Constantine of Rhodes, On Constantinople and The Church of The H
Constantine of Rhodes, On Constantinople and The Church of The H
Constantine of Rhodes, On Constantinople and The Church of The H
Edited by
LIZ JAMES
University of Sussex, UK
Liz James has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Index nominum
Index verborum notabilium
5 ‘A partial account of the statues of the city and its high and very great
columns’: Constantine’s Account of Constantinople
6 The Church of the Holy Apostles: Fact and Fantasy, Descriptions and
Reconstructions
Bibliography
General Index
There are too many Constantines in this volume: the poet himself together
with the emperors Constantine I and Constantine VII. In a bid to try and
avoid confusion, Ioannis Vassis and I have referred to the poet as Constantine
of Rhodes, and called him Rhodios where necessary. The emperors
Constantine are always referred to with their numbers and/or their respective
titles, ‘the Great’ or ‘Porphyrogennetos’. Transliterations of Byzantine names
are taken from the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.
Notes
1 G. P. Begleri, Chram svjatych Apostolov i drugie pamjatniki Konstantinopolja po opisaniju
Konstantina Rodija (Odessa, 1896); É. Legrand, ‘Description des œuvres d’art et de l’église des saints
Apôtres de Constantinople. Poème en vers iambiques par Constantin le Rhodien’ Revue des études
grecques 9 (1896), 32–65.
2 A. Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche. Zwei Basiliken Konstantins. Untersuchungen zur
Kunst und Literatur des ausgehenden Altertums, Zweiter Teil. Die Apostelkirche in Konstantinopel
(Leipzig, 1908); C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453 (Toronto, 1972), 199–201
provides the longest published section in English that I am aware of.
3 In G. Downey, ‘The Builder of the Original Church of the Apostles at Constantinople’, DOP 6
(1951), 55, n. 8. Other references come in his ‘On Some Post-Classical Greek Architectural Terms’,
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 77 (1946), 25, n. 9; ‘Notes on
the Topography of Constantinople, Art Bulletin 34 (1952), 235, n. 3; ‘Constantine the Rhodian: His
Life and Writings’, in K. Weitzmann et al. (eds), Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of
A.M. Friend, Jr. (Princeton, 1955), 212; Nikolaos Mesarites, Description of the Church of the Holy
Apostles at Constantinople, ed. and trans. by G. Downey, Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society 47, 6 (1957), 855. Here and in his ‘The Tombs of the Byzantine Emperors at the Church of the
Holy Apostles in Constantinople’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 79 (1959), 27, n. 1, Downey says that the
death of Friend made the completion of the planned collaborative monograph ‘impossible’.
4 O. Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice (Chicago, 1984), 364, n. 5 and 366, the end of n.
7, explaining that the manuscript of Underwood’s text is in Dumbarton Oaks. Friend had enlisted
Underwood’s help in 1945 for a study of the decoration of the Holy Apostles. See E. Kitzinger, ‘Paul
Atkins Underwood (1902–1968)’, DOP 23/24 (1969/1970), 2. Dumbarton Oaks holds four archival
boxes of Underwood’s papers labelled as relating specifically to Holy Apostles. I am grateful to
Shalimar White for this information.
5 Mesarites, Description, 859–918.
6 Inquiries have found nothing at Dumbarton Oaks, Princeton or Indiana.
The translation of Constantine’s poem was begun some years ago by a group
consisting of Charles Barber, Antony Eastmond, Liz James, Katrina Kavan,
Ruth Webb and Barbara Zeitler. Ruth Webb and Liz James pressed on with
the work, and later drafts were then reworked with the help of Bente
Bjornholt and Nadine Schibille, and finally brought to a conclusion by
Vassiliki Dimitropoulou, Robert Jordan and Liz James. in the final stages,
Elizabeth Jeffreys provided crucial advice, expertise and encouragement.
Part-way through this process, Ioannis Vassis freely allowed us to work from
his new edition of the text. Even more generously, he agreed to publish this
edition alongside the translation.
In translating the poem, we have aimed at accuracy rather than elegance.
We benefitted greatly from Dr Ronald McCail’s own private translation of
the poem, which renders the Greek both accurately and elegantly. We are
most grateful to Dr McCail for providing Liz James with a copy of his
translation and to Mary Whitby for facilitating this. Liz James owes an
enormous debt to Elizabeth Jeffreys for the thoughtful and substantial giving
of her time and knowledge – above and beyond the call of duty – and for
saving the translation from a great many mistakes and pitfalls. Errors and
inaccuracies in the translation are entirely the responsibility of Liz James.
Liz James would like to thank all the above for making this book possible,
especially Ruth Webb, who cannot be held responsible for the translation but
who nevertheless played a major part in getting it this far. I would also like to
thank Margaret Mullett who taught me that texts matter, even for art
historians, encouraged me every step of the way and allowed me to take this
to Ashgate. I am very grateful to Paul Magdalino for his insights and
especially for sharpening the arguments about the poem’s unity and the
poet’s priorities, and to Foteini Spingou for her thoughtful reading of the text.
I have been very aware that Marc Lauxtermann’s volume dealing with
Constantine is about to be published and I am grateful to Marc for advice on
Constantine and for allowing me to read and use his important forthcoming
essay, ‘Constantine’s City: Constantine the Rhodian and the Beauty of
Constantinople’, here.
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I also owe thanks to Simon Lane who produced the map and the plans, to
Bente Bjornholt for her editorial assistance, Gemma Hayman at Ashgate for
her work, Florentia Pikoula who helped with the modern Greek, Alexandra
Loske who helped with the late nineteenth-century German, Michelle
O’Malley who acted as a lay reader, and to all those who responded to
questions and pleas for assistance: Christine Angelidi, Dirk Krausmuller,
Michael McGann, Tassos Papacostas, Dion Smythe, Shaun Tougher, the
University of Sussex interlibrary Loans team, especially William Teague ;
and finally, my family, George and Alex, for their patience. Albrecht Berger
and Peter van Deun kindly gave permission to use plans originally published
in Byzantinische Zeitschrift and Byzantion. I am also grateful to Walter
Kaegi, Peter Guardino and Edward Watts (indiana), and Shalimar White,
James Carder and Deb Stewart (Dumbarton Oaks) for help and advice in
trying to track down Glanville Downey’s work on Constantine of Rhodes.
AP Palatine Anthology.
Text and translation available as W. R. Paton (trans.)
The Greek Anthology (Cambridge, MA, 1960)
B Byzantion
BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
ByzF Byzantinsche Forschungen
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
ODB A. P. Kazhdan et al. (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (3
vols, New York and London, 1991)
PG J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Graecae: Patrologiae Cursus
completus (161 vols, Paris, 1857–1866)
3 Date
The conventional date for the poem is at a point in the period 931–944.
Taking as his starting point lines 22–26, which mention four rulers together,
Reinach was the first to suggest that the work of Rhodios must have been
written at some time between August 931 (the death of Christopher,
Romanos Lekapenos’ eldest son) and December 944 (the fall of Emperor
Romanos Lekapenos himself), a period marked by the reigns of four
emperors: Romanos Lekapenos, Constantine porphyrogennetos, and the two
sons of Romanos, Stephen and Constantine.22
This proposal was accepted by later scholars. Only Speck questioned this
dating, suggesting that lines 22–26 were an interpolation.23 His arguments
were as follows: i) only in these lines are the four emperors addressed, while
none is actually named. In the lines that immediately follow (27–28),
4 Metrics
The poem is composed of a total of 981 dodecasyllable lines.29 Of these, 675
have their caesura after the fifth syllable (c5: 69 per cent), while the
remaining 306 have their caesura after the seventh (c7: 31 per cent).
According to their endings, verses of type c5 are divided thus: proparoxytone
(117 lines: 17 per cent), paroxytone (314 lines: 47 per cent) and oxytone (244
lines: 36 per cent). The verses of type c7 are distributed as follows:
proparoxytone (207 lines: 68 per cent), paroxytone (91 lines: 30 per cent) and
oxytone (eight lines: 2 per cent).
The final ending of the line is paroxytone, with just four exceptions ending
5 De ratione edendi
The present critical edition of the ekphrasis of Constantine of Rhodes is
based on a new reading of the codex unicus, while also taking into account
previous editions and corrections that have been suggested by scholars in the
past. The apparatus criticus does not record the misreadings and
typographical or other errors of the earlier editions of Legrand and Begleri.
Notes
1 See the detailed description of the manuscript in the catalogue of Spyridon Lauriotes and S.
Eustratiades, Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts in the Library of the Laura on Mount Athos, with
Notices from other Libraries (Cambridge, MA , 1925), 293, together with the observations of Legrand,
‘Description des oeuvres d’art’, 34–35, and Begleri, Chram, 2. See also T. Antonopoulou, ‘The
Metrical Passions of SS . Theodore Tiron and Theodore Stratelates in Cod. Laura Λ 170 and the
Grammatikos Merkourios’, in S. Kotzabassi and G. Mavromatis (eds), Realia Byzantina (Berlin and
New York, 2009), 1–11.
2 K. Sathas, Μεσαιωνικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη (Venice, 1872), vol. 1, 274–275.
3 Legrand, ‘Description des oeuvres d’art’, 36–65. The text is accompanied by the archaeological
commentary of T. Reinach, ‘Commentaire archéologique sur le poème de Constantin le Rhodien’,
Revue des etudes grecques 9 (1896), 66–103. Begleri, Chram (with an introduction and commentary in
Russian). A copy of this rare edition is held in the Gennadius Library, Athens (cat. no. BL 675). K.
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Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (2nd edition, Munich, 1897), 725, remarked that
Begleri’s edition was published just a few weeks after Legrand’s. However, L. Paranikas in his
‘Review’ of Legrand and Begleri in Vizantijskij Vremennik 4 (1897), 188, noted that Begleri’s edition
came out in January 1896, while Legrand’s edition was published in the January–March 1896 issue of
Revue des etudes grecques.
4 See Legrand, ‘Description’, 33–34, and Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 66–67.
5 A list comparing the divergences between the two editions, although neither is exhaustive or totally
free from errors, is provided in Paranikas, ‘Review’, 190–192.
6 P. Maas, ‘Der byzantinische Zwölfsilber’, BZ 12 (1903), 322, n. 47; Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und
Apostelkirche, 120–129, 225, 239–240; G. J. M. Bartelink, ‘Constantin le Rhodien, ecphrasis sur
l’église des Apôtres à Constantinople, vv. 539, 665, 882, 888’, B 46 (1976), 425–426; U. Criscuolo,
‘Note all’Ekphrasis di Costantino Rodio’, Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana n.s. 38 (1989), 141–149; P.
Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos. Zweck und Datum der Ekphrasis der sieben Wunder von
Konstantinopel und der Apostelkirche’, Poikila Byzantina 11 (Bonn, 1991), 252, n. 12, 253, n. 18, 256,
n. 26.
7 See, for example, O. Wulff, ‘Die sieben Wunder von Byzanz und die Apostelkirche nach
Konstantinos Rhodios’, BZ 7 (1898), 317, and C. Angelidi, ‘Ἡ περιγραφὴ τῶν ἁγίων Ἀποστόλων ἀπὸ
τὸν Κωνσταντῖνο Ῥόδιο. Ἀρχιτεκτονικὴ καὶ συμβολισμός’, Symmeikta 5 (1983), 98, who finds in the
author only a passable knowledge of verse techniques.
8 Downey, ‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 220, who also considers Constantine’s description to be
remarkably exact in matters of architectural detail.
9 Some commentators (such as Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 100, and Angelidi, ‘Ἡ περιγραφή’, 117)
assume that, following the example of Paul the Silentiary, Constantine intended later to add a separate
account of other important sections of the church, such as the sanctuary, the pulpit and the mausoleum.
The poem itself, however, does not provide us with grounds for accepting this assumption. A. Salač,
‘Quelques epigrammes de l’Anthologie Palatine et l’iconographie byzantine’, Byzantinoslavica 12
(1951), 14, while being the only scholar to consider the manuscript tradition of the ekphrasis as having
preserved the text intact, believes that the original poem was never in fact finished, since he assumes
that Rhodios was using as his source a description of the mosaics which likewise came to an abrupt end
at this point.
10 See Legrand, ‘Description’, 34; Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 68 and 100; R. Reitzenstein,
‘Constantinus [14]’, Pauly’s Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 4, 2 (7) (1900),
1033; Angelidi, ‘Ἡ περιγραϕή’, 99, n. 2; Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 253, n. 14. Reinach,
‘Commentaire’, 100, and Downey, ‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 215, n. 16, suggest that Constantine
probably continued his account of the mosaic decoration of the church, and included major works
depicting episodes from the life of Christ, such as the Anastasis and the Ascension. Of course, with the
description of the Crucifixion, the symbolic number seven has already been reached (see Speck,
‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 253, n. 4). Constantine might have added one or two more descriptions, in
much the same way as in lines 804–915, where he describes five mosaic depictions of episodes from
the life of Christ, considering them to comprise, collectively, one miracle (the sixth in his overall
account), so as to produce a seventh θέαμα. This, however, remains a matter for conjecture for which
we have only one small indication: the actual description of the church of the Holy Apostles (423–981),
as it has come down to us, does lack a closing passage or epilogue.
11 See T. Preger, ‘Review’ of Legrand and Begleri, BZ 6 (1897), 166–168.
12 The relationship between Constantine of Rhodes and Kedrenos is interpreted differently by Wulff,
‘Die sieben Wunder’, 317–318, on the one hand, and by Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 69, 73, and Downey,
‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 217–219, on the other. Although, as Downey states, ‘a final solution of the
question seems impossible at the present time’, Preger’s hypothesis seems the most convincing. See
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also A. Berger, ‘Georgios Kedrenos, Konstantinos von Rhodos und die Sieben Weltwunder’,
Millennium 1 (2004), 233–242.
