Ioannis Vassis – författare

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.

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 4th to the 15th 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.