, but the purification of Kantorowicz’ “body politic,” the~~

~~60 VB 28.~~

~~61 VB 29.~~

~~62 VB 30.~~

~~63 VB 30~~

~~250 closure of Schmitt’s “state of exception,” or the establishment of civilization upon~~

Hobbes’ “state of nature,” have not yet taken place.64 VB has proven Basil’s divine sanction time and again through prodigy and felicity and through the contrasting vices and virtues of the two emperors, but the demands of human law have not been satisfied.

For VB and the Macedonian conception of the immediately preceding era of imperial history, the reign of Michael and his forebears was not merely a time of the personal moral decay of impious and deplorable individuals. The personal character of the emperor, understood to be “living law” since at least the time of Justinian,65 had in the

Byzantine imagination a profound effect on the institutions of the empire. If Michael were an insane, drunken tyrant, then the empire that he ruled and embodied would likewise reflect his character. Michael’s behavior not only delegitimized his rule but also created a breach in the continuity of Roman institutional life.

VB presents the direst breach as having been with regard to law. In the events that led to his ruin, VB presents Michael suspending due process under the influence of drink and jealousy. It is also in this context that VB introduces the term “tyrant,” a word heavy laden in ancient and medieval as well as in modern political discourse.66 The rule of law, whether it represented a reality or convenient rhetorical discourse, was central to

64 Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, 98–100 compares Byzantine conceptions of the state against these modern republican theorists.It seems fitting here to ground the account of Basil’s establishment of order as reported in VB in the (unconscious) political mythmaking of contemporary scholars of the middle ages.

65 Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan, Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2007) trace the concept even further, through the early Christian fathers back to Plato .

~~66 VB 25.~~

~~251~~

conceptions of the Roman state at all points in its history and development, and VB presents Michael as having failed to maintain this inner principal of Roman rule after allowing its outer manifestation, ceremony, to become disordered. Unlike the Abrahamic faiths, the Roman polity could not found itself on a corpus iuris that was divinely given to an inspired prophet,67 but rather had recourse to a conservative methodology of legal training and reasoning that somehow kept discordant laws in concord and reconciled contemporary practice, received custom, and the mos maiorum of an unimaginably ancient antiquity.68

~~5.5 The Mythological Foundation of the Macedonian Dynasty~~

Despite this well-articulated and long-lived narrative of Roman law and the state it incarnated, the practicalities of day-to-day life and the realities of changed conditions necessitated or enabled emperors at various points to (re)establish the law through the process of codification. It is understatement to say that in Roman constitutional thought, the relationship between the law and the emperor is vexed. In particular, the question of primacy, that is, whether the law flowed from the authority of the emperor or the office of the emperor flowed from the law, was continuously debated and contested but never solved.69 The codification of law by men with supreme power gave them the opportunity

~~67 For the history of this notion in biblical law, see Calum M Carmichael, The Spirit of Biblical Law (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996).~~

68 Augustine and Chrysostom give strongly negative critiques of this tradition in which both were trained. They condemn what they perceived as the shallowness and rhetorical hypocrisy of Roman legal practice in the fourth century and commend the superiority of revealed law.

69 Recourse to imperial rescripts increased in frequency, clearly establishing by the fourth century, in practice if not in theory, the supremacy of the emperor. See Wolfgang Kaiser, “Justinian and the Corpus 252 to assert their authority over the law and present themselves as lawgivers. The most famous of these men was Justinian, but he lacked neither predecessors nor imitators.70

~~The epoch-making power of codification has been recognized by modern editors, who canonize this fact (or perpetuate this narrative) by calling their collections Iurisprudentia~~

Antehadriana and Anteiustiniana.71 The lawgiver establishes himself athwart history and culture, and it is by his authority that the tradition is made authoritative. The process of codification is analogous to that of canonization in ecclesiastical contexts. From a great mass of material that is marked by the diversity of lived culture, the lawgiver, or his commission, selects a particular strand to represent the whole. The editorial principles driving the process no doubt partly derive from the sources they treat, but they also fashion and impose a viewpoint on the material they include or exclude. This model has become a commonplace in Dogmengeschichte,72 but its application by analogy to the development of law and the shaping of historical consciousness has been rarely exploited.

In the case of both codification and canonization, lines are drawn, hermeneutic principles identified, and orthodoxy or legality established. However amorphous or conflicted the preexisting tradition, the code or canon imposes order on chaos and

~~Iuris Civilis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Roman Law, ed. David Johnston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 120.~~

~~70 Caesar, Hadrian, the Macedonians, and most recently Napoleon have all played similar roles.~~

~~71 These are the titles of editions in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries edited by Bremer, Seckler, and Kübler.~~

72 Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), separated by 100 years from Adolf von Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1893) presents virtually the same narrative of the formation of Christian doctrine.

~~253 illuminates the darkness. Such processes are almost always accompanied by anathema or abrogation, the legal obsolescence of parts of the culture that existed prior to codification.~~

This is no less true of Justinian’s code, which attempted to control the past and the future by calling for the destruction of preexisting law books and banning the augmentation of his own with glosses and interpretative aids.73 “The Law speaks for itself.” Such steps in textual tradition have profound consequences for the historians of later ages, whose categories and interpretive frameworks are shaped by the very process of codification that they wish to document and observe from a standpoint outside of history. Of course, the process of codification is never as complete as the codifiers would hope, and the chance survivals of textual traditions preserved through disobedience, neglect, or accident are the raw material from which scholars deconstruct narratives (and construct their own).

In addition to allowing the emperor to assert his authority over law, codification gives him the opportunity to set a new foundation that finds its legitimacy in the past and, if successful, makes claims that will affect the thinking and identity of future generations.74 The process of inclusion and exclusion creates the foundation of a new legal culture that is authentically rooted in the past while at the same time attempts or succeeds at presenting innovation as restoration. The prooimoia, definitions, and authoritative hermeneutic frameworks promulgated alongside the codes set the

73 In an interesting confluence of civil and ecclesiastical affairs, Constantine is the first emperor documented as having cancelled certain glosses on Roman law in order to establish authentic interpretations. Kaiser, “Justinian and the Corpus Iuris Civilis,” 119–20, n7.

74 See Peter Pieler, “Kodifikation Als Mittel Der Politik Im Frühen Byzanz?,” in BYZANTIOS, Festschrift Für H. Hunger Zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Hunger and Wolfram Hörandner (Vienna: E. Becvar, 1984), 247–60. 254

~~boundaries and control discourse. The apparently conservative impetus behind such movements can be used for ends that are radical in both the literal and figurative senses.75~~

The narrative of order and disorder, founded on Michael’s ceremonial neglect of ceremony, now moves to something deeper and more primitive: the darkness of anomia and its remedy in the figure of a light bearing lawgiver.

Returning to the life of Constantine VII’s grandfather, we see that in the next several chapters of VB, Basil sets out to rescue the politeia from the “state of nature” into which it had fallen. Both VB and Genesios work to establish Basil as a culture hero.76

Again, this is in keeping with the example of Justinian. The proem to the Institutiones begins with an account of Justinian’s military prowess and subjugation of the barbarians before explaining that the establishment of justice through law is to be no less worthy of the emperor’s devoted attention.77 Having brought peace to the empire through force of arms, the emperor now turns to reestablishing civil society. Justinian uses the language

75 Radical means in the first instance that which pertains to the root of a thing rather than to its subsequent growth and development. In the twentieth century, scholars and commentators usually employed the term “radical” in political contexts to refer to leftist ideologies. Insofar as an ideology of the right seeks not merely to conserve the present order but to restore a notionally superior, primitive order, it becomes radical. For a genealogy of the concept, see Göran Dahl, Radical Conservatism and the Future of Politics (London: SAGE Publications, 1999), 51–59.

76 For a discussion of the anthropological concept of the “culture hero,” see Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 87–91.Scholars of ancient Greece consider Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and banished the darkness of the night to be the archetype of the culture hero. In a similar way, Herakles brought order out of chaos by slaying monsters and performing difficult labors. In later ages, politicians such as Peisistratos and Commodus sought to associate themselves with the myth of the culture hero. Significantly, across world mythologies the culture hero is often the founder of a dynasty and the principal lawgiver of a community.

~~77 Inst. inscription to proem. “fiat tam iuris religiossimus quam victis hostibus triumphator.”~~

255 of disorder and darkness contrasted against order and light.78 The textbook and compilation he has sponsored he intends to form the “initium... et finis” of legal knowledge that, though compiled from ancient authorities, now proceeds from the emperor’s mouth.79 In this Justinianic narrative, there is no question that peaceful, civil society rests upon the violent suppression of violence, authority derived from victory in war, and law guaranteed by a power that stands both outside and above it.

VB shows Basil following a very similar trajectory in the earliest days of his reign. After an act of extralegal (but perhaps not unconstitutional?) violence to remove an illegitimate emperor and Basil’s assumption and exercise of sovereignty to right wrongs, the new emperor seeks to close the period of the “state of exception.” He replaces the governors of civil and ecclesiastical institutions with competent, learned, and virtuous men. Then, Basil restores the Chalke and sets it up as a courthouse. The destruction and restoration of the image of Christ in this building played a significant role in Theophanes’ narrative of Iconoclasm and the Triumph of Orthodoxy,80 and surely VB intends to associate Basil’s renovation with this earlier (re-?)installation of the icon of Christos

~~Antifonitis. As a literary strategy, this centers Basil in the wider narrative of post- iconoclastic Byzantine history. Within the ideological framework of the Macedonians,~~

~~78 Inst. Proem 2: “sacratissimas constitutiones antea confusas in luculentam ereximus consonantiam.”~~

~~79 Inst. Proem 4.~~

~~80 Cyril A. Mango, The Brazen House: A Study of the Vestibule of the Imperial Palace of Constantinople. (Copenhagen: I kommission hos Munksgaard, 1959), 112ff.~~

~~256 VB presents Basil as having concern for the body and soul of his empire, a desire not only to reform the spirit of the laws, but also to give it a place in which to dwell on earth.~~

Three times in this chapter, VB shows Basil to take personal concern in ensuring that his intentions are realized,81 and in various other places, VB speaks of Basil making provision for the enactment of his will out of his own resources.82 These actions show

Basil’s distrust of magnates and the functioning of the Byzantine bureaucracy and also show his nearness to the people. This too has precedent in Justinian’s proem, which speaks not only of the emperor’s authority and the work of his illustrious commissioners in drafting the Institutiones but also the personal “cura” that the emperor expended in ensuring the completion and perfection of so expansive and difficult an undertaking.83

