Copyright by Vessela Venelinova Valiavitcharska 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Vessela Venelinova Valiavitcharska Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantine Homilies Committee: Jeffrey Walker, Supervisor Marjorie Curry Woods, Supervisor Linda Ferreira-Buckley Michael Gagarin John Kolsti Glenn Peers Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantine Homilies by Vessela Venelinova Valiavitcharska, B.A.; M. A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2007 Acknowledgements To say that I am deeply indebted to my supervisors, Professors Jeffrey Walker and Marjorie Woods, who generously shared with me their tremendous knowledge, intellectual brilliance, and academic experience would be an understatement. However, it is difficult to describe adequately my gratitude to the people who shaped the direction of my intellectual inquiries and who patiently and generously directed, commented, and improved draft after draft. Thank you! My profound gratitude also goes to Professors Wolfram Hörandner and Heinz Miklas from the University of Vienna, Austria, whose encouragement and comments on individual chapters has been of tremendous value. My dissertation committee members, Professors Linda Ferreira-Buckley, Michael Gagarin, John Kolsti, and Glenn Peers, helped me to improve the final version greatly with their insightful comments and questions; the approval of such distinguished scholars gave me encouragement to go on. I also owe much gratitude to Dirk Krausmüller from Queen’s University, Belfast, who has always freely and generously offered his outstanding expertise in the iv Byzantine Greek language and literature, and whose opinions on scholarly issues I trust completely. Kristin Dorsey and Donna Hobbs, the members of my small dissertation reading group, have, over time, read and commented on the entire dissertation with much acumen and willingness to go through large amounts of technical detail and poor writing. Their friendship, brilliance, and gentle critique have pushed me to persevere. My research has been sponsored in part by the generous support of an Ernst Mach Fellowship from the Austrian Academic Exchange (Österreichischer Austauschdienst), a Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies from the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Center, and a Continuing Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. To my husband David, who helped me with all software issues, and my daughter Anna Elena, love as always. v Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantine Homilies Publication No._____________ Vessela Venelinova Valiavitcharska, Ph. D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisors: Jeffrey Walker, Marjorie Curry Woods My dissertation seeks to bring more attention to speech patterns and rhythm in oratory – issues that have long been on the fringes of rhetoric scholars’ concerns – by arguing that prose rhythm in Byzantine and Old Slavic sermons was an important tool not only in creating an overall aesthetic experience but also in promoting shared meaning and individual persuasion. The first chapter offers a comparison between the clauses of early to middle Byzantine homilies and their translations into Old Church Slavonic, within a corpus of texts contained in the late tenth-century Codex Suprasliensis. The comparison shows a remarkable correspondence between the number of syllables and accents per clause in both languages. I conclude that the Slavonic translators strove not only to provide literal translations, but also to preserve the rhythmical patterns of the original homilies. The second chapter explores the classical and late antique theoretical underpinnings of rhythm in general and prose rhythm in particular and argues that in late antiquity there was a strong tradition of differentiation between rhythm and meter. Prose rhythm was considered the domain of the rhythmicians (not metricians) vi and defined by word arrangement and cadence. I argue that the word and its main accent were perceived as the basic unit of prose rhythm – in addition to clausular cadence, which so far has been considered the main carrier of rhythm. Thus homiletic prose rhythm resembles the accentual rhythms of Byzantine liturgical poetry. Chapter 3 examines Byzantine rhetorical commentaries and scholia on classical literature and concludes that the Byzantine teachers taught accentual rhythm by looking for regular accentual patterns in classical Greek texts and pointing them out to their students, who in turn internalized and reproduced them in their own compositions. My last chapter argues that the same principles were found in the first Slavonic translations of Greek homilies. I conclude that the persistent recurrence of similar rhythmical patterns, even across national and linguistic boundaries, may lead us to think of rhythm as a meaning-bearing component of oratory. vii Contents Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Byzantine Prose Rhythm and the Evidence of Old Church Slavonic Translations.......................................................................................35 Main Texts ........................................................................................39 Methodology .....................................................................................44 Syllable Counts in the Old Church Slavonic Texts...............................45 Accent and Stress in the Byzantine Greek Texts..................................53 Accent and Stress in the Old Church Slavonic Texts ...........................56 Text Comparison ...............................................................................62 Control Texts.....................................................................................64 Prose Rhythm in Old Slavic Texts ......................................................73 Chapter 2. Another Look at Byzantine Prose Rhythm.................................90 Are Meter and Rhythm the Same?......................................................91 The Rhythmical Unit of Prose ..........................................................106 Asianism and the Byzantine Homily.................................................124 Homiletic Oratory and Accentual Poetry ..........................................143 Chapter 3. Prose Rhythm in the Classroom...............................................159 Chapter 4. Rhythm in Old Slavic Texts Reconsidered ...............................203 Appendix.................................................................................................232 Bibliography ...........................................................................................258 Vita .. ......................................................................................................283 viii Introduction: Rhetorical Theory, Rhythm, and the (Awkward) Problem of Style “The speech of those who do not form their sentences with a rhythmical cadence,” says Cicero in Orator, “seems to resemble the movements of those whom the Greeks call apalaistrous, or ‘untrained in gymnastics,’ and it is far from being true that – as those are wont to say who, from lack of teachers, or slowness of wit, or shirking from hard work, have failed of success – careful arrangement of words enfeebles speech: on the contrary, without this it can possess no force or vigor.”1 Again, when analyzing a particularly well-wrought sentence in a speech by the tribune Gaius Carbo the younger, Cicero says that “it was marvelous what a shout arose from the crowd” at the sound of his closing rhythm.2 It is not difficult to perceive how much importance Cicero attributes to rhythm. He speaks of it as part of the life force of oratory and devotes about a third of his treatise Orator, where he sets out to paint a picture of the perfect speaker, to a discussion of its intricacies. “I have often seen the whole assembly burst into a cheer,” he says, “in response to a happy cadence. For the ear expects the words to 1 Cicero, Orator 229 (trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), 501): Itaque qualis eorum motus quos ἀπαλαίστρους Graeci vocant, talis horum mihi videtur oratio qui non claudunt numeris sententias, tantumque abest ut – quod ei qui hoc aut magistrorum inopia aut ingeni tarditate aut laboris fuga non sunt assecuti solent dicere – enervetur oratio compositione verborum, ut aliter in ea nec impetus ullus nec vis esse possit. 2 Orator 214 (ibid., 487): tantus clamor contionis excitatus est, ut admirabile esset. 1 bind the sentence together.”3 Rhythm, he contends, is naturally in the ear;4 but good rhythm is something that the best of orators attain with much toil, yet even the worst of audiences are able to judge accurately.5 Cicero is certainly not alone in recognizing the importance of rhythm in oratorical discourse. The first extant systematic – although rather sketchy – treatment of prose rhythm belongs to Aristotle. In Book 3 of the Rhetoric he recommends that “the form of prose composition [be] neither metrical nor destitute of rhythm,” because a highly regular, metrical rhythm – as in poetry – makes prose seem contrived and destroys the hearer’s trust, while “unrhythmical language is too unlimited, …and the effect [is] vague and unsatisfactory.”6 Aristotle explains rhythm in