13 See Downey, ‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 215–216.
14 See Angelidi, ‘Ἡ περιγραφή’, 97–98, 117.
15 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’.
16 It is for this reason that Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodes’, 256, assumes that between lines 254
and 255 we should postulate a lacuna that has arisen as a result of the loss of an entire quire.
17 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’.
18 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 251–252, nn. 10–11.
19 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 258.
20 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 262–265.
21 M. Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City. Constantine the Rhodian and the Beauty of
Constantinople’, in L. James and A. Eastmond (eds), Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). I did not have access to this article while writing my Introduction and so
have left it to Liz James to deal with the issues arising from this debate later in the book.
22 See Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 67–68. On the hierarchical order of the four coemperors throughout
this period see O. Kresten and A. E. Müller, Samtherrschaft, Legitimationsprinzip und kaiserlicher
Urkundetitel in Byzanz in der ersten Hälfte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1995), 37.
23 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 259–261 and 265.
24 Lines 1, 278, 286, 301, 387–388, 393, 419, 423–427.
25 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 265.
26 Lines 2, 248.
27 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 267.
28 As demonstrated convincingly by Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology from Meleager to
Planudes (Oxford, 1993), 301–302.
29 Only three of these lines (43, 366 and 496) seem to be 14 syllables in length on account of the
proper noun Ἰουστινιανός, but it is obvious that Constantine read the name as four, not six, syllables:
/ju-sti-nja-′nos/.
30 M. Marcovich, Three-Word Trimeter in Greek Tragedy (Königstein, 1984), 198–211.
31 Maas, ‘Der byzantinische Zwölfsilber’, 321.
32 Technical terms include κύβον 557, ἁψίδας 609, κοσμήτας 678, κοσμητῶν 747. Perhaps the
following words also need to be considered technical terms in the broadest sense of the term: of the
term: ἀρετῶν 24, γωρυτὸν 137, ῥοπάλῳ 138, χαλκαῖς 187, σχῆμα 602, λαγόσιν 745, εὐδοκίαν 767,
ῥοπάλοις 884. Arithmetical terms include ἑκκαίδεκα 594, ἑκατὸν 692. Proper nouns include
Ξηρολόφου 34, Κωνσταντῖνος 55. 150. 424. 426, Ῥώμης 61, Θεοδόσιος 184, Κωνσταντῖνε 286,
Κυβέλης 296, Πέλοπος 397, Εὐρώπης 518. 648. 654, Ἀνδρομέδας 525, Ἑβραίων 881. 938.
33 The single exception, as registered also in George of Pisidia, who constituted the model for all
other Byzantine poets writing 12-syllable verse, was the prefix δι’: δι’ οὗ 15, δι’ αὐτῶν 414, δι’ οὗ 466.
467, δι’ ἀμφοῖν 577, δι’ οὗπερ 800, δι’ οὗ 919. In one case is the hiatus only ‘optical’: αὖ [= af]
Ἅμαξαν 515.
34 Ἀβάλ’ 972, ἀλλ’ 117. 150. 211. 299. 309. 350. 432. 472. 510. 529. 534. 685. 871. 900. 912, ἄλλ’
528, ἀνίστατ’ 456, ἀσπάζετ’ 346, γ’ 519. 597. 671. 977, δ’ 3. 67. 74. 250. 253. 271. 358. 427. 459. 493.
536. 538. 555. 570. 588. 600. 601. 653. 659. 701. 734. 740. 844. 885. 889. 916. 958, δι’ 15. 414. 466.
467. 577. 800. 919, εἶθ’ 617, εἴτ’ 550. 555. 640, ἔνθ’ 455, ἐπ’ 275, ἔστ’ 243, ἐφ’ 196, ἡνίκ’ 107, ᾖσ’
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961, θ’ 218. 626. 811. 813. 910, ἵν’ 81, κ’ 351. 456. 648. 866. 954, καθ’ 620, κἄπειτ’ 611, κατ’ 472.
559. 563, κατάρχετ’ 22, κύκλωθ’ 698, μετ’ 362. 812, μηδ’ 857. 874, μήποτ’ 499. 964, μήτ’ 392, ὅτ’
129, οὐδ’ 294. 296. 298. 473. 515, οὔτ’ 376, πάντοτ’ 685, ποτ’ 58. 356, πότ’ 974. 976, σπέρμ’ 939,
στῆθ’ 368, σώματ’ 489, τ’ 85. 89. 122. 152. 190. 193. 312. 330. 490. 604. 655. 718. 744. 791. 794. 822.
952. 963, ταῦθ’ 941, ταῦτ’ 956, τέρπετ’ 341, τῇδ’ 57, τήνδ’ 66, τόδ’ 3. 859. 946, χ’ 335. 378. 498. 654.
745. 937, χεῖρ’ 45. 155. 367, ὧδ’ 260.
35 Κἀγὼ 411, κἀκ 669. 688, κἀκεῖθεν 633, κἀκεῖνον 757, κἀν 723. 865, κἂν 50. 383. 541. 821,
κἄπειτ’ 611, κἀπεμπολοῦντα 886, κἀπεμπολητὴν 878, κἀρρητουργίας 527, κἀτελευτήτων 954, καὖθις
497. 831, καὐτὸς 202. 243. 979, καὐτοὺς 817, κεὐειδεστάτοις 730, ταὐτὸ 723, τὄμμα 262. 892, τὄρος
804, τοὐμοῦ 28, τοὔμπαλιν 842, τοὔνδοθεν 743, τοὖργον 551.
36 Maas, ‘Der byzantinische Zwölfsilber⊠ Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche; Bartelink,
‘Constantin le Rhodien⊠ Criscuolo, ‘Note⊠ 141–149; Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos⊠.
37 See also Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 66, n. 1.
38 See also A. Kominis, ‘Τὸ βυζαντινὸν ἱερὸν ἐπίγραμμα καὶ οἱ ἐπιγραμματοποιοὶ “Athena’. Seira
diatrivon kai meletimaton 3 (Athens, 1966), 66f. n. 3.
I. CODEX
III. CETERA
<…> = adicienda
ac = ante correctionem
Ἄγαρ 369
ᾍδης 174, 471
Ἀμαλθία 523
Ἅμαξα 515
Ἀνδρέας 481, 490
Ἀνδρομέδα 525
Ἀνθέμιος 550, 640
Ἄννα 789
Ἀπόλλων 135
Ἀπόστολοι 6, 269, 363, 387, 417, 425, 429, 441, 455, 464, 468, 492, 510,
543, 639, 689, 718, 741
Ἀργοναῦται 524
Ἀρκάδιος 203, 243
Ἄρκτος 516
Ἀρτέμιος 485
Ἄρτεμις 128
Ἀσία 649
Ἀσσαήλ 405
Ἄτλας 63
Ἄττις 297
Ἀφροδίτη 526
Ἀχιλλεύς 308
Βαλαάμ 777
Βασιλίσκος 110
Βηθλεέμ 760
Βηρίνα 109
Βυζαντίς 280, 449
Γαβριήλ 752, 950
Γαλάται 653
Γίγαντες 113, 130, 139
Δαβίδ 850, 952
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Δημήτηρ 295
Δίδυμοι 522
Δοκίμειον 651
Ἑβραῖοι 881, 938
Ἑλλάς 147, 483, 654
Ἕλληνες 131, 506
Ἐρυθρά (sc. θάλαττα) 669
Ἔρωτες 190
Εὐρώπη 518, 648, 654
Ἐφέσιοι 128
Ἔφεσος 484
Ζεύς 133, 294, 516, 522, 523, 527
Ἠλίας 811
Ἡρακλῆς 136, 519
Θαβώρ 805
Θεοδόσιος 184 cf. Θευδόσιος
Θευδόσιος 220 cf. Θεοδόσιος
Ἰνδοί 648
Ἰορδάνης 793
Ἰούδας 867, 869, 904
Ἰουστινιανός 43, 366, 496
Ἰσίδωρος 550, 640
Ἰσκαριώτης 869, 910
Ἰσραήλ 775
Ἰωάννης 793
Καρία 652
Κάρυστος 655
Καρχηδών 662
Κρόνος 526
Κυβέλη 296
Κύζικος 672
Κωνσταντῖνος Rhodius 424, 426
Κωνσταντῖνος I magnus 19, 55, 64, 150, 438
Κωνσταντῖνος VII Porphyrogennetus 1, 27, 278, 286, 393, 419, 423, 427
Κωνστάντιος 477
Λάζαρος (1) 834
Λάζαρος (2) 914
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Λάκωνες 656
Λέων (I) 108, 109
Λέων (VI) 278, 394, 419
Λέων stella 519
Λήδα 522
Λιβύη 648, 661
Λίνδιοι 156
Λουκᾶς 483, 490
Μάξιμος 225
Μῆδοι 369
Μοῦσαι 303, 305
Μωσῆς 811
Νεῖλος 667
Ξηρόλοφος 34, 242
Ὅμηρος 307
Ὀρφεύς 288
Παλλάς 156, 162
Πάρος 674
Πάτραι 482
Πέλοψ 397
Πέρσαι 369
Περσεύς 525
Περσίς 771
Πέτρος 408
Πήγασος 521
Πλειάδες 517
Ποσειδῶν 134
Προικόνησος 122, 670
Ῥόδιος tit.
Ῥόδος 158, 424, 426
Ῥώμη 61, 73, 280
Σατάν 466, 801, 902, 920
Σενάτον 91, 126
Σιδών 734
Σιών 848, 854
Σκύθαι 209, 226, 240
Σολομών 309
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Σοφία 38, 268, 359
Στρατήγιον 259
Συμεών 780, 956
Συρία 734
Ταῦρος 34, 202, 244, 518
Τιμόθεος 484, 490
Τοξότης 520
Τριάς 442
Φρυγία 650
Χάριτες 304
Χριστός 65, 71, 374, 465, 480, 530, 737, 781, 799, 805, 840, 844, 855, 918,
927
Ὠρίων 514
stellula vocabula signata sunt, quibus Constantinus solus vel primus usus est
ἀβάλε 972
ἀγαλματουργός 185
ἀγλαΐζομαι 31, 202, 261, 304, 372, 406, 439, 660, 667, 796
ἀγλάισμα 85
ἄγραυλος 769
ἀγροικία 386
ἄεθλος 748
ἀήτης 199
ἄθεσμος 881, 938
ἀθρέω 500
αἴ 971
Αἰγύπτιος 666
αἰσχρουργία 294
ἀκήρατος 13, 305
ἀκουτίζω 823
*ἀκρόβαθμος 221
Ἀκυτανή (πλάξ) 660
ἁλίτροφος 666
ἀλλοδαπός 690
ἀλλοιόομαι 836
ἀλλόφυλος 690
ἀμαλδύνω 371
ἀμαυρόω 118
ἀμβλύνω 919
ἀμφανδόν 789
ἀμφιέννυμι 762
ἄμφοδον 221, 259
ἀναβρύω 312
ἀναγράφω 307
γαργαλίζω 274
γαῦρος 236
γενάρχης 446
γενέθλια 770
γεννάδας 113, 495
γίγας 335, 617
γονή 291, 527
Γόργειος 159
γραμμή 554
γραμμικός 553, 637
γωρυτός 137
δακρυρροέω 945
δείκτης 877
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δειματόομαι 145
δέρκομαι 143, 921
διάγλυφος 725
διαγράφω 603
διαμπάξ 638
διασπάω 586
διάστασις 248, 555
διασφηκόω 676
διαυγία 512
δίαυλος 411, 487
*διπλόμορφος 561
δίστομος 785, 959
δοκός 96
δορκάς 841
δορυφόρος 716
δρακόντειος 939
δράκων 139, 142, 509, 664
δυσάντητος 384
δύστηνος 971
ἐγγελάω 192
ἐγγράφω 8, 238, 630, 737
ἐγκαλύπτω 574
ἐγκάρσιος 459
*ἐγκαταρτίζω 568
ἐγκρύπτομαι 246
εἵνεκεν 327
εἰσάπαξ 210
εἰσδέχομαι 888, 933
εἰσοράω 830, 864
εἰσπλέω 321
ἐκβοάω 851
ἕκητι 879
ἔκθαμβος 382
ἐκθροέω 264
ἐκκαλύπτω 787
ἐκλιχμάομαι 142
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ἐκμιμέομαι 658
ἐκπλαγής 91
ἐκπληρόω 921
ἐκτρύχω 273
ἔκφρασις p.18, 425
ἔκφυλος 520, 691
ἐκφωνέω 777
ἐμβαίνω 805, 844
ἔμβολος 559, 563
ἐμμέριμνος 273
ἔμπλεως 189, 940
ἔμπνοος 222
ἐμπρέπω 118, 533
ἔμπυρος 632
ἐμφορέω 402
ἐναλλάσσω 807
ἐναρμόζω 584
ἐνδάκνω 230
ἐνδίδωμι 683
ἐννόμως 22
ἐνστρέφω 140
ἐντινάσσομαι 684
ἐξαλλάσσομαι 381, 932
ἐξανίσταμαι 828
ἐξαπατάομαι 148
ἐξεικάζομαι 25, 729
ἐξικνέομαι 797
ἐξισόομαι 84, 376
ἐξυφαίνω 426
ἐποκλάζω 193
ἐποτρύνω 536
*ἐργοσυνθέτης 624
ἑρμήνευμα 756
ἔρνος 304
ἐσκοτισμένως 132
ἐσπουδασμένως 866
εὐαγής 3, 311
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Εὐβοΐς 655
εὔγλυπτος 208
εὔγυρος 183, 621, 722
εὔδρομος 5
εὔζωνος 672
εὔηχος 288, 769
εὔθετος 561, 594, 623, 856
εὐίλατος 16
εὔκαρπος 303
εὔλαλος 352, 403
εὐνέτης 109
*εὐρυσύνθετος 461
εὐσθενής 335
εὐσταθής 754
εὐσταλής 113
εὐσταλῶς 330
ἕωλος 955
ἑωσφόρος 977
*ζάμβαξ 669
ζόφωσις 129
ζωηφόρος 833, 840
ἡμίτμητος 580
*ἰαμβόλεκτος 390
ἴαμβος 5, 289, 314, 317, 407
ἱμερτός 16
ἰνδικός 668
ἰσάριθμος 24
ἵστωρ 552
καθαρμόζομαι 187
καθιδρύομαι 608
καθοράω 217, 410, 714, 805, 918
καίνυμαι: κεκασμένος 188, 505
κακότροπος 876
κακουργία 435
κακοῦργος 928
καλλίμορφος 449
καλλίνικος 64, 418, 492
καλλιπάρθενος 153
καμάρα 634
καταγλαΐζομαι 342
καταθνῄσκω 875
κατάκριτος 928
κατάντης 215
καταπίπτω 633, 823
κατάρρυτος 445
καταρτίζω 631
κατασπαράσσω 106, 111
*κατασπειρόομαι 839
κατάστερος 114
καταστέφω 309
*κατάστιχος 708
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καταστυγέομαι 880