VB treats Basil’s early legislative activity briefly but shows him taking charge of both canon and civil law and setting them right. By reaffirming the seventh general council, Basil explicitly associates himself with orthodoxy and implicitly, his predecessor with iconoclasm.84 The last action in Basil’s plan to “retrieve” order is the “amendment” of the civil law.85 Reestablishing the rule of law is the last step in banishing the “state of exception.” Basil finds the law in “great disarray” and “lacking in clarity,” VB here once again using the language of disorder and darkness to describe the status quo that Basil

~~81 VB 31.~~

~~82 VB 31.~~

~~83 VB 31.~~

~~84 VB 32.~~

~~85 VB 33. “Amendment” is Ševčenko’s translation.~~

~~257 inherited from Michael. The word VB uses to describe Basil’s action is “ἀνακαθάρας.”86~~

~~Sevcenko translates this as “clarifying,” which makes a nice pair with the “πολλὴν~~

~~ἀσάφειαν” that opens the chapter, but the word might better be rendered as~~

“repristination.” Here, the prefix ἀνα- is significant; Basil is reaching back to reclaim something lost. The verb ἀνακαθαίρω has military, religious, and hermeneutic connotations, all of which could be appropriate here. The term unites the ideas of wiping out the enemy, purifying the law, and eliminating interpretive obscurity, all of which are proper to the office of an emperor-lawgiver.87 In a highly suggestive move, VB states that

Basil undertook and accomplished this task by means of his prometheia. This word occurs in nearly final position in the chapter that closes the account of Basil’s restoration of order, which the canons of rhetoric reserve for the most important, summarizing concept of a discourse. Whether or not we should ascribe anthropological significance to this passage and interpret Basil as a “culture hero,” VB uses the language of classical myth throughout both to praise and censure, and the location of the term is surely intended to associate Basil with Prometheus, the archetypical lawgiver who banishes the darkness.88

~~86 VB 33.~~

~~87 The citations given in Lampe are much fuller than LSJ and provide a better indication of the range of meanings that this word had in the medieval period.~~

88 Karl Kerényi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, Bollingen Series ; 65, 1 (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963) is the classic study of Prometheus in Greek myth, as well as of Promethean figures in general.

258 The concept of “purifying the law” did not originate with VB. The beginning of the Basilika states in the famous phrase “ἀνακάθαρσις τῶν παλαιῶν νόμων”89 what it is intended to do.90 Additional indications of the intent behind Basil’s legal work and that of his successor Leo are given in the prefaces to their law codes and the textbooks derived from them. Basil and Photios, in looking back at the Roman legal inheritance and whose last codification came with the Ecloga of the Isaurians, in their view iconoclastic heretics, felt the need not only to reconnect with a lost tradition but also to purify impious accretions. The care or epimeleia of the emperor in ensuring that this purification took place was, as we have seen,91 a key concept in the Macedonian restoration of Justinianic rulership and its repetition in various sources, both legal and literary, effectively associates this virtue with the ruling dynasty while presenting their predecessors as being careless. The emperors must, as the Eisagoge has it, “take back” (ἀναλαμβάνειν) their lost powers in order to ensure the proper governance of the basileia.

As with ἀνακαθαίρω, Photios’ ἀναλαμβάνω implies a gulf separating the past and the present. The ἀνα- prefix is both spatial and temporal. On the one hand, it is the emperor Basil’s task to take back those powers that have improperly fallen into the hands of lesser men, the loss of which has involved the diminution of the imperial dignity. On the other hand, Basil must reach across the darkness that separates the present from

~~Justinian’s golden age of law, order, economic flourishing, and the enrichment of the City~~

~~89 Peter Pieler, “Ἀνακάθαρσις τῶν Παλαιῶν Νόμων Und Makedonische Renaissance,” Subseciva Groningana 3 (1989): 61–77.~~

~~90 Chitwood, Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056, 19–22.~~

~~91 Justinian appeals to his cura in several places in the proem to Inst.~~

~~259~~

~~with massive building projects and luxurious art programs. Using the terms employed by~~

~~Basil and enshrined by his biographers, this stage of reclaiming and recovering can be thought of as the period of analepsis.~~

~~5.6 From Lawgiver to Regulator~~

This work was continued and perfected by Basil’s successor, Leo. Leo is most famous for his three compilations or revisions, the Taktika, the Book of the Eparch, and the Procheiros Nomos, which deal with military and economic regulations and private and criminal law. The Taktika begins with a priamel,92 explaining that glory and pageantry are not the emperor’s concern, but rather the welfare of his subjects. After a generation of rule, Leo still casts the preceding period as one of neglect, and almost quoting Photios’ definition, contrasts his own sleepless care and desire for knowledge with the decay ushered in by unnamed predecessors.93 Returning to VB and the “culture myth” of state formation, it seems that the Macedonians have secured the basis of civic life and now must turn to the next stage of development. With Basil’s restoration of law,

Leo can now bring order to the military and the economy, the two fundamentals that ensure the flourishing of the empire and the protection of peace. Where Basil’s ideology had focused on the language of darkness and light, of loss and recovery, Leo will make order and disorder the keywords of his cultural project. In a sort of mimesis, Leo takes as

~~92 Tak. Proem.2.~~

~~93 Hunger, Prooimion, 97–99.~~

260 his model the Strategikon of Maurice,94 the last of the Justinianic emperors. Just as Basil and Justinian had brought discipline to an unruly mass of contradictory laws, so Maurice and Leo look to renew the vigor of the Roman army by returning to the practices of a more victorious and courageous time.95 Just as Basil brought Justinian’s Latin into Greek,

~~Leo has “translated the Roman (Latin) [tactical terms] into their Greek equivalents.”96~~

Leo directly associates the Taktika with the Procheiros Nomos,97 explaining that his military treatise will, like the handbook he had distilled from his father’s law code, reduce to precept “what is useful and worthy of respect.”98 Leo goes on to say that he has omitted only those things “that are no longer needed because they are superfluous, useless, and their description is not clear.”99

~~Here, he is continuing a practice established in his treatment of law. In one of his~~

Novellae, Leo called for the “abolition of laws fallen into desuetude.”100 In the prooimion to the Procheiros Nomos, which was prepared under Basil but finished and promulgated by his son, Leo explains that the work has been necessitated by “changes in human condition” and that the text contains a selection of “the things that are necessary and

~~94 For the relationship between the two texts, see Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI.~~

~~95 Tak. Proem.5 See Dennis, 5, note 2.~~

~~96 Tak. 6.~~

~~97 Tak. 6.~~

~~98 Tak. 6.~~

~~99 Tak. 6.~~

~~100 Nov. 78. See also 47, which shows the development of imperial autocracy.~~

261 useful.”101 Like the Taktika, the Procheiros Nomos is innovative in its approach to the texts its inherits: Latin has been translated into Greek, laws have been “changed” for the better out of “necessity,” and that which was “adulterated” has been “restored.” The continuity between Basil and Leo is clear, with the same medico-ritual language of healing, but Leo shifts the focus of imperial concern to the building of a new society rather than merely the reclamation of one that had existed in the past. In his management of both the army and the law, Leo seeks to take what he regards as the best of tradition to meet the challenges that beset the empire in the present day, and he is not afraid to use his authority to alter and abrogate what he has received from his predecessors if circumstances so demand. Where the founder had brought order out of chaos and fought both bureaucratic and religious corruption, the successor has practical ends in view and seeks to give his empire that which is useful.

And what could be more usefully mundane than a prescriptive exposition of the inner workings of the Constantinopolitan economy? Given Leo’s desire in his military and legal manuals to cut through the mass of accumulated tradition and provide his empire with practical regulations to accomplish ends efficiently, one would expect to find more of the same in the Book of the Eparch, one of the most precious documents for historians of the Byzantine economy. But in the proem, Leo, by comparing his book of regulations to the creative and legislative activity of God, grounds his activity in the most solemn and formal way possible. The laws God revealed at Sinai, says Leo, were

101 Basilius and Karl Eduard Zachariä von Lingenthal, Ho Procheiros nomos Imperatorum Basilii, Constantini et Leonis Prochiron; Codd. MSS. ope nunc primum edidit, prolelomenis, ann. et ind. instruxit C.E. Zachariae (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1837), 6–8.

262 intended to protect the weak from the strong,102 and the emperor imitates the divinity in ensuring that these laws, published widely long ago, be made known again. At the end of the proem, Leo, in what is surely characteristic of Byzantine political rhetoric, grounds this Biblical narrative in the Roman past and seeks to present his innovation as really something old. The ordinances of the Book of the Eparch are, he claims, based on existing statutes.103 Even if he innovates, Leo imitates the ancient Roman tradition of legislation by interpretation, whether through definition, clarification, or simplification.104

~~He synthesizes both strands of middle Byzantine identity and connects his activity in the present to the legislative traditions of both the Kingdom of God and the Roman politeia.~~

The result of the legislation, it is hoped, will be to bring the world back to the moment of creation, to a primordial state where all things are disposed “ἐν κόσμῳ καὶ εὐταξίᾳ.”

With the promulgation of the Basilika in 892, Leo VI brought symbolic closure to the period of lawlessness that the Macedonians believed, or wished to have others believe, had preceded their reign. The movement of analepsis had restored and in fact expanded the authority of the emperor by using the language of legal reform to reduce inherited political institutions, such as the senate and consulate, to a system of titulature from the governing bodies they had been (although not approaching the influence of their

~~Republican-era namesakes) since Constantine the Great established New Rome some six~~

~~102 LP Proem.~~

~~103 LP Proem.~~

~~104 For a concise discussion to the issues, see Andrew M. Riggsby, Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 32–33.~~

263 centuries earlier.105 Leo VI’s rhetoric shows a man unafraid to reclaim what is his and to dispense with what is obsolete in the interest of ensuring the efficient operation of justice, fostering discipline in the army, or encouraging economic activity. The emperor stands above the fray and ensures that the proud are humbled and the weak protected. For Leo

~~VI, the criterion is utility, and the method is direct.~~

~~5.7 The Vocabulary of Recovery~~

In addition to utility, the concept of order is central to Leo VI’s literary production. The terms kosmos, taxis, eutaxia, and ataxia appear throughout his works and function as slogans for his reign. Interest in taxis was nothing new in Byzantium,106 but it seems that Leo gave new impetus to the movement to produce taktika, a literary genre that included lists of precedence for ecclesiastical and civic dignities and ceremonial manuals as well as military handbooks. To the contemporary reader, it may be strange that one term should encompass such seemingly disparate subjects, but for Leo and his successors, there was no distinction between the order governing the mustering of an army on campaign and that which governed etiquette at a banquet in the imperial palace.107 Both were occasions for the display and performance of imperial dignity. Both

~~105 For this development, see Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 324; Timothy E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 227.~~

106 Johannes Lydos, who lived during Justinian’s reign, made taxis in its many meanings the focus of his literary activity. For a study of the man and his works, see Michael Maas, John Lydus and the Roman Past: Antiquarianism and Politics in the Age of Justinian (London: Routledge, 1992). With the exception of De Magistratibus Lydus’ works have not received adequate, modern editions.

