APPENDIX I THE LETTERS OF THEODORE OF STUDION THEODORE OF STUDION carried on an extensive correspondence, especially during the three periods in which he was living in banishment. After his death his letters were collected by his disciples at Studion. The total number of letters thus collected was at least 1124, of which over 550 are extant, in several MSS., none of which contains them all or preserves the same order. They have been edited partly (1) by Sirmond, whose posthumous ed. was reprinted in Migne, P.G. 99, and partly (2) by Cozza Luzi (see Bibliography). The Sirmond-Migne collection is derived from Vaticanus 1432 (V), a MS. of the first half of the twelfth century. The letters which it contains are divided into two Books, and the division professes to represent a chronological principle, Book I. comprising letters written before A.D. 815, Book II. from A.D. 815 to the writer's death. There are 54 letters in Book I. (nominally 57, but in three cases, 45-47, there are only the titles of the correspondents); and 219 in Book II. (No. 3 consists only of a heading, but No. 183 represents parts of two distinct letters). Two additional letters were added to Book II. by Migne (as Nos. 220, 221) from another MS., Vat. 633; so that this edition contains in all 275 letters. The letters printed for the first time by Cozza Luzi are taken from a MS. of the fifteenth century, Coislinianus 94. This book contains 545 letters, including all but six of those contained in V. The titles of the others had been published in Migne's ed. (Index, nn. 272-548). Cozza Luzi proposed to print only the unpublished letters, but he worked so carelessly that (in his total of 284) he included 8 already printed (namely, Migne, ii. 2, 9, 21, 24, 29, 56, 183b, 211). For his text he also compared another MS., Coislinianus 269. The relations of these various MSS., and of another, Paris 894 (P)—which was consulted for Sirmond's edition,—have been carefully investigated in a most important study by the late B. Melioranski (see Bibliography), of which I may summarize the chief results. Coisl. 269 was written in the ninth century and is itself the first volume of the original collection of Theodore's Epistles made in the monastery of Studion. It contains 507 letters and is divided into three Sections. Sect. 2 is written in a different hand from that of Sects. 1 and 3; and Melioranski, on the ground of a palaeographical comparison with the script of a copy of the Gospels dated A.D. 835 and signed by a Studite named Nicolaus, makes it probable that the copyist is no other than Theodore's disciple Nicolaus, who had been his amanuensis and shared his persecution. Melioranski also seeks to establish that the writer of Sects. 1 and 3 was the monk Athanasios who became abbot of Studion towards the close of the ninth century. The letters of Sect. 2 belong entirely to the years A.D. 815-819 and include all those published by Cozza Luzi. In the ninth century a copy was made of this Studite collection, but the letters were rearranged in a new order. They were divided into five Books. Books 1-4 contained at least 849, and Book 5 275 letters. This MS. is not preserved, but it is undoubtedly the collection which is referred to in Michael's Vita Theodori (246 D) as consisting of five Books. We have an incomplete copy derived from it in P, which contains a selection from Books 1-4. The importance of P lies in the circumstance that the copyist has noted the numeration of each letter in the archetype. Thus the letter numbered 170 in P (= ii. 146, Migne) was 726 in the archetype. The highest number in the archetype is 849. V, like P, is an anthology; it differs from P not in contents but only in form;1 like P, it contains none of the letters of Book 5. The two Books into which V is divided on a chronological principle do not correspond to any of the Books of the Five-Book arrangement. But from Book II. Ep. 37 onward the letters follow in the same order as that of the older non-chronological collection, and therefore the order in V has no chronological value; the date of each letter must be determined, if it can be determined, by its contents. Obviously the anthologies V and P cannot be independent of each other. Coisl. 94 is also an anthology (non-chronological). It contains more letters than any of the other MSS., and the last 275 are Book 5 of the tenth-century collection. A new edition of the Epistles of Theodore is desirable, and it seems evident that it should be based on Coisl. 269. 