Chapter Three ANTHOLOGIES AND ANTHOLOGISTS Between c ...

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Part One: Texts and Contexts
recurrent festive occasions, most poems in the Anthologia Barberina were composed
for a one-off event. Is the purpose of AB “antiquarian”? In various
scholarly publications Constantine VII is praised for, or accused of, his alleged
“antiquarianism” – which is rather an unlucky catch phrase to denote the
various cultural phenomena of his long reign. The Anthologia Barberina is
perhaps “antiquarian” inasmuch as it contains many poems that were composed
for a specific moment in the past. But it is equally “modern”, as it
provides models to be imitated for future occasions, such as the epithalamium
on Leo VI (AB 36), which was re-used and adapted some twenty years later for
the wedding of Constantine VII and Helen Lekapene (AB 39). More importantly,
however, an anthology containing a large amount of poems in accentual
metres is really without precedent in the ninth and early tenth centuries. It is
precisely for this reason that the Anthologia Barberina should be viewed as a
novelty rather than as a supposedly “antiquarian” enterprise. Seen from the
viewpoint of tenth-century Byzantium, the Anthologia Barberina opens up new
perspectives on the recent, but somehow ever distant past.