240 Part Two: Epigrams in Context
obvious pride, what he has done for the empire. “During the six years that I
held the reins of God’s people, this is what I did. I engaged the Scyths in fierce
battle. I wholly devastated the cities of the Assyrians and the Phoenicians, and
even subjugated unassailable Tarsos. I cleansed the islands and drove off the
barbarian host from vast Crete and vaunted Cyprus. East and West shrunk
back, bliss-giving Nile and rugged Libya fled before my threats” (Cr. 290, 2–9).
In this fictitious epitaph, just as in the two verse inscriptions on the tombs
of Basil II and John Tzimiskes, we see that emperors are allowed to boast of
their military prowess propria voce, speaking to us from beyond the grave. It is
highly likely that the fictitious epitaph by Geometres and the two genuine
verse inscriptions, all three of which present dead emperors bragging about
their heroic feats, ultimately go back to a common source. In order to deter-
mine what this common source may have been, there are two important clues.
Firstly, bragging emperors are not laid to rest in the mausoleums of the Holy
Apostles, but in private burial sites. And secondly, the emphasis on military
prowess presupposes not only that there are heroic feats to brag about, but also
that there is an ideological climate in which such boasts receive a warm
welcome: that is, the warrior culture of tenth-century Byzantium. Taken in
conjunction, these two clues strongly suggest that we are dealing with the
tomb of Emperor Romanos I, who was buried in 948 in the Myrelaion, a
monastery he had rebuilt and designated as the final resting place for himself
and his next-of-kin. It is reasonable to assume that there was an epitaph
inscribed on the tomb of Romanos Lekapenos in the Myrelaion. And since no
other tenth-century emperor, except for Lekapenos, Tzimiskes and Basil II,
was buried in a private burial site instead of the church of the Holy Apostles,
it is very likely that this epitaph was the hypothetical common source that
Geometres and the two anonymous poets imitated.