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‘Political’ personae: the poem from prison of Michael Glykas: Byzantine literature between fact and fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis
Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis*
Affiliation:
Harvard University and Byzantinisch-Neugriechisches Institut, Freie Universität, Berlin
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Abstract

Byzantine vernacular literature, much of it in verse, has long been seen as material for Quellenforschung into the historical or social conditions of its time. Following the precepts for literary history set down by such pioneers of Byzantine studies as Karl Krumbacher, the study of these texts has concentrated on authors rather than on the texts themselves as autonomous objects of historical study, whose form and content should guide our understanding of their original intention and reception by Byzantine audiences. The ‘Poem from Prison’ by Michael Glykas illustrates both the shortcomings of the focus on authors and the alternative potential for renewed engagement with Byzantine texts as objects of imagination and creativity.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , 2007 , pp. 53 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2007

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References

1 Krumbacher, K., ‘Michael Glykas. Eine Skizze seiner Biographie und seiner litterarischen Thätigkeit nebst einem unedierten Gedichte und Briefe Desselben’, Sitzungsberichte der philos.-philol. u.d. hist. Kl. der K. Bayer. Akademie Akad. d. Wiss., 1894, Heft III (Munich 1895) 391–460 Google Scholar. All translations into English, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

2 The classic articulation of the ideological and aesthetic underpinnings of this approach, formulated by Roland|Barthes (‘La mort de l’auteur’ Mantéia V, 1968; Engl. trans., ‘The death of the author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath, S. [New York 1977] 142-8Google Scholar) well over three decades ago, prompted a variety of discussions, some rigorous, others patently polemical. Byzantinists, whether philologists or art historians, have been slow to exploit this discussion in order to contend with large-scale artistic anonymity, in texts and art of all types, thus missing a significant opportunity to engage contemporary intellectual debate from the unique vantage point of Byzantine culture.

3 Krumbacher cited the example of Hippolyte Taine, the celebrated historian of English literature, or, more accurately, English authors (see his classic Introduction à l’histoire de la littérature anglaise, ed. Charlton, H.B. [Manchester 1936]Google Scholar; originally published in Revue germanique et française, 1 Dec. 1863 under the title: ‘L’Histoire, son présent et son avenir’). This characteristic nineteenth-century preoccupation with authors eventually gave way to New Historicism’s and especially Structuralism’s reassessment of the nature of texts after seminal developments in linguistics ushered in by F. de Saussure and what has come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in literary criticism of the twentieth century. In the study of Byzantine literature Alexander Kazhdan’s effort to reassert the importance of authors (see, for example, the socio-intellectual profiles in Kazhdan, A., in collaboration with Franklin, S., Studies on Byzantine Literature of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries [Cambridge, 1984]CrossRefGoogle Scholar) was meant to compensate for what he perceived as an increasing emphasis on genre in both the newer Handbücher of Hunger and Beck, and in the proliferating studies which sought to elucidate the ‘impersonal’ dimension of Byzantine texts, their generic qualities, rhetoric, and structure. The dichotomy is false, but the prominence given to authorial personalities in a field so overwhelmed by texts with unidentified authors or authors who are little more than ciphers is nevertheless quite striking. The study of saints’ lives, some of which were composed anonymously, has proven an exception in recent years as scholars have focused increasingly on the evolution of this literature along thematic and formal lines, looking for its ideological and aesthetic underpinnings, that is, looking at the text rather than behind it. See, for example, Boyer, Régis, ‘An attempt to define the typology of medieval hagiography’, in Bekker-Nielsen, H. et al. (ed.), Hagiography and Medieval Literature (Odense 1981)Google Scholar.

4 Indeed Krumbacher does not fail to emphasize the importance of ‘psychologische Zergliederung’ (‘psychological analysis’) among the literary historian’s paramount tasks. But Krumbacher and Freud, after all, were contemporaries, and while we tend to single out the Viennese father of psychiatry as having single-handedly invented modern psychology, we should do well to remember that psychology was ‘in the air’ at the end of the nineteenth century, not least among scholars and writers on topics of history and literature. See Gay, P., Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York 1988)Google Scholar.

