Byzantine Poetry in Context 47dexterity, and failed to achieve rhetorical grandeur. But we do not know if good
poets, such as Christopher Mitylenaios or John Mauropous, were widely ac-
claimed in their time. Talent they certainly had; but did they have a large
audience? There are dozens of texts in which one intellectual congratulates
another for his sublime style, impeccable metrics and fine rhetoric, but these
texts, I am afraid, do not help us much to understand the modes of literary
communication in Byzantium. What these texts tell us is how the inner circle
of intellectuals judged new literary texts, not how the much larger group of
intended readers and listeners actually responded. Since Byzantine poetry was
rarely copied, the circulation of texts is unfortunately not an argument on
which a literary sociologist can build his case. Whereas the value judgments of
contemporary critics constitute a sort of Byzantine literary review magazine,
there is not a contemporary bestseller list to put things into perspective. In
short: we know more or less what the Byzantine critics liked, but we do not
know what the Byzantine public liked.
In the iambic preface to the Cycle, Agathias tells the public that if they
want to read more epigrams than his anthology provides, they should go to the
market-place and buy whatever they like (AP IV, 3. 39–41). In the sixth
century there was still a flourishing urban culture, with bookshops and culti-
vated readers buying books. After the year 600, however, manuscripts are no
longer an everyday commodity, the trade in books reaches rock-bottom, and
we lose sight of the literary market. True enough, there are some references to
prices in the manuscripts Arethas possessed and there are some inventories of
personal libraries (such as the one of Eustathios Boilas), but one can hardly
pretend that the book trade in Byzantium was a booming business. Of course,
many texts were produced for oral performance and thus were not intended for
consumption in the tangible form of a book. But what about all the other texts,
the reading materials of the Byzantines? Given the scarcity of manuscripts
containing Byzantine literary texts in prose and verse, it is highly unlikely that
these texts were much read. The reason for this is probably that there were not
that many readers interested in Byzantine literature – at least, not interested
enough to spend large sums of money on the purchase of expensive manu-
scripts. Literary texts were not a marketable commodity and the book trade,
as far as it existed, must have been bumping along the bottom of recession.
Therefore, to speak of texts as “literary products” is rather an anachronism,
because it conjures up the image of a lively industry and a large market of
consumers. There is only one poem that one may perhaps call a “product”,
inasmuch as it is a ready-made standard text that could be used by any
Byzantine who had to give a speech. This encomium can be found in two
southern-Italian manuscripts. In Vat. gr. 1257, fol. 57v (s. X), the poem
consists of 30 verses and addresses an unnamed Calabrian youth; in Vall. E 37,
fol. 91r (a. 1317), however, there are 86 verses and the poem addresses an