107 Cf. The Kleterologion, which was included in DC and disappeared as a separate text. Bury, Imperial Administrative System; V. Beneševic’, “Die byzantinischen Ranglisten nach dem Kletorologion Philothei (De Cer. 1. II c. 52) und nach den Jerusalemer Handschriften zusammengestellt und revidiert,” Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbücher 5 (1926): 97. Military treatises flourished in the next century, but 264 brought together the leading figures of the empire. Whether in the field or at the palace, such events allowed the emperor and his officials to play their parts and project order onto the world.

The contrasting pair of abstract nouns ataxia and eutaxia gives the Macedonians’ view of the origin and aim of their dynasty. The primary meaning of both words is military, and they describe both the physical and moral state of soldiers in Herodotus,

Thucydides, and Xenophon.108 Ranks serried in good order achieve victory and glory, while those lacking in discipline suffer defeat. In classical political philosophy, ataxia becomes abstract and is paired with akolasia,109 amathia,110 and anarchia,111 being a precondition for the unrest that leads to the ruin of a state. In Plato’s cosmogony, God is described as “εἰς τάξιν ἤγαγεν ἐκ τῆς ἀταξίας,”112 wishing all things to be good and judging order to be in every way better than disorder.113 In the practical ethics of the

~~Stoics,114 eutaxia is the prudent judgment of the philosophic man. In Aristotle’s theory of~~

the tradition eventually faded away, tracking the fortunes of the late Byzantine military. Ceremonial manuals continued to be produced into the Palaelogian period, the famous of which goes under the name of Ps.-Kodinos. Macrides, Munitiz, and Angelov, Pseudo-Kodinos, the Constantinopolitan Court; A. Failler, “À propos du traité des offices du Pseudo-Kôdinos,” Revue des etudes byzantines 74 (2016): 385–99.

~~108 Examples include Xen. Mem. 3.3.14., Th. 6.72. ,Hdt.6.11., Th.2.92., and Xen. HG.3.1.9.~~

~~109 Pl.Cri.53d.~~

~~110 X.Ath.1.5.~~

~~111 Arist.Pol.1302b28.~~

~~112 Pl.Ti.30a~~

~~113 “ἡγησάμενος ἐκεῖνο τούτου πάντως ἄμεινον”~~

~~114 SVF.3.64.~~

265 the state, eutaxia is equated with eunomia,115 since, he goes on to explain, the establishment of law must precede the realization of order, and that order ultimately rests in the divine power that governs the universe.116

The means of achieving eutaxia, of bringing this abstract principle to concrete expression, are taxis and kosmos. The primary meaning of taxis is once again military, and it appears from the classical historians onwards to describe a rank of soldiers in battle array.117 From this basic meaning is derived “rank” in the sense of position within a hierarchy, which likewise in English has this denotation as well as describing an ordered line of soldiers. From here, it comes to mean the state in general, and then the constitution of a state.118 Already in the Gorgias, in his discussion of the good that exists in things as disparate as a healthy body, an argument, a house, and a ship, Plato’s

Socrates claims that they all derive their goodness from taxis and kosmos.119 The second of these terms is much older and poetic, appearing already in Homer and Hesiod. The usage of this term in the archaic poets shows that kosmos had both moral and aesthetic aspects. These two pathways continue to expand throughout the subsequent history of the

~~Greek language, with kosmos taking on meanings as diverse as women’s cosmetics, the universe, and the constitution of a state. This last sense applies especially to the~~

~~115 Arist.Pol.1326a30.~~

116 Ibid. “νόμος τάξις τίς ἐστι, καὶ τὴν εὐνομίαν ἀναγκαῖον εὐταξίαν εἶναι, ὁ δὲ λίαν ὑπερβάλλων ἀριθμὸς οὐ δύναται μετέχειν τάξεως: θείας γὰρ δὴ τοῦτο δυνάμεως ἔργον, ἥτις καὶ τόδε συνέχει τὸ πᾶν.”

~~117 See LSJ s.v., τάξις for the wide distribution and specialized meanings.~~

~~118 Arist.Pol.1271b40 and Ath.3.1.~~

~~119 Pl.Grg.504a~~

~~266~~

Spartans,120 the most military of the Greeks, who represented for the conservative oligarchs of Athens, reeling from a defeat they considered the result of the disorder of mob rule,121 the best ordered and most successful of all Greek states. The two terms start from very different places but converge at the point of describing the particular order that governs a people. Later, this is generalized, and in the Roman administrative form of

Greek that is preserved primarily in inscriptions, kosmos becomes synonymous with oikoumene,122 which in the Byzantine period will be equated with basileia, which, as we have discussed above, is the empire both as a geopolitical and institutional unit as well as the emperor’s personal rulership.

It should be clear from this review of the semantic fortunes of these terms that the foundation myth of the Macedonian dynasty performed in the legal, military, and economic reforms of Basil and Leo and given narrative form in VB was a reflex of a deep linguistic and philosophical heritage. In the progression from military ranks to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, the deep structures of the Macedonian cultural program become evident. It is impossible to separate the various types of order; the military, political, religious, and philosophical meanings operate simultaneously to reinforce the vision of bringing the inner laws of the universe to bear on the seemingly mundane details of seating precedence at a banquet and the proper marching depth to be

~~120 Hdt.1.65.~~

~~121 The extract from Aristotle above in fact appears in a section describing the degeneration of democracy.~~

~~122 OGI458.40 (9 B.C.), Ep.Rom.1.8, etc.; ὁ τοῦ παντὸς κ. κύριος, of Nero, SIG814.31, cf. IGRom.4.982 (Samos); “ἐὰν τὸν κ. ὅλον κερδήσῃ” Ev.Matt.16.26.~~

267 maintained by a formation of soldiers on campaign. Likewise, the regulation of these details represents man’s participation in the divine order, so that the two operate in a sort of diastolic movement, where the order of the universe proceeds from God and man, through reflection and action, brings about its implementation through regulation.

~~5.8 From Analepsis to Katalepsis~~

~~There is a famous but controversial connection between Constantine VII and the~~

Book of the Eparch. Although much ink has been spilled in attempting to correlate precisely the apparently conflicting dated inscriptions that accompany the oldest (partial) manuscript of LP,123 it is clear that the compilation and promulgation of the book dates to

Constantine’s boyhood. One could well imagine that Constantine grew up watching his father slave away at regulating the details of the silk industry and that this experience of seeing the emperor weighed down with such cares inspired him to turn away from the practical affairs of running an empire towards the antiquarian and ceremonial endeavors for which he is best remembered. Even were it possible to prove such a motive, the works conventionally referred to as De Administrando Imperio,124 De Thematibus,125 and Tres

~~Tractatus,126 cannot be dismissed as mere antiquarian productions and show Constantine~~

~~VII’s deep interest in the foreign affairs of his empire and the regulation of his army.~~

~~123 Johannes Koder, ed., Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisen (Vienna: Verl. der Österr. Akad. der Wiss., 1991), 37.~~

~~124 For the name, see Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, 11.~~

~~125 Agostino Pertusi, ed., De thematibus (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1952).~~

~~126 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century.~~

268 Each of these works combine obsolete information with directives for contemporary action and present themselves in the language and form of a practical manual. This mixed form has perplexed and frustrated scholars who want to see these works as failures either to attain the heights of literature or to provide Constantine’s successors with clear and up to date instructions on how to manage the day to day affairs of the empire. This is no less the case with De Caerimoniis, which shows a similar disregard for modern notions of practicality in its compilation of protocols from many periods and generally antiquarian bent. While these works may indeed be unsuccessful according to modern canons of what a practical handbook should be, in the context of the cultural program of the Macedonian recovery, the represent a progression, and, as Constantine VII hoped, a completion of the work that began when Basil set out to restore law and order in the wake of Michael III’s mismanaged and immoral rule. While Basil and Leo had in view the recovery of the ancient dignity of the emperor by reclaiming lost powers, renewing the laws, and regulating the army and the economy, Constantine aimed at nothing less than bringing the order of heaven down to earth, making his empire a true reflection of the kingdom of

~~God.~~

Whatever his ultimate motivation, unlike Leo, Constantine had the instincts of an antiquary, preserving things because they are precious and ancient, not because they are useful. In the works of modern historians, we often see him poring over musty old codices by lamplight in some forgotten room of the palace as he awaits the coup that will

~~269~~

free him from house arrest and bring him to the throne that is rightfully his.127 This conventional picture implies that Constantine was an antiquarian and a dilettante, a mere collector of pretty things and ideas. Further, we see that he continued to work in this mode after becoming emperor, ordering compilations, chief among them in scope and size the Excerpta Historica, which discarded as much as they preserved and left modern scholars in search of testimonia and fragments with complex editorial knots to untie.128 In this case, it is arguably the modern scholars rather than the Byzantine emperor who misunderstand the role that history played in the pre-modern world. Constantine VII’s arrangement of the great tradition of Greek historiography into more than fifty compendia under headings that may strike twenty-first century readers as Borgesian129 followed the ancient conception that history is a branch of rhetoric and that its study provides the contemporary man of action with a sure guide to human nature and furnishes him with exempla for emulation. That contemporary scholars would use their works to write economic or social history rather than to cultivate virtue would surely have surprised

~~127 Jenkins, Byzantium; the Imperial Centuries, A D 610-1071; Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus.~~

128 Attitudes towards the Excerpta are shifting, as the preparation of a new edition for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana that treats the work as a literary production in its own right demonstrates. Pia Carolla, Excerpta historica quae Constantini VII Porphyrogeniti dicuntur, vol. 1, De legationibus Romanorum ad gentes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).

129 I refer here to Borges’ fictitious Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which appears in his essay “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” available in translation as Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 101–5. Borges’ taxonomy entered scholarly discourse through Michel Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). The work is an extended discussion of the culturally relative aspect of any scheme of categorization and argues that utility rather than reality is the principle that drives attempts to categorize.

~~270 Thucydides and Constantine VII as well as those Greek historians who wrote in the interval separating the two men.~~

Understood properly, there could be few things more practical for a sovereign and his successors than the Excerpta Historica. By arranging the various accounts under headings as diverse as legations, traps, and virtues and vices, and famous sayings,

Constantine VII could dispense with much of the labor of historical study and skip straight to the payoff: improving wisdom and deepening moral excellence. Whatever of synchronic specificity was lost by removing the exempla from their context within an historical narrative was compensated for by a gain in the discernment of the diachronic continuity of human nature. From this perspective, Constantine’s Excerpta represents a more efficient and practical path toward gaining this wisdom.

