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Exile and return in John Mauropous, Poem 47

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Christopher Livanos
Christopher Livanos*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Abstract

The author reads an epigram by John Mauropous as an engagement with epic and biblical traditions. Critical studies of exile and return from different eras of the Greek literary tradition by Émile Benveniste, Gregory Nagy and Nancy Sultan are used to provide a theoretical approach to the tradition with which Mauropous engages. It is suggested that Mauropous’ wanderings in the territory of the xenos and return to the familiar world of the philos, and especially his personification of his home as a trophos (nurse), allude to Homer, and that epic language and motifs strengthen the poet’s assertion of selfhood and make ancient literary themes relevant to Mauropous’ life as a scholar and churchman.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , 2008 , pp. 38 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2008

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References

1 Mauropous’ educational views and practices are discussed in Karpozilos, A., The Letters of loannes Mauropous, Metropolitan of Euchaita (Thessalonike 1990) 11 Google Scholar.

2 Psellos, Michael, Chronographie, 2 vols., ed. Renauld, E. (Paris 1926) I, 18 Google Scholar. Translation quoted in Agapitos, P. A., ‘Teachers, pupils and imperial power in eleventh-century Byzantium’, Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. Too, Yun Lee and Livingstone, N. (Cambridge 1998) 170-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 175.

3 Agapitos, ‘Teachers, pupils and imperial power’, 178.

4 Text from Cantarella, R., Poeti Bizantini, 2 vols. (Milan 1992) II, 714-8Google Scholar. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

5 Karpozilos, Letters, 19.

6 Dräseke, J., ‘Johannes Mauropous’, BZ 2 (1893) 461-93, here 477Google Scholar.

7 Even the date of his departure for Euchaita is controversial. For a careful consideration of the facts and the opinion of various scholars regarding the dating and the circumstances of Mauropous’ appointment, see Karpozilos, A., Συμβολή στή μελέτη τοΐι βίοο кш’ τοΰ εργου τοθ Ίωάννη Μυρόποδος (Ioannina 1982) 33–46 Google Scholar. Karpozilos argues convincingly (41) for a date of 1049-1050. He has also more recently written on the matter in his introduction to the Letters, 17-21.

8 Karpozilos, Letters, 16.

9 In an early letter (ep. 17) to an ecclesiastic named Gregory, Mauropous writes of the harmony of Christian and thyrathen wisdom. See Karpozilos, , Letters, 70-9, 210-3Google Scholar. For a broader discussion of the topic in Byzantium’s early years, see Pelikan, J., Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven 1993)Google Scholar.

10 Basil, St, The Letters, ed. and trans. DeFerrari, R. J., 4 vols. (Cambridge 1934) IV, 391 Google Scholar.

11 Sultan, N., Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition (Lanham, MD 2000) 19 Google Scholar.

12 Nagy, G., Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore, MD and London 1990) 188-9, 206, 277Google Scholar.

13 Sultan. Exile, 5.

14 Nagy, G., The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore, MD 1979) 232-4Google Scholar.

15 Benveniste, E., Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Palmer, E. (London and Coral Gables, FL 1973) 278 Google Scholar, quoted in Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 232-3.

16 The poem’s historico-biographical vagueness has also been noted by Karpozilos, Letters, 18-9.

17 Sultan, Exile, 4-5.

18 Sultan, Exile, 6.

19 For the importance of fosterage in heroic literature, see Miller, D. A., The Epic Hero (Baltimore, MD 2000) 95-8Google Scholar.

20 References to the Old Testament are from Septuaginta, ed. Rahlfs, A. (Stuttgart 1979)Google Scholar. References to the New Testament are from Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, ed. Nestle, E. E. et al.(Stuttgart 1984)Google Scholar.

21 Poem 1 discusses Mauropous’ decision to publish only a selection of the many epigrams he had composed. See Lagarde, P., ed., ‘Quae in codice Vaticano graeco 676 supersunt’, Abhandlungen der Gottingener Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 28 (1881) 1–2 Google Scholar. For discussion of the process by which Mauropous selected pieces of correspondence for publication, see Karpozilos, Letters, 28.

22 Hopper, V. F., Medieval Number Symbolism: lts Sources, Meaning and Influence on Thought and Expression (New York 1938) 71 Google Scholar.

23 Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism, 85. This passage from Hopper is in reference to St Augustine’s summary of Pythagorean and early Christian numerology. It does not refer to Augustine’s original ideas, which Mauropous is unlikely to have known. While parts of Hopper’s work are only relevant to the medieval west, his book remains the most thorough study of medieval number symbolism, and the sections on biblical, early patristic and early Pythagorean number symbolism are equally relevant to Byzantine and western texts. Pythagoras and Pythagoreans were appreciated by Christian Byzantine writers. See Ierodiakonou, K., ed., Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources (Oxford 2002)Google Scholar; especially the essays by J. Duffy, ‘Hellenic philosophy in Byzantium and the lonely mission of Michael Psellos’, 139-56; and D. O’Meara, ‘The Justinianic dialogue On Political Science and its Neoplatonic sources’, 49-62. See also Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 101.

24 Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism, 101.

25 See Reiss, E., ‘Number symbolism and medieval literature’, Medievalia et Humanística n.s. 1 (1970) 161-74Google Scholar for more on numerology in western medieval literature.

26 Morris, C., The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (New York 1972)Google Scholar; Gurevich, A., The Origins of European Individualism, trans. Judelson, K. (Oxford 1995)Google Scholar.

27 Holmes, O., Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis 2000) 25–69 Google Scholar. The place of Mauropous’ book in the history of Byzantine author-ordered collections is discussed in Lauxtermann, M., Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Géomètres (Vienna 2003) 62-5Google Scholar.

28 For studies of the importance of the author’s subjective experience in Psellos’ Chronographia, see Kaldellis, A., The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia (Leiden 1999) 23-8Google Scholar; and Corno’s, D. Del introduction to Michele Psello, Imperatori di Bisanzio, ed. Impellizeri, S. and Cruscuolo, U. (Venice 1984) xxxii–xxxv Google Scholar.

29 Irmscher, J., ‘Autobiographien in der byzantinischen Literatur’, Studia Byzantina 2 (Berlin 1973) 3–11 Google Scholar. Nearly all of Irmscher’s examples are chronologically later than Mauropous. It has been argued that individuality never became as prevalent in Byzantium as it did in the west. See Zizioulas, J., ‘The Cappadocian contribution’, Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act (Edinburgh 1995) 44–60 Google Scholar. A lesser degree of interest in the individual may account for why Byzantine culture did not develop a tradition of autobiographical poetry cycles on the scale produced in the west. For more on Byzantine autobiography, see Hinterberger, M., Autobiographische Traditionen in Byzanz (Vienna 1999)Google Scholar.

30 Prodromos, Theodore, Amicitia exultans, PG, 133, 1321 b-1332Google Scholar.