5 See the introduction to Kazhdan, A., in collaboration with Sherry, L.F. and Angelidi, C., A History of Byzantine Literature (650-850) [Institute for Byzantine Research, Research Series, 2] (Athens 1999)Google Scholar. Cf.Mullett’s, M. wide-ranging discussion of the various views and implications of the competing definitions of literature and their concomitant ideal histories: ‘A new literary history of Byzantium: a worthwhile endeavour?’, in Agapitos, P. and Odorico, P. (ed.), Pour une nouvelle histoire de la littérature byzantine (Paris 2002) 37–60 Google Scholar.

6 The matter of Glykas’ imprisonment and possible blinding, along with the various potential reasons for it, all patently spurious in my view, may be found in passing in a significant number of books and articles written over the last century, with opinions varying greatly as to the cause(s) and the subesquent punishment meted out to the plaintive author. I mention here only the most thorough attempt of the last few years to connect Michael Glykas with a mysterious plot by a certain Styppeiotes to overthrow Manuel I, partially reported by Nicetas Choniates and analysed at exhaustive length by Kresten, O., ‘Zum Sturz des Theodoros Styppeiotes’, JOB 27 (1988) 49–103 Google Scholar.

7 A critical edition of the poem is appended to Krumbacher’s biographical and literary profile of Glykas. See n. 1 above.

8 In the ‘Poem from Prison’ the narrator reiterates his innocence in ll. 70-7, 439, 542-6 (with intriguing and opaque references to various offences and crimes. These have been used to infer Glykas’ crime, but their heterogeneity sounds more like a general protest of innocence than a denial of any specific charge), 578-9. In ll. 68f. the narrator-author of the prooimion to the collection of proverbs dedicated to Manuel I upon his return from his ‘bloodless victory’ in Hungary categorically admits to his crimes and misconduct.

9 Psalm 118, 71: Άγαθόν μοι δτι έταπείνωσάς με, δπως ν μάθω τα δικαιώματά σου.

10 Psalm 118, 13: έν τοΐς χείλεσί μου έξήγγειλα πάντα τα κρίματα τοϋ στόματός σου.

11 The difficulty of following the notice can be illustrated by the matter of Glykas’ blinding mentioned in the notice and then variously described by Byzantinists as ‘partial’ or ‘light’ in order to account for Glykas’ continued career as a writer.

12 ‘Warum sich Glykas in einer so wichtigen Sache des völksmässigen Idioms bediente, wissen wir nicht.’ For this and the following citations from Krumbacher, see his Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, 2nd edn (Munich 1897) III, ‘Vulgärgriechische Literatur’, 1. Poesie, 806-7. Krumbacher relied extensively on the opinions of Legrand, E., who had produced an edition of the poem in his Bibliothèque grecque vulgaire I (Paris 1880) 18–37 Google Scholar (see Tsolakis, n. 23 below, for a description of Legrand’s edition).

13 Krumbacher, ‘Michael Glykas’, 401.

14 Hunger, H., Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vols (Munich 1978) II, 422-6Google Scholar. Although Glykas’ poem is nominally outside the purview of ‘high literature’, Hunger does include the stories about Glykas’ incarceration and ‘mild’ blinding transmitted in the manuscript of his vernacular poem. He expresses no opinion on the identification of Glykas with the incarcerated Sikidites mentioned by Choniates, an old theory most recently advocated again by O. Kresten; see n. 6 above. Beck, H.G. had expressed strong doubts about the identification with Sikidites in Die Geschichte der byzantinischen Volksliteratur (Munich 1971)Google Scholar. However, neither Beck nor Hunger suggests the poem’s contents are anything less than historical.

15 See, for example, Robert Browning’s survey of linguistic registers and literary forms in ‘The language of Byzantine literature’, in Vryonis, Speros Jr. (ed.), The ‘Past’ in Medieval and Modern Greek Culture (Malibu 1978) 123 Google Scholar.

