A Greek Alchemical Epigram in its Middle Byzantine Context

Abstract

This article examines the dedicatory epigram of the earliest and most important witness to the Greek alchemical corpus, the tenth-century manuscript donated by Cardinal Bessarion to the Republic of Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana MS gr. 299, as a window onto the cultural coordinates of the manuscript’s middle Byzantine readers. Scrutiny of the epigram’s meter, language, literary conventions, and the handwriting of the scribe who copied it into the manuscript point to a tenth-century date not only for the manuscript but also for the epigram itself and make it possible to situate the epigram, and with it the alchemical manuscript that contains it, within the mainstream of middle Byzantine elite culture.