A common criticism of Constantine VII’s cultural and literary projects is that they were idealistic and impractical. This may be true if his compilations are judged according to modern, utilitarian standards, but in the context of Byzantine political thought, steeped as it was in in the Neo-Platonic “synthesis”130 of late antiquity, there could be no division between the theoretical and the practical.131 Both the philosophia theoretike and the philosophia praktike rested on a version of Plato’s Theory of Forms. In this theory, which was extremely influential in Christian as well as Pagan philosophy and theology, immaterial but substantial Ideas act as the prototypes of all existing things, which reflect

130 For the evolution of this synthesis and its encounter with Christianity, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

~~131 In Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae P.1, Lady Philosophy appears with the letters pi and theta embroidered on her robe, indicating the unity of the two branches.~~

~~271 the Ideas, however imperfectly, in the material world. A thing is more perfect and more truly itself the more it resembles the form of which it is a particular instantiation. For~~

Neo-Platonists, to know something is to know its Form. In their conception, the first task of the philosopher is to know, and the second is to act. And the knower directs right action towards the realization of the Form. Idealism, then, is practical, that is, directed towards action, because it is ethical. Ethics, which is the philosophia praktike, is founded on knowledge of Ideas, which is the philosophia theoretike. The two therefore form a circle that proceeds from the Form, which is apprehended through contemplation and then put into practice.

This discussion of Neo-Platonic metaphysics may seem out of place in the apparently mundane world of Byzantine compilation literature, but according to the proems appended to many of these works, the connection is made explicit. This is no clearer example than the proem to the Eisagoge, which scholars have long attributed to the influence, if not direct authorship, of Photios,132 the polymathic patriarch of

Constantinople. In contrast to the biblical foundation for imperial law claimed by previous emperors, most famously the iconoclastic Isaurians, Photios grounds his account in the creative activity of the Neo-Platonic Demiurge, which he of course identifies with the God of the Old Testament.133 In the Eisagoge, Photios presents a narrative of the decadence of imperial law, the subsequent decline of the empire, and the restoration of both through legal anakatharsis that is later given mythological depth and breadth by

~~132 Chitwood, Byzantine Legal Culture and the Roman Legal Tradition, 867–1056, 30–31.~~

~~133 For a translation of and commentary on this proem, see W. J. Aerts et al., “The Prooimion of the Eisagoge: Translation and Commentary,” Subseciva Groningana 2001, no. 7 (2001): 91–155.~~

272 Constantine VII in the Vita Basilii. On top of this narrative, Photios analyzes the failure of previous emperors to uphold the law in philosophical and theological terms. These are always separated into pairs. In the platonizing mode, we have things that are perceptible and things that are knowable, i.e., form and matter. As corresponding theological categories, Photios proposes the two natures of Christ, divine and human, and claims that the Iconoclastic denial of Christ’s human nature resulted in the dissolution of the synthesis that made the empire a reflection of heaven.134 In summarizing the project that has produced the Eisagoge, Photios pointedly argues that the value of the Macedonian anakatharsis is not its utility, but rather that it accomplishes the recovery of the lost tradition of genuine, Roman law. Losing contact with Roman law coincided with the heterodoxy of the emperors, and reestablishing a link with the source of the law will ensure both orthodoxy and good government.

~~Another text that sheds light on imperial political thought during this period is~~

Basil I’s Paraenesis ad Leonem filium, which Photios certainly influenced, even if he did not write. The Paraenesis is a regrettably understudied production of Basil’s declining years that was intended as a sort of last will and testament.135 The text takes part in the long tradition of the “Mirror of Princes,” which forms a rich source for the study of

~~134 The duality of natures in Christ had been a deeply divisive problem for Eastern Christianity and the Eastern Empire since the mid-fifth century.~~

135 One does not find it mentioned in Tusculum Lexikon, or ODB. The most current edition is Kurt Emminger, Studien zu den griechischen Fürstenspiegeln (München: Buchdruckerei von F. Straub, 1906). Paidas quotes the text to make his arguments but does not treat it systematically. Paidas, Η θεματική των βυζαντινών. It was well-regarded up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when it was still being commended as reading for those interested in cultivating virtue and studying the principles of good government by the likes of Grotius and Locke. A thorough study of the text and its reception is greatly to be desired.

~~273~~

Byzantine political thought. In-depth study of this tradition has so far been impeded by the lack of adequate editions and translations, as well as scholarly disputes over whether the texts included under this title share enough in common to constitute a coherent genre.136 Whatever the particulars of the authorship and classification of the Paraenesis, it is, like the proems that have attracted so much attention, an officially sanctioned indication of an emperor’s theory of what it takes to rule the basileia, as well as what the basileia is or ought to be. Like the proem to the Eisagoge, the Paraenesis at several points draws a distinction between the spiritual and the material, and the need for somehow bridging the divide through imitation. The distinction is treated compactly in chapters on justice and eunomia, which are treated separately. Drawing a connection between thought and deed, or knowing and acting, the Paraenesis states that “if what you speak is good, you will act in like manner.”137 It also claims that this principle holds true for both individuals and states, claiming that the fall of nations is caused by confusion of law, and that good order and right action follow when clarity and harmony characterize the law.138 The law, which is like the Form, provides the prototype for action realized in the material world. Human action in conformity with properly disposed law participates in justice and eunomia, realizing these transcendentals on the mundane plane. And the emperor, by taking charge of the law, must ensure its proper disposition so that this synthesis of the formal and material can be accomplished. Indeed, the chief occupation

~~136 Hana Bohrnová, “Mirrors for Princes: Genuine Byzantine Genre or Academic Construct,” Graeco-Latina Brunensia 22, no. 1 (2017): 5–16.~~

~~137 PG 107 31D. εἰ δὲ λέγων ἀγαθὰ, τὰ ὅμοια πράττεις.~~

~~138 PG 107 38B.~~

~~274 of the emperor is to ensure that he directs his zeal at transforming the earthly basileia into the heavenly kingdom.139~~

This distinction of spiritual and material continues in a chapter on mortality and immortality,140 and in a discussion of the care to be taken in providing for the comeliness of the body.141 Just as immortality is infinitely more valuable than mortality and yet must be approached by mortals living on a perishable earth, so the wise ruler must learn to regard beauty of soul as being superior to that of the body, while understanding that the form of the body must accord with the dignity of the imperial station, and due care must be taken to present that dignity with fitting nobility.

The Paraenesis also presents something like a briefly stated theory of history. It praises the study of history as an easy means of learning to imitate the virtues of the good, avoid the vices of the wicked, and of gaining stability in the midst of the shifting fortunes that attend life on earth.142 These three goals track well with what we know about the aims of Constantine VII’s Excerpta, which could be said to be little more than a practical working out of the implications of the commendation of historical study that the

~~Paraenesis presents. If history provides for most people a surer and more efficient means of gaining an understanding of ethics, then a compilation that arranges history into ethical~~

~~139 PG 107 42D “σπεύσωμεν ἀμείψασθαι δι᾽ ἀρετῆς τὴν ἐκεῖθεν βασιλείαν”~~

~~140 PG107 43D-46A.~~

~~141 PG 107 47D-49A.~~

~~142 PG 107 49C.~~

~~275 rubrics rather than into a chronological narrative must be an even more practical means of abstracting exempla of right action for meditation and deployment in the present.~~

Constantine VII continued this tradition in his De Administrando Imperio, which focuses much more on the practical, in the modern sense of the term, than moral aspects of running the Byzantine empire. Scholarship on DAI has traditionally used the text as mine for information about the early history of the peoples and lands it describes, and the ethical dimensions of the text as a representative of the “Mirrors of Princes” genre has attracted much less attention. This has more to do with the interests of contemporary scholars than with the literary intent of the text itself. Further study is necessary to work out how precisely DAI functions as a text of practical philosophy and how it fits into the tradition. There is another interpretation of the inclusion of this “antiquarian” material that sees DAI as participating in the Byzantine tradition of historians using ancient ethnonyms for new peoples who had nothing to do with their ancient namesakes.

According to this interpretation,143 the Byzantines project the past onto the present in order to construct a geopolitical system that is unchanged from antiquity, from a time when Roman arms and diplomacy were unchallenged and barbarians presented no existential threat to the empire. If it is correct to connect DAI to this tradition, then even the most “practical” of Constantine VII’s works engages in a sort of mimesis that seeks to unite the past with the present.

143 Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Kaldellis, Ethnography after Antiquity Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature.

~~276 5.9 Reflecting the Order of Heaven~~

Although the Paraenesis does not use the term “mirror” to refer to itself, the platonic theory of Forms that underlies Photian thinking in this treatise and in the proem to the Eisagoge is almost irresistibly tied to language of light, darkness, and reflection.

One of the most common words used for reflection in this period is σκιά, usually rendered by the English “shadow,” which has obvious connections to the Platonic theory of Forms. The simile “as in a mirror”144 appears frequently in middle Byzantine literature and often in contexts related to anakatharsis and katalepsis. From this it is clear that there exists a strong association between mirrors and ethical instruction, which is ultimately directed towards action.

Not many years ago, Stratis Papaioannou offered a valuable catalogue and analysis of the role played by mirrors in middle Byzantine literature.145 At the beginning of his study, Papaioannou warns against imagining that these texts refer to the vitrine mirrors that have become common since the eighteenth century. The reader must remember that in the middle ages, as in antiquity, mirrors were made of bronze, and even when well-made and cared for, presented the viewer with a distorted reflection of their subject. This fact is central to Papaioannou’s thesis that mirrors provide insight into

~~Byzantine notions of self-representation and subjectivity.~~

~~At the same time, Papaioannou draws attention to two positive evaluations of the ability of mirrors to reflect reality: the proem to Constantine VII’s De Caerimoniis and a~~

~~144 “ὡς ἐν κατόπτρῳ”~~

~~145 Stratis Papaioannou, “Byzantine Mirrors: Self-Reflection in Medieval Greek Writing,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010): 81–101.~~

277 passage from the Ethical Discourses of St. Symeon the New Theologian.146 In both of these examples, the authors use mirrors as metaphors to discuss how words and texts function to establish taxis and hierarchies, which were the central preoccupations of the cultural activities of the early Macedonians.