16 By ‘vernacular’ I do not mean works composed in a necessarily thoroughgoing demotic register. The oft-cited fact that no Byzantine author ever wrote entirely in the spoken language of his time (as few Greek authors appear ever to have done) should be balanced against the fact that in no period in any society is there such a thing as the spoken language, only spoken languages. Objections such as those of Hans Eideneier (see n. 19 below), about the linguistic ‘inconsistency’ of an author like Glykas assume an abstractedly ‘pure’ vernacular only partially exploited by twelfth-century writers, rather than an educated vernacular adapted from and to the needs of literature and perhaps spoken in less formal circumstances by courtiers and the upper classes. The most sensible discussion I have come across to date is Jeffreys, M., ‘The literary emergence of vernacular Greek’, Mosaic 8.4 (1975) 171-93Google Scholar; for a comprehensive discussion of recent arguments based on the linguistic evidence, see Horrocks, G., Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers (London 1997), esp. 254-65Google Scholar.

17 Such arguments are circular and are no more credible than the means by which they are arrived at. An instructive parallel may be drawn with the tradition of biographical sketches of archaic and classical Greek authors so conclusively refuted by Lefkowitz, M.R. in The Lives of the Greek Poets (London 1981)Google Scholar.

18 The most exhaustive treatment has for some time been Jeffreys, M.’ generous discussion of the origins and stages of the πολιτικος στίχος throughout Byzantine times in ‘The nature and origins of the political verse’, DOP 28 (1974) 142-95Google Scholar. Especially relevant are the tantalizing references to those verse forms in non-learned circles. These would almost certainly have entailed oral performance, broadly defined so as to include casual invocation or versified proverbial wisdom exchanged informally between people. The most complete bibliographical survey remains that of Alexiou, M. and Holton, D. in ‘The origins and development of “politikos stichos”: a select critical bibliography’, Μαντατοφόρος 9 (1976) 22–34 Google Scholar.

19 Eideneier, H., ‘Zur Sprache des Michael Glykas’, BZ 61 (1968) 5–9 Google Scholar.

20 ‘Die wörtliche Anklänge scheinen durchaus Zufälligkeiten zu sein, die inhaltliche Verwandtschaft mag auf die gemeinsame Quelle des Bin- und Bettelgedichts in der Volkssprache zurückgehen’: ibid., 8.

21 Ibid., 8.

22 Which is not to say the poems in fact shared an audience. The scholarship on Glykas’ poem thus far has had little to say about the potential audience or the significance of reception for an understanding of the poem’s potential literary status. More about this below.

23 All citations of the ‘Poem from Prison’ are from the edition by Tsolakis, E.T., Στίχοι ο’ύς εγραφε καθ’ ‘óv κατεσχίθη jca¡póv(Thessalonike 1959)Google Scholar.

24 Eideneier may be right in suggesting that much, if not all, of Glykas’ poem is cobbled, as it were, from established sources, like the Christian Fathers, the New Testament or other ‘canonical’ proverbial wisdom. (Ptochoprodromos: kritische Ausgabe der vier Gedichte [Cologne 1991] 7). But it is Glykas’ creative compilation and adaptation of the disparate elements into a more or less coherent whole, and in an exacting metre, that should guide our criticism.

25 It is worth noting what part authorial sincerity played in the debate surrounding attribution of the Ptochoprodromic corpus. Once the possibility of a narrative or poetic persona is introduced, as Kazhdan observed, many of the historically based objections to Theodore Prodromos’ authorship of the poems fall away. See ‘Theodore Pródromos: a reappraisal’, in Kazhdan, Studies on Byzantine Literature, 87-115.

26 I have reluctantly placed the word ‘literary’ in inverted commas, not because I consider the straightforward use of the word naïve, but in order to reserve judgement on the full meaning of such a word as applied to Byzantine culture of the twelfth century. The word is invested with various meanings, ranging from the rather elementary and inclusive Schrifttum to the sophisticated and exclusive littérature. The latter has always enjoyed (or suffered, depending on your view) a reputation for exaggeration, a fictionalizing tendency, one might even say ‘distortion’, which would make Cyril Mango’s characterization of Byzantine literature more interesting than he perhaps intended.

