10 - A Learned Dialogue across the Ages: Pachymeres Confronts Prokopios

Summary

For intellectuals of the re-conquest generation, Prokopios became a helpful guide to the city they had lost and regained. George Pachymeres (1242–ca. 1308), a highly placed court historian, engaged in an intertextual dialogue with the lengthy account of the horseman written by Prokopios. Pachymeres set out to write an exemplary ekphrasis that would outperform Prokopios in vivid explication of Justinian’s monument. The narrative structure follows Prokopios, but emphasizes different points. Pachymeres created a narrative contrast between the Constantinople of his own days and the glorious Constantinople of earlier times by focusing on the horseman – the tangible imperial link that threaded together two eras. The narrative offered by Pachymeres provides a lens through which we can behold the experience of an intellectual returning from exile and a learned observer examining a monument of a glorious past. His extended description of the monument sought to reconstruct its creator’s reasoning by using his own powers of observation, thus addressing a failure of Prokopios. Pachymeres can therefore be considered an eager, early pioneer of the fertile terrain that is now known as "late antique studies."