Papaioannou shows that, likely due to their great expense and consequent rarity, the metaphorical use of mirrors is much more common in middle Byzantine literature than discussions of mirrors as physical objects in daily use. He states that these metaphors are so frequent, that one might say that Byzantines from the seventh to the twelfth centuries were “obsessed” with mirrors,147 but beyond reiterating that mirrors were luxury objects, he does not explain why this might be the case. In fact, Papaioannou often elides the biblical verses that underpin his authors’ arguments and does not consider the philosophical (platonic) and theological (Christian) backgrounds of the texts he treats, beyond stating that mirrors often function to establish and project “normative expectations.”

According to his survey, Papaioannou finds that mirrors in middle Byzantine literature overwhelmingly refer to the reflection of types, rather than individuals, but his study focuses on this second group, which, although it represents a minority tradition, fits

Papaioannou’s purpose of exploring subjectivity. Within the restricted purview of his study, Papaioannou finds that Byzantine authors’ attitudes towards mirrors and their use is mostly negative or at best, something that must be explained with some sort of

~~146 Papaioannou, 83–84.~~

~~147 Papaioannou, 84.~~

278 apologia. In his study, mirrors are associated with frivolous women, foolish servants, and vain monks rather than with saints and emperors. While Papaioannou makes a valuable contribution to understanding one aspect of the literary tropes centered on mirrors in

~~Byzantine literature, much more work needs to be done in order to establish the context and range of meanings of this long-lived and frequently employed metaphor.~~

In order to better understand the proem to De Caerimoniis, and by extension, the work as a whole and its relation to the Macedonian Recovery, it is necessary to examine the “majority tradition” in greater depth, while restricting the breadth of the study to encompass only the early Macedonian period. Furthermore, where Papaioannou included words related to the stems katoptr-, enoptr-, and e(i)soptr-, for the discussion of De

Caerimoniis, those terms derived from katoptr- provide the best axis of comparison,148 since Constantine VII uses the term katoptron for reasons that are of great significance to his wider cultural project.

Already in the first century, the twofold tradition of the mirror metaphor appears to be well-established. In words that would become proverbial for subsequent Christian tradition, St. Paul provides two evaluations of mirrors, which could be characterized as

~~“optimistic” and “pessimistic.” The more famous of these, at least in the Christian~~

~~West,149 is traditionally rendered as, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then~~

~~148 Stems built from katoptr- also appear to be much more common than enoptr- or e(i)soptr-, which are roughly synonymous.~~

~~149 Not least of the reasons why this should be the case is the role the verse plays in St. Augustine’s thought (cf. Aug. Conf. 10.5.)~~

279 face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”150 A common interpretation of this verse sees the mirror as presenting a cloudy and imperfect image of truth and the need for believers to trust in faith to provide what the understanding lacks. In the second verse, which has become in the Christian East a canonical expression of the way of spiritual progress trod by means of askesis and the liturgy,151 St. Paul explains, “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”152 Here, the mirror is fully able to transmit the light of heaven and effect a transformation on those who behold it. It not only communicates the prototype to viewers; it also makes viewers into what is beheld, bringing them up into heaven and into a fuller realization of the prototype. Closer to the Macedonian period, this verse is commonly cited in iconodule writings to justify the veneration of icons,153 and its reception certainly formed a part of the background for Photios’ theological account of the law in the proem to the Eisagoge.

It is the second verse that provides the context for many of the mirror similes in middle Byzantine literature. The very word katoptron contains within it the prefix kata-, which orients the discourse in a vertical hierarchy, making it an ideal literary device for

~~150 I Cor. 13:12 (KJV).~~

151 For a brief discussion of this huge tradition, see Jean Daniélou’s introduction to Jean Daniélou and Herbert Musurillo, eds., From glory to glory: texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s mystical writings (New York: Scribner, 1961).

~~152 II Cor. 3.18 (KJV).~~

153 See, for example, the Epistula ad Theophilum Imperatorem de Imaginibus, which is treated at length in Heinz Gauer, “Texte zum byzantinischen Bilderstreit: der Synodalbrief der drei Patriarchen des Ostens von 836 und seine Verwandlung in sieben Jahrhunderten” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Köln, 1994).

280 explaining both the Platonic theory of Forms and the Christian notion of theosis. In contrast, the ana- prefix, exploited to good effect by Basil and Leo, is horizontal and oriented towards profane history. The prefixes stand for the two movements of the

Macedonian Recovery: across time to bridge the Isaurian and Amorian “dark ages,” and up to heaven and back down to earth, to realize the Forms and bring celestial order to the mundane plane of human affairs. By shifting to words built from the kata- prefix,

~~Constantine moves the Macedonian Recovery from the temporal and material to the spiritual and eternal.~~

~~This shift is not unique to Constantine. The Encomium of St. Pancratius of~~

Taormina by Gregory the Pagurite,154 a ninth-century hagiographic text, presents its subject as “desiring to mirror perfectly (τράνως) the splendor of the trinity.”155 In order to satisfy this desire, St. Pancratios must first seek the purifying waters of baptism before he can enter the vestibule of the Lord’s court in order to approach His throne.156 Purification

~~(katharsis) precedes the transformation that allows St. Pancratios to take part in the ceremonial life of heaven by means of the reflected glory of a mirror. In a letter of~~

~~Photios, there is a direct association of the power of a mirror to effect the shining forth of purified light.157 Slightly later than Constantine’s time, Symeon the New Theologian uses~~

~~154 For an edition and translation, see C. Stallman-Pacitti, “The Encomium of S. Pancratius of Taormina by Gregory the Pagurite,” Byzantion 60 (1990): 334–65.~~

~~155 “οὗτος δὲ ἐραστὴς ἦν τὴν αἴγλην τῆς τριάδος τρανῶς κατοπτρίσασθαι.”~~

156 “Διὸ καὶ ἑαυτὸν προκαθάρας, τὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ποτήριον προθύμως πέπωκεν καὶ τὸ βάπτισμα ἐβαπτίσατο καὶ ἀπολαύει τοῦ ἀδύτου φωτὸς τὴν λαμπρότητα τῷ κυριακῷ θρόνῳ παριστάμενος”

~~157 Epistulae et Amphilochia, “καὶ καθαρότητα διαυγῆ, κατόπτρου δύναμιν.”~~

~~281 virtually the same language of purification and mirrors in several places to refer to~~

Christians’ growth in the spiritual life as they reflect the glory of the Lord.158 Both immediately before and immediately after Constantine VII, the mirror functioned as a powerful metaphor for describing the sacramental transformation of human life through contact with the mediated glory of heaven.

~~In his proem to the Eisagoge, Photios used his treatment of “the knowable” and~~

“the perceptible” to discuss how divine and human law might be reconciled. In establishing a connection between “what is” and “what appears to be,” Photios drew attention to the need for purification before order could be properly reestablished. In short, dirty laws make for a dirty polity. Moving to the proem of De Caerimoniis,

~~Constantine’s intent is to set his manual159 up in the imperial palace to act as a mirror that will reflect the order of heaven.~~

In framing his motives for composing De Caerimoniis, Constantine grants himself a heavenly perspective when he states that in the present day, the basileia had become “a bad sight when viewed from above”160 In describing the work, which has a rubric but no title, Constantine explains that it is the product of imperial zeal, replacing the epimeleia

158 In the Orationes Ethicae, Symeon states “ἀνακεκαλυμμένῳ προσώπῳ νοὸς τὴν δόξαν Κυρίου κατοπ- τριζόμενος” and the Capita theologica, he more clearly associates mirrors with light: “οἷον τὸ φῶς τῆς λαμπάδος ἔνδοθεν ἐν τῷ κατόπτρῳ δείκνυται, οὐκ ἐν φαντάσματι ἀνυποστάτῳ καθάπερ ἐκεῖνό ἐστιν, ἀλλ’ ἐν φωτὶ ἐνυποστάτως” and “Τοῦτο καρδίας καθαρᾶς ἐπ’ ἀληθῶς σημεῖον καὶ ἔνδειγμα βέβαιον, ἐν ᾧ τις καὶ τὰ μέτρα γινώσκει τῆς καθαρότητος καὶ ὡς ἐν κατόπτρῳ ἑαυτὸν καθορᾷ.”

159 The problem of the unity of DC is not easy to solve. The proem discussed here properly refers only to book I. Book II is much less homogeneous in both theory and practice than book I, and the appendices have a very thin connection to either of the books. See Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 35.

~~160 “δυσειδῆ τὴν βασιλείαν ἦν καθορᾶν”~~

~~282 of the administrator, to which his father and grandfather appealed, with Christian spoude.~~

He seeks to preserve from oblivion things that would otherwise disappear that have great value (μέγα χρῆμα) even if they are not explicitly useful (χρήσιμος), which was the driving principal behind much of Leo’s legal and literary activity. He compares the polity to a body, and like Photios, argues that both need proper disposition in order to be harmonious and to project harmony onto those who behold them.

Constantine uses two metaphors to describe his compilation: a bouquet of flowers and a mirror. The first explains his method, which is not to present an historical account of imperial ceremony, but rather, taking anthologia in its literal meaning, to gather the most beautiful flowers from all periods of the Roman ceremonial past, to tie them together, and to present them as an “incomparable decoration for the imperial splendor.”161 With the second, he explains his goal, which is to effect a “comprehension”

(katalepsis) of the order of heaven by setting up his work as reflecting mirror (katoptron) in the very middle of the place. Within the Byzantine tradition of mirror metaphors, there is the danger that instead of reflecting light, a mirror will project darkness and fail to perform its function efficiently. It is therefore unsurprising that Constantine characterizes his mirror as “transparent and newly polished.”162 Every care has been taken to ensure that De Caerimoniis presents a true reflection of the Roman tradition and thereby is capable of restoring rhythm and order to the basileia, inspiring devotion in the hearts of

~~161 “εἰς ἀσύγκριτον εὐπρέπειαν τῇ βασιλικῇ παραθέσθαι λαμπρότητι”~~

~~162 “διαυγὲς καὶ νεόσμηκτον”~~

~~283 both those who participate in the ceremonies and of those who observe them, and that the emperor and his court may become living icons of the creator and the cosmos.163~~

~~With the repetition of the kata- prefix in kathoran, katoptron, and katalepsis,~~

Constantine is not reaching across time to bring back what has been lost; he is reaching up to bring down to earth what is in heaven. In Constantine’s vision, his predecessors, through analepsis and anakatharsis, had brought about a recovery of order and a purification of tradition that was historical and ritual. By building on this recovered and purified tradition, excerpting it, and putting it in order, Constantine VII claims to achieve a comprehension that is both mental and physical, spiritual and material, mundane and heavenly. His “grasping down” of the order of heaven completes the work of Basil and

~~Leo and is the crowning achievement of Constantine VII’s literary activity.~~

Through the canonization of a mythological understanding of his family’s origins in the Vita Basilii, the revision and completion of his predecessors’ legal projects, and finally the compilation and extension of their cultural and literary movements,

~~Constantine VII attempted to synthesize the Roman tradition and make it an effective means for realizing cosmic taxis. This context goes a long way towards explaining why~~

Constantine VII devoted so much of his time and imperial zeal to the apparently frivolous task of rooting out dusty manuals from the stacks in the palace library and resurrecting, at least in his idealized vision of what the daily life of his court ought to be, obsolete titles and ceremonies from a remote but glorious Roman past.