27 Theogony, ed. Bekker, I., Abh. Beri. phil. -hist. Kl. (Berlin 1840) 147-69Google Scholar, verses 721-22, 730-33.

28 M. Jeffreys, ‘The nature and origins of political verse’, 174f.

29 Partner, N.F., Serious Entertainments (Chicago 1977)Google Scholar. See especially the introduction for a discussion of the wedding by twelfth-century English historians of edification with entertainment and the pressures exerted by both on one another. On Manasses’ combination of narrative technique and historiography, see Nilsson, I., ‘Discovering literariness in the past: literature vs. history in the Synopsis Chronike of Konstantinos Manasses’, in Odorico, P. and Agapitos, P.A. (ed.), L’Écriture de la mémoire: la littérarité de l’historiographie [Dossiers byzantins] (Paris 2006)Google Scholar.

30 Macrides, R., ‘The ritual of petition’, in Roilos, P. and Yatromanolakis, D. (ed.), Greek Ritual Poetics (Cambridge, Mass. 2005)Google Scholar.

31 Magdalino, P., The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143-1180 (Cambridge 1993) 336-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Cf., for example, the introductory comments of St Basil in his ‘Προς τους Νέους’ in which he sets out guidelines according to which Christians may profit from pagan literature: ‘Tó τε γάρ ήλικίας οϋτως εχειν, καί το δώ πολλων ήδη γεγυμνασθαι πραγμάτων, καί μήν καί το της πάντα παιδευουσης έπ’ άμφω μεταβολής ίκανώς μετασχειν, εμπειρόν με εΐναι των άνθρωπίνων πεποίηκεν’ ( Basil, St, Oeuvres, ed. Boulenger, F. [Paris 1935]Google Scholar).

33 Erotici scriptores Graeci, ed. Hercher, R., II (Leipzig, 1859) 553-77Google Scholar; Der Roman des Konstantine Manasses. Überlieferung, Rekonstruktion, Textausgabe der Fragmente, ed. Mazal, O. [Wiener byz. Stud., 4] (Vienna 1967)Google Scholar.

34 Kazhdan, A. and Epstein, A.W., Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley 1985)Google Scholar. Cf.Kyriakis, M.J., ‘Poor poets and starving literati in the twelfth century’, B 44 (1974) 290–309 Google Scholar, where the tradition of historicist readings of the poems leads Kyriakis to propose a virtual sub-class of ‘ailing and starving’ poets on the periphery of leading artistic circles. But poets working in a satiric vain have been known to exaggerate their plight. I should not dismiss the possibility of sincerity out of hand, but nor would I take it as a given.

35 I say ‘appears’ because it is equally probable that it is in just such a genre that we are least able to discern those pointed references to custom and norm which animate satire and make it such an effective vehicle for subversion. Humour, in this respect, is no laughing matter. Cf.Baldwin, B., ‘A talent to abuse: some aspects of Byzantine satire’, BF 8 (1982) 19–28 Google Scholar.

36 Kazhdan, Studies on Byzantine Literature, 103; for both monasteries see Janin, R., La Gèographie ecclésiastique de l’empire byzantin, I: Le Siège de Constantinople et le patriarcat oecuménique, 3. Les églises et les monastères, 2nd edn (Paris 1969) 70-6Google Scholar.

37 The twelfth century fostered a remarkable increase in fictional scenarios, of which the novels are the best-known example. But perhaps equally significant are those works which attempt to make a point through the entertaining device of dialogue, such as Eustathios of Thessalonike’s fictional conversation between two monks discussing the relative merits of being named Φιλόθεος vs Ίεροκλής in Eustathii Opuscula, ed. Tafel, G.F. (Frankfurt am Main 1832; repr. Amsterdam 1964) 141-5Google Scholar.

38 On the rhetorical shaping of personality in literature, see the dissertation of Eustratios Papaioannou (Vienna), where he posits the concept of ‘Homorhetoric’ to account for Psellos’ self-conscious manipulation of literary style in a bid to project a particular cast of maleness in his letters.