1 The arrangement in P was based on two principles: (1) subject—forty dogmatic epistles, on image - worship, were grouped together and placed at the beginning; (2) chronology-the remaining epistles were divided into two groups, (a) those of the first and second exiles, (b) those of the third exile. The arrangement of V was purely chronological. The tenth-century collection from which both these anthologies were derived was not based on chronological order. APPENDIX II GEORGE'S CHRONICLE THE Chronicle of George the Monk is a world-chronicle beginning with Adam and coming down to the first year of Michael III. (842-843). Of the writer we only know that he was a monk who lived in the reign of Michael III., and that he did not put the last touch to his work till after the death of that Emperor. His interest was entirely ecclesiastical; he had the narrowest of monastic horizons; and the latter portion of his work, which concerns us, is inordinately brief and yields little to the historian. His account of the reign of Theophilus, of whom he must have been a contemporary, is contained in three and a half short pages (in de Boor's edition), and of these more than a page consists of a quotation from Gregory of Nazianzus. For this portion (802-843) he made use of Theophanes; Theosteriktos, Vita Nicetae; Ignatius, Vita Nicephori; the Epistola synodica ad Theophilum; works of the Patriarch Nicephorus. (Cp. his Prologue, pp. 1-2, where he refers to modern histories, chronographies, and edifying works, which he laid under contribution). His account of the reigns of Leo V., Michael II., and Theophilus has no pretensions to be a historical narrative; it is little more than the passionate outpouring of a fanatical image-worshipper's rancour against the iconoclasts. The text of this chronicle is preserved in a variety of forms which have caused great perplexity. A great many MSS. are largely interpolated, and in many of these a Continuation has been added, transcribed from the work of Simeon the Logothete (see next Appendix). These MSS. are derived from an archetype in which large additions were inserted in the margin, from the Logothete's chronicle, and the MSS. vary according as the scribes incorporated in the text various parts of these additions. From 1 The words μετὰ δὲ Θεόφιλον έβασίλευσε Μιχαὴλ υἱὸς αὐτοῦ ἔτη κε' (p. 801) surely imply that Michael's reign was over. The author adds "he reigned for fourteen years with his mother Theodora and was sole Emperor for eleven years and three months." This gives twenty-five years three months; it should be twenty-five years eight months (Jan. 27, 842, to Sept. 23, 867). But it would be wrong, I think, to infer that George wrote this in April 867. Hirsch argued that the joint reign of Michael with Basil (from May 26, 866) was not included, and that the words were written before Michael's death, but he read ' erŋ, whereas the evidence of the MSS. establishes la erη (see de Boor's critical note ad loc.). Leo V. forward they furnish a tradition of the Logothete's text. In several of them the "Logothete's" authorship of the Continuation is noticed. The later part of the composite chronicle, from A.D. 813-948, was printed by Combefis (1685) in the Paris ed. of the Scriptores post Theophanem, and was reprinted by Bekker in the Bonn Corpus. The text was based on a depraved Paris MS., but Bekker used Hase's collation of codex Coislinianus 134, which contains the Chronicle of George unadulterated by interpolations from the Logothete, and signalised its variants. The whole composite work was edited for the first time by Muralt (1859), who based his text on a Moscow MS., which, as de Boor has shown, is "ita interpolatus ut a genuino textu omnium fere plurimum abesse iudicandus sit" (Georg. Mon. pp. x, lviii). Muralt procured collations of many other MSS., including Coislinianus 310, but he did not reproduce them accurately, and he failed entirely to see their relations, or even to grasp the problem. De Boor's judgment on his edition is that "studiis Byzantinis non modo non profuit sed valde nocuit" (ib. p. x). Nevertheless it was of some use to Hirsch, who in his Byzantinische Studien (1876) made it generally clear that the Coisliniani 310 and 134 preserve the genuine text of George, and that the other MSS. with which he was acquainted present an interpolated redaction (cp. p. 14). The difficult problem of determining the original text of George and explaining the interrelations of the numerous MSS. was attacked by C. de Boor, and his edition of the genuine Chronicle of George Monachus appeared in 1904 (see Bibliography, where his preliminary studies on the subject are noted). He arrived at the conclusion that George himself wrote out his chronicle twice. The first copy was rough and perhaps incomplete, and a large number of illustrative extracts from Biblical and other literature were added in the margin. This rough copy was not destroyed, and in the tenth century it was copied by a scribe who incorporated all the marginal additions in the text. This later copy exists to-day as Coislinianus 305 (the text only comes down to the reign of Constantine V.). Afterwards, George prepared a revised copy, in which he incorporated only parts of his marginal material and treated the text of the excerpts very freely. All the other MSS. are derived from this second edition (going back to an archetype which is most faithfully produced in the tenth-century Coislin. 310 and in Coislin. 134), and it is this which the edition of de Boor aims at reproducing. The hypothesis that these two distinct traditions are due to George himself explains the facts, but cannot be considered certain, as rehandling by copyists is a conceivable alternative. See the observations of Prächter in his review of de Boor's edition (B.Z. xv. p. 312). |