The hexameter poems of Theodore Metochites are perhaps the most determinedly baroque of all Byzantine literary productions to have survived. The tortuous constructions of Metochites' prose rhetoric are transmuted into his rather imprecise concept of the hexameter, with a vocabulary that is ostensibly Homeric but in fact ranges over the whole spectrum of Greek literature, with not a few coinages of his own. The twenty poems, in just over 9,000 lines, were written probably towards the end of his period in (...) high office; several clearly date from the period immediately before his fall from power in 1328, with others written in the years between his return from exile to his beloved monastery of the Chora and his death in 1332. The topics treated by Metochites range from solipsistic musings on his youth and the troubles that afflicted his old age to bombastic funerary memorials. Although the poems are preserved in several manuscripts, it has been demonstrated (by Ihor Ševčenko) that Par.Gr. 1776 stands at the head of the tradition. It is in a format similar to that, for example, of another luxury copy of Metochites' own works, Vindob. Phil. Gr. 95, while the corrections to the verses have been shown to be in the hand of Metochites himself. (shrink)

It is widely known that one of the projects that was most preoccupying the late, and much regretted, Alexander Kazhdan in his latter years was a study of Byzantine literature that would bring this field into the modern era. For far too long Byzantine literature, he asserted, had been encased in the strait-jacket imposed by Krumbacher's magisterial Geschichte. Byzantinists were constrained by a Handbuch mentality whose bonds had been confirmed by the three volumes that replaced Krumbacher's single tome: Beck on (...) ‘Theologische Literatur’ and ‘Volksliteratur’ and Hunger on high-style secular literature. However humane the tone might appear at times in these reference works (Hunger's contributions being particularly noteworthy), nothing could disguise the fact that these books were taxonomic catalogues. Byzantium's literary output was categorised by genre, genres largely imposed by modern historians and not necessarily recognisable to any Byzantine: authors were disposed under a series of at times arbitrary divisions and it was virtually impossible to have a sense of any individual's total output; Psellos was perhaps the most notoriously splintered example. Furthermore, the content of these catalogues was resolutely pragmatic: names, dates, works, editions, contents. Qualitative assessments were eschewed, there was little interpretation of literary movements. (shrink)