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Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance
Edited by Jason König, Greg Woolf
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Chapter
10 - Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and tenth centuries pp. 219
-231
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139814683.013
Cambridge University Press

10 Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and
tenth centuries
paul magdalino
Encyclopaedism was an ongoing phenomenon throughout the eleven hun-

dred years of Byzantine history in two senses. Firstly, enkyklios paideia was
the name used to characterise the basic secondary school curriculum; this
in theory provided an ‘all-round education’ in the liberal arts, although
in practice the enkyklios often consisted of little more than a heavy diet
of grammar with smatterings of other subjects, from which only the more
committed students would go on to study rhetoric and philosophy in depth,
along with elements of the mathematical quadrivium.1 Secondly, Byzantine
culture was permanently encyclopaedic in the sense that it was continually
collecting, summarising, excerpting and synthesising earlier texts. Most of
this activity was religious and geared to theological controversy and ascetic
devotion. But there were times when it extended into the sphere of secular
learning. The most significant of these times was the period of renewed
cultural production in the ninth and tenth centuries that is sometimes
called the Byzantine Renaissance, or the Macedonian Renaissance, after the
dynasty that came to power in 867 with Basil I from Adrianople, which was
then, confusingly for us, the capital of the administrative circumscription
known as Macedonia.
The notion of Byzantine encyclopaedism in this period is indissolubly
associated with the third Macedonian emperor, Basil I’s grandson Con-
stantine VII, or Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who in his sole reign from
945 to 959 oversaw a number of collecting and excerpting projects. The
idea that encyclopaedism was the literary Leitmotiv of the age, and that
Constantine VII was the key figure in promoting it, was classically for-
mulated by Paul Lemerle in his book Le premier humanisme byzantin, still
unsurpassed as a survey of Byzantine learning in the early Middle Ages.2
Lemerle’s last chapter is entitled ‘The Encyclopedism of the Tenth Century’
This article overlaps substantially with two others in recently published volumes: ‘Orthodoxy
and history in tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedism’, in Macé and Van Deun (2011) and
‘Knowledge in authority and authorised history: the imperial intellectual programme of Leo VI
and Constantine VII’, in P. Armstrong (2013) (ed.) Authority in Byzantium, Aldershot.
1 See Markopoulos (2008).
2 Lemerle (1986) (originally published in French in 1971). All references here are to the 1986
English translation. 219
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220 paul magdalino
and is almost entirely devoted to describing Constantine VII’s literary activ-

ity and patronage in encyclopaedic terms. He sees Constantine’s treatises
on political institutions and foreign policy – the so-called De cerimoniis,3
the De thematibus4 and the De administrando imperio5 – as forming a sort
of ‘imperial or political encyclopedia’.6 While denying that Constantine’s
Excerpta historica7 – originally a vast collection of passages excerpted from
ancient and Byzantine historians and grouped under fifty-three thematic
headings – is worthy of being considered a historical encyclopaedia, because
of its complete lack of critical sense, Lemerle has no problem in seeing it as a
moral encyclopaedia.8 He goes on to state that ‘besides these encyclopedias
that Constantine VII considered his own work, there were many others, but
it is difficult to be precise about their origins and dates’.9 Of these works
associated with Constantine but not by him, Lemerle confidently identifies
the Geoponica, with its preface addressed to Constantine, as an encyclopae-
dia of excerpts from ancient treatises on farming.10 On the basis of the same
preface, which makes a threefold division of the state into the military, the
religious and the agricultural sectors, Lemerle regards the military treatises
written under Constantine VII as constituting a military encyclopaedia.11
He contemplates the possibility that the liturgical and hagiographical com-
pilations of the late tenth century (Typikon and Synaxarion of the Great
Church, the Metaphrastic Menologion) were meant to form an analogous
encyclopaedia of religion, though ultimately he rejects the idea, mainly
because these projects are not attributable to Constantine’s initiative.12 For
the same reason, Lemerle does not accord encyclopaedic status to the legal
compilations made during Constantine’s reign, although he does suggest
that the law books issued by the Macedonian dynasty as a whole do add up
to ‘a kind of legal encyclopedia’.13 He also includes within his encyclopaedic
purview the contemporary Hippiatrica, a veterinary treatise, and an anony-
mous treatise on animals dedicated to an emperor Constantine who can
only be Constantine VII.14 He admits, however, that it is difficult to speak of
a ‘scientific encyclopedia’, given the lack of evidence for any tenth-century
treatise or compendium on the exact sciences.15
3 Ed. Reiske (1829); Book 1 ed. and trans. by Vogt (1967). 4 Ed. Pertusi (1952).
5 Ed. Moravcsik (1993). 6 Lemerle (1986) 317.
7 Ed. de Boor (1903–10). See András Németh in chapter 11.
8 Lemerle (1986) 331–2. 9 Lemerle (1986) 332.
10 Lemerle (1986) 332–5; cf. Lefort (2002) vol. I, 231–310 (translation of the preface on p. 231).
11 Lemerle (1986) 336–7. On the tenth-century military treatises, see Sullivan (2010).
12 Lemerle (1986) 337–9. On the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes, see now Høgel (2002).
13 Lemerle (1986) 340–1.
14 Lemerle (1986) 342; on the Hippiatrica see now McCabe (2007). 15 Lemerle (1986) 343.
Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and tenth centuries 221
Lemerle observed that further codicological research might reveal the

