The Round Table, ‘The Byzantine World Chronicle as Open Text’, offers an opportunity to discuss some of the many tantalizing issues that remain to be investigated in connection with Byzantine world chronicles. This brief con-tribution offers some general introductory thoughts as a background to the detailed discussions that follow.
First, my interpretation of the two terms in this Round Table’s title.
‘Byzantine World Chronicle’: I think we all know what this is – a Christian historical narrative of world empires, eventually narrowing down to the Roman and Byzantine; the pattern is that the texts open with Creation and end dur-ing the period of the writer’s life time, or perhaps with the imperial reign that precedes the writer’s life time. This pattern began to evolve during the third century CE, with Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 160–240) and Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 360–340) as seminal authors,1 and lingered on as a viable genre, especially in Greek-speaking areas, until the eighteenth century.
‘Open text’: this is not quite so obvious. I take this phrase to mean a text which has no closure, that exists in multiple versions and perhaps has no identifiable author. In the case of the Byzantine world chronicles a normal situation is that each manuscript of a chronicle presents a unique text, simi-lar – to a greater or lesser extent – to other forms of what purports to be the same text, but sometimes departing far from it. This state of affairs presents an editorial nightmare.
A prime example of a text of this type is, of course, provided by the ear-liest Byzantine world chronicle to survive in virtually its full extent – the Chronographia of John Malalas, or the Epitome, as a recent study would prefer to call it.2 The main witness is one twelfth-century manuscript which is mutilated
1 Still worth consulting on this is Croke, B.: ‘The Origins of the Christian World Chronicle’.
In Croke, B. – Emmett, A. (eds.): History and Historians in Late Antiquity. Sydney 1983, 116–32.
2 Burgess, R. – Kulikowski, M.: Mosaics of Time: the Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD. Turnhout 2013, 223–4.
at beginning and end, and also in the middle, but which clearly ran from Creation to far into Justinian’s reign. There are many other witnesses both in Greek and other languages which show a multitude of variants.3 The situation is much the same, for example, for the versions of George the Monk in the ninth century4 and a batch of chronicles from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that are part of the nexus around the text that is commonly known still as the Synopsis Sathas.5 Hence the title for these musings: plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
So questions. Why this phenomenon? How should modern readers and editors react?
Why this phenomenon? The answers probably lie in a combination of hu-man nature with medieval tools and technologies. Huhu-man nature provides the intellectual curiosity that wants to know where one comes from, one’s place in time and space, one’s relationship to the divine order of the cosmos. Once a satisfying, satisfactory formulation had been worked out, it became in ef-fect a ‘best-seller’, copied repeatedly in each generation. Human nature also wants to have the latest information, so the best-seller was updated. Add in the fact that medieval tools and technology (hand-writing, and pen and ink) provide a laborious way of disseminating a text (hours of labour expended on writing out thousands of words), so naturally when a new copy is required the opportunity is taken to bring it up to date: the ending is shifted later, and improvements are made en route.
There is a striking similarity of attitudes towards these texts from each end of the Byzantine chronicle tradition. The proemium to Malalas’ chronicle in the sixth century ends up with a sentence to the effect that Malalas’ succes-sors “must complete the story”.6 In the thirteenth century the Synopsis Sathas (admittedly heavily indebted to Malalas in its earlier sections) says much the
3 As is discussed in the contributions to Jeffreys, E. – Croke, B. – Scott, R. (eds.): Studies in John Malalas. Sydney 1990.
4 Some of the complexities of which are hinted at by Afinogenov, D.: Style Structure and Authorship of the Hypothetical Source of Theophanes for the Reigns of Leo III and Constantine V. In: Jankowiak, M. – Montinaro, F. (eds.): Studies in Theophanes (= Travaux et Mémoires 19) Paris 2015, 467–72; see also Treadgold, W.: The Middle Byzantine Historians. Basingstoke 2013, 114–20.
5 Zafeiris, K.: The Issue of the Authorship of the Synopsis Chronike and Theodore Skoutariotes.
Revue des études byzantines 69 (2011) 253–63; but see now Tocci, R.: Theodori Scutariotae chronica: editio princeps. Berlin 2015, especially at pp. 64*–101*.
