Chapter Two2. COLLECTIONS OF POEMS
One late summer afternoon, at the turn of the millennium, a group of
friends was making a pleasant boat trip on the Bosporos. While the sun was
setting, they sailed along the coast admiring from a distance the prosperous
olive-yards and orchards. The water was purplish, soft breezes bellied out the
sails and as the boat headed towards the Propontis, the sailors were singing
shanties in time to their work. The waves were murmuring gently, the birds
were warbling and nature as a whole was one sweet harmony. The passengers
aboard were absolutely thrilled! Halfway on their voyage they even spotted
some dolphins turning somersaults in the waves. It was almost as if these
dolphins, the joyous “friends of the Muses”, were there to welcome them and
encourage them to take part in the universal merriment. It was clearly the
right moment for poetry, they thought, and since they had been imbibing
substantial amounts of wine during the trip, they were also in the right mood
for some literary entertainment. So the whole company started to recite by
turns. They declaimed with great enthusiasm and all sorts of texts could be
heard: “the sweet flowers of words”, ranging from the melodious rhythms of
iambic poetry and the smooth harmonies of ancient epics to the well-balanced
periods of rhetorical prose. They had a wonderful time and when they finally
returned to Constantinople, after hours of declamation (the sun had already
gone down), they felt they had enjoyed all that is good in life^1.
One might wonder what these literati, had they been able to read the
magnificent book on their own species, the “homo byzantinus”, would have
thought of the following verdict by the late Kazhdan: “(...) literature (...) was
addressed primarily to the solitary reader”^2. There can be little doubt, though,
that if they had been able to read this sentence, they would have read it aloud,
alone or in the presence of friends. They would perhaps have memorized it and
repeated it afterwards to others who did not know the text, and they might
even have paraphrased it in the form of parody or learned allusion in one of
their own declamations. Contrary to what Kazhdan maintained in various
(^1) For the text of the poem, see SOLA 1916: 20–21.
(^2) A. KAZHDAN & G. CONSTABLE, People and Power in Byzantium. An Introduction to
Modern Byzantine Studies. Dumbarton Oaks 1982, 104.