καταυγάζω 69
καταχρυσόω 743
κειρία 838
κέλευσις 840
κένωμα 607
κένωσις 749
κεράστης 518
*κηρόμορφος 653
κίων 53, 97, 103, 121, 124, 154, 168, 202, 255, 336, 651, 659, 686, 703, 708,
721, 724
κληρουχία 26
κλινήρης 829
κλίτος 701, 710
κλύω 313
κομάω 727
κόρος filius 522
κορύνη 884
κοσμήτης 678, 747
*κοσμοπαμπόθητος 59, 267
κοσμοσύστατος 348
κόφινος 76
κόχλος 98
κρηπίς 584
κροσσωτός 644
*κρουματίζω 298
κυβικός 558, 602
κύβος 553, 554, 557
κυδαίνω 204
κυκλικός 732
κύκλος 120, 197, 575, 587, 623, 707, 711
*κυκλοσύνθετος 622
κύκλωθι 698
κύλινδρος 578, 621
κύλισμα 632
κυρία 779
λαγών 745
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λακαρικόν 725
λαμπηδών 974
λεοντῆ 136
λευκοπόρφυρος 652
λευκόχροος 669
λῆμμα 879, 887
ληρωδία 293
λιγύς 198
λιθοξόος 671, 731
λιθώδης 922
λογογράφος 552
*λυγίστροφος 76
λυγρός 876
*μαρμαρογλύφος 693
μαρμαρυγή 344, 808
μαρμαρύσσομαι 511
μεσόμφαλος 567
μετασκευάζω 497
μηχανουργία 257
μηχανουργός 541
μίγδην 742
μουσηγέτης 314
μυδάω 836
μυθογράφος 528
μυρίπνοος 728
μύρομαι 944
μυσταγωγός 713
ξένισμα 164
ξενότροπος 858
ξενοτρόπως 29, 420, 431, 763
ὁδίτης 331
οἴκτιστος 960
ὄνησις 963
ὀρείπλανος 297
οὖδας 347, 560
οὐρανοδρόμος 359
οὐρανόμορφος 735
ὀφίτης 663
πάγκακος 872
*πάγκλυτος 28, 58, 100, 323, 326, 478, 548, 703
πάγχρυσος 312
παιδάριον 80
παιδοτρόφος 516
παλινδρομέω 843
παλίστροφος 515
παμβόητος 20
παμβότανον 696
παμπόνηρος 940
πανάγαστος 388
πάναγνος 783
πανάχραντος 772
πανσέβαστος 474, 917
πανσθενής 290
παντάλας 868
παντάναξ 716
πάντιμος 35, 766
πανύμνητος 15, 58, 917
πανυπέρτατος 284
πανύστατος 598
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παράστασις 179
παραστάτης 436
παρέρπω 438
παριππάζω 495
πάτος 671
πάτρα 688
πεζοδρόμος 331
πεντάστεγος 503
*πενταστρόμορφος 458
*πεντασύνθετος 572
περίβλεπτος 90
περίκλυτος 488, 736
περισκέπω 167
περιστέφω 120
περιστρέφω 262
περιτρέχω 407, 707, 711
*πηγανόμορφος 657
πῆγμα 589
πήσσω 559, 562
*πινσόπυργος 592, 594, 635
πινσός 562, 579, 582, 605
πλάξ 115, 652, 660, 667, 670, 672
πλαστικός 228
πλαστός 130, 188
πλεκτός 76
ποδηγετέω 774
ποδηγέτης 422, 433
πόλισμα 654
πολυθρύλλητος 163
πολύκροτος 390
πολύστονος 332, 656
πολύστροφος 287, 621
πολύτροπος 538, 546
πολύχρους 641, 668, 673, 746
πολύχρυσος 258
πρασόχρους 659
*πρόβαθμος 39
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πρόγραμμα 469
πρόδηλος 83
πρόκριτος 450, 806
προλάμπω 29
προνωπής 824
προσᾴδω 290
προσγελάω 191
προσδέχομαι 792
προσδέω 579
προσλαλέω 299, 782
προσνέμω 765
προσοράω 333, 923
προσπελάζω 323
προσπλέκω 578
προστίθημι 72, 320
προσφυσάω 194, 199, 197
προσφυῶς 300
προὔχω 626
πτύσσομαι 347
πύλη 125, 250, 253, 345, 385, 848, 873
πυραμίς 182
πύργος 26, 231, 254, 334
*πυργοσύνθετος 182
πυργόω 66
πυρίπνοος 414
πυρπολέω 275
πυρσεύω 665
*πυρσολαμπής 23
ῥιπτέω 141
*ῥοδοπλεκής 13
ῥοδόχρους 601, 651, 724
ῥοΐσκος 189
ῥυπάω 294
σαρδόνυξ 668
σάττω: σεσαγμένος 683
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σέβασμα 812
σελασφόρος 453, 697, 700, 808, 953, 979
σκαίρω 832
σκέπη 503, 629
σοβαρότης 232
σπαραγμός 966
σπειράομαι 140
σπέος 760
σταυρικῶς 569
σταυρός 35, 166, 372, 462, 463, 469, 471, 576, 616, 927, 934
στέγη 32, 96, 338, 574, 610, 722, 739, 744
στερέμνιος 212
στεφάνη 680
στεφηφόρος 486
στέφος 44, 60
στήλη 969
στηριγμός 502
στικτός 663
στίξ 121
στίχος tit, 5, 70
στοά 32, 703, 709, 722
στρατάρχης 615
στρατηγέτης 715
στύλος 24, 51, 56, 67, 75, 119, 213, 239, 244, 247, 364, 650
συγκαταρτίζω 638
*συγκατασκιάζω 816
συγκροτέω 458
συλλαλέω 814
συμμιγής 697
σύμμιξις 389
συμπάρειμι 813, 942
συμπεραίνω 705
συμπερικλείω 460, 680
σύμπηξις 93
συμφύρω 837
συναρμόζω 10, 589, 643, 704, 709
σύνδρομος 408
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σύνεγγυς 46
συνουσία 901
σύνταγμα 4
σύντονος 494
συντόνως 545
σύστημα 100, 443
συστρέφω 853
σφαῖρα 565, 574, 580, 588, 625
σφαιρόμορφος 581
*σφαιροσύνθετος 32, 503, 610, 744
σφενδόνη 575, 624
σχῆμα 182, 498, 538, 558, 570, 602
σχηματισμός 637
ταξιάρχης 714
ταχυδρόμος 521
τέλεσμα 713
τελεσφόρος 241
τέρας 159, 196, 520
τετράγωνος 679
τετραήμερος 834
τετραπλοῦς 564, 595, 606
τετράριθμος 562, 592, 603, 625
τετράς 593
τετρασκελής 186, 564, 595, 606
*τετρασύνθετος 554, 605
*τετραφεγγής 166
*τετράφωτος 23
τέχνασμα 186, 283
τεχνικῶς 583
τεχνουργία 354, 636
τιάρα 183
τιθηνός 523
τιναγμός 684
τοῖχος 95, 115, 127, 676, 732
τορός 287
τραγῳδέω 292
τρίαινα 134
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τρίμετρος 289
τρισάθλιος 524, 871
τρισόλβιος 475, 804, 961
*τυμπανόκτυπος 296
τύπος 35, 395, 576, 748
τύπωσις 462, 890
τυραννίς 225, 801
Τύριος 98
ὕελος 742
ὑπέρμαχος 18
ὑπερτέλλω 94, 334
ὑπέρτιμος 325, 416, 629, 739
ὑπερφέρω 271, 452, 745
ὑποκλάω 588
ὑποστήριγμα 181
ὕψωμα 498
χαλκέμβολος 634
χάλκεος 125
*χαλκοσύνθετος 196, 364
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*χαλκότορνος 37, 632
χαρμονή 86, 753
χιονόχρους 674
χορηγία 81
χοροστάτης 120
χρεμετίζω 234
χριστώνυμος 463
*χρύσαυγος 319, 645
χρυσήλατος 489
*χρυσολαμπόμορφος 439
χρυσόμορφος 342
χρυσοστεφής 365
ψηφίς 115
The Poet
The career of Constantine of Rhodes is reasonably well-documented, for a
Byzantine poet. He was born between 870 and 880 at Lindos, on the island of
Rhodes, and died at some point after 944.1 In an epigram in the Greek
Anthology, he says that his parents were called Ioannis and Eudokia.2 In the
890s, he seems to have been a scholar of the New Church.3 A ‘Rhodios’
appears in written sources in 908 as a secretary (notarios) of the eunuch
Samonas, one of Emperor Leo VI’s favourite ministers, and it is assumed that
this is the same man as the Constantine of Rhodes of the poem. This man was
employed in a plot against another of Leo’s favourites, a further Constantine,
writing a scurrilous pamphlet.4In 927, Constantine of Rhodes, a basilikos
klerikos, was one of the ambassadors sent to negotiate peace and a royal
marriage with the Bulgarians.5 Constantine’s Rhodian origins were clearly
important to him; he described himself as being ‘of Rhodes’ in the acrostic
that opens this poem, as well as emphasising his Lindian origins in the
epigram that mentioned his parents.6 In terms of official positions, as the
acrostic reveals, by the time of the poem, he held the position of asekretis.7
Both origins and imperial status were of significance to Constantine in
defining his identity to any reader of the poem.
Apart from the poem translated here, several satirical poems survive under
Constantine of Rhodes’s name, including verses directed against the diplomat
Leo Choirosphaktes dated to 907 and a protracted controversy in iambs with
the otherwise unknown eunuch, Theodore the Paphlagonian.8 In addition,
Alan Cameron has shown that Constantine was almost certainly Hand J, the
redactor of the Palatine Anthology, a collection of some 3,700 epigrams, both
pagan classical, Late Antique and Christian. Cameron dates this production to
some point after 944, when Constantine was perhaps in his late sixties.9 The
Anthology also contains several epigrams written by Constantine himself.10
Because the dating of Constantine’s poem is problematic, it is worth
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mapping Constantine’s career against the reigns of the emperors that he
served. If he was born between 870 and 880, then he must have been
employed by Samonas whilst he was in his twenties. When Leo VI died in
912, Constantine would have been in his early thirties. Leo was succeeded by
his brother Alexander and his son, Constantine VII, known as
Porphyrogennetos. Constantine VII became sole emperor in 913, after the
death of his uncle, when he was only seven years old. His first regent, the
patriarch, Nicholas Mystikos, was soon expelled and replaced by
Constantine’s mother, Zoe Karbonopsina, but in 920, Romanos Lekapenos
overthrew Zoe and had himself crowned as co-emperor with the 15-year-old
Constantine VII. By this time, Constantine of Rhodes was in or approaching
his forties. When Constantine VII managed to regain sole imperial power in
945, Constantine of Rhodes was in his sixties or older, something that would
have placed him in the category defined by the Byzantines as ‘old age’.11
At what point in his life Constantine wrote the poem translated in this
volume, and indeed whether it is one coherent poem, is uncertain. Ioannis
Vassis, in his Introduction to the edition, has already discussed the issues
around both date and composition, but I want to consider them further here.
As Vassis pointed out, lines 22–26, which describe a group of unnamed
rulers, holding power lawfully like ‘four pillars’ or like representations of the
four virtues, are almost always taken as providing evidence for the date of the
whole poem. Four rulers suggest the period of four emperors, which would
date the poem to between August 931 (the death of Christopher, son of
Romanos Lekapenos) and December 944 (the fall of Romanos Lekapenos), a
period marked by the joint reign of Romanos Lekapenos, Constantine
Porphyrogennetos and the two sons of Romanos, Stephen and Constantine.
The years between 931 and 944 are indeed employed as the conventional
dating for the poem.12 However, some scholars have questioned this. Paul
Speck, for one, as Ioannis Vassis has detailed, argued that these lines were an
interpolation on the part of an editor engaged in putting together a copy of the
works of Constantine of Rhodes.13 Elsewhere in the poem, on at least five
further occasions scattered throughout the remaining lines (lines 27–28 –
immediately after the reference to four rulers; 278–279; 393–395; 418–419;
427–428), Constantine extols Constantine VII alone as son and heir of Leo.
Speck argued that it was highly unlikely that a court orator would have
praised Constantine as the sole heir of Leo in the period of the joint reign.
