254 Part Two: Epigrams in Context
impossible to retrieve the “archetype”. There are no “originals”. There are only
different “redactions” and different “versions”. In fact, each manuscript is
unique in its own way and presents readings that cannot be found anywhere
else. This phenomenon of an “open” text tradition (in contrast to the “closed”
text tradition of highbrow literature, which is slavishly copied) is, of course,
familiar to all who study Byzantine vernacular texts. However, the same
phenomenon can be observed in a few literary texts written in more learned
Greek, such as gnomic epigrams. There, too, we see that there are as many
different versions as there are manuscripts and that the “original” texts,
whatever they may have been like, are lost beyond retrieval. When we talk
about “the epigrams of Kassia”, we are, in fact, referring to various manuscript
collections containing different epigrams with different readings. The same
holds true for the various fables transmitted in Byzantine manuscripts, where
we notice that the text tradition is open to all sorts of alterations, additions
and omissions.
These two genres, namely fables and gnomic epigrams, have a lot in com-
mon. They both express forms of popular wisdom, moral admonitions and
every-day ethics. Fables are short, amusing stories that point out what is right
and wrong by sketching the characteristic behaviour of animals and human
beings; they usually end with an epimythion, the concise “moral” of the story.
When these epimythia are put into verse, they are actually quite similar to
gnomic epigrams – so similar, in fact, that the “moral” to a Babrian fable came
to be attributed to Kassia (epigram no. C 1), without anyone noticing the error
until the twentieth century. The ascription to Kassia is a mistake, of course,
but there are few mistakes as understandable as this one, because the text of
the Babrian epimythion differs little from the epigrams that go under her name.
It is worth noting that some of the epigrams attributed to Kassia are more or
less anecdotic, relating a short story about painful aspects of life: for instance,
A 120–123, “a poor devil found some gold and grabbed it, but his life was at
stake ever after; a lucky bastard, however, makes a profit and a lucrative
business of anything he finds, even if it is a live snake”^35. Though it is debat-
able whether Kassia had a specific fable in mind when she wrote these lines, it
is beyond doubt that both the pattern of thought and the narrative structure
of the epigram demonstrate Kassia’s acquaintance with the Aesopic genre.
Further proof of this is the following epigram, which marvellously illustrates
the curious peregrinations of Aesop and his fables throughout the centuries:
\Anër óalakrñß kaò kzóñß kaò monöceir,
mogg5lalöß te kaò kolobñß kaò m6laß,
loxñß to¦ß posò kaò to¦ß Ámmasin Óma(^35) For the second verse of this epigram, see MAAS 1901: 55.