6 Malalas, Chronographia (ed. I. Thurn, Berlin 2000) p. 3, line 11: δεῖ δὲ καὶ τοὺς μετὰ ταῦτα συγγράψασθαι τὰ λοιπὰ ἀρετῆς χάριν.
same thing: “I am so far from taking personal pride in this narrative and from boasting of its great discoveries that I permit any one who wishes may call himself the book’s father”.7 We see in both texts here the same urge to have a complete picture of world history, but made relevant to particular circum-stances. A similar phenomenon exists within Latin medieval chronicles, as has been well illustrated by Richard Burgess, notably in his Mosaics of Time.8 Both are part of a medieval attitude towards authorship which is particularly clearly articulated in the Latin West – with a scholastic distinction between scriptor (who writes the words of others), compilator (who puts others’ words together), commentator (who adds his own words) and auctor (who writes his own words). I have discussed this recently in connection with Mischa Meier’s grand project on Malalas,9 and pointed to three late manuscripts in Paris published in Cramer’s Anecdota Graeca of 1839: Paris, BnF, gr. 1551, 2600 and 854 which contain excerpts from Theodore Lector, Eustathius of Epiphaneia, Eusebius of Caesarea and Malalas, all hugger-mugger together without attribution. These are surely prime examples of open texts, open to multiple contributions, and covering the sacred and secular history of the known world. Something of the same sort is going with the Synopsis Sathas and the intertwined thirteenth- and fourteenth-century chronicle texts found in Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, gr. Z 407 (coll. 1032), Vatican, BAV, Vat. gr. 1889 and Athos, Dionysiou 224.10 Each of these would have been a welcome addition to any gentleman’s library, and surely it is the process of satisfying this demand we see at work here.
To return to the western definition of authorship that has just been referred to, I am not aware in the Byzantine East of any such clear articulation, but some distinctions in copying practices, based on language usages can be observed.
Texts in a form of Greek which is close to the vernacular are treated very freely by copyists with each manuscript functioning as a different recension; this is especially true of texts in vernacular verse with Digenis Akritis a particularly
7 Synopsis Chronike (ed. K. Sathas: Mesaionike Bibliotheke. Vol. VII. Venice 1872) p. 3, ll. 6–10:
Ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἀλλὰ τοσοῦτον ἀπισχυρίζομαι, μὴ φιλοτιμίᾳ τὴν διήγησιν ταύτην ποιήσασθαι καὶ ἐπὶ τοῖς ἱστορουμένοις καὶ μέγα τι φρονῆσαι, ὅτι παραχωρῶ τῷ βουλομένῳ πατέρα λέγειν τῆς βίβλου ὃν βούλεται.
8 Cited in n. 2.
9 Jeffreys, E.: The Manuscript Tradition of Malalas’ Chronicle Reconsidered. In Meier, M. – Radtki, C. – Schulz, F. (eds.): Die Weltchronik des Johannes Malalas: Autor–Werk–
Überlieferung. Tübingen 2016, 140–51.
10 On the authorship of these and the role of Theodore Skoutariotes (bishop of Cyzicus 1277–83), see Tocci (n. 5).
good example. On the other hand, sacred texts, or texts in ancient Greek, are treated circumspectly and copied carefully and accurately – how else, oth-erwise, do we have credible texts of Homer, Plato, Aristotle and so forth?11 The world chronicles come in the middle of this spectrum of treatment.12
So, what should we do with open texts like the chronicles? It is an editorial nightmare, which accounts for the bibliographical mess from which the ninth- and tenth-century chronicles and chronicle-like texts have taken long to emerge, when inter alios Julius Pollux, Theodosius Melissenus and Leo Grammaticus have been taken as chronicle authors rather than copyists. The editorial nightmare also explains the furore that first erupted over a century ago around the texts that circulated under the label ‘John of Antioch’, but which recently got its second wind and is still reverberating to this day. It has probably also given the ambitious Malalas project in Tübingen more headaches than they had bargained for.
In theory an open text demands respect for each version and a separate publication for each manuscript. To some extent this is what has happened with the nineteenth-century Bonn editions of the various texts emerging, for example, from the environment of the Logothete Chronicle, published as George Monachus, Leo Grammaticus, or Symeon Magister. A less costly and more compendious alternative is a critical edition which reports all variants in relation to a base text: this process has its own problems, as another Round Table at the Congress is discussing. The results from a critical edition can vary, even in publications from the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae which, functioning under the aegis of the Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, in theory has a set of strict guide-lines: thus Thurn’s edition of Malalas controversially back-translates the Slavonic witnesses into Greek while Wahlgren’s edition of Symeon the Logothete uses a deliberately restricted set of witnesses. In the digital age the answer should be obvious: electronic editions, which include every manuscript, digitized, transcribed and annotated. But life is not that simple,13 though this is surely the way forward. Developments over the next ten years cannot fail to be interesting.
11 Though note the words of caution in Krueger, D. – Nelson, R.: New Testaments in Byzantium.
In: Krueger, D. – Nelson, R. (eds.): The New Testament in Byzantium. Washington, D.C. 2016, 1–20.
12 For insightful remarks, see Giannouli, A.: Education and Literary Language in Byzantium.
In: Hinterberger, M. (ed.): The Language of Byzantine Learned Literature. Turnhout 2014, 52–71.
13 Here the studies published from the University of Stockholm in the Ars Edendi Lecture Series are instructive.