MarcLauxtermann, following Speck, also sawlines 22–26 as an
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interpolation. He pointed out that the syntax of the passage is very
awkward.14 Both Speck and Lauxtermann also suggested that the continued
references to Leo throughout the poem implied that Leo was still very much
present in people’s minds and that this, combined with Constantine’s being
saluted as sole emperor, actually indicated a date in the early years of
Constantine’s reign, the time of the regency in fact, 913–919, before the
period of power-sharing with Romanos Lekapenos and his sons. If this is so,
then it is conceivable that, despite the grammatical issues with the verses, the
four lawful rulers mentioned in lines 22–26 might refer to Constantine VII,
his mother, Zoe Karbonopsina, and her two key supporters and members of
the regency council, Leo Phokas and Constantine the Parakoimomenos,
placing the poem into the period 914–919. This might also account for the
frequent references to Constantine’s VII’s father, husband of the regent Zoe.
A further appealing possibility is that the allusion to four emperors refers to
Constantine VII, his wife Helena, his son and co-emperor, Romanos II and
his wife, Bertha-Eudokia, thus allowing the poem in this revised form, with
the interpolation, to date to the early years of Constantine VII’s sole reign.
This would also explain why the reference was made once only and why
Constantine then features as the only emperor of significance.15 Alexander
Kazhdan has raised another possibility for dating, suggesting that the mention
of the statue of Justinian repelling Medes, Persians, Hagarenes and all
barbarian tribes (lines 368–369) was a reference to Romanos Lekapenos
making peace with Bulgaria in 927, for Constantine’s barbarian threats were
all located on the eastern border of the empire.16 This last seems to me
unconvincing; I find the number of references to Constantine as sole emperor
suggestive of a period of sole rule, though whether at the start or the end of
his reign is another matter.
This is because the issue of date is further complicated by the probability
that the poem that survives to us, preserved only in one fifteenth-century
manuscript, is, as outlined above by Ioannis Vassis, unlikely to have been
written as a single coherent work all at the same time. It is an unfinished or
an incomplete text, breaking off abruptly in the course of a lament made by
the Virgin at the foot of the cross. It is also contradictory and inconsistent.
There are at least two beginnings, in lines 1–18 and 423–436; there is the
promise of an account of Hagia Sophia, which is not fulfilled; there is a
certain amount of repetition, for example in the account of the statue of
Justinian (lines 42–50 and 364–374), and also in words and phrases (such as
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lines 420 and 431 ). The manuscript seems to preserve two separate poems,
the account of the monuments of the city and the account of the church of the
Holy Apostles, and evidence that someone, perhaps Constantine, perhaps a
later editor, has attempted to weld them together, topping and tailing them
with passages hailing the emperor.17 The 981 lines can be seen to break down
as follows:
Lines 1–18 consist of a dedication to the emperor, Constantine VII, who
had commissioned the work. The initial letter of each line forms an
acrostic of the author’s name and his title.
Lines 19–254 form an account of monuments and statues in
Constantinople: seven of these monuments are highlighted as ‘wonders’,
though more than seven are described. Speck saw a lacuna here where
he suggested that a passage about statues in Constantinople had dropped
out.18
Lines 255–284 are a transitional passage, ending the section on
monuments and moving into a description of the churches of Hagia
Sophia and the Holy Apostles.
Lines 285–320 form another transitional passage addressing Constantine
VII. It does not necessarily form an introduction to the account of the
churches for, in fact, it refers simply to moving on from the account of
the things which the ‘gold-gleaming city’ bears within itself (lines 318–
320). Lines 321–422 form a third transition (and indeed, line 321 may
continue straight on from 320) which represents a proem to the account
of the Holy Apostles.
Lines 423–424 consist of a verse title and second epigram, in which the
ekphrasis of the church of the Holy Apostles is again dedicated to
Constantine Porphyrogennetos.
Lines 425–981 make up the account of the church of the Holy Apostles.
Here, Constantine talks about its history, its architecture and its
decoration, with a focus on seven wonders, seven scenes from the life of
Christ (lines 751–981), though, again, as with the monuments of
Constantinople, more than seven scenes are described.
Exactly how these sections relate, and when they were written, is a matter of
some debate. Speck suggested that the text in the Athos manuscript
represents a posthumous edition of the poem produced on the basis of various
poetic fragments written by Constantine and put together by a later
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editor.19Lauxtermann, disliking the idea of a posthumous editor, proposed
that the original part of the account of the church of the Holy Apostles, which
he dated to the early part of the reign of Constantine VII, consisted of lines
1–18, 285–422, 423–424 and 425–981, and the missing lines after 981.20 He
argued that the original poem on the Holy Apostles had two parts. Lines 425–
981 were the written poem itself, with a metrical heading (lines 423–424).
Lines 1–18 and 285–422, however, formed an encomiastic speech made by
Constantine when he presented the poem to the emperor: 1–18 made up the
dedication and 285–422 the encomium.21 In this reading, the account of the
monuments of the city (lines 19–254) is a separate poem, though one also
composed before 931. It might also be the case that the header to this section,
between lines 18 and 19, is a later addition to the text: the use of the word
μερική, ‘partial’, reads more like an editorial comment. In contrast to Speck’s
theory of a compilation text, a scribe putting together a dossier from various
drafts and trying, unsuccessfully, to make sense of the whole, Lauxtermann
suggested that Constantine of Rhodes himself, at some point between 931
and 944, decided to integrate the two accounts into one, putting in the
passage referring to Romanos and his sons, and also perhaps adding in a third
description, now lost, of Hagia Sophia (hinted at in lines 268–273 and 282–
283). This revision was never completed.
In support, Lauxtermann argued that evidence survives showing that
Constantine was an occasional reviser of his own texts. He cited a passage in
Kedrenos’s twelfth-century History where the author quotes a patriographic
source which had itself derived material from John Lydos, Malchos, assorted
unidentified patriographic texts and, crucially, Constantine of Rhodes’s
account of the monuments of Constantinople.22 That Kedrenos’s passage
owed much to Constantine has long been recognised, but Lauxtermann
followed Theodore Preger in arguing that what Kedrenos used was a different
text of Constantine’s on the monuments of the city to that which we have
now.23 Both Preger and Lauxtermann cited the double change of verb in the
recording of the epigram supposedly on the statue of Constantine the Great
on the Porphyry Column as evidence of Constantine’s editorial practice.
Indeed, Lauxtermann suggests that there were at least three different copies
of Constantine’s text on the monuments of the city in existence: the original;
the one revised by Constantine; the one in the Athos manuscript. These, in his
view, represent the original text composed for the young emperor
Constantine VII; the revised version used by the patriographic source which
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was itself used by Kedrenos; and the updated version of 931–944 which was
never officially published.
Lauxtermann’s view has considerable merit in explaining the discrepancies
between version of the text and in offering plausible contexts for these
discrepancies and alterations, as well as for the differences in referring to
emperors. The poem as it survives displays elements of coherence. The
numbers four and seven are central motifs in both parts; indeed, the passage
about the ‘four emperors’ serves to introduce the significant number four into
the city section of the poem. Images are repeated in both sections: columns
are described through the image of giants in the context both of the columns
of the Senate House (line 113) and of the columns of the Holy Apostles (line
617); Constantine’s neologism, σφαιροσύνθετος (‘dome-fashioned’) is used
of the roofed porticoes of the city (line 32) and of the domed roof of the
church (lines 503, 610). The poem on the wonders of Constantinople and the
church of the Holy Apostles as preserved in the Athos manuscript should be
understood as being an assortment of related verses rather than a complete
and polished poem. There may also, in its slightly repetitive nature, be an
element of the oral version of the poem present in this text, an issue to which
I shall return.
Scholars have tended to be sharply critical of Constantine’s poem. The
early editors were restrained in their praise of it.24 Glanville Downey, who
was prepared to see Constantine as presenting an original point of view,
described his style as ‘artificial and frequently involved’.25 Alan Cameron
described the poem as ‘dreary but not unimportant’.26 Alexander Kazhdan
said that although the work is written in iambics, readers should not confuse
metrical composition with poetry.27 He suggested that there was no personal
emotional attitude on the part of Constantine to the objects he described. The
Annunciation, for example, is devoid of any reflection or association, let
alone emotion; it is dry and matter-of-fact in contrast to, for example, the
‘passionate’ account of the patriarch Germanos in his homily On the
Annunciation.28 For Kazhdan, the poem was best seen as the work of an
intellectual paying tribute to historicism. As poetry, he claimed,
Constantine’s writing was artificial, patchy, amateur and incoherent, full of
unnecessary repetitions, composite words, neologisms and non-classical
adjectives, all elements worthy only of criticism.29 The poem was written
with an ‘abstract “objectivism”’, apparent not only in the ‘coldness’ of
Constantine’s imagery but also in his attention to architectural volumes and
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arithmetical figures, in his itemised delineation of the marbles of the church,
and in his abstract similes.30
It is apparent that, for Kazhdan at least, the distinction between poetry and
metrical composition was the presence of emotion. But, as Marc
Lauxtermann has said, we need to understand Byzantine poetry in its own
contexts and definitions, not ours.31 Here, the question of ‘emotion’ is very
different. Elizabeth Jeffreys has made it clear that emotion was not an
essential part of Byzantine poetry.32 Rather, the process of composing
involved getting words into the right metrical patterns, patterns inherited
from Classical authors. The structure of the verse was critical in determining
what a poem said and how it said it: the choice of verse-type affected the
syntax, word order, vocabulary, all the expressive forms of verbal
communication. There were expectations of special morphological forms or
particular elements of vocabulary suitable for level of discourse; certain
forms were metrically useful, only used in metrical contexts and avoided in
prose. Significantly, the structure of Byzantine poetry was affected by
linguistic shifts: Greek moved from syllable length to syllable stress. Where
pattern forms in Classical Greek consisted of long and short syllables,
increasingly these lengths no longer formed part of the language of daily life.
Accent metres were modified but metrics and the writing of poetry was a
technique whose rules were acquired laboriously. As a result, writing by
these rules was increasingly seen as a peak of artistic achievement and an
expertise in formal language and its use was a critical skill for high-level
officials and clerics. In this context, it is unsurprising that Constantine chose
to write poetry and it is unfair to criticise that poetry for a perceived lack of
emotion. The frequent references throughout the text to his composition in
iambs (lines 5, 390, 407) perhaps underline Constantine’s pride in his own
achievement in this long poem.
Furthermore, in understanding Byzantine poetry in its own context, we
need especially to understand its relationship to manuscript copies. As
Lauxtermann has pointed out, most Byzantine poems are found in only a
handful of manuscripts.33 Those more widely preserved seem to be poems
where the subject-matter appeared to have a wider significance, one which
was very often religious. What was copied and recopied was not based on
poetic quality but on what interested or was relevant to later generations.34
That there might once have been three or more manuscript versions of
Constantine’s poem suggests that it was a piece thought worth copying. But it
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needs to be remembered that the text of Constantine’s poem that survives is
fifteenth century and clearly a copy at some distance from the temporal life of
the poem, though at what remove from the tenth century it is impossible to
say. Its fifteenth-century context was as part of a collection of other texts
including orations by Church Fathers, commentaries by the ninth–tenth
century writer Niketas David the Paphlagonian and some anonymous iambic
canons and verse lives, and it is not clear how it fits with these texts.35
Manuscripts give a distorted image of Byzantine poetry: they represent the
poem in its second-hand version, or even further down the line from the
original composition, a particularly acute issue in the context of
Constantine’s poem.36 Poems were, by and large, composed for oral delivery;
their appearance as written texts is, usually, a record after their delivery to an
audience (and in no way reflects their success or failure with that audience).
Thus the original manuscript must have been the author’s own working copy;
how widely that might then be copied, by whom and for whom is a matter for
conjecture. Lauxtermann’s view is that there were a very restricted number of
copies and thus a limited audience for written poetry.37 There is a paradox
therefore at the heart of Byzantine poetry: poems had, we assume, potentially
large audiences of listeners but a selected small public of readers. In the case
of Constantine’s poem, or poems, no knowledge of their delivery survives.
There is no evidence of their being composed for a specific event (as was the
case, for example, with Paul the Silentiary’s sixth-century poem on Hagia
Sophia) nor for an audience beyond that of Constantine VII, and possibly
Romanos Lekapenos and his family. Although Lauxtermann has isolated
elements of an encomiastic speech within the text (lines 1–18 and 285–422)38
as it survives, that does not prove that the poem was ever delivered. The text
as we have it raises other issues over delivery: how was the poem delivered?
Byzantine poetry, dependent on rhythm, came to life when spoken aloud and
Byzantium was a culture in which reading aloud appears to have been the
norm. So was it declaimed? Read? Even sung? Does the amount of repetition,
especially of key words and phrases (phrases: γῆς πέδον in lines 496, 558,
588, 874; ‘Constantine scion of the purple’ at 1, 27 and 393 and ‘son of the
most famous Leo’ at 278, 419; whole lines: 564, 595, 606 are the same; 209
and 240, 930 and 936 are very similar; 431 and 433 echo 420 and 422),
simply indicate unfinished business and the putting together of different
drafts by an editor, whether Constantine or another? Or does it relate to the
poem’s incarnation as an oral text, one potentially delivered from memory
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with repeated phrases and lines helping the speaker to remember where he
was going and filling the metre?
If little can be said of the delivery of the poem, what can be said of its
patronage and context? Throughout the whole text as it survives, Constantine
of Rhodes claims that the poem was the commission of Constantine VII. In
lines 8–9, the poet says that he was ordered to write; at line 12 that he
brought ‘service unbidden’; at lines 277 and 387 that he wrote at the ‘urging’
and ‘order’ of the emperor; but at lines 426–428 that he, a devoted servant of
Leo VI, the emperor’s father, ‘wove’ and ‘gave’ the poem to Constantine VII.
