Constantinian Excerpts

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The Constantinian Excerpts

Byzantine emperor Constantine VII (945–959), but probably not completed until after his death.[2] Today only two volumes survive complete plus fragments of three others. The titles of 21 other volumes are known.[1] The volumes are typically known by their Latin titles.[2] The title of the whole, Excerpts, is also conventional.[3][4]

The original work may not have been truly a selection of excerpts so much as an anthology of whole texts rearranged thematically. According to the preface, the project involved taking the works of selected historians and rearranging their passages by topic rather than chronology so that "nothing contained in the texts would escape this distribution into subjects; by this division according to the content nothing of the continuous narration is omitted, but rather it is preserved entire."[2] Nonetheless, there is evidence of abridgement.[1] There is also commentary.[4]

The earliest historian included in the Excerpts is

Malchus of Philadelphia.[5] The ordering of authors within volumes follows no obvious rationale.[1] An author's excerpts within a volume, however, are never presented out of order.[6]

Only four volumes of the original 53 survive either in whole or in part. The complete surviving volume is the Excerpta de legationibus, which is divided into two parts: Excerpta de legationibus gentium ad Romanos (On embassies to Rome) and the Excerpta de legationibus Romanorum ad gentes (On embassies from Rome).

first edition of the Excerpta, printed at Antwerp in 1582.[8]

The purpose of the Excerpts was as a sort of

mirror for princes. Since history was believed to contain useful lessons for rulers, it was considered advantageous to arrange history thematically so that, in the words of Leonora Neville, "if an emperor was concerned with an upcoming embassy, he could read all the examples of embassies in Roman history at one time."[2] The compilers of the Suda made use of the Excerpts more often than the original works.[1]


Notes

  1. ^ Latin: Excerpta Constantiniana, Excerpta Historica or simply Excerpta; Greek: ᾽Εκλογαί, Eklogai, eclogues.

Editions

  • Excerpta Historica iussu imperatoris Constantini Porphyrogeniti Confecta, ed.
    Ursul Boissevain
    , Carl de Boor, Theodor Büttner-Wobst, and Anton Roos, 4 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 1903–1910.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Banchich 2012.
  2. ^ a b c d e Neville 2018, pp. 110–113.
  3. ^ Humphreys 2018.
  4. ^ a b c Kazhdan 1991.
  5. ^ Németh 2018, pp. 5–11.
  6. ^ Németh 2018, p. 4.
  7. ^ Banchich 2015, p. 3.
  8. ^ Németh 2018, p. 5.

Bibliography

  • Banchich, Thomas M. (2012). "Constantinian Excerpts". The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Blackwell. .
  • Banchich, Thomas M. (2015). The Lost History of Peter the Patrician: An Account of Rome's Imperial Past from the Age of Justinian. Routledge.
  • Humphreys, Mike (2018). "Excerpta". In Oliver Nicholson (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, Volume 1: A–I. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. p. 574.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
    . Oxford University Press. pp. 767–768.
  • Manafis, Panagiotis (2017). "The Excerpta Anonymi and the Constantinian Excerpts". Byzantinoslavica. 75 (1–2): 250–264. CEEOL 608919
  • Németh, András (2018). The Excerpta Constantiniana and the Byzantine Appropriation of the Past. Cambridge University Press.
  • Neville, Leonora (2018). Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing. Cambridge University Press. .