The substantial work done in Books I–IV on embellishing the narrative is certainly not enough to qualify the author(s) as ‘historian(s)’ and not simply
‘chronicler(s)’. Indeed, George the Monk devoted much effort to producing rhetorical amplification of the bare events, adding personal comments through-out of his work. The difference lies to a great extent in the models: Biblical for George and Classical for the Continuator. And together with the sources comes the great quantity of Classical vocabulary used by the Continuator, who did not shrink from copying entire passages from Ancient Greek historians to improve his narrative.
We must therefore conclude, on the basis of the models used, that the author(s) of ThCont I–IV strove after the genre of History. If we consider also the attention paid, as noted above, to the chronological sequence and structure of the narrative, it is clear that the work is to be understood as a part of bigger project of the recovery of Classical history sponsored by the emperor and directly connected with the so-called Historical excerpts, a project that the anonymous Continuator probably knew from first hand and in which he may well have taken part personally.
We have therefore a first profile of the anonymous author, but can we be sure that he was only one person? Pairs of synonyms appear throughout the first four books, but long quotations from Ancient Greek historians are not found after the first half of book II. This change is perhaps due to the nature of the sources at the author’s disposal (more colourful for the reign of Theophilus), or to his increasing expertise. One could also posit that the author found this procedure too demanding and without appreciable effect, since the references would not have been intended to be detected, and he thus eventually stopped working in this way. Indeed, if a hypothesis ad hoc may be ventured, Constantine’s anonymous assistant may have been working on the historical excerpts at the same time he was writing books I–II of ThCont and incorporated here some of his readings from the excerpts by coincidence (especially from Polybius).42 These borrowings would have ended when he concentrated his efforts solely on the Continuation and abandoned the excerpting of historians. If however, against all these considerations, we assume that the final text was the work of a team, the unevenness of style could be explained by the participation of different persons with different strategies.
42 See examples 3 and 5 above, with note 39.
On the other hand, the fact that we can detect the author’s stylistic rewrit-ing procedures, which seem based to a great extent on the use of pairs of synonyms, the quoting of proverbs and the copying of long passages from historians (without revealing the sources), does not necessarily mean that he was some mediocre author who cannot be identified with some known figure of his age such as, for instance, Daphnopates. However, no certain identifica-tion can be made on the basis of such consideraidentifica-tions. The different nature of the VBas, a biography of Basil I in which Constantine VII was personally involved, complicates its comparison with the previous four books and the identification of any one author who might have worked on both parts of this historiographical project. The cross-references between the two parts do not confirm or exclude this possibility.
Whether written by an anonymous author or by a team, we can confidently affirm that ThCont I–IV was conceived and planned as a ‘history’. However, modern scholars have usually labelled the work a ‘chronicle’, as for instance in the handbooks of Herbert Hunger43 and Jan Olof Rosenqvist,44 whereas Warren Treadgold in his recent book on Middle Byzantine historians consid-ers it to be a history.45
The reason for this confusion lies in the fact that 1) ThCont is given the title χρονογραφία in the sole preserved manuscript, and 2) it is a continuation of the chronicle of Theophanes. However, as I have argued in a recent paper,46 both the title of the work47 as well as its position as a continuation of a chronicle48 have less weight in defining this work than other factors such as structure and style, as we have argued again here. Moreover, we should not be perplexed if contradictions arise when we try to find a uniform definition of historical genres in Byzantium: perhaps we are following the wrong path and trying to
43 Hunger, H.: Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner. Vol. I. München 1978, 339 speaks of “eine Gruppe von Chroniken”.
44 Rosenqvist, J. O.: Die byzantinische Literatur. Vom 6. Jahrhundert bis zum Fall Konstantinopels 1453. Berlin 2007, 72.
45 Treadgold (n. 11) 188–196.
46 Signes Codoñer, J.: Dates or narrative? Looking for Structures in Middle Byzantine Historiography.
In: Juhász, E. (ed.): Byzanz und das Abendland IV. Studia Byzantino-Occidentalia. Budapest 2016, 227–255.
47 For titles of Byzantine historiographical texts see now the survey by Kiapidou, E.-S.: The Titling of Byzantine Historiographical Texts. Medioevo greco 16 (2016) 119–143.
48 We should not forget that Constantine VII was a distant relative of Theophanes, see Signes Codoñer, J.: Theophanes at the Time of Leo VI. In: Jankowiak, M. – Montinaro, F. (eds.):
Studies in Theophanes. (Travaux et Mémoires 19) Paris 2015, 159–176.
force the changing nature of historical writings into a simple dichotomy ‘history vs. chronicle’ which was not perceived as such by the Byzantines.49 Sometimes it seems that modern scholars use more rigid categories than Byzantine writ-ers, whom they usually blame for being inflexible adherents of the categories of Classical literature.
This brings us to a final consideration that is perhaps more pertinent in this collection of papers and has to do with the rewriting and recycling of historical texts in Byzantium. Traditionally, only ‘chronicles’ have been considered ‘open texts’, having neither authorial ‘copyrights’ or stylistic intentions. However, every historical text, either ‘history’ or ‘chronicle’ was, after its completion, by its very nature as an ‘historical source’, subject to rewriting.50 This applies equally to the histories of Anna Komnene and Niketas Choniates, which were
‘translated’ and reproduced as metaphraseis; and also to ThCont, in two ways:
1) backwards, in as much as the Continuator not only completely rewrote the original sources at his disposal (he might even be called, as least with respect to part of his work, a metaphrastes avant la lettre) but also created a continu-ous narrative out of a disparate collection of excerpts;51 and 2) forwards, in as much as Skylitzes used our text as the basis for a stylistic rewriting, adding nothing and only suppressing a few digressions.
In the Middle Byzantine period histories seem to be as fluid and open to change as chronicles. This does not mean, however, that genres or literary categories did not matter to Byzantine historians. But we must avoid over-simplification and pay attention to minute details of form (style, vocabulary, rewriting etc.) before embarking on a crusade of taxonomies.
49 See now Kiapidou (n. 47) 134: “From the Middle period onwards… the boundaries between histories and chronicles begin to blur”; or Markopoulos, A.: Le public des textes historiogra-phiques à l’époque macédonienne, Parekbolai 5 (2015) 53–74, esp. 59: “J’espère, et je mesure mes mots, que nous avons aujourd’hui abandonné sans retour la théorie de Krumbacher concernant les deux genres totalement distincts d’écriture historique à Byzance, i.e. l’historiographie et la chronographie”.
50 See Németh (n. 41) Excerpts versus Fragments 261: “I would suggest that the integrity of a historical text, as we understand it, did not exist in the tenth century. Historical works were long regarded as repositories of shorter stories rather than as frozen collections of historical events”.
51 Against the theory that the common source of Genesius and the Continuator was a chronicle, as argued by Ljubarskij, see Signes Codoñer (n. 7) 648–652.