The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library already published in 2021 The Byzantine Sinbad (alias Syntipas) by Michael Andreopoulos, – a work akin to the Eugenian recension of Stephanites and Ichnelates, now edited by Alison Noble with the collaboration of Alexander Alexakis and Richard H. Greenfield. Both books are Byzantine translations of texts of oriental origin, closely related to the fable genre. Stephanites and Ichnelates, named after the two jackals who are the protagonists of the first, main fable of the book, is a work of Indian origin, successively translated into Middle Persian in the sixth century, Arabic in the eighth century, and then Greek and other European medieval languages. Like Syntipas, Barlaam and Joasaph and the Life of Aesop, it was a very popular story, which enjoyed a wide international reception.
The first Byzantine translation from the Arabic was made in the eleventh century by Symeon Seth and dedicated to the emperor Alexios I Komnenos. It was a somewhat shortened version, containing only chapters 1-7 and parts of chapter 9 from the Arabic original (entitled Kalila wa-Dimna). The present “Eugenian” recension offers a more complete version: while making use of Symeon Seth’s work, its author also resorted to the Arabic version to restore the sections omitted by Seth. It is this enlarged recension, completed in twelfth-century Sicily, that has here been edited and translated.
The book, published in a series meant to make medieval texts accessible to a broader public, includes a short but well-informed introduction, summarizing the various phases of the complicated history of the text. A special accent is put on the Sicilian, cultural context of the Eugenian recension, composed under the patronage of Eugenios of Palermo, an Italo-Greek translator and poet working for the Norman administration. “As a multilingual kingdom,” Sicily was a favorable milieu for such literary undertakings. In her introduction, Noble briefly summarizes the content of a work conceived according to the “Chinese box technique,” with a narrative framework (a discussion between the king of the Indians and a philosopher) leading to the telling of fables, which in turn contain other inserted fables. The introduction concludes with a few remarks on the language of the work: their elusive character is slightly frustrating given the complexity of the problem, which is due to the existence of notable variations and contaminations in the manuscript tradition.
The main part of the book is occupied by the edition and translation of the Eugenian recension, which includes a preface and three prologues, two of which are related to “Perzoué,” the personal physician of Chosroes, who was supposed to have brought the work from India and translated it into Middle Persian. These prolegomena, extending from pages 2 to 83 and representing more than 20 % of the whole work, are followed by the fifteen chapters of the main text. After the edition and translation, we find a few pages on the history of the text and the principles of the edition, notes to the Greek text (that is, an apparatus criticus), notes to the translation, a very short bibliography (most of the bibliographic references have indeed been inserted into the notes to the introduction, pp. xx-xxvi), and an index.
Even if, according to its editors, the Greek text published in the present volume cannot be considered a true critical edition, as the apparatus on pages 401-455 gives only the main variants of the manuscripts that significantly affect the translation, it nevertheless represents a “substantially new edition of the Eugenian recension,” based on four manuscripts – Par. suppl. gr. 692 (P), Vat. Barb. gr. 172 (B), Leiden Vulc. 93 (L), and Oxford, Bodl. Auct. T. 5.10 (O), as explained in the “Note on the Text.” Among the previous editions of Stephanites, by V. Puntoni (1889) and by L.-O. Sjöberg (1962), only the first one included the Eugenian recension; however, Puntoni did not use manuscript P, which provides a more complete text, of a higher stylistic level, and which is probably, according to Noble and Alexakis, closest to the original, even if, because of frequent contaminations, “we do not possess a single manuscript that preserves the authentic Eugenian recension.”
As a non-native speaker, I am not in a position to pass a well-grounded judgment on the English translation of the text. Nevertheless, my impression is that more precision would sometimes have been required to give a more exact view of the richness of the Greek vocabulary, especially where terms denoting intelligence and cunning are concerned – a semantic field much exploited in Stephanites, which includes a great many nearly synonymous adjectives, such as ἐχέφρων, συνετός, νουνεχής, φρόνιμος, and ἀγχίνους, whose translation appears somewhat uncertain: ἐχέφρων is indistinctly rendered by “sensible,” “smart,” “clever,” “intelligent,” or “wise,” while “smart” and “intelligent” are used indiscriminately for ἐχέφρων, συνετός, and νουνεχής, “sensible” for ἐχέφρων, νουνεχής, and φρόνιμος.
