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Penelope Buckley Alexios Komnenos As the Last Constantine

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Penelope Buckley Alexios Komnenos As the Last Constantine Penelope Buckley Alexios Komnenos as the Last Constantine The art of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad is many-sided. This paper will consider only one: the art with which a pattern that has been partly subterranean comes into view. Once the Treaty of Devol is signed in Book Thirteen, Komnene ends a long struggle, symbolically containing the Normans, and reveals the long-projected discovery that Alexios is a second Constantine. The discovery is controlled in such a way as to reveal that indeed he is also the Last. Paul Magdalino places the revival of Constantine the Great’s name and reputation between the seventh and tenth centuries. “It was in the middle of this period that Constantine fully came into his own as a figure of hagiography.”1 By the tenth century, when sons were being named, “[t]he tension between reference to imperial tradition and reference to ancestral tradition was finally resolved in favour of the latter”.2 But Constantine had by no means lost éclat: in the same era “we find Constantine Porphyrogenitus inventing pronouncements of Constantine the Great”.3 While Magdalino sees the fever as having passed by the eleventh century, he notes signs that Constantine VIII, the last emperor buried in the first Constantine’s mausoleum, may have been “trying to be a new Constantine”.4 Then, as Margaret Mullett says, Komnene revived the practice in a “careful presentation of Alexios as New Constantine”.5 Though she does not name him as such until Book Fourteen, she has been preparing the comparison since the opening of Book One. It is tacitly mediated by resemblances to other emperors (especially the Basils) who seem intended to be recognized though they are not named, and quietly constructed through narrative motifs that might as well have come direct from Eusebios, however they did in fact reach her and through what tributary legends. It seems fanciful to imagine that she had access to Eusebios’ Vita, despite Cameron’s and Stuart’s encouraging remarks that “Photius’ entry shows a renewed awareness of the VC in Constantinople with the revival of learning and the ending of Iconoclasm”, and that “the oldest and best” surviving manuscript is tenth-century and the next two best are from the twelfth.6 In any case, she did not need it. The Constantinian legend had many forms of transmission: the exemplar had itself become a palimpsest. It is beyond my scope to try to trace Komnene’s particular means of access to cultural memories of Constantine but the legend as told by Eusebios is so durable within it that a range of similarities appears in a direct comparison between the Alexiad and the Vita. I shall use the Vita, and Skylitzes following Theophanes Continuatus,7 as representative versions of Komnene’s cultural capital, without implying that she had read either – although it appears more likely than it once did that she read Skylitzes. 1 “It was in the middle of this period that Constantine fully came into his own as a figure of hagiography”: New Constantines, ed. Paul Magdalino (Hampshire 1994), 3. 2 Magdalino, New Constantines, 6. 3 Magdalino, New Constantines, 3. 4 Magdalino, New Constantines, 6. 5 M. Mullett, “Alexios I Komnenos and Imperial Renewal”, in New Constantines, 259–267, 267. 6 Eusebios, Life of Constantine, ed. and trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford 1999), 50– 51. 7 Together with the two texts she worked directly from, the Hyle and the Chronographia. 190 Alexios Komnenos as the Last Constantine It is no surprise that Alexios is named a Constantine. It would have been surprising had he not, but the way in which it is done illuminates the trajectory of Komnene’s history and her art. Looking back, one sees how the patterned likeness becomes fully visible once she has guided the conclusion into view. And here, as elsewhere, her strategies respond to three factors she sees as critical to his reign and her account of it: the loss at Manzikert, the view of emperors expressed by her literary mentor Psellos, and the huge impression made on Byzantine thinking by the Norman wars. From the beginning, Alexios’ task was one of restoration. His historian’s parallel task is to reclaim for him the idea of empire embodied in the myth of Constantine, confound Western pretensions and give Alexios’ empire its apotheosis. Although Psellos did not discredit the Constantinian legend, he placed it firmly out of reach: “an emperor...especially if he lived longer than most, would never be able to maintain the highest standards all through his reign.”8 As Komnene constructs her father as a second Constantine, she is equally pursuing her project of contradicting this main tenet of the Chronographia. The idea of Constantine was antithetically inscribed in the city itself: a New/Old Rome of western design in the east. Constantine himself famously had strengths that counterbalanced each other: he renewed the Roman tradition through his innovations, he was warlike but merciful, pious yet rational; these antithetical virtues made him easy for imperial propagandists to evoke, in that if an emperor were not warlike he could plausibly be described as merciful, and vice versa. Psellos subverted this pattern to describe the difficulties and failings of an emperor: “If he gives rein to kindly sentiments, he is accused of ignorance, and when he rouses himself to show interest, they blame him for being meddlesome.”9 Komnene picks up the antithetical form and restores it to its traditional function, turning from one of Alexios’ virtues to its counter-virtue in the manner of a philosopher: “and if someone were to say, I should reply...”. She duplicates her father’s anxious conscientiousness by building the Psellosian pattern of emperor-critique into the pattern of her defence. Like the great exemplar’s, and her father’s, her restorations are innovations and her innovations restorations. Psellos had raised the standard of imperial history-writing. Among much else, she takes from him a strong sense of the liveliness of human personality, with its mix of motives and behaviours, and a keen feeling for the scepticism of the intelligent reader. She reasons critically through her material as she offers it. She anchors the extreme in factual contexts. In her last book, she likens Alexios to a small implement of war: “in flight he would triumph, in pursuit conquer, falling he stood and dropping down he stood upright, like a caltrop (for however you throw it, it will always point upwards).”10 The caltrop is a humble and defensive μηχανή – physics-based, with an element of trick or game. Alexios had used it against Robert Guiscard. Its innate uprightness yet ingenuity make it an ingenious emblem for her emperor, as its resilience does for her own style: her 8 Michael Psellos, Chronographia, 6.27, ed. and trans. Émile Renauld, Michel Psellos, Chronographie (Paris 1926–1928), 1.131; trans. Sewter, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers (London 1966), 169. 9 Ibid. 10 Anna Komnene, Alexiad, 15.3.3, edited by Dieter R. Reinsch and Athanasios Kambylis, Annae Comnenae Alexias (CFHB vols. XL/I, Berlin and New York 2001), 468; trans. E.R.A. Sewter, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena (London 1969), 478. .
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