358 Appendix X
miniatures portraying the evangelists in Par. Coisl. gr. 195 (s. X) and Laura A
12 (s. XI)^2. Since epigrams on the evangelists do not appear in illuminated
Gospel Books before the year 800, nos. 80 and 83–85 will have been written in
the ninth century^3. Nos. 81–82 are literary imitations of no. 80. These two
epigrams also date from the ninth century, because they must have been
composed after no. 80 had been written (c. 800 at the earliest) and before they
entered the anthology of Cephalas (c. 890–900).
Nos. 78–79 (on St. Peter and St. Paul) and 86 (on St. Basil) are book
epigrams. Since they do not describe images, they clearly do not belong to the
original epigram cycle. These three epigrams cannot be dated.
Seeing that nos. 78–79 and 86 (book epigrams), nos. 80 and 83–85 (ninth-
century epigrams on miniatures), nos. 81–82 (literary imitations of no. 80) and
no. 88 (a three-line book epigram on St. Dionysios) are later additions to the
corpus, it is reasonable to assume that the corpus ended where most of the
additions start, namely at no. 77. If this is the case, nos. 87 and 89 are Cephalan
additions as well. The former deals with St. Polycarp (no. 87), the latter with
St. Polycarp and St. Nicholas (no. 89). The text of the second epigram reads:
“Polycarp has Nicholas near him because the hands of both were ever most
prompt to deeds of mercy”. Here the famous St. Nicholas plays second fiddle
to St. Polycarp. The cult of St. Nicholas is relatively young. It manifested itself
outside Lycia in the sixth century when Justinian built the church of St.
Priscus and St. Nicholas in Constantinople. In this church, as in the two
epigrams on St. Polycarp, the devotional status of St. Nicholas was secondary
to that of St. Priscus. The cult of St. Nicholas gradually spread between c. 500
and 800. It was not until the ninth century that the local saint of Myra
achieved great prominence. St. Nicholas suddenly ranked among the major
Byzantine saints, was venerated throughout the empire and became a popular
subject in Byzantine art^4. It is reasonable to conjecture that the two epigrams
dedicated to Polycarp and Nicholas date from before the year 800, when the
cult of St. Nicholas had not yet reached its peak.
According to Salac^5 , the epigram cycle originates from two different sourc-
es: a collection of hexametric couplets and a collection of elegiac distichs. The
(^2) See Appendix VIII, no. 76.
(^3) The epigrams on the evangelists obtain their information from the prefaces to the
Byzantine Gospel Book. As these prefaces “are not a feature of the earliest manuscripts,
but appear only in the early ninth century”, the epigrams found in Byzantine Gospels
cannot have been composed before the year 800: see NELSON 1980: 97.
(^4) See G. ANRICH, Hagios Nikolaos. Leipzig 1913–17, II, 441–466 and N. PATTERSON
ŠEVCENKO, The Life of Saint Nicholas in Byzantine Art. Turin 1983, 18–22.
(^5) SALAC 1951: 1–9. So also A. ARNULF, Versus ad picturas. Studien zur Titulusdichtung als
Quellengattung der Kunstgeschichte von der Antike bis zum Hochmittelalter. Berlin
1997, 141–145.