International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Rachele Ricceri
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; 
[e-mail]
Texts, Paratexts, Manuscripts: 
The Reception of the Psalms in the 
Metaphrasis Psalmorum
As Byzantine literature is mainly centred on religious topics, the reception and the re-reading 
of the Bible has extensively influenced also Byzantine poetical production, to various extents and 
in different periods. In my paper I shall focus on the book of Psalms from the viewpoint of its 
reception in the Byzantine transmission of the 
Metaphrasis Psalmorum
, traditionally (and very 
probably erroneously) ascended to Apollinaris of Laodicea (IV cent.). The 
Metaphrasis
makes use of 
the highbrow Greek metre 
par excellance
, the dactylic hexameter, and shows off a proud knowledge 
of Homeric stylistic and linguistic features (Golega 1960).
Originally written in Hebrew as poetic texts, the Psalms were translated into Greek (in the 
Septuagint edition) without any specific metre, and represent an important group of texts whose 
influence crosses the entire history of Western literary culture. Significantly, early Christian and 
Byzantine readers continued to recognize the lyric features of the Psalms, since psalmody (i.e. the 
practice of singing the Psalms in divine worship) was a typical exercise of monastic life (Wegman 
1990; Parpulov 2010). Moreover, memorizing the book of Psalms was a common base of Byzantine 
education. I intend to illustrate how the Psalms are reflected in the concrete way of writing poetry 
and in the material production of a specific kind of poetical texts, namely the metaphrases.
My enquiry will mainly be manuscript-based. The core of my investigation is the examination 
of two aspects of how some manuscripts present the 
Metaphrasis
: the relationship with the Psalms, 
from the point of view of the layout of the manuscripts, and the analysis of the paratexts that 
accompany this metrical psalter. Unfortunately, the manuscript tradition of the 
Metaphrasis
is 

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contaminated and generally late (De Stefani 2008), but it reflects an interesting way of dealing with 
a canonic model and some intriguing considerations can arise from the extant witnesses to the 
metrical psalter.
Aiming at underline the direct dependence of the metaphrastic text from the biblical one, most 
of the scribes who dealt with these hexameters used to copy the Psalms along to the 
Metaphrasis
. 
Moreover, the figural representation of the two sets of texts plays an important role, since it is to be 
considered as a trace of how respectively the ‘Homeric psalter’ and the original one were treated and 
offered to the readers by Byzantine copyists.
The paratexts, finally, are a rich source of information on the tradition of the 
Metaphrasis
. Each 
of the metrical psalm is preceded in the manuscripts by at least one metrical title. Although they are 
already published in the only complete critical edition so far available (Ludwich 1912), the metrical 
titles have only incidentally been the object of a study (Gonnelli 1989) and definitely deserve more 
attention, for more than one reason. As titles, these verses occupy a prominent and visible position 
in the codices, they are often written in different ink and could not be ignored by whoever read 
the book. Despite their quality as poetic texts is not always satisfactory, the metrical titles provide 
an interesting evidence of how Byzantine readers like to play with meters and to adapt even basic 
information to a higher style.