Metre and rhythm play an indirect, yet sonorous role in Byzantine literary production, both in poetry and in prose. The musicality, so to speak, that these two intertwined elements bring to literature follows its own logic. In recent decades, the study of metre and rhythm in Byzantine poetry and prose has advanced significantly, thanks to fresh research devoted to the topic, discovery of new, unpublished texts, and analysis of the metrical practice of some authors relying on better critical editions based on modern philological criteria. As it has been noted, the ever-present and fundamental counterpart to metre in Byzantine literature is rhythm, a qualitative and accentual continuation of the earlier quantitative metrical system. Metre and rhythm thus become two sides of the same coin in Byzantine literary production, in both highbrow literature and popular production. Rhythm, in both prose and poetry, is capable of shaping a passage into more varied and extended forms than the earlier quantitative metre once allowed — sometimes creating sort of stanzas or precise sections of a text. Rhythm vibrantly displays itself in clusters of caesuras, varied use of clitics, word-patterns, internal ‘rhyming’, structures across verses, and an overall sensation of balance. This session will present a series of case studies, moving from the particular to the general, embracing poetry and prose: it will begin with examples focused on individual elements that are strongly related to metre and rhythm, particularly in hymnography; then, the session will adopt a more philological and historical approach, and it will explore two cases in which metre and rhythm serve the philologist in determining authorship and style; finally, on a broader scale, it will examine two complementary cases of metre and rhythm in Byzantine poetry, viewed through their historical and cultural lenses — especially in comparison with the Latin West.
Throughout the Middle Ages, poets continued to employ ancient quantitative metres, both in Medieval Latin and Byzantine literature. Since the distinction between long and short vowels had been lost in medieval Greek (and Latin), quantitative patterns could be grasped intellectually only by a learned audience; yet poets continued to employ them. Conversely, everyone perceived the…
This paper examines the role of political verse in the late Byzantine period, particularly its connection with the emergence of the so-called vernacular romances. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries onward, texts written in political verse took two distinct directions: on the one hand, popular epic, such as Digenis Akritis; on the other, refined compositions…
“Accent does not equal stress. It quite often denotes stress, but not always…” (Appendix Metrica, p. 306). The reverse is also true: lack of accent does not necessarily mean lack of stress. To put it differently, accent-bearing words may in fact be clitic and words without accent may in fact be orthotonic. Byzantine accentuation has…
Among the poems ascribed to John Geometres, the Carmen de S. Panteleemone (BHG 1415) stands out for its length (over a thousand prosodic dodecasyllables) and the number of copies (at least seven manuscripts preserving the whole text or part of it). However, its authorship is uncertain, since the poet is explicitly named in only two…
The authorship of the Σχέδη τοῦ μυός remains a matter of scholarly debate. A single manuscript explicitly attributes the work to Theodore Prodromos, while in all other witnesses it is anonymous. Konstantin Horna was the first to suggest that the author might in fact be Constantine Manasses, basing this attribution on notable parallels between passages…