Some Unnoticed Greek Quotes in Old Russian Chronicles

Abstract

This chapter looks at Greek quotes in the chronicles of Kyivan Rus’ and speculates on how they came to take their eventual form. While many quotations have a clear provenance, and often constituted secondary translations from Bulgarian, in some cases, there are subtle differences, or other signs that they may have been taken, at least in part, from unknown intermediary sources. The example is given of the “Philosopher’s Speech” in the Primary Chronicle, where an isolated quote from Amphilochius of Iconium shows that the compiler of the chronicle must have been drawing on more than one source. Other phrases use metaphor in ways that are unlikely to have come naturally to the mind of a native of Rus’, and, while they have a clear Greek precedent, are from texts which, at the time, had largely fallen into obscurity, indicating again the probable use of a bridging source.