existence of other collections of an encyclopaedic nature, but he added,
cautiously, ‘we must refrain from seeing encyclopedias everywhere’.16 His
wishful thought has not been realised by subsequent research, but his words
of caution have proved all too appropriate, and indeed have haunted his own
results. Lemerle, like Alphonse Dain before him, clearly laid himself open to
the charge of seeing encyclopaedism where it did not exist, and the charge
was brought quite trenchantly by Paolo Odorico in an article published in
1990.17 The objections to Lemerle’s method and thesis are not hard to find,
and they go well beyond the points that Odorico raises in his critique. None
of the tenth-century compilations is an encyclopaedia in the strict Byzantine
sense of being a digest of the material studied in the full enkyklios paideia:
for this, one has to wait until the work of Neilos Doxopatres in the twelfth
century and that of Joseph Rakendytes in the fourteenth.18 There is one
earlier work that fits the modern definition of an encyclopaedia, and which
also qualifies for the looser Byzantine meaning of the enkyklios paideia, in
that it provides a primary reference work of names, terms and meanings
that a student with a basic education in grammar would find useful. Indeed,
its usefulness for that timeless figure, the average student, long outlasted
Byzantium, and earned it a famous mention by Alexander Pope:
For Attic phrase in Plato let them seek,

I poach in Suidas for unlicens’d Greek. (Dunciad 4. 227–8)
The Suidas or, more correctly, Souda with its thousands of entries from A to
Ω, is, despite its quirks, a real encyclopaedia, and Lemerle rightly recognised
that it represented the culmination of the tenth-century developments he
was analysing.19 Among other things, it incorporated much material from
the Excerpta historica of Constantine VII. Yet, as he also recognised, it
cannot be securely dated: the earliest manuscripts are thirteenth-century,
the earliest mention is late twelfth-century, the terminus post quem provided
by the content is the reign of the emperor John I Tzimiskes (969–76), and the
only indication that the author lived closer to that time than to the year 1100
is his intemperate outburst against the patriarch Polyeuktos (956–970). In
any case, there is nothing to link him personally to Constantine VII.
This points to the main limitation of Lemerle’s survey of Byzantine ency-
clopaedism. While stretching the definition of encyclopaedism to cover
16 Lemerle (1986) 339. 17 Odorico (1990).

18 On Neilos Doxopatres, see de Vos (2011) and Neirynck (2011); on Joseph Rhakendytes, see
Gielen in chapter 12.
19 Ed. Adler (1928–38); see also Lemerle (1986) 343–5; Baldwin (2006).
222 paul magdalino
all the compiling projects authored or sponsored by Constantine VII, he

