Latinité d’occident, latinité d’orient: Le ‘latin’ du Livre des cérémonies de Constantin Porphyrogénète

Abstract

SummaryAfter the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the imperial ritual was preserved and systematized in the East, in the ‘Byzantine’ Empire, by intensifying and Christianizing. The Book of Ceremonies by Constantine Porphyrogennetos, written in Greek in Constantinople in the 10th century, by compiling protocols of the previous centuries, gathers a rich collection of court rituals to be observed during the great religious and civil ceremonies which accompanied the important events of the reigns of the sovereigns, and the sportive events at the Hippodrome. We investigate about the permanence and the future of the Latin language in the ceremonial of the Byzantine Court: the survival of formulaic expressions of order and acclamation in Latin (rhômaïzein), Latin phrases underlaying the Greek text, and a great lot of Latinisms (rhômaï(k)a lexis) in the institutional and technical lexicon, sometimes unknown in Latin, which attest integrational processes, lexical creation, and phenomens of ‘aller-retour’ (round trip) between the West and the East, and between the Greek and the Latin languages.