~~163 “εἰκονίζοι μὲν τοῦ δημιουργοῦ τὴν περὶ τόδε τὸ πᾶν ἁρμονίαν καὶ κίνησιν”~~

~~284 CHAPTER 6~~

~~CONCLUSION~~

~~6.1 Overview~~

In this dissertation, I have worked to place Constantine VII’s De Cerimoniis in a variety of contexts: philological, socio-linguistic, literary, and historical. For most of the last two hundred years, scholars have seen De Cerimoniis primarily as a witness to the concrete realities of Byzantine ceremonial and its use an instrument in the construction and maintenance of an imperial ideology. Without questioning the valuable insights gained from these perspectives, I have shown that the variety of strands that come together in De Cerimoniis are much subtler and more profound than many scholars have thought and that examining the book from a broader variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives deepens our appreciation for Constantine VII’s accomplishment and the wider renewal project of his dynasty.

Perhaps because of the transcendent perspective of its author-compiler, many scholars have used De Cerimoniis as a timeless repository of facts and textual witnesses that help to answer archaeological and topographical questions. The fact that De

Cerimoniis is obviously a compilation of earlier sources but that those earlier sources have almost all perished makes it difficult or impossible to engage in the traditional sort of editing, dating, and source criticism that are a philologist’s first duty in confronting a text. Perhaps these difficulties have spared De Cerimoniis the fate of other tenth-century 285 compilations, such as the Palatine Anthology and Constantine VII’s own Excerpta, which scholars have for centuries chopped up and rearranged in attempts to get beyond or behind the anthologizer and discover the transmission history of the disparate parts stitched together, with varying degrees of success, by scribes, editors, and emperors in

Middle Byzantium. The past decade has seen the growth of interest in the role these texts played in the culture that produced them, and a renewed focus on material culture has led to an increased appreciation for what individual manuscripts can teach about their particular time and place and origin, rather than their role as witnesses to a universal and idealized textual tradition.

~~Given the apparent lack of concern for anachronism on the part of Constantine~~

~~VII’s compilators and the unlikelihood that any substantial new evidence will be uncovered to increase understanding of the sources that lay behind it, scholars of De~~

Cerimoniis are in the odd position of studying a text that presents a highly idealized vision of Roman ceremonial but that is represented by a unique manuscript in poor condition with only slight echoes in a wider textual tradition. One must therefore work to explain how, why, and to whom Constantine VII chose to present this perhaps idiosyncratic vision at apparently great labor and expense. One must conclude that if it is dangerous to use De Cerimoniis as a guide to the reconstruction of middle byzantine ceremonial, it may in fact be a precious witness to an imperial ideal that has previously been discovered most readily in the prefaces to law codes and in the legends of coins and lead seals.

~~If, as seems apparent from the tiny manuscript tradition, De Cerimoniis never had wide circulation and could not have had much impact beyond the palace and its library,~~

~~286 from which Constantine VII and his compilators almost certainly gathered their material.~~

~~Whereas the golden coins and lead seals achieved something like worldwide distribution, and the law books exerted influence if not jurisdiction beyond the empire’s borders, De~~

Cerimoniis could only have had an extremely localized audience. For this reason, it seems wrong to regard the compilation as wholly or primarily an instrument of ideological propaganda. On the contrary, one should regard De Cerimoniis, like De

Administrando Imperio, which suffers from a similarly tiny manuscript tradition, small circulation, and lack of reception history, as an intimate portrait of a Byzantine emperor’s self-understanding, of what he thought his empire should look like, and what his goals in so minutely regulating the daily round of court ceremonial were.

~~Whatever the historical facts that underlie the contemporary construction and deconstruction of narratives such as “Iconoclasm” and the “Macedonian Renaissance,”~~

De Cerimoniis shows Constantine VII’s concern to recover something that he regarded as lost. In a geopolitical situation where the legacy of Rome was contested by Latin- speaking “barbarians” and Greek-speaking “Romans,” Constantine VII sought to reclaim his empire’s Latin heritage and make his own time resemble and reenact those of

Constantine, Justinian, and Herakleios, when Latin and Greek were dual expressions of the ecumenical claims of Romanitas. In a culture that believed it had lost much of lasting value due to the mismanagement of a string of corrupt, sinful, heretical, and destructive rulers, Constantine VII sought to recover some of what had been lost, to renew his empire through the recapitulation of the past, and to reunite the Christian and Roman strands of his basileia, both as an historical reality and an eschatological sign.

~~287~~

~~At the level of language, Constantine went about this by redeploying Latin terms where their prestige was greatest: in the government and army. In the way that he framed~~

De Cerimoniis and the linguistic register in which he couched it, he united it to an old but little studied genre of Greek letters, which had over time become closely associated with sovereignty and eventually, the Roman empire. In imagining how ceremony served to advance the interests of his basileia, he leveraged a theory of performance and imitation that had deep and complimentary roots in pagan philosophy, Roman practice, and

Christian theology. And in canonizing his dynasty’s claim to rule, Constantine VII tied his transcendent recovery of cosmic order to the restoration of law, economic regulation, and military discipline that his father and grandfather claimed.

~~6.2 De Cerimoniis and the Recovery of Latin~~

In chapter 1, I challenged the ideas that the cultural interchange between the two literary languages of the Roman Empire had generally been in one direction, from Greek to Latin, and that what Latin words that were to be found in Greek were always or almost exclusively from low-prestige semantic domains. Leveraging the innovative work of scholars who have united the relatively young disciplines of contact linguistics and sociolinguistics with the well-established field of historical linguistics, I applied models and methodologies originally applied to Medieval England, which is now the paradigm for historical sociolinguistics, to the Roman (Byzantine) Empire in late antiquity and the middle ages as reflected in a sample derived from close study of the vocabulary of De

~~Cerimoniis.~~

288 The results of this inquiry revealed things that were both surprising and unsurprising. The primary outcome of my investigation provides a corrective to the longstanding literary biases of classical philologists by bringing nuance to the discussion of relative social prestige in the context of contact linguistics during antiquity and the middle ages. The strict standards of classicism, which even a generation ago were as closely guarded by Byzantinists as by classicists, are now breaking down as canons, both temporal and linguistic, accommodate a wider variety of texts and attract the attention of historians of language. The traditionally narrow focus on philosophy and elite literature has concealed the deep and long-term influence of Latin on the Greek language. The ideology of Atticism, which has colored and to some degree been adopted by the interpretations of subsequent generations of classicists and historians, has focused on the artificial language of a small elite to the detriment of understanding the still literate and cultivate but more popular registers used in law, the army, and the government. As I demonstrated, it would be a serious mistake to consider these three semantic domains as being of low socio-cultural prestige. One could argue that these elite institutions had a much more pervasive and quotidian influence on the language of the literate elite as well as users of more popular registers of Greek. We therefore need to revise our notions that

~~Latin influence on Greek was slight and limited to the superficial borrowing of names for objects important in commerce and the everyday life of the masses.~~

To place this discussion on a more objective basis, I have made a small but important contribution to the study of Latin loanwords. It has long been a desideratum to develop a comprehensive wordlist of the Latin words current in post-classical Greek, but even with sophisticated digital tools, this task requires a great expenditure of time and

289 effort due to the variety of often idiosyncratic spellings and the great mass of evidence, the majority of which is represented by inadequate editions and much of which is still in manuscript. The wordlists and categorization that I have provided show that the traditional account is correct, insofar as the great mass of Latin loanwords are limited to nouns. This finding aligns well with the standard typology of contact linguistics and is unsurprising. What is surprising is that for the first time it has been possible to demonstrate that the vast majority of these nouns refer to titles, objects, and places with great social and cultural (although not literary) prestige. I hope that this initial exploration will serve as the foundation for future work on the language of “middle register” Greek, where I expect much more evidence supporting this general trend awaits collection and analysis.

~~6.3 Technical Greek and Practical Philosophy~~

~~Moving up the tower of the arts from grammar to rhetoric, I have situated De~~

Cerimoniis and, by extension, the compilation literature of tenth-century Byzantium, within long-term trends and traditions in Greek literature. Like the “middle register” of the Greek language, whose existence scholars recognize but whose precise definition is elusive, the compilation literature has gone by a variety of names but has generally been too slippery to assign to any particular generic convention. By examining the deep roots of “technical literature” and the language in which it is written, I have linked the tenth- century compilations to the practical handbooks that have their remote origin as far back as Hesiod or earlier, but that reached their “classical” form in the Roman imperial period.

~~From this perspective, the compilations can take their place within a recognized genre,~~

~~290 which allows scholars to investigate how the compilators and their audiences understood these monuments to the industry, wide reading, and zeal of tenth-century scribes, librarians, and writers.~~

~~Once the compilations have been understood as partaking in the long tradition of~~

“technical literature” and the related tradition of the “practical handbook,” we can begin considering the apparent disconnect between their aims and their contents. While many modern and contemporary scholars expect to find factual and descriptive material in books of this sort, the ancients and medievals, as one gathers from a close reading of their prefaces and their style, hoped to present their subjects in an idealized and prescriptive manner. The “anachronism” of much of the technical literature becomes from this perspective a testament to the author-compilator’s moral purpose and an implicit theory of mimetic emulation of historical exempla. The “practical handbook” subsequently reveals itself to be a species of ethical instruction rather than a technical textbook. The compilation literature is then a part of “philosophy” in its widest possible sense, specifically a component of philosophy’s “practical” branch, the love of wisdom directed towards virtuous action.