ignores many others that exhibit the same concern with instructing, collect-
ing, and retrieving the past, particularly the imperial past. Most surprisingly,
he hardly mentions the Palatine Anthology, the vast collection of epigrams
from antiquity to the ninth century that was put together in the mid-tenth
century, probably by Constantine of Rhodes, who presents himself else-
where as a devoted dependent of Constantine VII.20 Lemerle totally neglects
another anthology of the same date, a collection of anacreontic poems now
only partially preserved in Barberinianus 310.21 This de luxe manuscript is
in the same hand and surely from the same imperial workshop as the equally
luxurious Berolinensis Philippicus 134, the manuscript of the Hippiatrica,
which Lemerle did recognise as a Constantinian commission.22 But there are
other tenth-century works without clear imperial connections (and with-
out classical content) but with distinct encyclopaedist tendencies. The most
obvious is the Patria, the collection of legends about the origins of Con-
stantinople and its main buildings, which appears to date from 995.23 Less
obvious, perhaps, but equally deserving of consideration are certain chron-
icles and saints’ lives that assemble antiquarian and didactic material. The
tenth-century chronicle of Pseudo-Symeon, and the closely related text that
was adopted verbatim by George Kedrenos, contain much miscellaneous
information, especially about the origins of the arts and sciences and about
the early monuments of Constantinople, which corresponds to entries in
the Souda and the Patria.24 Perhaps significantly, much of this information
is entered with the ὅτι formula that introduces each of the excerpts in the
Excerpta historica.25 Hagiography may not seem to be a natural medium
for encyclopaedism, but, as we have already seen, Lemerle raises the possi-
bility that the great rewriting (metaphrasis) of older Greek hagiographical
texts by Symeon Metaphrastes at the end of the tenth century formed an
encyclopaedic project. Two new saints’ lives written around the same time,
the Life of Andrew the Fool and the Life of Basil the Younger, exhibit ency-
clopaedic tendencies. The two texts complement each other in forming a
summa of commonly held, but not officially taught, doctrines about the end
of the world: the Last Judgement, heaven, hell, and the afterlife. Both texts
can be linked to Basil the parakoimomenos (high official charged with the
20 Cameron (1993); Lauxtermann (2003) 83–6.

21 Lauxtermann (2003) 123–8. 22 Lemerle (1986) 342; McCabe (2007) 24–7.
23 Ed. Preger (1907); see also Dagron (1984); Berger (1987).
24 Pseudo-Symeon is largely unpublished. For Kedrenos, see Bekker (1838–9); and for his
sources, Tartaglia (2007).
25 E.g. see Bekker (1838–9) vol. I, 12, 15–17, 20–3, 26–8, 321–3, 325–7, 330–3, 563–7.
protection of the emperor during the night), the illegitimate son of the
emperor Romanos I, and the all-powerful minister of four later emperors
for almost forty years before he was dismissed and disgraced by Basil II in
985. He is of interest to us here because he was a munificent patron of art and
literature who continued Constantine VII’s work of compiling and collect-
ing, and was probably responsible for commissioning the hagiographical
rewriting project of Symeon Metaphrastes.26
The so-called encyclopaedism of the tenth century was thus both more
varied and less imperial than Lemerle portrays it. It was also older, as Lemerle
himself remarked in another flash of recognition that his categories and his
chapter divisions were too restrictive: ‘It would be a serious error to attribute
everything to Constantine Porphyrogenitus: all he did was to follow and
perhaps accelerate a movement that started before him.’ As we have already
seen, the legal compilations made under Constantine were only a postscript
to the much more impressive projects of codification undertaken on the
initiative of his father and grandfather: the Procheiros Nomos and Eisagoge
of Basil I, the Basilica and the Novels of Leo VI.27 The numerous military
handbooks of the tenth century – Lemerle’s ‘military encyclopedia’ – all went
back to the revival of the genre by Leo VI in his Taktika,28 a collection of
military precepts based on, though not limited to, the so-called Strategikon
of Maurice. Leo was directly or indirectly responsible for a number of other
compilations and treatises. He himself composed or compiled a set of ascetic
precepts, the ῾Υποτύπωσις οἰακιστικὴ ψυχῶν (Rule for the Guidance of Souls),
which he addressed to an unnamed abbot, and which can be seen as the
monastic equivalent of the military Taktika that was aimed at the empire’s
generals.29 He approved, if he did not actually commission, the ceremonial
treatise of Philotheos the atriklines, which attempted to systematise the
protocol for the seating at imperial banquets.30 In method (researching and
editing old documents), in purpose (to remove the confusion due to the
passage of time), and in ideology (concern with order, taxis, the dignity of
the empire, and conformity to an imperial and divine norm), Philotheos
26 On the Lives and the links to Basil the parakoimomenos, see Magdalino (1999a). On Basil’s
patronage of literary projects, see most recently Pryor and Jeffreys (2006) 183–7. His patronage
of the Metaphrastic project can be inferred from the evidence that Basil II commissioned the
work while under the dominance of the parakoimomenos and ordered it to be burned after the
latter’s fall: see Høgel (2003) 221–3.
27 On these works and the relationship between them, see now Signes Codoñer and Andrés
Santos (2007).
28 Ed. and trans. Dennis (2010).
29 Ed. Papadopoulos-Kerameus (1909) 213–53. 30 Oikonomidès (1972) 65–235.
224 paul magdalino
clearly anticipates the De ceremoniis of Constantine VII. Another collection

