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The Spring of Rhythm. An Essay on the Political Verse and Other Byzantine Metres

The study of Byzantine metrics is not a pastime with a large following. It demands a confident command of the rules of Greek versification from ancient to medieval times, never a widespread skill and one which is now becoming very rare indeed; even editors of verse texts all too easily find more approachable topics for investigation in their introductions. In this short book, however, Lauxtermann not only demonstrates his mastery of the field but also makes a good case that it is one which still has an exciting potential. Lauxtermann's aim is to examine the history of octosyllables and heptasyllables between ca. 400 and 1000, and ultimately to investigate the perennial problem of the origins of the fifteen-syllable political verse. He starts from the premise that it is now accepted, since Koder's work on Romanos, that the political verse did not arise as a single unit but is formed from two separate colons, an 8-syllable and a 7-syllable. He argues that the way to understand how the verse came into being is not to carry on counting syllables and searching for random examples of 8-, 7and 15-syllable accentual line in early Byzantine verse, but to examine the contexts in which accentual verse is used, from the 4th century onwards: a constructive proposition. Thus, after a brief introduction, he set out his study in 5 sections: 1. (pp. 21-40) on the political verse of the 10th century, and the genres in which it appears; 2. (pp. 41-54) on the 8and 7-syllable verse of the 9th and 10th centuries, which is used in the same genres as the political verse; 3. (pp. 55-68) on early accentual poetry, in hymns, acclamations and satirical songs; 4. (pp. 69-86) on the salient metrical features of this poetry; 5. (pp. 87-96) on two Spring Songs, one well known from the Book of Ceremonies, the other produced by Arsenios, an obscure 9th-century schoolmaster. There is an epilogue with suggestions for future progress in the study of Byzantine metrics, and an appendix with an edition of the 10th-century catanyctic (penitential) alphabet of Kyriakos of Chonai, based on Par. Suppl. gr. 690 (P). The appendix is justified by Lauxtermann's identification of P as a much better witness than the manuscript used in the previous edition (by Anastasijewic in 1907), but very many of the other texts he discusses are also available only in old and not always satisfactory editions. The 7-syllables of Christopher Protasekretis, or Arsenios' Spring Song, for example, are only to be found in Matranga's AnecdotaGraeca of 1850: an edition of these would have been useful.