Effectively, therefore, Constantine Rhodios establishes Constantine
Porphyrogennetos as his patron. What this actually meant is unclear. Was
Rhodios commanded or was the poem a ‘gift’? Did the poet expect payment
or honours in return? Marc Lauxtermann has argued that there is no evidence
to suggest that Byzantine poets between the seventh and eleventh centuries
expected to make money from their work, in contrast to poets writing in the
twelfth century.39 Certainly, in Constantine’s poem, there are none of the
explicit expressions of poverty and begging for support that are found in the
works of poets such as Prodromos.40 Nevertheless, given what is known
about poetry in tenth-century Byzantium, was it the case that poets composed
pieces in hope rather than expectation? What seems more likely is a situation
akin to that of Ming China where poets, as educated men, did not ask for
money but did expect gifts.41 Further, although the emperor Constantine
appears in the poem as its patron, questions of date again suggest that this
needs nuancing. If any part belongs to Constantine VII’s early years, that
raises the question of whether the emperor was making an early start to his
career as a literary patron, as the poet suggests (lines 9–10; 387, for example)
or whether, in this the period of his minority, it was a commission on the part
of his regency. In describing Constantine VII as a ‘compassionate lord’, a
‘champion of those wearied in their labours’ (lines 17–18), is Rhodios talking
of an established emperor with a record of patronage or is he expressing a
pious trope? Ioannis Vassis rightly notes that the second dedicatory epigram
(lines 423–436) is very different in tone, ending with a prayer addressed to
the Apostles, to protect the emperor from all danger and from the threats of
unnamed ‘wretched’ enemies. He suggests that this implies that the two
epigrams were written under different circumstances and at different times.42
If the work or any part of it does belong to the later years, then it leaves open
the relationship between the poet and the Lekapenoi.
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What the context for the composition of the poem might have been is
unknown. Downey favoured the dating 931–944, the reign of the four
emperors, as he felt this meant that the poem fitted with the theme of
Constantine VII’s devotion to the church of the Holy Apostles.43 The
emphasis on a later date, even one beyond the rule of four emperors, certainly
fits with what is known of Constantine VII’s work in relation to the church.
He wrote an oration for delivery at the festival of the translation of the body
of John Chrysostom – it is assumed for the 500th anniversary in 938 – and
another one for the annual commemoration of Gregory of Nazianzos at the
church, and he also constructed a shrine for St Theophano within the
church.44 However, although it does describe relics within the church, the
poem as we have it does not mention Chrysostom or Gregory, which might
be taken as implying that it pre-dated Constantine VII’s activities with these
saints.
The church itself was a site of importance to the Macedonian emperors
generally. Michael III and then Basil I had begun, after a period of over 300
years, to use Constantine the Great’s mausoleum at the church as an imperial
mausoleum again.45 The Life of Basil, written in the reign of Constantine VII,
claimed that Basil had carried out significant restoration works on the
church.46 Leo VI wrote a homily around the translation of the body of St John
Chrysostom to the church and may himself have carried out restorations of
the building.47 In this broader context, dating the poem to the early years of
Constantine’s reign, to the regency of his mother, in fact, might indicate a
commission celebrating the Macedonian imperial past and underlining the
legitimacy of Constantine VII.
A further question is how far locating a context for the work in relation to
the account of the Holy Apostles ignores the first half of the text, the account
of the monuments of the city. What might have been the reason for a poem
on this topic? Ought it, in fact, to be decoupled totally from the section on the
Holy Apostles and seen as originally having been a separate poem for a
different set of circumstances? What were the circumstances that might have
led to the poet (if it was he) putting the two sections together? The section on
the monuments of Constantinople can be seen to fit into a patriographic and
even cataloguing tradition, said to be a feature of the later reign of
Constantine VII, but the text, as I will discuss later, in its emphasis on
imperial figures and imperial legitimacy, might also have been composed in
support of a young, vulnerable emperor and his regents.
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If then the specific context of the poem is lost to us, what of its wider
cultural context? In its subject matter and form, the poem as a whole fits in
well with literary activities in both the ninth and tenth centuries. In its
concern with the monuments of Constantinople, it shares an interest with
texts such as the tenth-century Patria. Rhodios’s categorising and listing of
monuments and mosaics might appear as part of the codification and
encyclopaedism of the period, the defining of order and collecting of the
heritage of the pagan and Christian pasts apparent in the literary work of both
Leo VI and Constantine VII.48 Both emperors commissioned and participated
in a wide range of literary ventures across a variety of subjects, including
theology and history, court ceremony, foreign policy, law codes and
collections of military, agricultural and even veterinary works.49 Constantine
VII is usually regarded as most engaged in his antiquarian interests and
compilations between 920 and 945, and scholars such as Downey have taken
this as an additional reason for dating Rhodios’s poem to the reign of the four
emperors.50 However, an imperial interest in poetry is apparent in Leo VI’s
own literary compositions and it was towards the end of Leo VI’s reign and
the start of Constantine VII’s that Leo Choirosphaktes was active in
composing anacreontic verses for both emperors, including a poem on a
secular building that also formed a commentary on the court environment.51
The classicism of Constantine of Rhodes’s poem matches with the interest in
the classical past, especially in the literary styles and language of the
perceived classical past, among members of the educated elite in both the
ninth and tenth centuries.52 Rhodios, who was active as an author from at
least 908 (the libel on behalf of Samonas) to a point after 944 (the
compilation of the Palatine Anthology), could, in theory, have found an
appropriate context for the composition of his poem or poems at almost any
point in this period.
The Poem
The style and language of the poem seem typical of much tenth-century
Byzantine writing.53 Although Kazhdan complained that Constantine’s
writing was artificial, patchy, amateur and incoherent, full of unnecessary
repetitions, composite words, neologisms and non-classical adjectives, this
seems unduly harsh. The repetitive elements of the poem might be better
Notes
1 Downey, ‘Constantine the Rhodian’. Also see Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 116–117.
2 AP 15; 15. Discussed by Cameron, Greek Anthology, 301–302.
3 Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 116.
4 Leo Grammaticus, Chronographia, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1842), 284, line 2. See Downey,
‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 212 and n. 4 and Kazhdan, Byzantine Literature, vol. 2, 158, calling for
caution over this identification.
5 Leo Grammaticus, Chronographia, 316, lines 12–13, identifying the man simply as ‘Rhodios’;
Theophanes Continuatus, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1838), 6, 413, lines 1–3, for the full name and the title.
6 Koutrakou, ‘Universal Spirit’. Also see Cameron, Greek Anthology, 303–304 and 306 and
Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’, which also makes the case for Constantine’s constructing himself
as both an insider and an outsider within this poem.
7 Theophanes Continuatus, 413, 1–3.
8 For the attack on Leo Choirosphaktes, see the texts in P. Matranga, Anecdota Graeca (Rome,
1850), vol. 2, 624–625; for Theodore the Paphlagonian see Matranga, Anecdota, vol. 2, 625–632. Also
Cameron, Greek Anthology, 301. For Leo himself, see G. Kolias, Léon Choerosphactès, magistre,
proconsul et patrice (Athens, 1939); P. Magdalino, ‘In Search of the Byzantine Courtier: Leo
Choirosphaktes and Constantine Manasses’, in H. Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to
1204 (Washington, DC, 1997), 141–166; I. Vassis, Leon Magistros Choirosphaktes, Chiliostichos
Theologia. Editio princeps. Einleitung, kritischer Text, Üersetzung, Kommentar, Indices (Berlin-New
York, 2002), 1–18.
9 Cameron, Greek Anthology, 301; Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 116–117.
10 AP 15; 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19, whose dates are uncertain. AP 15; 15 describes Constantine as
‘faithful servant’ of Leo, who is associated in his rule with his son Constantine and Leo’s own brother,
Alexander. It is often assumed to have been written after the death of Leo. Cameron, Greek Anthology,
301–302, however, makes a convincing case for dating this to 908–912.
11 See A. M. Talbot, ‘Old Age in Byzantium’, BZ 77 (1984), 267–278. The average lifespan of the
Macedonian emperors was 59 and of the Komnenians, 61. However A. Kazhdan, ‘Two Notes on
Byzantine Demography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’ ByzF 8 (1982), 115–122, esp. 116,
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makes the case that scholars seem to have lived into their sixties and seventies.
12 By, for example, Reinach in his ‘Commentaire’, 37; Begleri, Chram; Downey, ‘Constantine the
Rhodian’, 214; Cameron, Greek Anthology, 301. Reinach, ‘Commentaire’ also uses AP 15; 15 to
suggest that Constantine wrote this poem as an old man, but see Cameron, Greek Anthology, 301–302.
13 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 265.
14 Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry and ‘Constantine’s City’. As Paul Magdalino, (personal
communication) also pointed out, lines 22–28 are parenthetical to the main construction of the
sentence.
15 Paul Magdalino, pers. comm, suggested this last scenario.
16 Kazhdan, Byzantine Literature, vol. 2, 159.
17 Also see Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
18 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 256.
19 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’.
20 Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
21 Both in Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 40 and Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
22 Kedrenos, Synopsis Historion, 1, 563–567; Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
23 The patriographers used by Kedrenos varied between summarising Constantine’s lines in prose,
between offering a mixture of poetry and prose, and between quoting parts of Constantine’s actual
verse. Preger, who was the first to suggest this model, was also the first to note that the patriographic
author had a different version of Constantine’s poem to the one we have today. On Kedrenos’s use of
Constantine, see the discussion in Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 42; Preger, ‘Review’; Downey,
‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 218, arguing against Preger; C. Mango, M. Vickers and E. D. Francis, ‘The
Palace of Lausus at Constantinople and its Collection of Ancient Statues’, Journal of the History of
Collections 4 (1992), 89–98; Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
24 For example, Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 37, 64.
25 Downey, ‘Constantine the Rhodian’, 220.
26 Cameron, Greek Anthology, 300.
27 Kazhdan, Byzantine Literature, vol. 2, 159.
28 Kazhdan does not specify to which homily he refers.
29 Kazhdan, Byzantine Literature, vol. 2, 161.
30 Kazhdan, Byzantine Literature, vol. 2, 160. Kazhdan oddly suggests that the description was
‘educative’, 159, though why is not clear. As Kazhdan himself points out, calling Constantine VII
‘victorious and wise lord’ seems strange in an educative context.
31 M. Lauxtermann, ‘Byzantine Poetry in Context’, in P. Odorico and P. A. Agapetos (eds), Pour une
‘nouvelle’ histoire de la littérature byzantine: problèmes, méthodes, approches, propositions. Actes du
Colloque international philologique, Nicosie-Chypre, 25–28 mai 2000 (Paris, 2002), 139–151;
Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 20–21; M. Lauxtermann, ‘Byzantine Didactic Poetry and the Question
of Practicality’, in P. Odorico, P. A. Agapetos and M. Hinterberger (eds), ‘Doux remède’: poésie et
poétique à Byzance (Paris, 2009), 37–46. In the context of the following discussion, I wish I had seen
Floris Bernard’s doctoral thesis much sooner: F. Bernard, The beats of the pen. Social context of
reading and writing poetry in eleventh-century Constantinople, Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte.
Vakgroep Latijin en Grieks, Gent, 2010, available on-line at:
https://www.biblio.ugent.be/publication/915696 (Accessed 31st July 2012; with thanks to Foteine
Spingou for the reference).
In terms of subject matter, the opening part of Constantine’s poem (lines 19–
254, together with lines 255–263), describing monuments within the city of
Constantinople, has attracted less attention than the section on the church of
the Holy Apostles. Indeed, whilst Glanville Downey suggested that the
description of the church held an important place in the literary programme of
Constantine VII, he made no comment on the significance of Constantine’s
account of the monuments of Constantinople.1 However, if it is accepted that
Constantine composed his poem for a purpose, or a variety of purposes, then
it is necessary to consider what that might have been.
Constantine’s portrayal of the city has generally been used in an empirical
fashion, quarried for information about both existing and lost monuments and
their locations, and for what it can say about the dating and survival of
monuments. But Byzantine accounts of monuments do not simply record
what is there; they also offer, as Gilbert Dagron recognised, an imaginative
record of how buildings and monuments were perceived and used by their
audiences.2 Like other written sources about monuments, such as Paul the
Silentiary’s sixth-century poem on Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, or the eighth-
century Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai and the tenth-century Patria of
Constantinople, both texts concerned primarily with the topography and
history of the monuments of Constantinople, and even the Life of Basili
account of Basil Is building work in Constantinople, Constantine’s account is
not a straightforward narrative.3 In focusing his account on monuments and
employing the technique of ekphrasis, Constantine did not write with the
intention ofprovidingan accurate description of the buildings and monuments
of Constantinople. Rather, he aimed to bring them to life in the mind’s eye of
his audience and to show his audience their deeper significance.
The text offers a picture of tenth-century Constantinople in which
seemingly random elements, seven monuments selected by the author as
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‘wonders’, form part of a larger whole, a poem written for Emperor
Constantine VII. Although the poem is not entirely coherent, there is a level
of consistency in the themes treated by the poet. Constantine of Rhodes’s
dealings with Constantinople’s architectural past appear fairly specific and
focused, with a core theme, that of imperial elements within the city’s
monuments. He wrote for an imperial audience and therefore with an imperial
agenda and his poem offers a ‘Constantinople imaginaire’ to its audience,
where, in the choice of monuments and of historical and imperial references
within the poem, the poet created a very specific history for the city, a history
in which certain long-ago emperors were key figures.4 Throughout the poem,
Constantine deliberately employed this particular historical past to illuminate
the contemporary present, for above all, this section of the poem, more than
the section on the Holy Apostles, reflects imperial values and attitudes
present in other works of the reign of Constantine VII.