produced under Constantine VII, the Palatine anthology, was very largely
built on the anthology put together under Leo VI by Leo Kephalas, whose
position as a priest in the imperial New Church next to the Great Palace
suggests that he was working at least with the emperor’s approval.31 Finally,
we may include under the encyclopaedic products of Leo’s reign, or its
immediate aftermath, two didactic verse pieces by one of the emperor’s high
officials, Leo Choirosphaktes, both addressed to the infant Constantine VII.
One concerns the operation of the hot springs at Pythia (modern Yalova)
in Bithynia,32 while the other, the Chiliostichos theologia (Thousand-line
Theology), is a curious defence of transcendental monotheism against an
unnamed and probably non-existent critic.33 I have suggested elsewhere that
it was a vehicle for Choirosphaktes to defend his own contentious brand
of scientific religion that advocated the worship of God through study of
the natural world rather than through sacraments, saints and icons.34
While this particular piece of synthesis was going nowhere, the same
was not true of the other works we have just mentioned. Thus three of the
encyclopaedic projects associated with Constantine VII around 950 – the
military, the ceremonial and the poetic – clearly originated with Leo VI
around 900. Moreover, it was Leo, not Constantine, who brought the legal
project to its peak, and who produced a florilegium of ascetic wisdom that
had no follow-up later in the tenth century. All in all, it is deeply misleading
to speak of the encyclopaedism of the age of Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
The movement was at least fifty years older than Constantine, and many of
its characteristic products appeared up to a generation after his death, or
perhaps even later in the case of the Souda, the most bona fide encyclopaedia
in the group. And when the movement is viewed as a chronological whole,
the appropriateness of defining it as encyclopaedism becomes even more
questionable. The works of indisputably encyclopaedic content – basically
the Souda, the Excerpta historica, and perhaps the Geoponica – are not
numerically well represented, while compilations of a political and religious
nature are not only more numerous but also, on the whole, come first, in
that they predominate among the projects of Leo VI.
How then should all these works that we have assembled under the leaky
umbrella of encyclopaedism properly be labelled and contextualised? Is it
correct or helpful to assemble them at all, and should we not rather be
undoing, as opposed to completing, the process of association begun by
31 Lauxtermann (2003) 86–9. 32 Gallavotti (1990).

33 Ed. Vassis (2002). 34 Magdalino (2006) 72–6.
Lemerle? Should we not classify each work according to genre and content,
so that we reserve the label of encyclopaedia to the very few that deserve
it, and find different labels for the rest? This might be useful, but it would
still leave us with the many connections between different works. To begin
with, such a concentration of collecting and compiling projects is not to be
found in any other period of Byzantine history. Secondly, most of them can
be tied to the patronage of two emperors, father and son, with pronounced
cultural interests, a strong sense of dynastic identity, and a strong didactic
urge. Other works have associations with a quasi-imperial cultural patron,
Basil the parakoimomenos. Thirdly, apart from the common denominator of
collection, several projects, including the ‘true’ encyclopaedias, share other
characteristics: a concern with the past and ancient material, and a concern
with ‘order’ (taxis). Finally, three of the non-imperial works – the chronicle
of Kedrenos, the Patria, and the Souda – share material or an interest in the
same kinds of material which suggests that genre is not in itself a decisive
criterion.
So is there a better concept than encyclopaedism for describing the com-
pilations of the ‘Macedonian Renaissance’? Paolo Odorico, Lemerle’s critic,
suggested that we refer simply to a ‘cultura della sylloge’, a collecting cul-
ture, which is certainly not inaccurate, though it is also not specific enough
to the production of the period.35 Paul Speck suggested that the imperial
core of this production was in essence a series of ‘teaching dossiers’ for the
instruction of the heir to the throne.36 Again, there is something in this
suggestion, and we shall return to it, but the tone of the works in question
is not merely pedagogical – unlike, for example, the manuals produced for
Michael VII in the eleventh century37 and for members of the Komnenian
aristocracy in the twelfth. The tone in the tenth century is also normative
and authoritative. Thus Peter Pieler’s idea was that the political treatises of
Constantine VII – the De thematibus, De cerimoniis, and De administrando
imperio – should be seen as extensions to the Macedonian emperors’ work of
legislation and legal codification; they did for public law what the Eisagoge,
the Procheiros Nomos, the Basilika and the Novels of Leo VI had done for
private law.38 I have endorsed this idea, and developed it to argue that the
extension into the domain of public law began not with Constantine but
35 Odorico (1990). 36 Speck et al. (1991) 269–306, 326–7.

