Arethas of Caesarea and the Addressivities of Scholia

Arethas (c.860-c.939), archbishop of Caesarea, is one of the most important figures in the flowering of literary culture in late 9th- and early 10th-century Byzantium. To date, most scholarship has focused on Arethas’s role in preserving works of classical Greek thought. Yet, Arethas also played a critical role in the transmission and reception of Greek patristic literature. The famous “Arethas-codex” (Paris Gr. 451) is one of the most important (and in some cases the sole) witness to key works of early Christian apologetic literature. The codex is also important for the many scholia that stand in its margins. I am currently working on a full study of Arethas’s marginalia in his three extant volumes of Christian literature: Paris Gr. 451, Vallicellianus F10 (a nomocanon), and Moscow Gr. 231 (a patristic collection). These I am comparing with the better-known Arethan codices of classical Greek literature to obtain a complete picture of Arethas as a reader and annotator. In this Free Communication, I will offer a typology of the Arethan marginalia based on form, function, and modes of “addressivity” (that is, the different responses they anticipate from contemporary and later readers). Additionally, I contend that traditional approaches to Arethas’s marginalia fail to account for the complex literary and theological dimensions of his work as annotator. Traditional approaches value Arethas’s marginalia as historical curiosities, for their sometimes irascible tone towards certain authors (e.g. Lucian), or as an example of Middle Byzantine “reception” of classical and early Christian literature. I will show instead how Arethas’s annotations constitute a complex web of addressivity that includes Arethas as well as his contemporaries, and future readers. Through this case study of Arethas, I hope to encourage the field towards more interdisciplinary approaches that take Byzantine marginalia seriously as an important form of literary and theological discourse.