Constantine of Rhodes, On Constantinople and the Church of the Holy Apostles

With a new edition of the Greek text by Ioannis Vassis

Liz James, Liz James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317161769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Constantine of Rhodes's tenth-century poem is an account of public monuments in Constantinople and of the Church of the Holy Apostles. In the opening section of the work, Constantine describes columns and sculptures within the city, seven of which he calls 'wonders'. In the second part of the poem, he portrays the Church of the Holy Apostles, offering an account of its architecture and internal decoration, notably the mosaics, seven of which are also depicted as 'wonders'. On one level, the poem offers an account of what was visible, a sense of city topography and, in the case of the Apostoleion, a vital description of a now-lost building. But it cannot be read as a straightforward description. Rather, Constantine's work offers insights into Byzantine perceptions of works of art. The monuments Constantine decided to portray and the ways in which he chose to describe them say as much, if not more, about the social and cultural milieu in which he operated as about the actual physical appearance of the monuments themselves. Further, the poem itself, as it survives in one fifteenth-century manuscript, raises questions: is it, in its current form, a single poem or is it made up of a compilation of Constantine's writings? This book supersedes the two previous editions of the poem, both dating to 1896, and provides the first full translation of the text. It consists of a new Greek edition of Constantine's poem, with an introductory essay, prepared by Ioannis Vassis, and a translation and commentary by a group of scholars headed by Liz James. Liz James also contributes an extensive discussion of the two distinct parts of the poem, the city monuments and the Church of the Holy Apostles.

SECTION I
The Poem

Chapter 1
Introduction to the Greek Edition

Ioannis Vassis

1 Manuscript Tradition and Editions of the Text

The verse ekphrasis, written by Constantine of Rhodes, describing the church of the Holy Apostles is preserved in a single manuscript of the fifteenth century, Athos Lavra 1161 (Λ 170), on fols. 139r–147v. The manuscript, measuring 26 × 20 cm, is composed of 171 paper folios. The first folio of the text, fol. 139r., which contained lines 1–24 on its verso, became detached from the manuscript and was replaced by the present fol. 139r. on which were copied the same verses (on the basis of Begleri’s edition) at some stage after 1896. The manuscript contains a number of other interesting texts, including orations by Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzos, John Chrysostom and Maximos the Confessor, together with commentaries by Niketas the Paphlagonian and some verse compositions (iambic canons and verse vitae).¹

The ekphrasis of Constantine of Rhodes was first brought to scholars’ attention by K. Sathas in 1872 when he published a catalogue of the most important manuscripts held in the monasteries of Mount Athos.² The text, however, was only published nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1896, in two editions that came out almost simultaneously: one by É. Legrand; and the other by G. Begleri.³ The main reason for this double edition was the interest shown in the text by a learned monk of the monastery of Great Lavra, Alexandros Evmorfopoulos, who had sent both editors copies of the text made by himself. Only Legrand, however, managed to get his hands on photographs of the manuscript, on the basis of which he made his somewhat hastily prepared edition.⁴ Nevertheless, besides a number of oversights in transcribing the text and a few typographical errors, both editors made valuable suggestions in the process of restoring various passages, as can be seen from a glance at the apparatus criticus that accompanies the present edition.⁵ Later corrections to Legrand’s edition were proposed by Maas, Heisenberg, Bartelink, Criscuolo and Speck.⁶

2 Form and Structure of the Text

The verses of Constantine of Rhodes are generally held to be of only mediocre poetic worth,⁷ while his style has, with some justification, been described as artificial and over-elaborate.⁸ His text has more than its fair share of rambling digressions and parenthetical phrases, accumulation of parallel figures, repetition, pleonasm, excessive use of interdependent genitives, frequent use of enjambment and various syntactical irregularities that obscure the meaning or interfere with grammatical coherence. However, the reasons for some of these phenomena need to be sought, in part, in the form in which the poem has been handed down to us.

The work preserved under the general title Στίχοι Κωνσταντίνου ἀσηκρίτη τοῦ Ῥοδίου can be divided into the following five parts:

A. Lines 1–18: an epigram (with an acrostic constructed on the genitive form of the author’s name, Κωνσταντίνου Ῥοδίου), in which the ekphrasis of the church of the Holy Apostles is dedicated to the emperor, Constantine Porphyrogennetos, who had commissioned the work.

B. Lines 19–254: detailed description of the seven wonders of Constantinople.

C. Lines 255–422: transitional section, a kind of preface with general references to important monuments of the capital, in which the forthcoming description of the churches of the Holy Apostles and of Hagia Sophia is announced.

D. Lines 423–436: verse title and second epigram, in which the ekphrasis of the church of the Holy Apostles is dedicated to Constantine Porphyrogennetos.

E. Lines 437–981: ekphrasis of the church of the Holy Apostles: history (437–532), architecture and marble decoration (533–750), mosaic decorations (751–981).

Although the work is prefaced by an epigram in which Rhodios dedicates the ekphrasis of the church of the Holy Apostles to Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, the text that follows does not appear to have reached the final form that would have been presented to the emperor. The various opinions that have been expressed on this text tend to concur on the observation that what we have before us is an unfinished work, or a series of sketches and poetical drafts.

Whatever the case, the last section of the work – the description of the church of the Holy Apostles (lines 437–981) – does possess internal coherence. That Constantine of Rhodes was working on the basis of a specific design is evidenced by lines 536–537, in which he states that he will return to his account of the mosaics in the church; in lines 751–981 he fulfils his promise. A similar phenomenon can be seen in section C: in lines 317–320 he returns to his theme following a digression that begins in line 284. The poem appears to have reached a final form,⁹ although, as scholars have already noted, it ends abruptly: after the description of the seventh mosaic, in which the Crucifixion is depicted, and following the lament of the Virgin, one might have expected some kind of epilogue that would round off the work in a balanced way.¹⁰ The other sections of the work present yet more problems.

Theodore Preger was the first to suggest that the surviving text is not the final version, basing his hypothesis on a comparison of section B of the ekphrasis with the more detailed account of miracles 2–7 contained in the Chronicle of Kedrenos, which apparently contains fragments of trimeters from Rhodios’s account.¹¹ Preger observed that some of the fragmentary verses in Kedrenos cannot be traced to the ekphrasis and must surely have derived from a later version (of, at least, section B of the poem) by Constantine that has not survived elsewhere. It would have been a copy of this later version that provided the source for Kedrenos’s Chronicle.¹²

Glanville Downey came to the conclusion that the poem as ...