~~For a variety of cultural reasons, this practical philosophy of the Hellenistic,~~

Roman, and Medieval periods has long been overshadowed by the theoretical philosophy of classical antiquity. Even so, there is now a growing scholarly literature and a burgeoning popular interest in this “practical philosophy.” Recognizing that the traditional association of the Romans with “pragmatism” should not necessarily imply a lack of interest in philosophy, we see a rehabilitation of “Roman” philosophy, especially in Latin authors such as Cicero and Seneca. In addition to this effort to broaden the

291 understanding of ancient and medieval notions of what constitutes philosophy, we should also unsettle the traditional division of classical literature along purely linguistic lines. If we can posit the existence of a tradition of “practical philosophy” associated with Rome, we will also need to consider the phenomenon of Roman literature written in Greek. As with the traditional focus on Atticism, accounts of post-classical Greek culture have tended to operate within a narrative that could be characterized as nationalist. Authors who resist identification with Rome and stress their continuity with classical Hellas have been taken as normative, when from an early date, we can find authors who write in

Greek but consider themselves Romans. This trend becomes more pronounced over time and is fully developed in the tenth century, when compilations like De Cerimoniis were brought together. As a corollary, I suggest that we should move in the opposite direction and reconsider our categories in dealing with the possibility of Byzantine literature written in Latin. The long-term narrative of Romanitas and its adoption by diverse peoples deserves to be told in greater detail and should serve as a corrective to our traditional narratives, colored as they are by nineteenth-century nationalisms.

We are left then with a literary tradition that is at once stylistic, rhetorical, and philosophical, but also long-lived and closely associated with Romanitas. By demonstrating that De Cerimoniis was inspired by and partakes in this tradition, my study clarifies certain difficulties in interpreting how Constantine VII understood the purpose and scope of his work and why he chose to include what he did in a work that so many scholars have seen as a somewhat defective witness to purely historical information for the reconstruction of late antique and medieval Roman ceremony.

~~292 6.4 Ceremonial Realism and Anamnesis~~

The interpretation of Roman and medieval ceremonies has for a long time been limited to phylogenetic and functional interpretations. The phylogenetic approach has been less successful, primarily because of the ephemeral nature of most ceremonies and the consequent lack of evidence. The various difficulties in using tenth-century compilations as guides to historical development, discussed in the previous two chapters, have frustrated most attempts to “get behind” Constantine VII’s editorial work and move towards the recovery of the traditions of previous ages. The phylogenetic accounts of the development of Roman ceremonies, whether they discuss the East or the West, have tended to see a movement from the secular-republican to the imperial-Christian. This interpretation rests on a selective reading of the evidence, a lack of terminological precision, and is influenced by twentieth-century intellectual trends.

From a purely historical perspective, it is difficult to maintain that the political culture of the Roman Republic and the ceremonies that acted to renew, represent, and spread that culture were necessarily or even mostly “secular.” The priestly and monarchical functions of the magistrates of the Roman Republic, which are well- documented and have been studied by students of religion but mostly neglected by historians of Roman polity, invite at the very least the complication of the narrative of secular republicanism and a more nuanced discussion of the role of Christianity in the real or imagined “liturgification” of Roman ceremony. The early and native origin of much in Roman imperial ceremony, still seen by non-specialists as late and foreign, makes it difficult to maintain that an initially simple and secular Roman polity became by degrees more and more dedicated to oriental notions of divine rulership before eventually

293 becoming fully theocratized in the centuries following the conversion of Constantine. To answer this discrepancy, I suggest that the phylogenetic account be reconfigured as moving from pagan to Christian and that many of the monarchical features of “sacral kingship” that have traditionally been seen as imperial or Christian impositions are in fact developments of notions and practices inherited from republican times. From this perspective, we would do better to speak of a Christian baptism of the Roman past rather than its liturgification.

As an alternative to the phylogenetic study of Roman ceremony, some scholars have pursued a functional account of such Roman practices as the triumph, processions, and acclamations. These scholars have overwhelmingly stressed the socio-economic function of these ceremonies and their usefulness for rulers anxious to assert and affirm their claims to legitimacy. While this interpretation has a definite validity, it is too often couched in reductionist terms that ignore their wider cultural and intellectual significance.

In addition to enabling the sometimes cynical power plays of self-interested political actors, these ceremonies were loci for fostering social stability, shared identity, and uniting present triumph with a glorious past and hope for the future. Whether or not one agrees with the sentiments incarnated by such ceremonies, it is a distortion of reality if one cannot admit that at least some of the people some of the time, including the consuls, generals, and emperors who were their focus, took part in these ceremonies sincerely and believed that they had real effect in the world. This belief consequently influenced behavior, which its actors attempted to unite to an implicit theory of mimetic ethics and participation and to historical and transhistorical narratives.

294 Both in his preface and in the texts of the acclamations that Constantine VII chose to include in De Cerimoniis, one sees his concern, Roman and Christian, to incorporate the historical past and present of the empire within an eschatological participation in the heavenly basileia. Accordingly, I argue that the reason that De Cerimoniis defies a purely historical reading is that one of its primary goals is to blur the historical distinctions on which developmental, phylogenetic accounts are built. Rather, Constantine VII situates his compilation in a mentality that could be called “liturgical,” and is influenced by notions of mimesis and anamnesis that have sources and reflexes in Greek thought,

Roman practice, and Christian theology. His understanding of the purpose of ceremony is bring order into being through the imitation both of the past and of the transcendent, heavenly hierarchy of which the Roman Empire is a worldly foretaste and anticipation.

~~In the tenth-century, such notions are widespread but unsystematic. De~~

Cerimoniis provides insight into the understanding of imitation and the later elaboration of “liturgical realism,” the by now traditional Christian understanding that sacraments are not merely symbolic but rather have real effects in the here and now and participate in a transcendent order. This model helps to explain some perplexing features of Byzantine political culture and provides an additional tool for understanding some of the outstanding issues in the history of late antique and medieval political philosophy. That the evidence provided by De Cerimoniis is to a certain extent ambivalent is a testament to its grounding in a symbolic understanding of reality rather than an absence of theory, as some have alleged. The reconciliation of contraries and the merging of the corporeal and spiritual realms appears as the essential feature of ceremonial language, with a variety of sources and outcomes in Roman history, both Christian and pre-Christian.

295 As scholars are beginning to recognize, the Neoplatonic and Christian developments of classical political thought do not represent a break with the past and are not wholly in a theocratic direction. Rather, they bring a theological concern to answering questions of a political nature and seek to reconcile the competing claims of the material and spiritual, without banishing religion from the “secular” or the material and mundane from the “religious.” In the late Roman Empire, scholars now see among both pagan and

Christian thinkers a concern to bridge the divide between the two realms. The model is growth and synthesis of complementary points of view rather than the competition, decay, and replacement of one ideology by another. In this ever-broadening examination of a pervasive and multivalent tradition that is the unconscious and therefore mostly unstudied background of so much of Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian thought, much reevaluation of the sources and interrelation of Byzantine, Roman, and Christian political ideas is needed. This study contributes to opening up this reevaluation and points to new questions with relevance for the history of both political philosophy and liturgical theology.

~~6.5 De Cerimoniis as an Instrument of Macedonian Katalepsis~~

The final chapter of the study places Constantine VII’s project in the context of the work of the emperors Basil I and Leo VI, his grandfather and father. Over the past twenty years, there has been a strong push to deconstruct the historical narratives of

“Iconoclasm” and the “Macedonian Renaissance.” In both cases, there are a variety of problems in treating the material and sorting out what actually happened historically, what writers in past ages wanted later readers to believe had happened, and how modern

296 historians have interpreted, rightly or wrongly, happened, based on a variety of trustworthy and untrustworthy sources. In the case of iconoclasm, there is a growing scholarly consensus that the standard narrative, encapsulated by the theological and historical writings of the Byzantines themselves, is one sided and in need of thoroughgoing correctives from critical readings of the texts and the aid of archaeological evidence that was not available to previous generations of scholars.

The case of the Macedonian Renaissance is different. This “Renaissance” is clearly a modern narrative constructed by western scholars in the last century by analogy to the “real” Renaissance that scholars have used to separate the Medieval and Modern periods of western history. The concept of the Renaissance, even within its “proper” temporal and geographical extension, is now considered highly problematic by specialists in its field. Most of the scholarly controversy centers on deciding what precisely is meant by “renaissance” and what components of later, Western European culture are thought to have been reborn during that time period. This discussion has in turn caused a reevaluation of the application by analogy of the term “renaissance” to other periods of history, especially to its originally polemical use by historians of the medieval period.

One solution to this problem has been to avoid the term “renaissance” in discussions of these earlier periods of cultural renewal. For the period that once was called the “Carolingian Renaissance,” many scholars now use the term “Renovatio,” which they derive from the programmatic statements of writers from the Carolingian period. Not only has this avoided the problems attendant with using a concept from a different time and place, but it has also encouraged scholars to investigate what writers meant by the terms they used, thereby inspiring a greater synchronic appreciation for

~~297~~

~~their particular mentality. Using the works of Constantine VII, within which I regard De~~

Cerimoniis as occupying the central place, I have derived the term “recovery” for his dynasty’s movement to connect legal, economic, military, and ceremonial reforms to historical precedent. As part of this contextualization, I focus on the directionality implied in the terms “analepsis” and “katalepsis,” arguing that they are not quite synonymous and that Constantine’s employment of the latter after the former had been used by his predecessors was a conscious move to shift the rhetorical importance of his dynasty’s “recovery” of order. Whereas Basil I and Leo VI were concerned with a historical “recovery” stretching “backwards” in time to a neglected Roman past,

~~Constantine VII look “upwards” to a “recovery” of heavenly models.~~

A close reading of the Vita Basilii composed under Constantine VII’s name if not actually by his pen, reveals a strong connection between that work and De Cerimoniis, explains the emperor’s deep concern for proper ceremony, and connects both works to his ultimate project of restoring cosmic order his empire, which he regarded as a reflection of the heavenly basileia. Building on the notion of “recovery,” I show how Constantine understood his dynasty’s predecessors to have corrupted the imperial office and to have plunged the empire, and by extension the world and cosmos, into disorder. Through a variety of rhetorical strategies and allusions, the Vita Basilii transcends mere narrative and becomes truly mythological, a story that explains both why things are the way they are and how they ought to be.

The existence of political mythology in antiquity, the middle ages, and modernity shows the necessity of constructing a narrative to make sense of the present and serve as a foundation upon which to build up political philosophy and political theology.

298 Comparing Vita Basilii to several of these historical analogues shows a cultural typology, where a foundational story serves to inspire concrete developments in law, economics, and the military as well as in philosophy, theology, literature, and art. Whether or not the ninth-century narrative of Iconoclasm represents the events of those times accurately, I emphasize that Constantine VII believed it did, and that this belief inspired his cultural projects and imperial policy. Building on the concept of Iconoclasm, Constantine VII developed a narrative of decline and recovery, if not of “dark age” and “rebirth.”