37 Treatises on physics and astronomy (Symeon Seth and/or Michael Psellos), ed. Delatte (1939)
vol. II, 17–126; treatise on diet (Symeon Seth), ed. Langavel (1868); treatise on the laws
(Michael Attaleiates), in Zepos and Zepos (1931) vol. VII, 411–97. For the didactic poems of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Jeffreys (1974).
38 Pieler (1989).
226 paul magdalino
with Leo VI, and specifically with the ceremonial treatise of Philotheos and
the military Taktika.39 Philotheos describes his enterprise as a revision and
reissue, sanctioned by the emperor, of the prescriptive protocol for seating
at imperial banquets. Although he does not use the words, he is effectively
describing the process of anakatharsis (cleansing), ananeosis/anakainisis
(renewal), and epanorthosis (restoration) that the emperors applied in their
recodification of the Justinianic Corpus iuris. In the military Taktika, Leo VI
directly echoes the language of legislation. In his preface, he adopts from
his source, the Strategikon of Maurice, the description of the work as an
introduction (εἰσαγωγή), and adds that it has the status of a legal manual
(ἔχοντα προχείρου τάξιν νόμου).40 Eisagoge and Procheiros Nomos were the
names of the first two law codes composed under the Macedonian dynasty.
There are further echoes of the Eisagoge in the first constitution of the
Taktika, where Leo defines strategy and tactics, and the aim (σκοπός) and
purpose (τέλος) of the latter.41 The Eisagoge begins similarly with definitions
of law, justice and the aim, purpose, and speciality (ἴδια) of the emperor
and patriarch. The legal tone of the Taktika is made clear in other ways.
The twenty sections of the book are called constitutions (διατάξεις). Leo
repeatedly uses verbs of command: κελεύομεν, παρακελεύομεν, διεταξάμεθα,
διωρισάμεθα. He insists that the dispositions of the treatise are binding
‘laws of strategy’ (νόμοι στρατηγικοί), and generals are urged to ensure that
their behaviour (τρόπος) becomes a law (νόμος) for their troops. Finally, the
method and conception of the Taktika were those that the emperor and his
legal team had used in the recodification of Roman law. He refers several
times to another book in which the ancient military texts were quoted in
extenso (κατὰ πλάτος). The same procedure is evident in the legal projects
of Basil I and Leo VI, where the Procheiron summarises the translated texts
of the Justinianic corpus collected in the πλάτος τῶν νόμων, which devel-
oped into the sixty books of the Basilika.42 To some extent, this division
followed the Justinianic model of the Institutes and the Digest, with the
difference that the Institutes were intended to be a textbook for freshmen
law students, whereas the Procheiron, as its name implies, was a manual
for use by professionals at all levels. A closer parallel might be found in
the theological literature of the sixth to ninth centuries, in the florilegia of
patristic authorities that accompanied dogmatic treatises and conciliar acts.
Here we may note that, like the so-called Strategikon of Maurice, the Taktika
adopts a strong religious tone, and is concerned to present the science of
39 Magdalino (1997). 40 Dennis (2010) 2–11.

41 Taktika I, 4.6 (ed. Dennis (2010)). 42 See Signes Codoñer and Andrés Santos (2007).
warfare as compatible with divine providence, the ultimate cause of victory.

