Rhetoric and Cultural Synthesis in the "Hexaemeron" of George of Pisidia

Abstract

George of Pisidia's longest and most profound work is a didactic poem whose generic title Hexaemeron or Kooloupyia is barely suggestive of its broad scope.' With 1894 lines set in correct iambic trimeter, the meter of classical dramatic dialogue, the text is, for one thing, an important witness to the classical literary tradition in seventh-century Constantinople. Four centuries after its composition, