146 Part Two: Epigrams in Context
they no longer see Leo alive. Oh, what a great loss!”^31. Although one would
expect that an epitaph to Leo the Philosopher, the leading figure of the
classicizing movement in ninth-century Byzantium, should be as classicistic as
Leo the Philosopher’s own poetry, this is not the case. The epitaph is certainly
not the run-of-the-mill kind of thing one normally finds in Byzantine poetry,
but it does not look particularly classicistic either. It makes abundant use of
the metonymic figure of speech called personification: all the excellent qualities
for which Leo the Philosopher was celebrated, lament because he is gone. This
figure of speech is very common in Byzantine epitaphs: see, for instance, John
Geometres’ epitaph to Theodore Dekapolites (Cr. 297, 29), where it is said that
Lady Justice (D5kh) wishes to be buried in the same grave as Dekapolites, who
was noted for his expertise in legal matters. To express his sense of bereave-
ment, Choirosphaktes adroitly uses harsh asyndeta, which sever the syntactical
period into short, rapid clauses: it is almost as if he gasps for air and searches
for the right words because he is overcome by grief. This is a stylistic device
(called gorgotes by the rhetoricians^32 ) which Byzantine poets often employ in
moments of eloquent passion. Though grief-stricken, Choirosphaktes tries to
assuage the emotional tension he has built up with all these asyndeta by making
his verses as smooth and rhythmical as possible. The rhythm is invariably
heptasyllabic and proparoxytone in the first, pentasyllabic and paroxytone in
the second hemistichs. The two last verses of the quatrain have rhyme before
the caesura: oœmwfoysin – bl6poysin. Rhyme is not a feature of ancient poetry,
but is very common in Byzantine rhetorical prose. The epitaph is in fact a
splendid piece of Byzantine rhetoric, carefully constructed so as to convey to
the readers the idea of deeply felt grief.
The first line of the epitaph is vaguely reminiscent of a late ninth-century
book epigram celebrating an anonymous scholar who produced an edition of
Plato or a commentary to the Platonic corpus (AP XV, 39b): t2 to ̄ Pl1tznoß
™xereyn8saß b1qh, t2 t0n logism0n ™xer5fzsaß p1qh [note the rhyme], “by
exploring the depths of Plato, you have uprooted the passions that disturb
reasoning”. But the most interesting parallel is undoubtedly a Byzantine
epigram dedicated to the Holy Virgin, which begins with almost the same
incipit as the epitaph to Leo the Philosopher: qezri0n Œvzma, dogm1tzn b1qoß,
“height of contemplations and depth of dogmatic truths”^33. As the epitaph
reveals close parallels with other Byzantine poems and is constructed accord-
ing to the rules of Byzantine rhetoric, we can draw but one conclusion: it is not
particularly classicizing. It has little in common with the ancient epigram nor
(^31) Ed. KOLIAS 1939: 132.
(^32) See LAUXTERMANN 1998b: 25–28.
(^33) The epigram is still unpublished. It can be found in Athous 4418 (Ib. 288) [s. XVI],
fol. 1r.