The preface even suggests that military science is necessary to attract God’s
support, stating, in a remarkable inversion of the usual cause and effect, ‘as
long as the armed forces of the Romans were in good order (ἐν εὐταξίᾳ), the
state enjoyed divine assistance for not a few years’.43
This statement is key to understanding the rationale, not only of the
Taktika and the military treatises, but also of all the imperial compilations
of the ‘Macedonian Renaissance’, including those that cannot be considered
remotely juridical, like the Excerpta historica. All are concerned with restor-
ing the empire, its institutions and culture to a state of ‘good order’ (eutaxia)
associated with the great Christian emperors of the past.44 The same concern
can be seen in the building projects of the Macedonian emperors,45 and in
Constantine VII’s appointment of professors to teach rhetoric, philosophy
and mathematics to budding civil servants.46
The importance of the concept of taxis in Byzantine imperial ideology of
the ninth and tenth centuries has long been recognised, as has the analogy
that it implies between the realm of the earthly emperor and the order
prevailing in the kingdom of heaven. It is not clear, however, whether the
ideological significance of the word derived from secular or religious usage.
What is certain is that the Macedonian emperors promoted taxis and eutaxia
with a strong sense of religious mission. The preface to the Excerpta historica,
written presumably by the head of the cutting and pasting team, addresses
Constantine VII as the most Christian and orthodox emperor of all time. As
Lemerle notes, Constantine was very active in promoting hagiography and
in bringing holy relics to Constantinople from the east.47 His father Leo VI,
surnamed ‘the Wise’, cut an even higher religious profile, and probably came
closer to being emperor and priest than any other Byzantine sovereign:48 he
wrote and preached numerous sermons,49 he officiated at the consecration
of churches, and, as we have seen, he compiled a book of ascetic precepts,
which effectively told the head of a monastic community how to do his
job. His conception of himself as a divinely inspired image of Christ, and
a new Solomon, undoubtedly informed his codification projects, which, I
have been arguing, were the inception of the so-called encyclopaedism of
the tenth century.
43 Dennis (2010) 4–5. 44 Magdalino (1999b).
45 The buildings of Basil I and Constantine VII are described in their respective biographies in
Theophanes Continuatus: Bekker (1838) 321–41, 447, 449–52, 456, 460–1. For Leo VI, see
Magdalino (1988). Some of the relevant texts are translated by Mango (1972) 202–6, 207–10.
46 Bekker (1838) 445–6. 47 See Flusin (2001) 48–54.
48 On Leo in general, see Tougher (1997); on Byzantine ‘caesaropapism’, see Dagron (2003).
49 Ed. Antonopoulou (2008).
228 paul magdalino
Yet his projects also, undoubtedly, owed much to the inspiration of a man
whose vision of a Christian society was as orthodox and ecclesiastical as Leo’s
was authoritarian and imperial. This was the great Photios, who in addition
to being twice patriarch (858–67, 877–86), was, in the years before his sec-
ond patriarchate, a major intellectual and spiritual influence on Basil I and
tutor to the young Leo. Photios is widely regarded as the real author of one
of the first Macedonian law codes, the Eisagoge of Basil I. He may well also
have ghost-written the two collections of Κεφάλαια παραινετικά, chapters of
moral advice in the Fürstenspiegel tradition, that Basil addressed to Leo;50 as
didactic florilegia, these works anticipate Constantine VII’s ‘encyclopaedic’
treatises on government, at least one of which (the De administrando impe-
rio) was destined for Constantine’s son and heir Romanos II. It also picks
up a genre that Photios had already cultivated in his didactic letter to the
newly converted king of Bulgaria, Boris-Michael, which can be seen as a
mini-encyclopaedia of useful knowledge for a Christian ruler.51 Photios’
encyclopaedic tendencies did not stop here. He produced a Lexicon,52 and
for much of his career he was at work on a massive collection of 280 book
reviews, the so-called Bibliotheca or Myriobiblos, which in size and range
of authors dwarfed all the encyclopaedias of the tenth century apart from
the Excerpta historica.53 It included reviews of ancient encyclopaedic works,
including the so-called Anthologies of John Stobaeus, about which Photios’
concluding judgement is worth quoting as an example of what he thought
made a good encyclopaedia:54
The book is useful both to those who have read the works of the authors in question
and to those who have no previous experience; to the former, as an aide-mémoire, and
to the latter, because in studying them, if only in summary, they will in a short space
of time gain knowledge of many and various good ideas. For both types of readers, it
is easy to find what they are looking for, whenever one wishes to refer from the sum-
maries to the full texts (ἀπὸ τῶν κεφαλαίων εἰς αὐτὰ τὰ πλάτη). Among other things,
the book is far from useless for those who wish to write and practice rhetoric.55
Whether or not Photios introduced the Bibliotheca to his royal pupil, the
work was certainly being read while Leo VI and Constantine VII were organ-
ising their compilation and codification projects: the earliest manuscript, of
the tenth century, was copied to include the marginal comments of at least
one earlier reader.56
50 Texts in PG 107, xxi–lx; cf. Markopoulos (1998).
51 Ed. Laourdas and Westerink (1983) no. 1; translation and commentary by Stratoudaki White
and Berrigan (1982).
52 Ed. Naber (1864–5); and Theodoridis (1982–98). 53 Ed. Henry (1959–77, 1991).
54 Codex 167 (Henry (1959–77, 1991) vol. II, 149–59).
55 Henry (1959–77, 1991) vol. II, 159. 56 Zorzi (2004).
As obscure as the question of the Bibliotheca’s influence is that of its