A City of Emperors
The claim that they themselves maintained the glories and traditions of
these great past rulers was one regularly invoked by the Macedonian
emperors and those around them. Basil I was hailed as the new Constantine;
he named his eldest son and heir Constantine and on the death of that son, he
revived the tradition of imperial burial in the mausoleum of Constantine the
Great in the Holy Apostles.63 Basil was also renowned for rebuilding
churches founded by his imperial predecessors, above all by Constantine and
Justinian, as well as for associating himself with a variety of other emperors
including Theodosios I.64 His successor, Leo VI, took a high view of the
imperial office, appearing to regard the Old Testament king David as his
equal, and the gift of royalty as closely connected with that of priesthood.65
Leo also portrayed himself as the successor to Justinian in, for example, his
reworking of Justinian’s legal code, where he claimed to take over the roles
of that emperor and even to surpass him. In turn, his son, Constantine VII,
promoted the legacy of Constantine I still further, emphasising the use of the
cross as a symbol and even going so far, in the Life of Basil, as to suggest that
Constantine’s City
It is not difficult to see how, if completed or made public, this part of
Constantine’s poem relates to imperial themes important in the tenth century.
Although all seven of the wonders came from the distant past, as did the
sculptures, Constantine of Rhodes made them relevant to his tenth-century
audience. The image of Constantinople given by Rhodios is of an imperial
city filled with imposing imperial monuments keeping the memory of the
great Christian emperors of the past fresh in the tenth-century present.
Constantine’s city was strong, powerful, mistress of the world, inheritor of
Rome and the inhabited world; the monuments Constantine described were
an adornment to the city and a wonder to strangers. But it was also the city of
Emperor Constantine VII, whether at the start of his reign, when the poet may
have wished to show the young, questionably legitimate heir of Leo as
rightful successor to his father and to the great imperial champions of the
past, or later, when Constantine VII may have wished to reclaim his city from
the usurper, Romanos Lekapenos.80 The seven wonders Rhodios chose to
describe evoked past Christian hero-emperors in the context of tenth-century
Notes
1 Downey, ‘The Builder of the Original Church’, 68.
2 Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire.
3 Paul the Silentiary: ed. Friedländer, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentarius and partial
translation in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 80–96; Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai: eds. A. M.
Cameron andj. Herrin, Constantinople in the Early Eighth Century: the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai
(Leiden, 1984); the Patria: ed. Preger, Scriptores Originum; Life of Basil, Theophanes Continuatus,
book 5 and translation of chs. 78–90 in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 192–199.
4 Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire, esp. 54–60. On these themes more widely, see P. Magdalino,
‘The Distance of the Past in Early Medieval Byzantium’, in Ideologie e pratiche del reimpiego
nell’Alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto,
1999), 115–146. On the relationship of the present, past and future, see P. Magdalino, ‘The History of
the Future and its Uses: Prophecy, Policy and Propaganda’, in R. Beaton and C. Roueché (eds), The
Making of Byzantine History (Aldershot, 1993), 1–34. For a brief history of medieval Constantinople,
see Magdalino, Constantinople medievale and Magdalino, ‘Medieval Constantinople : Built
Environment and Urban Development’, in A. Laiou (ed.), Ih e Economic History ofByzantium, vol. 2
(Washington, DC, 2002), 529–537.
5 As Speck did in ‘Konstantinos von Rhodos’, 249–268.
The final section of the poem is the best-known and most-often discussed
part of Constantine’s work. Indeed lines 437–981, which form the
‘description’ of the church of the Holy Apostles, have often been considered
as if they formed a completely separate piece of work to the rest of the poem.
This is not for the reasons that relate to the literary form of the work, but
because the text appears to offer the possibility of reconstructing the plan,
appearance and interior decoration of the church.
This chapter will look at the debates concerning the reconstruction of the
church but its focus will lie with what Constantine actually says and with a
consideration of what this part of the poem might have been intended to
achieve. I will suggest that the poem was not written as a ‘description’ of the
church but that, like the section on columns and statues, it had particular foci
and functions and that it is these that colour Constantine’s account of the
church, its architecture and its mosaics.
Byzantine written sources make it clear that the church of the Holy Apostles,
the burial place of emperors, was one of the most important churches in
Constantinople after Hagia Sophia, and a building that seems to have served
as a model for other churches dedicated to the Apostles, both Byzantine and
Western.1 However, the church was destroyed after the conquest of the city
by the Ottomans in 1453; almost nothing remains of it and even its site is
uncertain.2 As a result, Constantine’s poem sits alongside Prokopios’s sixth-
century report of Justinian’s rebuilding of the church and the long twelfth-
century prose description of Nikolaos Mesarites, together with sundry briefer
references in a variety of Byzantine textual sources, as the only evidence for
the appearance of the building.3
Otto Demus, in the context of the mosaic decoration of the church and its
similarities with San Marco, considered the internal architectural form of the
building in more detail. He raised the question of whether the main cross-
shaped space was enclosed by tympana-shaped fenestrated walls that rose
above and continued the two-storeyed arcades, as happens in the side walls of
Hagia Sophia, or whether this space extended to the outer walls with the
upper arcades free-standing and forming a sort of screen, as is the case in San
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Marco.22 Wulff, Soteriou and later Wulzinger interpreted Constantine’s lines
720–724, describing the columns supporting the roof of the colonnade and
the rose-coloured columns above them, as referring specifically to the vaults
of the cross arms, and thus as implying the first model.23 Demus, based on
arguments made by Paul Underwood, argued that these lines refer to the
arcades of the ground floor carrying the vaults of the aisles, that the rose-
coloured columns were not described as supporting anything and therefore
that the upper colonnade was only a sort of screen. In fact, Constantine is not
at all specific and his account leaves it open. More generally, drawing
arguments from silence assumes that the author must have put in every last
detail and that seems to me a very dubious proposition, especially in a
Byzantine text.
Richard Krautheimer built on this earlier work to present what has been
perhaps the most influential version of the architectural history of the
church.24 Krautheimer believed that the church described by Constantine of
Rhodes was that built by Justinian. However, he argued that the differences
in the accounts of Constantine and Mesarites, notably over the fenestration or
lack of in the domes, indicated a rebuilding of the church between 940 (his
dating of Constantine’s poem) and 989 (the illumination of the Menologion
of Basil II, Vat. Gr. 1613). It was at this time that the four unfenestrated
drums of the four domes described by Prokopios and, Krautheimer claimed,
by Constantine of Rhodes, were converted into the windowed drums depicted
in the image of a five-domed church in the Menologion and recorded by
Mesarites. Krautheimer proposed that three scenes in the Menologion of Basil
II showed the Holy Apostles. These images show the martyrdom of Timothy
and the translation of his relics (fol. 341r), the reception of the relics of John
Chrysostom (fol. 353r), and the burial of St Luke (fol. 121r). As the building
depicted in each is shown with one tall windowed dome and four low,
fenestrated domes, it must be the Holy Apostles as that church was so
intimately connected with the relics of these three saints. Krautheimer also
maintained that the Holy Apostles was the building depicted in the two
twelfth-century manuscripts of the Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos.25 In
both of these illuminations, a five-domed structure is shown, with the central
dome higher than those around it; all five domes appear to have windows.26
On the basis of these architectural features, the building must again be the
Holy Apostles; as for other architectural features that did not match or were
not present, these were shifted, as was conventional practice, to fit the
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composition. Finally, Krautheimer maintained that the churches of St John at
Ephesos and San Marco, in particular the latter, indicate both the ground plan
of the Holy Apostles and its superstructure. San Marco has a cross plan, bays,
colonnaded aisles and five domes, all lit with large windows. All of this made
it clear to Krautheimer that the unwindowed domes of the Holy Apostles
described by Prokopios and Constantine had been modified by the time
Mesarites came to describe the church and that this modification fell into the
late tenth century.
However, Ann Wharton Epstein highlighted the problems inherent in
Krautheimer’s hypothetical period of reconstruction.27 Although she agreed
with Krautheimer that both Prokopios and Constantine of Rhodes appeared to
mention the central dome as raised and having windows in the drum, she
argued, against Krautheimer’s reading, that Mesarites’ account did not make
it at all clear whether the central dome was raised and lit or not.
Consequently, she suggested that there was no Byzantine textual evidence for
the architectural changes that Krautheimer proposed. Indeed, it is worth
noting that Constantine’s account says nothing about the fenestration of the
church, though a lack of references to windows throughout the poem is
unlikely to mean that the Holy Apostles was a windowless building.
Epstein noted that in all three Menologion illuminations, one or more of
the drums do not have windows, arguing that this raises problems in
identifying the building as the Holy Apostles, if only because actually, we
have no idea whether or not the four lesser domes were fenestrated. She also
pointed out that it was a commonplace within manuscript studies that
manuscripts were themselves copied from earlier models, and that
consequently, the illuminators of both the Menologion and the Homilies need
not have been drawing from life. As Krautheimer himself had said, it is not
the case in Byzantine illuminated manuscripts that depictions of buildings
were ever architecturally precise and accurate: the Byzantine painter ‘does
not represent a building analytically… [H]e selects…a few features he
considers essential in the structure to be represented and he reshuffles them
so as to fit narrative and composition’.28 Quite how the scholar identifies
those features and that reorganisation appears to be a matter of speculation.
The domes and the windows in the manuscripts in question might be essential
features; they might also represent an architectural restructuring. The building
in the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts might be a representation of the Holy
Apostles without being an accurate depiction of the church. It might even be
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an anonymous composite building featuring symbolic architecture, an
architectural fantasia.
Epstein also questioned what it might have meant in the Middle Ages to
describe one building as ‘modelled’ on another: how closely did a building
need to follow the original paradigm still to be perceived as derived from it?
She argued that the fact that San Marco possessed domes on windowed
drums does not prove that the Holy Apostles also shared this feature; the
sharing of five domes might have been enough for the two buildings to be
seen as like. Indeed, Epstein suggested that other Byzantine churches might
have been modelled on the Holy Apostles, including the cathedral of San
Sabino in Canosa with its five windowless domes. This church is dated to the
mid-eleventh century: before San Marco but after Krautheimer’s suggested
date of reconstruction of the Holy Apostles.
In some ways, the use of St John at Ephesos (Figure 4.2) and San Marco in
Venice (Figure 4.3) in reconstructions of the Holy Apostles is misleading.29
The former comparison is relevant because of Prokopios’s claim that the
church of St John at Ephesos was built on the model of the Apostles, but
exactly how close a model is uncertain. It is said that excavations at Ephesos
confirm the similarities between the two churches, though St Johnhas six
domes and the similarities often appear to be based on the way in which the
Holy Apostles is reconstructed.30 The comparison between San Marco and
the Holy Apostles is also problematic. The first surviving explicit reference to
the claim is late in the history of San Marco: an early twelfth-century
Venetian source.31 Krautheimer and Demus both argued that the original
founders of San Marco in the ninth century had the plan of the Holy Apostles
in mind, though Demus also highlighted ‘differences’ between the two
buildings.32 Megaw added further support to the idea that it was the ninth-
century San Marco that derived from the Holy Apostles, arguing that, in
political terms, the ninth century was a better time than the eleventh for the
Venetians to borrow Byzantine models.33 If this is so, since it is very unclear
both what the original ninth-century church of San Marco looked like and
how far the current eleventh-century church is based on that church, it would
appear that comparisons between two largely lost buildings in a bid to
establish the architectural form of both are somewhat optimistic.34 Further, as
Krautheimer himself pointed out, for a medieval church to be described as a
‘copy’ it needed to share only a very few features of its original, making its
use to reconstruct that original problematic. Megaw also noted that the
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tradition that an Apostle’s church should be cruciform had been current in
Italy since the time of Ambrose in the fourth century and it is conceivable
that San Marco owed its plan in reality as much to Italian church design as to
Byzantine. San Marco is a five-domed basilica church; the Holy Apostles
was a five-domed church. The comparison may go no further than that and it
may well be that it was a claim founded as much on Venice’s political
aspirations in the twelfth century and the superficial similarities between the
two buildings as it was on detailed architectural intention, planning and
knowledge.
Further, in response to Krautheimer’s suggestion of aperiod of
reconstruction between 940 and 989, it needs to be noted that 940 as the date
of Constantine’s poem is, as discussed elsewhere in this book, contentious.
However, these debates about the Holy Apostles demonstrate how attitudes to
Byzantine written sources have changed. Much of the argument has hung on
almost implicit assumptions about which source to credit as the most
veracious and accurate and which author to see as the least trustworthy. For
Krautheimer, Prokopios was essentially an honest narrator and therefore his
account was to be accepted in every detail; Mesarites was similarly reliable.
In contrast, he appears to have placed less faith in Constantine. Current trends
are inclined towards an acceptance that Byzantine written texts are never
simply descriptive in their accounts of art and architecture, that what an
author records is always deliberately chosen for a purpose.35 Since
Krautheimer wrote, a great deal of work has been done in establishing the
political, propaganda and literary elements present in Prokopios’s writings,
including the Buildings, revealing it to be a more complex and potentially
less ‘accurate’ text than previously believed.36 In considering Prokopios’s
account of the Holy Apostles, for example, it is worth reflecting on its
location within the Buildings. It is not described immediately after Hagia
Sophia, but comes after Hagia Eirene and the churches dedicated to the
Mother of God, St Anne, St Zoe, the Archangel Michael, Sts Peter and Paul
and Sts Sergios and Bakchos, in other words, some way down the pecking
order. How well Prokopios knew the church is unknown and there is no
reason to suppose that he offered an accurate record, as we would understand
that term, as opposed to a general sense of Justinian’s work. Just as images
cannot be seen as objective depictions, so too texts display levels of
subjectivity.
It is true to say that the use of Constantine by those seeking to reconstruct the
Holy Apostles has been influenced by agenda beyond an interest in his
account for its own sake or a consideration of what Rhodios’s own motives
might have been. What then of Constantine’s account?