The marginalia or rubrics to the text have been divided, somewhat bizarrely, under the two headings of the “Notes to the text” and “Notes to the translation.” In the former, the editors have reproduced the short headings written in the margins of the text, used to mark the development of the narrative or its main sections; one can also find a few notes of the ὅρα type, meant to draw attention to the passages the copyist considered mostly remarkable. In the “Notes to the translation,” the editors have reproduced the numerous paratexts appended to the preface and the three prologues of the Eugenian version: this interesting metatextual material has already been investigated by M. Lauxtermann, in a paper much referred to by Noble and her collaborators.[1]
The “Notes to the translation” also provide references for the frequent quotations that are scattered throughout the narrative and can serve as an interesting clue to the stylistic level of the Eugenian recension – all the more so as/since several of them are explicitly signalled in the Greek text, albeit by means of periphrastic expressions such as κατὰ τὴν ποίησιν (1, 2; 2, 10; 4, 7), γέγραπται (4, 23; 13, 2), φησὶ γάρ τις τῶν σοφῶν or other formulas of the kind (1, 52; 3, 12; 7, 12). If borrowings from the Old and New Testament or from the Church Fathers are not surprising in a fictional work belonging to middlebrow literature (Gebrauchsliteratur) of a didactic kind such as the Book of Syntipas, quotations from Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, from classical tragedies, and from Demosthenes are less expected and point to a redactor not devoid of paideia – a point confirmed by his knowledge of Aphthonios’ Progymnasmata (mentioned on p. 474). However, some of the quotations signalled by the editors are probably of an indirect kind, for instance the reference to Euripides’ Hippolytus 612 (“It was my tongue that swore, not my mind”) in chapter 9.7, as this famous verse had been widely repeated and paraphrased, and had also been excerpted in gnomologia – a possible source for the author of Stephanites.
The brevity imposed by the popularizing orientation of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library sometimes leaves the reader hungry for additional information. As far as the history of the text is concerned, one would have liked more details on the manuscript tradition of the work as a whole, which was studied by L.-O. Sjöberg and J. Niehoff-Panagiotidis in books duly quoted in our authors’ bibliography.[2] In their “Note on the text,” they allude to the presence of a few illustrations in ms B: again, one would have liked to know a little more about these images, even if the manuscript is rather late.
On Eugenios of Palermo and his cultural milieu, one would expect a reference to Carolina Cupane’s article “Eugenios von Palermo: Rhetorik und Realität am normannischen Königshof des 12. Jahrhunderts.”[3] Some additions could also be made to the “Notes to the translation”: in chapter 1, 44, the story of the crow, jackal, and wolf deceptively proposing to be eaten by the lion resorts to the rhetorical procedure of prosangelia, often exploited by the authors of progymnasmata; it corroborates the influence of rhetorical teaching on the author of Stephanites. For chapter 15, 4 (“About a crow”), one would expect a reference to the series of Aesopic fables concerning the jackdaw trying to pass as a crow (or a dove). In chapters 1, 54-55, the depiction of the character of a scholastikos is reminiscent of the Philogelos, where scholastikoi (“intellectuals” rather than “lawyers”) are the targets of many jokes: the link between this work and the Life of Aesop, sometimes associated with Stephanites in the manuscripts, is a well-known fact.
The previous remarks should be considered a sign of the reviewer’s interest raised by reading the work of Noble and her collaborators. They have to be thanked for making Stephanites available to a wider public. It is still a little-known text, in spite of the international popularity that it enjoyed throughout the Middle Ages. This is even more true for the Eugenian version, which remains less known than the one by Symeon Seth, even if its proximity to the Arabic original, its copious metatextual apparatus, and its Sicilian context make it particularly interesting.
Notes
[1] M. Lauxtermann, “The Eugenian Recension of Stephanites and Ichnelates: Prologue and Paratexts”, Nea Rhômê 15, 2018, 55-106.
[2] L.-O. Sjöberg, Stephanites und Ichnelates: Überlieferungsgeschichte und Text, Uppsala, 1962; J. Niehoff-Panagiotidis, Übersetzung und Rezeption: Die byzantinischen-neugriechischen und spanischen Adaptionen von “Kalila wa-Dimna”, Wiesbaden, 2003.
[3] C. Cupane, “Eugenios von Palermo. Rhetorik und Realität am normannischen Königshof des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in V.Z. Zimmerl-Panagl (éd.), Dulce Melos II. Akten des 5. Internationalen Symposiums: Lateinische und griechische Dichtung in Spätantike, Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Wien, 25.27. November 2010), Pisa, 2013, 247-270.