origins. What motivated Photios to take on such a huge task, and what
determined his choice of books to review? If the project began, as he states
in the preface,57 as a reading list requested by his brother Tarasios, it surely
grew into more than that, and it surely continued long after Photios’ depar-
ture on the embassy to Baghdad that supposedly prompted the request. It
is also difficult to believe that the works reviewed were simply those that
Photios happened to own, or to have come across while browsing. Given
the preponderance of Christian works, and Photios’ frequent expressions
of disapproval on pagan or heretical content, it is reasonable to suppose
that he aimed to produce an ideologically correct canon of reading mate-
rial. Given, too, the fact that Photius was not the only well-read scholar
in mid-ninth-century Constantinople, but had an immensely learned con-
temporary in the person of Leo the Mathematician or Philosopher,58 it
is reasonable to suggest that his reading list would have had an emphasis
that reflected their ideological and intellectual differences. Leo was deeply
into mathematics, astrology, and profane classical poetry, subjects that are
poorly represented in the Bibliotheca. Although he had a brief ecclesiastical
career as archbishop of Thessalonica, he owed it to the iconoclast regime
of the emperor Theophilos, and specifically to his cousin John the Gram-
marian, the last and most notorious iconoclast patriarch, with whom he
was deposed when the regime changed and icons were restored in 843 in
what was hailed as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Photios, by contrast, came
from a pro-icon family and when patriarch was loud in his condemnation
of iconoclasm as a ‘bastard and Jewish doctrine’.59 He showed his zeal for
orthodoxy in other ways: in his efforts to eradicate the Paulician heresy, in
his denunciation of the Latin addition of the Filioque to the Nicene Creed,
and in his related concern to convert Bulgaria to the Byzantine form of
Christianity. His collection of book reviews should therefore be seen in
the same context as his collection of doctrinal and moral teachings for
the newly converted Bulgarian king, his collection of introductory laws,
the Eisagoge, to be issued by the emperor Basil I, and his collection of
moral precepts for Basil’s son and heir Leo VI. What all had in common
with each other, and with Photios’ homily on the restoration of icons to
Hagia Sophia,60 was the renewal of order in the church after the disorder of
iconoclasm.
Thus the search for the origins of tenth-century Byzantine ency-
clopaedism takes us back, through the codifying projects of Leo VI and
57 Treadgold (1977). 58 Lemerle (1986) 171–204; Magdalino (2006) 62–9.

