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Bohemond’s breathing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Barry Baldwin
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Extract

In the course of her elaborate description (Alex. 13.10) of the physical and moral qualities of Bohemond, Anna Comnena writes of his nasal and pulmonary makeup thus:

Type
Short Notes:
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 15 , 1991 , pp. 314 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1991

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References

1. Leipzig 1884.

2. Miller, E., Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Hist. Grecs. I (Paris 1875) 2, 65–179.Google Scholar

3. Buckler, G., Anna Comnena (Oxford 1929) 473 Google Scholar, without going into any detail, describes the sentence as ‘obscure with one lacuna and one possible misreading’.

4. Wilson, N.G., An Anthology of Byzantine Prose (Berlin 1971) 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Sewter, who used Leib’s text came up with ‘He breathed freely through nostrils that were broad, worthy of his chest and a fine outlet for the breath that came out in gusts from his lungs’. Leib himself has ‘sa poitrine était proportionée à ses narines et ses narines l’etaient à sa large poitrine’. E. Dawes in her version (Oxford 1928), accepting a lacuna, left the sentence as ‘his chest corresponded to his nostrils and by his nostrils… the breadth of his chest’. Buckler, loc. cit., left it out of her translation altogether. The exception is L. Schopen who in the Bonn edition (p.255) translated the verb by adiuvabat.

6. Buckler 485–96 did not include the word in her discussion of Anna’s vocabulary.

7. It does not feature in Buckler’s account (57–9) of Anna’s descriptions and notions of the ideal physique, nor in the detailed survey of ancient pen portraits and theories of physiognomy in Evans, E.C., ‘Roman Descriptions of personal Appearance in History and Biography’, HSCP 46 (1935), 43–81.Google Scholar

8. For references and discussion of this image in such authors as Nicetas Choniates and Nicephorus Chrysoberges, see Browning, R., ‘Greeks and Others from Antiquity to the Renaissance’, History, Language and Literacy in the Byzantine World. (Northampton 1989) 18 Google Scholar; ‘An Unpublished Address of Nikephoros Chrysoberges to Patriarch John Kamateros of 1202’, Byz. Stud./Etud. Byz. 5 (1978) 42 (repr. in the aforementioned volume).

9. Buckler has no mention of Empedocles as an author known to Anna.

10. For speculations as to the survival of some of Empedocles’ texts until 1204 in Constantinople, cf.Horna, C., ‘Empedocleum’, Wien. Stud. 48 (1930) 1–11 Google Scholar. Similarly, it may be recollection of Empedoclean notions of strife and love that prompted Anna to use the verb of anger, e.g. at 8.3 and 15.3, albeit its application to love by Musaeus 91 should also be noted.

11. Assumed without warrant by Horna, art. cit. 9, to be the celebrated doctor Leipsiotes; cf. Gautier 194, n.l.

12. Empedocles does not appear as a topic of attention in Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (London 1983). However, he is three times cited by name in the scholia to Lucian (pp.101, 22; 103, 25; 226, 22 Rabe) and more than once by Tzetzes, e.g. Chil. 7.522; Ep. 98.