International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Darko Todorović
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy,
Department of Classical Studies, Belgrade, Serbia;
[e-mail]
On One Erroneous Attribution of the Byzantine Apology of Eunuchism
It was the German philologist and historian Peter Lambeck, or Lambecius (1628–1680), a 
17
th
century librarian of the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, who was the first to raise the issue of the 
authorship of the Byzantine treatise in defense of eunuchism, now unquestionably attributed to 
Theophylact, Archbishop of Ohrid (c. 1088/1089–after 1107/1108). While giving the detailed 
account of the content of what is now the 
Codex Vindobonensis graecus 43
(16. c.), in which the 
Apology of Eunuchism
forms a part of a unique group of five manuscripts – otherwise known from 
the 
Laurentianus graecus 19–12
(13. c.), a far superior prototype of the 
Vindobon. gr. 43
, which in 
addition provides the undubitable testimony to Theophylact’s authorship – Lambeck, apparently 
not informed of the existence of the older codex, engages in subtle speculations about the identity 
of the author of the peculiar opuscule, trying to reconstruct the probable historical circumstances of 
its occurrence (P. Lambeck, 
Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensi 
lib. IV
, Vindobonae 1671, pp. 11–5). Considering the fact that the author of the 
Apology 
was the very 
person who at the same time wrote the encomiastic and paraenetic sermon, the fourth text of the 
group, which is actually dedicated to the author’s royal pupil named Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 
Lambeck firstly made a fairly natural assumption that the mentioned emperor could be no other 
than Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (945–959), the most famous bearer of that name; while on 
the other hand the author of both texts, as well as the rest of the body, could have consequently 
been only the Emperor’s teacher Theodore Pedagogue, a figure otherwise not unknown from 
the scanty reports provided by Byzantine historians Leo Grammaticus, Cedrenus and Zonaras. 
(As a matter of fact, the ‘purple-born’ pupil in question is Constantine son of Emperor Michael 
Doukas, Theophylact’s student.) As regards the unnamed adressée of the 
Apology
, mentioned in its 
Prologue as the author’s ‘brother eunuch’, Lambeck identified him quite reasonably as the Theodore 
Pedagogue’s brother Symeon, a eunuch whose unlucky fates (recorded in the same historiographical 
context) could indeed constitute the appropriate pretext for a literary consolation of this kind.
Following the Lambeck’s attribution, William Cave (1637–1713), an English patristic 
scholar and author of the once influential 
Literary History of the Ecclesiastical Writers
, went a step 
further by readily promoting Theodore Pedagogue into a prominent ‘ecclesiastical writer’ of the 
‘saeculum obscurum’ (i.e. the 10
th
century, according to Cave’s nomenclature), establishing him as 
an indisputable author of the body of ‘quinque orationes’, with the curious 
Apology 
occupying the 
central position (W. Cave, 
Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria
, Londini 
3
1698, p. 310; it 
is interesting to note that the 
4
1705 edition of 
SEHL
, p. 536, included for the first time the entry on 
Theophylact of Ohrid, with one of the titles listed being the author’s 
Institutio regia ad Constantinum 
Porphyrogennetam Michaelis Ducae filium
, published 1651 in Paris by P. Possinus – which certainly 
implies that Cave anyway 
could
compare the first Greek lines from the Possinus’ edition with the 
Greek incipit of 
Ad imperatorem Constantinum Porphyrogennetam, Leonis sapientis filium
which he 
had taken over from Lambeck and quoted a few pages earlier, on p. 495 of the same edition – but he 

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obviously failed to do so: otherwise, he would have noticed the complete coincidence between the 
two wordings, and so perhaps revised or completely abandoned the Lambeck’s theory on Theodore 
Pedagogue’s authorship).
Cave’s information was then uncritically adopted by a number of contemporary authors, none 
of whom, not even Cave himself, could naturally have any closer idea about the specific content 
of an unpublished manuscript treatise ‘pro eunuchismo et eunuchis’, known only by a general 
bibliographical description (supplied by Lambeck). This left room for various loose and unfounded 
speculations as to the overall literary and generic character of this fairly unique piece of medieval 
literature. Dom Bonaventure d’Argonne, a French lawyer, man of letters and Carthusian monk 
(known under the pseudonyme M. de Vigneul-Marville, c. 1634–1704), in his popular and widely 
read Gleanings from History and Literature characterized the writing, rather arbitrarily, as ‘singulier 
et bizarre’ (
Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature
, vol. 2, Rotterdam 1700, p. 132), thus offering the 
keyword to his younger contemporary Charles Ancillon (1659–1715), a French jurist and diplomat, 
who then unhesitatingly placed the Byzantine ‘praise of eunuchism’ into the well-known satirical 
genre of the paradoxical encomia of unworthy or trifling objects (the same as Isocrates’ praise of 
Busiris, Cardano’s praise of Nero, as well as that of gout, Sinesius’ eulogy of baldness, Erasmus’ 
praise of folly and many others of this kind, Ch. Ancillon, 
Traité des eunuques
, s.l. 1707, p. 9). It is 
worth noting that the tradition of the erroneous attribution of the Byzantine 
Apology of Eunuchism 
persisted in some respect even as late as the second half of the 20
th
century (e.g. Grosrichard, 1979), 
right up to the first critical editions of Theophylact’s treatise (Gautier 1980, Spadaro 1981).