Supplementa Byzantina

The Ethnica by Stephanus of Byzantium constitute a dictionary of geography and cultural history from the Justinian period that has been transmitted to us in abridged form. They record place names and terms of belonging (ethnica), generally using quotes from source authors. Alongside their value as a source of lexicographical information, where authors' works have been lost, the Ethnica are hugely significant as a source of fragments.

This volume collects the most important articles published by the Ancient Greek, Byzantine studies, and Modern Greek scholar Athanasios Kambylis between 1963 and 2006. The topics discussed in the articles range from ancient lyric and hymns to Byzantine historiography and the Modern Greek novel.

This volume offers the first critical edition of the vast Commentary on the Pentecostal iambic canon (traditionally ascribed to St John the Damascene) composed by Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica. The attribution of the hymn to the Damascene was, in principle, called into question by Eustathius himself, who eventually suggested to have it adopted into Damascene’s paternity only out of ecclesiastical obedience.

The Commentary is probably the last text Eustathius wrote. It can be regarded as the summa of his method of work, his style of exposition, his scholarly interests and literary tastes. Moreover, it can be read as the first Byzantine attempt to create a fusion between a method of work which originated from the exegesis of classical texts and the modes of theological interpretation connected in turn with liturgical experience and pastoral practice.

The edition of the text is accompanied by three apparatuses, a complete range of indices, and exhaustive Prolegomena where the editors shed light on the Commentary as such – its genesis and date, its audience, its discussion of the traditional attribution, its sources – and on history of its manuscript tradition, with a special focus on the Constantinopolitan didaskaleion of Prodromos-Petra.

This analytical volume examines the various aspects of "De emendanda vita monachica", combining this with the question of whether this text by Eusthatios of Thessalonica with its polemical fireworks and learned allusions was really intended for the monks of the diocese, who are portrayed as being uneducated, or was actually aimed at an unnamed readership. This question forms a leitmotif through the various chapters of the study in which the author locates the work historically within Eustathios' biography and the context of contemporary monastic life, analyzes its place in literary history together with the linguistic devices deployed to establish the different stylistic levels and to influence the psychology of the readers and paints in the theological and hermeneutic background. A detailed commentary is appended.

This volume compliments the edition published in the series "Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae". Both volumes are available as a set .

This reference work provides a tool with which the scholar of Byzantine literature can speedily establish the identity, authorship and place of issue of a poem from its opening line. It provides an alphabetical listing of the opening lines of some 20,000 Byzantine poems – profane and religious, edited and unprinted, in the literary and the colloquial language – from the beginning of the 4^th to the 15^th century. Apart from broadly-based compositions and epigrams it also takes account of all types of poetic inserts, monosticha, notes by copyists, owners and readers of manuscripts, metrical work and chapter headings, marginalia and end-notes, together with metrical scholia. Each opening line is accompanied by all the necessary information on the author, subject, place of issue and length of the poem. The work is completed with a listing of all the Byzantine authors quoted.

The anonymous tale of Alexander and Semiramis harks back to a Persian-Ottoman version of Turandot material reworked according to the conventions of late Byzantine literary romance. Both versions are critically annotated in this edition, which also provides a detailed introduction about the origin of the narrative material, its place in fourteenth-century Byzantine literary history, and the linguistic analysis of the text. A word index and a translation complete the edition.

The Theology in a Thousand Verses, written by Leon Magistros Choirosphaktes, an outstanding tenth-century Byzantine diplomat, is a philosophical and theological didactic poem addressed to a young emperor (perhaps Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus). The main objective of the present edition is to provide a linguistically accessible text. Handed down in a single manuscript (Vat. gr. 1257) under inauspicious conditions, the poem had been hidden away to this day and is printed here in its entirety for the first time since its creation some ten centuries ago. It is accompanied in this book by a translation and a commentary intended primarily to clarify the inherently difficult and sometimes obscure text. The volume also includes four indexes.

The Cartulary of the Lembos monastery near Smyrna, preserved in Vind. hist. gr. 125, is one of the richest and historically most important collections of legal documents that has come down to us from the Byzantine world. After its restoration by Emperor John III Vatatzes, the Lembos monastery quickly developed into one of the leading imperial foundations in Byzantine Asia Minor during the Nicaean Empire and the early Palaiologan period. The 207 pieces preserved in the monastery’s cartulary were, for the greatest part, issued in the years 1224–1294 by a broad range of public authorities, such as the imperial court, state officials, various law courts, the metropolis of Smyrna, and local notaries. The collection constitutes a prime source for secular and ecclesiastical institutions, fiscal administration, land use, rural economy, topography, and prosopography of Byzantine Asia Minor and thirteenth-century Byzantium. This is the first complete critical and annotated edition of the cartulary with detailed English summaries and replaces the partial edition of F. Miklosich and J. Müller in the Acta et Diplomata graeca medii aevi series of 1871.