Although it is inevitable that written texts are used to understand more
about buildings and monuments, we need also to be very conscious that this
was not their primary purpose. Constantine of Rhodes’s poem is not a work
that set out to record what the church of the Holy Apostles looked like for the
benefit of future audiences who might wish to reconstruct the building. To
seek to assess Constantine’s ‘accuracy’ in comparison to that of Prokopios or
Mesarites is to overlook the roles of the three texts as three diverse literary
works with different functions. As already discussed, Constantine’s text must
have started life as a poem for oral delivery to an audience already familiar,
to varying extents, with the building. As it survives, as a written text, it
engages with the rules and conventions of Byzantine poetic and rhetorical
composition in order to talk about a fascinatingly complex subject, a church,
laden with significance in both form and function. Ekphraseis were not
written to give an objective description of the subject under discussion.
Rather, ekphrasis, as a rhetorical technique, served to bring to its audience a
vivid depiction of whatever was under consideration, and to emphasise
perceptual understanding and spiritual realities.37 Its audience did not expect
architectural exactitude and detail; instead, the conventions of Byzantine
literature led them to anticipate a vivid rendition of the church that
highlighted certain features and omitted others for the purposes of the poem
and its aims, a text that selected, ordered andpresented material in a deliberate
way to offer a commentary on and around the building, often for an audience
that knew that building. Such portrayals were not objective descriptions of
the edifice but representations of it. In seeking to create a verbal equivalent to
the church and to convey something of its spiritual significance,
Constantine’s composition is some way from the formal account of what was
there that scholars have wished for. Instead, it offers a vivid amplification of
the church and its significance.
Even the most impartial account of a building or object will involve the
picking out of some features and the omitting of others. In choosing those
details, authors will inevitably impose a linear unfolding and ordering of
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material on their audiences.38 Any account of a building involves translating
material that is perceived simultaneously by the viewer into a sequential
account; this influences the structure of the narrative. In the case of Paul the
Silentiary’s account of Hagia Sophia, Ruth Macrides and Paul Magdalino
have shown that the poem progresses through the church in a variety of ways,
west to east, up and down.39 Similarly, in the homilies by Photios on the
Pharos church, and Leo VI on the church of Stylianos Zaoutzes and the
Kauleas, there is a sense of periegesis, of moving through the building.40
Constantine adapted this model of progression but also continually disrupted
it.
Constantine opened his account from a distance and moved inwards. He
began by locating the church within the city: on the fourth hill of the city, the
highest and most prominent of the hills, and in the middle of the city (lines
437–454), a site planned for it from the beginning of time (lines 440–441). In
fact, the fourth hill was not the highest and, when the church was founded in
the fourth century, it was not in the middle of the city; but this is not the
point. As Christine Angelidi has suggested, Constantine’s emphasis on the
height and location of the church was deliberate.41 On a very basic level, it
highlighted the importance and visibility of the building located on a site
marked out for it by God. Its construction was thus part of the divine plan
from the creation of the world. Angelidi went so far as to suggest that this
created a sense of the church as built on a ‘cosmic mountain’, a part of the
foundations of the world. Further, in a poem heavily concerned with
numerology, in terms of the construction of Constantine’s poem, the church’s
location on the central fourth hill may echo the column with the cross,
located fourth among the city wonders.42 The feeling of the divine nature of
the building was maintained by its bearing the forms of a five-pointed star
and of the cross (lines 458–459, 462); Constantine underlined the
significance of the shape of the cross as Christ’s sceptre and the sign of
mortal salvation (lines 465–471). Its size mattered: the church was the
‘mightiest’ and ‘most visible’, ‘very broad’ (lines 455, 456, 461). In this
opening passage, the church was associated only with God and the Apostles,
not with mere mortals, thus revealing it as a fore-ordained building ‘not made
with hands’, evocative of the buildings of the New Jerusalem, another a city
built on a hill.
From having established the church as a divinely-ordered construction (and
thus also associating its builders with carrying out the will of God),
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Constantine disturbed the progress of his narrative by moving away from the
actual structure to backtrack in time and remind his audience of the original
foundation and interment of relics by Constantius, piously carrying out the
will of God. Rhodios then moved to the great transformation carried out by
the mighty Justinian, the greatest mortal work of all time. However, the
extravagance of the praise both here and in the earlier encomium of Justinian
(lines 375–381) is not picked up in the actual description of the Holy
Apostles, where the design of the building is not attributed to Justinian’s own
genius or special relationship with God, but to the initiative of the architect,
be that Anthemios or Isidore, who consequently appears in a much less
subordinate role than in Prokopios’s or Paul the Silentiary’s descriptions of
Hagia Sophia. This serves to underline the Christian rather than imperial
nature of the church.
The reconstruction of the Holy Apostles into a building that was a
newheaven on earth needed no further detail for Constantine’s audience: the
church, any church, was regarded by the Byzantines as a microcosm of
heaven. Next, moving inside the building, Rhodios told his audience that just
as heaven sparkled with stars, so the ceiling of the Holy Apostles bore its
own constellations, not unnatural scenes of pagan myth but ‘mightier stars’,
the Word of God and his miracles (lines 505–533). This is a statement of
triumphant Orthodoxy. The man-made roof of the church showing the life of
Christ is described as superior to the vault of heaven with its constellations
depicting pagan myths. In theological terms, this reads as an assertion of the
significance of the Incarnation, a key element in Constantine’s account, over
the creation of the natural world. Potentially, did the poem not lack its
conclusion, this passage would occupy a central position in the text,
underlining its importance in establishing the Christian ideology espoused by
the poet.43
At this point, Constantine checked his periegesis once again and changed
direction, promising to return later to the interior. First though, for the sake of
order, it was necessary to describe the form of the church itself. This
deliberate disruption of a linear progression, seemingly allowing and then
restraining his enthusiasm, means Constantine’s account is not a simple
journey into and through the building. The impression of disarray created is
highly appropriate to the subject matter of the ekphrasis, the sense of
confusion and lack of focus the viewer can feel when confronted with an
elaborate building.44 The sense of disorder matches the viewers’ impressions
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on approaching the building, the variety and simultaneity of the visual
experience, seeing architecture and art together; it is also an
acknowledgement that the poet can impose his own order on the church.
Constantine’s disruption of his description at this point led to his invoking
the aid of the Word who taught the Apostles (lines 543–545), a reference
both to Christ and to the Holy Spirit, in mastering the words (a deliberate
pun) to describe the church. Both disruption and invocation are conventional
literary topoi. The former serves to create a sense of the poet delivering a
spontaneous performance rather than a carefully-crafted composition; the
latter makes a claim both to modesty and to divine inspiration. Constantine is
very explicit that he is neither an architect nor a geometer (lines 541–542).
This disingenuous disclaimer served a double purpose. As discussed earlier,
it was a clever twist on the conventional topos of the author’s inability to
express in words the wonders that he was about to describe, but it also served
to distance Constantine as a literary man and a poet from architects,
craftsmen with whom he would not wish to be associated.
Constantine then approached the plan of the church. Reinach observed that
the section of the poem from line 548 onwards is a deeply obscure piece of
description and that Constantine’s invocation to the Word has been of no
benefit.45 This is certainly true in the context of looking for an objective
description from which the church could be reconstructed; however, in terms
of what Constantine was looking to achieve, it is a little harsh. Part of the
problem is that there is no simple route to follow around a cross-shaped
church: should the poet take his audience west to east and then north to south
or should he work sequentially through the cross-arms? In fact, what
Constantine appears to do is come to a standstill and locate himself in the
centre of the church under the main dome, as he described how the architect
laid out a central cube and then surrounded it with four further cubes (lines
557–561), fixing the form of the cross to east, west, south and north (lines
570–571). Constantine’s description conveys a sense of the church being
built around the fixed, static central point, as time and again he tells his
audience what lies around them on four sides.
Constantine’s original audience would not have needed the ‘facts’ of the
church’s appearance spelt out to them so he presented them with the architect
as geometer, constructing the church around a cube, or square, from multiples
of two and four, wonderfully creating a mystical building of which the
ultimate architect was God the Creator himself.46 In this expression of a plan
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based on cubes and fours, creating a divine form for the church, Constantine
wished, so he said, to articulate the harmony of the building’s composition
(lines 548– 581). Christine Angelidi pointed out the potential significances of
the cube in Byzantium, as, for example, an echo of the square city in the
Book of Revelations, but also as representing balance, stability and
harmony.47 In this context, she argued that the difference in Constantine’s
description with that of Prokopios over the lengthening of the western arm
derived from Constantine’s desire to see the church as square in shape. For
Constantine, the shapes of the building formed reflections of the eternal
heavenly and transient earthly worlds. The square or cube on which the
church was founded symbolised the earth and the four elements (as
Constantine made clear to his audience in lines 444–445) while the circles or
spheres with which it was roofed denoted the heavenly (line 505, a heaven
furnished with its own stars; lines 631–632, heaven furnishing the domes).48
This section of the piece is not meant to be an absolute record of how
many piers or vaults or columns there were in the Holy Apostles, though that
may also have been the case. These figures, what Kazhdan criticised as an
attention to architectural volumes and arithmetical figures, served a role of
revealing hidden truths.49 Constantine used numbers, almost invariably even
numbers in multiples of two and four, with particular reference to 12, the
number of the Apostles, to draw out for his audience the significance of the
numbering of those architectural features and the typological role that they
might play in the church. The numbers making up the cube, two and four,
underlined the qualities of stability and harmony suggested by the cube itself.
The number two also invoked the two natures of Christ. Four evoked, among
other things, equality, stability, justice, the elements and the virtues.50
Significantly, from the twos and fours and the cube form, the architect was
enabled to draw out the form of the salvatory cross. Five, the number of
vaults and domes, represented the fundamental form of the church, a ‘five-
composed’ building (for example, line 572), and the number five signified the
uniting of the first female and male numbers, two and three. It could thereby
indicate the universe or the human microcosm, emphasising the church as the
place where the heavenly and earthly worlds met.
The concept of the space of the church as an image of God, of divine space
and a replica of the universe, was a well-known one in Byzantium.51 As
Maximos the Confessor put it in his Mystagogy, the Church is ‘a figure and
image of the entire world composed of visible and invisible essences’; the
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human church reveals the church ‘not of human construction’. In this context,
‘The whole spiritual world seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible
world in symbolic form for those who are capable of seeing this’.52
Germanos’s eighth-century Ecclesiastic History is overt in its treatment of the
building of the church as a symbolic space, ‘the earthly heaven in which the
super-celestial God dwells and walks about’.53 Constantine’s role, as poet,
was to make his audience aware of this spiritual dimension. This
cosmological reading of the poem also has an eschatological dimension, one
that can be related to wider apocalyptic fears in the tenth century, fears found
also in texts such as the Life of Andrew the Fool.54 Although Constantine’s
account is not as explicit in its statements about symbolism as Maximos or
Germanos, his church nevertheless reflects the Byzantine belief that the
beauty of the church reveals the beauty of the world, a divine creation.
As well as divinely-patterned, the church was solid. Constantine
emphasised its firm foundations throughout the poem. The architect fitted the
building together skilfully and wisely (line 582); it was woven and bonded,
and given stable foundations and strong bases lest it fell beneath its own
weight (lines 577– 588). The masonry was ‘well-made’ (line 594) and the
church stood in ‘secure formation’, like generals or giants (lines 614–620)
entwining their fingers. As a description of the vaults, giants interlacing their
fingers with their neighbours is very evocative, adding to the image of size
and solidity that Constantine developed throughout the poem. He was much
concerned with the stability of the building, especially in terms of its
foundations (line 584), fearing lest either the weight of masonry (line 586) or
tremors (lines 683–684, 783–785) bring the church crashing down.
Earthquakes were a very real fear in Constantinople: by the tenth century,
seven days in the liturgical year had been set aside to remind the Byzantines
of their deliverances from earthquakes.55
Having established the church as a mystical yet well-grounded building in
which all elements fitted securely together, Constantine progressed to the
interior fixtures and fittings. He opened with a metaphor of the church
adorned like a bride or a bridal chamber, immediately reminding his audience
that the Christian church was the bride of Christ (lines 644–645). He then
described the marbles of the church, in a passage that, as has often been
remarked, bears a close comparison to Paul the Silentiary’s account of the
marbles of Hagia Sophia, and he did not fail to remind his audience once
more that the architects of the Holy Apostles were the Anthemios or Isidore
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responsible for Hagia Sophia (lines 640; 650–674). Paul’s account of the
marbles is seen as evoking in words the narratives implicit in the stones
themselves and so giving a taste of the expanse and glory of the Byzantine
empire, the extent of the remit of Justinian.56 Since the Holy Apostles was
also Justinian’s creation, the same points are surely valid here, both in the
context of Justinian and also in the context of the tenth-century audience,
suggesting the past glories of Justinian’s Byzantium as a part of the present
glories of the empire. The account of the marbles also lends an aesthetic
quality to Constantine’s description, emphasising the qualities of brightness,
brilliance and polychromacity valued by the Byzantines.57 But the sheer
weight of variety and creation of dazzle helps further to disrupt the linear
narrative and engenders the feeling of confusion felt by the viewer on
entering the church; this is, after all, the point where Constantine’s account
most clearly moves into the building. This sense of dizzying the viewer is
another topos, one used explicitly by Photios, for example, in his tenth
homily, where the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos is said to ‘whirl
around’ the viewer.58 Here, it might be that Constantine strove for that effect,
in order to create a sense of multiple wonder within the Holy Apostles.
Having talked about the marbles, Constantine used the internal columns of
the church to develop further his themes of the building as a divine and
mystic construction. He returned to his bridal metaphor, and to the image of
generals guarding the church, and to number symbolism – 12 and 48,
multiples of two and four – in creating an image of how the columns run
around the whole interior of the church and were used in the galleries.
