An Unpublished Funeral Oration on Anna Comnena

Extract

The Byzantinist has one advantage over the student of classical antiquity—unless the latter happens to be a papyrologist. With a little diligence and a minimum of good luck he can easily unearth unpublished texts and find himself producing an editio princeps. And however often one has turned over the leaves of a manuscript and laboriously read words which have remained unread for perhaps five centuries or more, it never loses its thrill. Yet one must admit that the advantage is less than it seems. The classical scholar's texts are usually worth reading from some point of view, while what the Byzantinist finds is so often empty rhetorical verbiage. Byzantine funeral orations are notorious for their lack of information on the life of the deceased. Yet they never tell us absolutely nothing if we read them alertly, and they are sometimes remarkably informative on the ideas and values of the times. When the subject is a major figure of medieval Greek literature about the details of whose life we are very much in the dark, even the most trifling addition to our knowledge is welcome. It is this thought which encourages me to present a hitherto unknown Byzantine writer of the middle of the twelfth century—George Tornikes, Metropolitan of Ephesus—and to dwell in particular on his funeral oration on Anna Comnena.