178 Part Two: Epigrams in Context
themselves as new Constantines and new Justinians. Therefore, the image of
imperial victory, as reflected in the glorious feats of Porphyrius and other
charioteers of late antiquity, was much more familiar to the Byzantines than,
say, the victory of an ancient athlete at the Olympic Games. And thirdly, when
the Byzantines and their emperors were present at a spectacle in the Hippo-
drome, they could see the remnants of their glorious past on the spina: the
Theodosian obelisk, for instance, but also the statues of the famous charioteers.
Porphyrius and the other charioteers were there to remind them of the glory
that was Rome: the “new Rome”, that is, in its heyday before the Arabs and
the “barbarous” iconoclasts despoiled it of its former splendour. Again as noted
by many scholars^72 , the classicizing movement of the ninth and tenth centuries
is basically a reaction to the disasters of the dark ages. When the military,
economic and cultural crisis was over, the Byzantines tried to link up with late
antique traditions by simply pretending that the links with the past had never
really been severed, not even by the intermediary period of cultural decline, for
which they blamed the iconoclasts. The cultural revival of the ninth and tenth
centuries is a nostalgic return to the legacy of late antiquity. And the indisput-
able fact that ninth-century Byzantium was quite different from sixth-century
Byzantium did not stop the Byzantine irredentists from dreaming that the
glorious past could be recovered if people just tried hard enough.
It is against the background of these ideological preferences, literary
vogues and cultural illusions that one needs to view the early tenth-century
decoration of the imperial gallery. In sharp contrast to the sixth-century
emperors who allowed the circus factions to erect statues of contemporary
charioteers, and to Constantine V who allegedly ordered that his own favourite
charioteer Ouraniakos should be depicted on the ceiling of the Milion^73 , here we
have an early tenth-century emperor desirous of representing the charioteers of
the past rather than those of his own time. This is quite peculiar. In fact, it
rather perversely shows that the idea of imperial renovatio popular in the ninth
and tenth centuries was nothing but a hollow sham. While earlier emperors
granted their charioteers the prerogative of sharing in the glory of imperial
victory (as long as it did not diminish their own authority), the emperors of the
Macedonian dynasty apparently did not tolerate any infringements on their
sovereign power. They did not wish to look at pictures of living champions. But
pictures of charioteers long dead are another matter, of course. It is not just
that dead charioteers cannot possibly claim a share in imperial victory, but the
fame of their illustrious exploits also relates to the imperial institution itself,
(^72) Above all Paul Speck in numerous publications: see, for instance, SPECK 1998.
(^73) See: La Vie d’ Étienne le Jeune par Étienne le Diacre, ed. M.-F. AUZÉPY. Aldershot 1997,
166 and 265, n. 411–412.