Constantine also described the sculpture within the church: shoots of vines
bursting with grapes, roses, lilies and fruits. If this is sixth-century decorative
work, then resemblances with sculptural fragments surviving from Anicia
Juliana’s church of St Polyeuktos are immediately apparent, as well as with
sculpture from Hagia Sophia itself.59 But, again, more important than the
‘actual’ appearance is what these images symbolised. Vines and grapes called
to mind Christ the True Vine; roses and lilies suggested the Song of Solomon
and the Beloved subject of that Song, who had a Christian symbolism as
Wisdom.60 That theme was additionally resonant in the context of a poem
offered to Constantine VII, son of Leo the Wise. Most importantly, as
Constantine himself reiterated, all of these aspects proved the church to be
both the Bride of Christ and a heavenly building on earth (line 735).
Throughout the portrayal of the church, the same themes recur: the
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building’s divine nature, supported by God; its stability, designed to last
forever; its magnificence; the deeper spiritual meanings it contains. Piling
detail on detail, Constantine’s language created a sense of movement and
animation, keeping the subject vivid for his audience. In part, this was
achieved moving from outside to in and around the building, in part by
ascribing actions to the architect, in part by describing architectural features
as if they were not static but in motion and in part by ascribing human
qualities to them: the architect stretched and unfolded the church (line 573);
piers and columns strode and extended their right hands into the air and
entwined fingers (lines 618, 619). Variegated effects helped the poet; the list
of the bright colours of the marbles is overwhelming in its detail. The point,
however, was to create an experience transcending human experience,
revealing spiritual mysteries, moving the account from the physical to the
spiritual world. The divinely-founded building was a wonder not simply
because of its architecture but also because of what its architecture
symbolised and evoked for its beholders. These were the elements of the
building that were not immediately visible but that were implicit in the
structure, most obviously through the numbers and shapes that Constantine
described. This was a church built by Justinian and his architects, but it was
laid out by Constantine for the tenth-century audience who now saw it, who
now appreciated the plan and form, the marbles and sculpture, and who now
gained a sense of the glory of the past still in existence, the magnitude of the
empire and its safeguarding by God.
The Mosaics
The final surviving element of the poem is an account of the mosaics of the
church. This, just as with Constantine’s description of the architecture, has
been used both in reconstructing the church – where exactly were they
located? – and in discussing and reconstructing the dating of its decorative
Conclusion
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The Church of the Holy Apostles, as much as Constantine’s Constantinople
in the opening part of the poem, was an elaborate creation by the poet. For all
Byzantines, the idea of church as microcosm of heaven was so much apart of
their perception of these buildings that it could remain implicit and
Constantine’s account is underpinned by this idea. Beginning outside the
building with the image of the fourth hill of Constantinople waiting for the
church since the Creation, Constantine created an image of the church as
foreordained by God. His description of the construction of the building spelt
out its mystical fulfilment, in form (the use of cubes, domes and the cross), in
numbers (multiples of two and four, and by the use of five and seven) and in
images. His microcosm, wondrously put together through the use of human
skill displaying mystical fulfilment, is nevertheless a wondrous building
constructed to the glory of God, the bride of Christ – and an imperial
foundation. Within this magical building, the Christian message is spelt out:
the Incarnation of Christ and his mission to save mankind from death, the
promise of joyful resurrection, perhaps appropriate themes for a church used
as a funeral church for emperors.
_______________
Notes
1 For a full account of the church, gathering together a very wide range of Byzantine sources, though
not Constantine of Rhodes, see Janin, Άπόστολοι (Ἅγιοι)΄, in La géographie ecclésiastique, 46–55.
2 For a long time, it was believed that the Fatih mosque was built on top of the site of the Holy
Apostles: Wulzinger, ‘Apostelkirche und die Mehmedije zu Konstantinopel’, 1–39. Now, it is more
widely accepted that this may not have been the case. See Berger, Untersuchungen, 520, and Berger,
‘Streets and Public Spaces’, 168–170; Mango, ‘Triumphal Way’, 169; K. Dark and F. Özgümüş, ‘New
Evidence for the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles from Fatih Camii, Istanbul’, Oxford Journal
of Archaeology 21 (2002), 393–413, though Cyril Mango in the ‘Addenda Altera’ to the third edition of
his Le développement urbain, 76, is not persuaded by this evidence.
3 Prokopios, Buildings, 1.4.9–24; Mesarites, Description, 859–918. Janin, La géographie
ecclésiastique, gives details of other textual references.
4 See the discussions of Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche, the first to collect together the
written sources, architectural parallels and manuscript examples; Downey, ‘The Builder of the Original
Church’; Krautheimer, ‘On Constantine’s Church of the Apostles in Constantinople’, 27–34; R. Leeb,
Konstantin und Christus. Die Verchristlichung der imperialen Repräsentation unter Dem Grossen als
Spiegel seiner Kirchenpolitik und seines Selbstverständnisses als christlicher Kaiser (Berlin and New
York, 1992), 93–120.
5 Eusebios, Life of Constantine, 4, 58–60, trans. and commentary Averil M. Cameron and S. G. Hall,
Eusebius. ‘Life of Constantine’ (Oxford, 1999), 176–177 and 337–338. Downey, ‘The Builder of the
Original Church’, 53, gives details of other sources favouring Constantine.
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6 Procopios, Buildings, 1, iv, 9–24. Downey, ‘The Builder of the Original Church’, 54–55, for other
pro-Constantius sources. On Constantius and the Holy Apostles, see N. Henck, ‘Constantius ὁ
Φιλοκτίστης’, DOP 55 (2001), 289–291. On Justinian’s Holy Apostles, see C. Strube, Die westliche
Eingangsseite der Kirchen von Konstantinopel in justinianischer Zeit: architektonische und
quellenkritische Untersuchungen (Wiesbaden, 1973), 130–147.
7 Downey, ‘The Builder of the Original Church’, argued very strongly for Eusebios’s account being
a later interpolation. Mango attempted to reconcile matters by suggesting that by the end of the fourth
century, there were two key elements to the church complex, a cruciform basilica and a separate but
adjacent mausoleum, Constantine being responsible for the mausoleum but not the basilica: Mango,
‘Constantine’s Mausoleum’, 51–62. Johnson, Roman Imperial Mausoleum, 119–129, offers a clear
synopsis and interpretation of sources with possible plans.
8 Gregory of Nazianzos, Carmen de Insomnia Anastasiae, vv 59–60, PG 37, 1258; also Leeb,
Konstantin und Christus, 100–101; John Chrysostom, Homilia contra Judaeos et Gentiles 9, PG 48,
col. 825. See also Johnson, Roman Imperial Mausoleum, 122.
9 Krautheimer, ‘On Constantine’s Church’. Such an argument assumes a highly structured form of
architectural development; it is also surprising that Eusebios did not mention this detail with its very
obvious symbolism.
10 Constantine does not mention the tradition, found in the Patria, 4, 32, p. 286, line 20 and in
Downey, Nikolaos Mesarites, Description, ch. 1, that Theodora was the prime mover in rebuilding the
church.
11 Legrand, ‘Description’; Begleri, Chram.
12 Downey, ‘The Builder of the Original Church’, 55 and n. 8.
13 Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6058 (565 AD). V. N. Lazarev, Storia della pittura bizantina
(Turin, 1967), 66, claims that the images introduced to the church by Justin II related to the two natures
of Christ and Christological disputes. As Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 124, n. 4, points out, the
phrasing is too vague to make a case for Justin’s additions being pictorial.
14 Life of Basil, Theophanes Continuatus, 5.80, lines 1–3, p. 323. The translation is from Mango, Art
of the Byzantine Empire, 192. As Maguire, ‘Truth and Convention’, 122, noted, ‘scraped off its old age’
is a reference to Iliad 9, 445.
15 On the mosaics, see Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche, vol. 2; N. Malickij, ‘Remarques
sur la date des mosaïques de l’église des Saints-Apôtres à Constantinople décrites par Mesaritès’, B 3
(1926), 125–151.
16 Prokopios, Buildings, 1.4, 9–24.
17 Mesarites, Description, ch. 13, 3–6. A. W. Epstein, “The Rebuilding and Redecoration of the Holy
Apostles in Constantinople: A Reconsideration’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 23 (1982), 79–
92, 87, suggested that it is conceivable that Mesarites hinted at fenestration in the central dome in his
account of the Pantokrator; I am not convinced that he made any such suggestion.
18 Reinach, ‘Commentaire’, 95, and Heisenberg, Grabeskirche und Apostelkirche, vol. 2, 123, both
based on Diodorus Siculus’s use of the term.
19 Downey, ‘Architectural Terms’, 29; Wulff, ‘Die sieben Wunder’, 322. For further discussions of
restorations, see Strube, Die westliche Eingangsseite, 132–134 and Angelidi, “Ἡ περιγραφή’, 115–116.
As Downey, ‘St Theophano’, 302, and Strube, Die westliche Eingangsseite, 138, n. 590 make clear, the
Book of Ceremonies also offers more detail about the form of the Holy Apostles, detail rarely taken into
account by those reconstructing the church.
20 Soteriou, ‘Ἀνασκαφαί’.
21 See also Janin’s comments on the reconstructions: La géographie ecclésiastique, 52. Dark and
All that is really known about Constantine’s poem comes from the internal
evidence of the work itself, and that leaves more questions unanswered than
answered. It seems likely that the text that survives in the Athos manuscript
represents only one version of the original work.1 This text is a collage of
pieces written at different times and on different topics but put together into a
reasonably coherent form by an editor, who most plausibly was the poet
himself, revising an earlier workforalater use or re-use.2 What exists consists
of at least two poems, one that focused on the honorific columns of
Constantinople and one that concentrated on the Holy Apostles. In addition to
these two major sections, the ‘poem’ contains a series of shorter, encomiastic
sections that establish that Constantine of Rhodes wrote for Constantine VII
Porphyrogennetos. However, it is not possible to date the poem or its parts
definitively within the long reign of that emperor. Although a reference to
four lawful rulers at lines 22–25 has been used to argue a case for the poem
as a whole as dating to between 931 and 944, when Constantine VII was
emperor with Romanos Lekapenos and two of his sons, those lines might also
indicate a period of rule at the start of Constantine’s reign, during the regency
of his mother, Zoe Karbonopsina. Alternatively, they may represent an
interpolation added by the poet during his own revisions and referring to
Constantine VII, the emperor’s son and their respective empresses.3 It has
been said that subject matter for the Byzantines was the quintessential feature
of a poem: the topic shaped the occasion; the occasion shaped the genre.4 On
a general level, it seems obvious that the poem, whether as a whole or in its
parts, belongs to a tradition of Byzantine poems and descriptions of city
buildings and monuments that range across time and genre, from Chorikios
of Gaza’s prose account of the churches of St Sergios and St Stephen in
Gaza, and Paul the Silentiary’s poem on Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in
the sixth century, through to pieces such as Leo Choirosphaktes’s poem on
the bathhouse of Leo VI. Constantine’s poem, categorising monuments and
works of art as it does, and evoking classicism, antiquarianism and imperial
Notes
1 Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
2 Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodes’; Lauxtermann, ‘Constantine’s City’.
3 For the late dating, see, for example, Downey, ‘Constantine the Rhodian’; for these lines as
interpolation, see Speck, ‘Konstantinos von Rhodes’ and Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry and
‘Constantine’s City’.
4 Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 69.
5 AP 15, 17. Εἰ ζωγραφεῖν τις ἤθελέν σε, Παρθένε, / ἄστρων ἐδεῖτο μᾶλλον ἀντὶ χρωμάτων, / ἵν᾽
ἐγράφης φωστῆρσιν ὡς φωτὸς πύλη / ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ὑπείκει ταῦτα τοῖς βροτῶν λόγοις / ἃ δ᾽ οὖν φύσις
παρέσχε καὶ γραφῆς νόμος, / τούτοις παρ᾽ ἡμῶν ἱστορῇ τε καὶ γράφῃ. The translation is W. R. Patons,
very slightly emended.
6 Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry, 122.
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Ahrweiler, H., ‘Recherches sur ladministration de lempire byzantin aux
IXXIème siècles’, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 84 (1960): 1–
111.
Alcock, S. E., ‘The Reconfiguration of Memory in the Eastern Roman
Empire’, in S. E. Alcock, T. N. D’Altrov, K. D. Morrison and C. M.
Sinopoli (eds), Empires. Perspectives from Archaeology and History (
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 323–350.
Alcock, S. E., Archaeologies of the Greek Past. Landscape, Monuments and
Memories ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Alexander, P. J., ‘The Strength of Empire and Capital as seen through
Byzantine Eyes’, Speculum 37 (1962): 341–345.
Alexiou, M., The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974).
Alexiou, M., ‘The Lament of the Virgin in Byzantine Literature and Modern
Greek Folk-Song’, BMGS 1 (1975): 111–140.
Anderson, B., ‘Classified Knowledge: The Epistemology of Statuary in the
Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai’, BMGS 35 (2011): 1–19.
Anderson, B., ‘Leo III and the Anemodoulion’, BZ 104 (2011): 41–54.
Fatihmosque 181–2
fires 27, 104
flowers 19, 67, 69, 201–2
fora 165
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of Arkadios see Xerolophos
of Constantine 25, 104
of Taurus 21, 37, 99, 111, 169–70
foundations 59, 120
friezes 165–6
fruit 33, 69
Kallisto 117
Karia 63, 122
Karystos river 63, 122
Kazhdan, Alexander 134, 137–8, 199
Kedrenos, Chronicle of 6, 136
kenosis 209 see also abasement
Kitzinger, Ernst 206–7
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Kometas 150, 155
Kosmas Indikopleustes 199
Krautheimer, Richard 183, 190–92, 194
Kronos 55, 117
kubos 146 see also cubes
Kybele 39, 112
Kyzikos 65, 123
zambax 123
Zeus 27, 39, 55, 105, 112, 117
Zoe Karbonopsina 96, 132, 133–4
zographos 148