Byzantine Poetry in Context 53mother. He is told to interpret this image as a symbol of God the Saviour, who
became man on earth, put Death on trial and died in the flesh in order to save
fallen mankind. Then he reads that the motive for donating the altar cloth had
been this very aspect of salvation: the donor presented her immaculate gift to
the immaculate one, so that she and her husband might be redeemed at the last
judgment. In fact, the viewer is urged to follow the example of the female
donor and to read the visual message of the image in the same symbolic manner
as she did.
But who is this viewer? Who sees the altar cloth and reads its epigram? In
this particular case, the answer is actually quite simple: the epigram was to be
read only by the few monks and priests who had access to the sacrosanct space
of the bema, where the altar cloth was on display. In order to understand who
the readers of a given epigram might have been, the question of context is
crucial. Where was the epigram to be found? Epigrams written next to splen-
did miniatures in luxuriously illustrated manuscripts can have been read only
by the happy few; but verse inscriptions on the city walls of Constantinople
address all those who can read and are willing to try to decipher the text.
Between these two extremes, however, there is a whole range of epigrams and
a whole range of intended readers, varying from a mere handful to dozens of
people.