This chapter proposes an assessment of the biblical figure of David as presented by Theodore Prodromos in some of his Historical Poems. David was often considered in Byzantine culture as the first and most important example of a Christian poet. The poet of the Psalms is depicted by Prodromos both as a source of inspiration for the persona loquens and as a role model for the emperor. This twofold representation is crucial to shed light on some of the poetic strategies used by Prodromos when dealing with Psalmic material in poems addressed to emperors. The chapter includes a close-reading of Prodromos’ Historical Poem 17, where a military victory of John II Komnenos is celebrated. In this long text, Prodromos systematically borrows verses from the text of the Psalms and adapts them in order to fit the occasional character of the poem. The analysis of the biblical hypotext as a literary source presented in the chapter provides new insight into the role that the biblical heritage could play within Byzantine authors’ canonical reference system.

This chapter offers a detailed literary analysis of Theodore Prodromos’ Katomyomachia, highlighting its theatrical aspects, its clever use of textual and structural parody, its function as a school text, and its position within Byzantine beast literature, with a particular emphasis on the ‘Aesopic’ as a literary mode.

The chapter looks at twelfth-century Byzantine poetry in the context of the milieu in which most Byzantine literature was initially published: the social gatherings known as theatra in which writers performed their compositions before an invited audience, usually presided over by an aristocratic patron. Poetry was particularly suited to such ‘theatre’ performance, and theatra flourished in the twelfth century as never before. This chapter illustrates the dramatic subject matter, style and narrative technique of much twelfth-century verse composition, with particular attention to three texts: a ceremonial poem by Theodore Prodromos, Constantine Manasses’ Synoptic Chronicle and Constantine Stilbes’ lament on a devastating urban fire in 1197. The discussion then turns turns to the question of how far the ‘theatrical turn’ of twelfth-century Byzantine literature, in both poetry and prose, had the potential to develop into real theatre. The contention here is that Byzantine writers perfected the art of purely verbal dramatic representation as a conscious substitute for reviving the institution of ancient theatre in material form.

By using a broad selection of ‘commentary discourse’, this chapter looks at the practice of reading, teaching and composing texts whose purpose is (partly) to explain older texts. Such commentaries, which can take various and sometimes unexpected forms, are of paramount importance for understanding the Byzantine intellectual and cultural framework of literary production, not only as a system of ‘authoritative mimesis’ but also as a system of ‘subversive anti-mimesis’. Thus, the chapter examines paraphrases of the Iliad, grammatical exercises such as the schede of Theodore Prodromos, lives of saints with integrated gnomologia, laudatory orations and novels, poetical treatises of political admonition (e.g. the anonymous Spaneas), scholia on ancient authors (like those produced by John Tzetzes on Aristophanes and Lycophron or by Eustathios on the Homeric poems), but also large-scale commentaries on Byzantine hymnongraphy (e.g. by John Zonaras on John of Damascus), philosophical and theological commentaries (Michael of Ephesos on Aristotle or Niketas of Herakleia on the Psalms). These texts represent different and yet interrelated discourses that highlight the key role of ‘commentary’ as a hermeneutic tool of and testimony to a broad spectrum of sociocultural and literary tensions within the longue durée of the Komnenian era.

Scholars since the nineteenth century have consistently divided Byzantine textual production into two distinct groups, ‘learned’ and ‘vernacular’, of which the latter was equated with the western vernaculars. The earliest longer texts in this ‘vernacular’ idiom appear in the twelfth century and became the beginning of Modern Greek (national) literature, while Byzantine ‘learned’ texts were left in a literary no-man’s land. The chapter criticizes this narrative by presenting and discussing the evidence from school practice in the twelfth century, where the vernacular idiom was part of learning Greek, and was used at the imperial court written by highly educated scholar-poets, such as Theodore Prodromos. In this sense, there was no beginning of Greek as vernacular in the twelfth century. Only in the later fourteenth century do we find a new textual production outside Byzantine territory that develops new forms of poetry including dialectal idioms. In this sense, vernacular Greek textual production does not have one beginning with a teleological ‘development’ towards the late fifteenth century and the end of Byzantium but, rather, two beginnings signalling two phases in the production of vernacular literature, one medieval and one early modern.