39 Kustas, G., Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric [Άνάλεκτα Βλατάδων, 17] (Thessalonike 1973) 22 Google Scholar, n. 1.

40 Beaton, R., ‘Πτωχοπροδρομικκήήθοποιΐα τοϋ άτακτου μοναχου’, in Μνήμη Σ. Καρατζα (Thessalonike 1990) 101-8Google Scholar.

41 ‘... τά δημώδη κείμενα τής έποχής πρέπει νά διαβάζονται καί να άξιολογοδνται μέσα άπο τά πλαίσια τής βυζαντινής ρητορικης. “Εχσι δεν θά μας άπασχολήσει ... ούτε ò δήθεν ρεαλισμος της άφήγησης, ουτε ή προσωπικότητα τοϋ αύτοβιογραφουμενου συγγραφέα. Τέτοιες προυποθεσεις άνήκουν στήν κριτικη γλωσσα τοΰ 19ου καί τοϋ 20ου αΐώνα, καί άδικα τΐς έφαρμόζουμε,ώςάφετηρία ή ώς κριτικο ύπόβαθρο ... στην προσέγγιση κειμένων, πού δημιουργήθηκαν μέ έντελώς διαφορετικους όρίζοντες.’ Beaton, op. cit., 102.

42 For the paradoxically sincere conceit of this idea in Byzantine epistolography, see Littlewood, A.R., ‘The Byzantine letter as an ‘Icon of the Soul’, Visible Language 10.3 (1976) 197–226 Google Scholar.

43 Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 336, stresses the former aspect, but a study of dramatic effects in the literature of the twelfth century might have more to say about the latter.

44 Beaton, like many others, includes Glykas’ poem in his discussion of the Ptochoprodromic texts and the ‘rhetoric of poverty’, acknowledging in passing that Glykas has turned folk wisdom to a subtle purpose which extends beyond direct appeal; ‘The Rhetoric of Poverty’, BMGS 11 (1987) 3 Google Scholar.

45 See, for example, Hunger’s superficial and terse description of Glykas’ poem in Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner II, 422-6.

46 ‘μας δίνουν το δικούωμα νά μήν άρνηθοδμε στο ποίημα μώ κάποια λογοτεχνική άξία.’ Tsolakis, Στίχοι οϋς εγραφε, 13.

47 The predilection was thus transferred from Manuel I, whose own fondness for such language had been invoked by Krumbacher as the impetus for such poetry, to Glykas himself. See Eideneier, ‘Zur Sprache des Michael Glykas’, 6ff.

48 ‘Hätte Glykas, wenn er sich für eine Gedicht bewußt der Volkssprache hätte bedienen wollen, nicht das ganze Gedicht in der Volkssprache geschrieben?’ Ibid., 8.

49 Cf. Eideneier, Ptochoprodromos, poem III.

50 Sophocles, fr. 312 contains the phrase φλέγει δέ μυκτήρ to describe the fire-breathing bulls, automata forged of bronze by Hephaistos for the Cretan king Aeetes of Kolchis ( Radt, S., Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, IV [Göttingen 1977]Google Scholar). Parallels such as these, whether they issue from knowledge of the Sophoclean text, or the myth, demonstrate that Glykas’ manner of composition cannot be reduced to mere pastiche of familiar proverbs and biblical allusion.

51 The multiple voices remind one of Hysminias’ numerous personae in his inner discussions with himself as he falls in love with Hysmine. I am grateful to Ingela Nilsson for pointing out this and many other elements shared between Glykas and the twelfth-century novels and chronicles.

52 Είςάστρικον καταπλοκης, είςδ>ρανάδικίας,ή μάννα μου μ’ έγέννησε,... (Glykas, 11. 295-6).

53 See the interesting article by Macrides, R., ‘The historian in the history’, in Constantinides, C.N. et al. (ed.), Φιλελλην: Studies in Honour of Robert Browning (Venice 1996) 205-24Google Scholar.

54 Mullett, ‘A new literary history of Byzantium: a worthwhile endeavour?’, 41.

55 Ibid., 39.