59 Mango (1977). 60 Trans. Mango (1958), no. XVII.
230 paul magdalino
the edifying works of Photios, to the tradition of excerpting, collecting and

compiling authoritative texts that had been fundamental to the definition
of correct doctrine from the very beginnings of Christianity, but which had
flourished particularly in the intense religious debates of the fifth to ninth
centuries. The period produced a large quantity of collections in various
literary forms: decrees and canons of church councils, strings of proof-texts
quoted in or attached to theological treatises, ‘chains’ (catenae) of patris-
tic commentaries appended to the text of the bible, anthologies of saints’
lives and edifying tales, handbooks of spiritual and moral precepts. One
collection, the De fide orthodoxa of John of Damascus, was effectively an
encyclopaedia of orthodox knowledge, comprising one hundred entries on
religious and moral themes.61 Basic to all of this production was the genre
of the florilegium.62 It would be a mistake to reduce everything to florilegia,
just as it would be wrong to regard John of Damascus and Photios as the
sole channels for their transformation into codified proto-encyclopaedias.
However, I do think it is appropriate to focus on the Triumph of Orthodoxy
over iconoclasm in 843 as a defining moment and turning point.63
In closing, I would like to mention three projects that had nothing to
do with Photios but were undoubtedly part of the restoration of ortho-
dox taxis after 843, and were not without consequence for tenth-century
encyclopaedism. One was a corpus of hymns for the saints’ feasts of the
whole liturgical year composed by Joseph the Hymnographer with the sup-
port of the Patriarch Ignatios, Photios’ rival; this anticipated the liturgical
and hagiographical projects of the late tenth century, the Synaxarion and
the Metaphrastic rewriting of the saints’ lives in the liturgical calendar.64
Another was the Sotirios, a late ninth-century moral and religious flori-
legium, which served as the basis for the Slavonic Sbornik of the Bulgarian
Tsar Symeon.65 The third project triggered by the Triumph of Orthodoxy
that deserves to be mentioned in the context of encyclopaedism is the chron-
icle of George the Monk,66 which may date from as early as the 840s.67 This is
for most Byzantinists the quintessential Mönchschronik, with all the negative
things that implies: short on reliable, original factual content, but high on
righteous ranting against pagans, Jews and heretics, especially iconoclasts.
Yet if there is such a thing as a typical Mönchschronik, or indeed a typical
Weltchronik, the chronicle of George the Monk is not it. It is rather a history
of orthodoxy, or history rewritten from an orthodox point of view. To make
61 See the first volume of the new edition, with introduction, by Kotter et al. (2010).
62 See M. Richard, ‘Florilèges grecs’, Dictionnaire de spiritualité, V, cols. 475–512.
63 On its significance, see Flusin (2010). 64 See N. Ševčenko (1998).
65 Ed. Sieswerda (2004). 66 Ed. de Boor (1904). 67 Afinogenov (1999) and (2004).
up for its lack of histoire événementielle, it has long digressions on topics

such as prophecy, monasticism and the Holy Land, often with large extracts
quoted from patristic writings. It is a compendium of useful religious infor-
mation for the orthodox believer, set in a historical narrative framework.
Its potential as an encyclopaedia was recognised by the real encyclopaedists
of the tenth century, since it is an important source for both the Excerpta
historica and the Souda. It is thus a very real link between orthodoxy and
encyclopaedism.

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Cambridge Books Online

Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Edited by Jason König, Greg Woolf

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139814683

Online ISBN: 9781139814683

Hardback ISBN: 9781107038233

10 - Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and tenth centuries pp. 219

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139814683.013

Cambridge University Press

Encyclopaedism was an ongoing phenomenon throughout the eleven hun-

and is almost entirely devoted to describing Constantine VII’s literary activ-

Lemerle observed that further codicological research might reveal the

For Attic phrase in Plato let them seek,

16 Lemerle (1986) 339. 17 Odorico (1990).

all the compiling projects authored or sponsored by Constantine VII, he

20 Cameron (1993); Lauxtermann (2003) 83–6.

clearly anticipates the De ceremoniis of Constantine VII. Another collection

31 Lauxtermann (2003) 86–9. 32 Gallavotti (1990).

35 Odorico (1990). 36 Speck et al. (1991) 269–306, 326–7.

39 Magdalino (1997). 40 Dennis (2010) 2–11.

warfare as compatible with divine providence, the ultimate cause of victory.

As obscure as the question of the Bibliotheca’s influence is that of its

57 Treadgold (1977). 58 Lemerle (1986) 171–204; Magdalino (2006) 62–9.

the edifying works of Photios, to the tradition of excerpting, collecting and

up for its lack of histoire événementielle, it has long digressions on topics

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