To compose, read, and use a Byzantine text: aspects of the chronicle of Constantine Manasses

Abstract

Constantine Manasses’ Synopsis Chronike is a twelfth-century verse chronicle, recasting Byzantine history in a specifically Comnenian, romantic and poetic vein. The chronicle has been preserved in many manuscripts, but it has also come down to us in a number of different collections of excerpts. This article wishes to draw attention to the readers! excerptors of the Synopsis Chronike, to consider the use and usefulness of the text in relation to the composition itself. Some collections of excerpts are compared and discussed, with special focus on the excerpts included in a fifteenth-century miscellaneous manuscript (Codex Upsaliensis Graecus 8).