Andreas Polymitis

The Byzantine Lexicon of Photios There are books written to be read, and there are books written because other books have already become difficult to read. In the ninth century, Patriarch Photios of Constantinople apparently decided that the second problem was serious enough and compiled his Λέξεων Συναγωγή, “Collection of Words,” known today simply as the Lexicon of Photios. I like the idea even before reaching the first word: one of the most learned Byzantines discovers that the ancient Greeks are already speaking Greek ancient enough even for Greeks, and someone has to explain what exactly they meant. Photios lived during a remarkable period of intellectual revival in Byzantium and knew both classical Greek literature and Christian authors extraordinarily well. His Lexicon was intended to help readers understand older texts whose words, expressions and meanings were no longer natural even to educated Byzantines. In his preface, Photios explains that he collected difficult words from orators, historians and theological writings, drawing also upon earlier lexicographical traditions. In other words, by the ninth century one could be Greek-speaking, highly educated, live in Constantinople and still open an ancient author with approximately the same feeling with which we sometimes open a legal contract: the words look familiar, but you suspect that somewhere among them something is happening that you do not understand. And this is precisely where the Lexicon ceases to be merely a dictionary. Because Photios and his sources do not simply explain rare words. They quote authors, and some of the works from which those quotations were taken subsequently disappeared. Thus a book intended to help a Byzantine understand an old text became, centuries later, a place where sometimes a fragment of the lost text itself survived. For modern classical philologists, the Lexicon is valuable precisely because it preserves information and fragments from ancient literature that otherwise has not reached us. Then the history of the Lexicon itself begins to look suspiciously like a story Photios ought to have included under the word “irony.” For a long time the text was known mainly through the badly damaged Codex Galeanus, today in Trinity College, Cambridge, a manuscript from approximately the eleventh or twelfth century from which enormous sections are missing. Scholars including Scaliger, Casaubon, Bentley and Porson worked with this textual tradition, and an important nineteenth-century edition was based upon it. And then came 1959. The Greek scholar Linos Politis was working with manuscripts at the monastery of Zavorda in Western Macedonia when he discovered Codex Zavordensis 95, a thirteenth or fourteenth-century manuscript containing practically the entire Lexicon, from alpha to omega. A text that European philology had spent centuries reconstructing from mutilated witnesses had been sitting in a Greek monastery waiting for someone to open the right codex. Better still, the newly discovered manuscript also preserved previously unknown fragments of ancient works. This is why I love books like this from Byzantium. They destroy the convenient idea that between Antiquity and us lies some empty corridor through which classical literature simply passed unharmed. Nothing passed “simply.” Someone read, copied, compared, explained an incomprehensible word, preserved a quotation, corrected another copyist and sometimes, without having the slightest idea, saved three lines from a book that would disappear after him. Photios wanted to help his contemporaries understand old words. More than a thousand years later, his old words help us understand what we have lost. Which is quite an impressive career for a dictionary.