~~Understanding how this story came together and what Constantine VII’s role in the process was allows a better appreciation for the scope of the Macedonian “recovery” and~~

~~Constantine VII’s vision for the place of De Cerimoniis within it.~~

~~6.6 Building on the Foundation~~

~~In each of the chapters of this study, I have worked to move the discussion of De~~

~~Cerimoniis in new directions. The language of De Cerminoiis presents numerous problems that have been previously noted but not deeply examined. By looking at the~~

~~Latin influence on a document produced at the heart of the middle Byzantine imperial administration, I have opened up a perspective on a question that many regard as settled.~~

Previous generations of scholars have failed to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of situations of language contact, and my theoretical and philological study of the language of De Cerimoniis points towards new methods of collecting and evaluating evidence as scholars work out a typology of the “middle register” of literary Greek and compile wordlists of Latin loanwords in every period of the history of the Greek language. I hope that my study will inspire deeper and broader work on the question of Latin influence on

~~299 Greek, and that the insights of historical, socio-, and contact linguistics can be combined in refining accounts of the history of Greek.~~

Building on this work, I have placed De Cerimoniis in wider theoretical frameworks to explore its literary, philosophical, and cultural aspects. As a unique witness to Byzantine ceremony and one of the very few works produced by an emperor,

~~De Cerimoniis deserves a more prominent place in contemporary discussions of~~

Byzantine political culture. At the popular, scholarly, and geopolitical levels, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in “Byzantinism” in both its positive and negative aspects, as well as an emerging research focus on illiberal and non-democratic forms of political philosophy. That scholars have seen Byzantium as the archetype both of theocratic autarky and as a medieval survival of ancient, secular republicanism is surely a sign of the richness and ambiguity of Byzantine political thought. This ambiguity should inspire deeper questioning of received truths, the reimagining of past mentalities, and a renewed attention to the sources of Byzantine political thought, of which De Cerimoniis must be considered an oblique but central example. If my study has not banished the darkness from the obscure problems of source criticism, historical development, the logistics of an imperial procession, and the topography of Constantinople, I hope that is has illuminated the varied contexts from which the text of De Cerimoniis arose and demonstrated how to make sense of this large book that has perplexed many modern scholars but that its author considered “a truly worthy product of the imperial zeal.

~~300 APPENDIX A:~~

~~THEMATIC LISTS OF “LATIN” WORDS IN DE CERIMONIIS~~

~~The following tables present a selection of the Latin loanwords found in Book I of~~

~~De Cerimoniis arranged according to part of speech. They demonstrate the relatively high concentration of Latin in titles and in the names of objects related to imperial ceremonial.~~

The existence of verbs and at least one adverb shows, according to accepted models of linguistic contact, a deeper level of Latin influence on Greek than has hitherto been appreciated. While it has not been possible in this study to present a comprehensive wordlist or to examine more closely the peculiarities of the Latin texts preserved in De

~~Cerimoniis, it is hoped that these tables will inspire more work in this direction.~~

The independent existence of many of the Latin forms below is, to say the least, highly doubtful. For instance, the first entry in the table, “Titles, Roles, Offices,” below, is admissionalius. The only attestation I have so far discovered for this form is in Jean

Paul Richter’s Quellen der byzantinischen Kunstgeschichte, which is a translation of an extract from DC I.89. 1 As with the doubtful existence of numera, Richter has taken a form only attested in Greek in oblique cases and derived a Latin nominative. These forms

~~1 Jean Paul Richter, Quellen der byzantinischen Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: C. Graeser, 1897), no. 735. 301~~

are always marked below with an asterisk, and the reader should be aware that they may never have existed in Latin, being rather, as I suggest, Greek coinages using Latin roots and sometimes even Latin suffixes. Phrasal nouns are written in italics.

~~302 TABLE A. 1~~

~~TITLES, ROLES, OFFICES~~

“Greek” word in DC Latin form Notes ἀδμηνσουναλίου *admissionalius ἀκουβίτων a(c)cubitus ἀσηκρήτων a secretis + -ης αὐγοῦστα augusta βενέτων venetus βεστιοπράται vestis + πράτης βαρβάτοι barbatus βεστήτορες vestitor βεστιτωρίσας Vestitor + -ισα βίγλης vigilia δεκανοί Decanus δομεστικίσας demesticus + -ισα δομἐστικος domesticus δρακοναρίων *draconarius δρουγγάριος *drungarius ἐγγιστιάριοι *engistiarius ἐκσκουβίτων ex cubito + -ης καβαλλάριον caballarius καγκελλάριοι cancellarius καμπηδηκτόρια *campi ductores κανδιδατίσας candidatus + -ισα κανδιδάτων candidatus κοιαίστωρος quaestor See § κόμης τοῦ στάβλου *comes stab(u)li κόμητι comes κομητίσας comes + -ισα κουαιστωρίσας quaestor + -ισα κουβικουλάριος cubicularius κουράτορα curator κούρσορες cursor λιβελλάριος *libellarius μάγιστροι magister μαγιστρίσας magister + -ισα μαγίστρους TABLE A. 1 (CONTINUED)

μαγλαβίται *manus + clava + This etymology is -ιτης uncertain. μαίστωρ *maister μανδάτορες mandator νοταρίων notarius νουμέρων *numera/munera νωβελησίμου Nobilissimus ὀργανάριοι *organarius ὀστιάριοι ostiarius ὀστιαροπριμικήριοι *ostiarioprimicerius ὀφφικιάλιοι *officialius πατρικίους patricius πραιπόσιτος praepositus πριμικήροι primicerius προσμονιάριοι r68 προς + *moniarius προτικτόρων protector πρωτοασηκρήτης πρωτο + a secretis + -ης πρωτονοταρίου πρωτο + notarius πρωτοστράτωρ πρωτο + strator ῥαικτωρ rector ῥεφερενδαρίου *referendarius σακελλάριος sacellarius σιλεντιάριος silentiarius σιλεντιαρίσας silentiarius + -ισα σινατόρων senator σκρίβονες σπαθάριοι *spatharius σπαθαρο- spathar(i)us + κουβικουλάριοι cubicularius στράτορες strator τριβοῦνοι tribunus χαρτουλαρίων chartularius

~~304 TABLE A. 2~~

~~PLACES~~

“Greek” word in DC Latin form Notes ἀραίας area ἀσηκρητειῶν *asecretium αὐγουστέωνα *augusteum The third-declension paradigm in Greek probably arises from a confusion of -ον and -ων αὐγουστέως N/A A bronze column in the Forum of Augustus αὐγουστίωνος N/A The Forum of Augustus δανουβίωι Danubius The Latin name replaces the ancient Greek Ἴστρος. διβηστίσιον *devestisium καβαλλαρικοῦ *caballaricus κάγχελλον cancellum καμάραν camera κανικλείου canna/caliculus This etymology is uncertain. κεντινάριον centenarium κλητωρίωι *cletorium κόγχη concha κόρτη cohors This has the modern meaning “court.” κονσιστώριον consistorium κουβουκλειου cubic(u)lum μαναύρας *magna aula μαρμαρωτοῦ marmarotus παλάτιον palatium παλαίστρα palaestra πραιτωρίου praetorium σακελλίου sacell(i)um σέκρετον secretum TABLE A. 2 (CONTINUED)

~~σικλότρουλλα situla + trulla σιλέντιον silentium σινάτον senatus This denotes the senate house rather than the body of senators. σωλαίας/σωλέας solea~~

ταῦρον taurus τριβουνάλιον *tibunalium This is nom./acc. sg. rather than gen. pl. It is impossible to determine if the -ιον suffix derives from Latin -ium or is purely Greek. φῖναν finem φορνικοῦ fornix φόρου forum

~~306 TABLE A. 3~~

~~OTHER NOUNS~~

“Greek” word in DC Latin form Notes ἅρμα arma βαλαντίδια bilanx βάνδων bandum Βέργαν/βεργίον virga βῆλα velum γραδήλια gradus βότου voto διπανῖται > πανίον pannus διστράλια dextralis δούλκιον dulce + -ιον δουμνικάλιον dominicalis ἐνδυτῆς *induta? “altarcloth” ἰνδικτιῶνι indictio καμησίων/ καμινσίων camisium καμπάγια campagus καμπότουβα campus + tuba κηρίον/κηρούς cera κιβώριον ciborium κορνίκλια corniculum κορτίνα cortina λάβουρα labarum λιβελλάρια libellarius μίνσαι missa μοδίου modius μονήτας moneta μουλτουσανοι *multus anni? A The unaccented form corruption of multos shows that the scribes annos? of DC recognized the word as being foreign. παστόν pastum πόρτηκι/πόρτικα *portex This is a third- declension form of porticus. πόρτης poera TABLE A. 3 (CONTINUED)

πορτικοῦ porticus πούλπιτον pulpitum πρεπενδουλίων *prependulia This term for the ornaments hanging from the Byzantine imperial crown has an obviously Latin origin but is unattested outside of Greek. προκένσος processus ῥόδα rota σελλίοις sella + -ιον σεπτοῖς septa (Saepta Iulia) σκάλας scalae σκάμνον scamnum σκηπίονας scipio σκουτάρια scutum + -αριον -αριον is here dim. σπέκια species? The etymology is uncertain. ταβλίον tabula + -ιον τόγα toga In DC, the word is indecl. φιβλίων/φιβλῶν fibula χρυσόκλαβα χρυσο- + clavus χρυσόταβλια/ χρυσο- + tabula χρυσοτάβλων ὠρατίωνα oratio In DC, this term means “certificate.”

~~308 TABLE A. 4~~

~~VERBS AND ADJECTIVES~~

“Greek” word in DC Latin form Notes ἀκουμβίσωσιν accumbo ἄσπρον asper “white” δίασπρον δι + ἄσπρος “very white” ἐπακουμβίζων ἐπι- + accumbo καβαλικεύοντες caballico = equito καισαρίκια Caesar + -ικια ῥούσια russeus “red”

~~TABLE A. 5~~

~~PHRASES~~

“Greek” word in DC Latin form Notes ἄνω φιλλικήσιμε anno felicissime There is evident confusion concerning Latin inflectional endings. βαῖνε, βαῖνε, ἡ Veni, Veni, o Augusta αὐγούστα βίτ dic/dicite ηλθεο η μούλτος N/A The scribe seems to ἄννος φιλικήσιμε/ have wanted to write ἦλθες followed by ἠλθεση μούλτους multos annos, ἄννους φιλληκήσιμε felicissime! καμπτάτε δόμηνι/ The variety of forms καπλάτε δόμηνε/ shows the scribes καπλάτε δόμηνι/ uncertainty. “Captate, καπλάτε δόμηνι/ domini!” seems καπλάτε δόμηνι/ likely. φιλλικήσιμε, felicissime, φιλλικήσιμε, felicissime, φιλλικήσιμε felicissime!

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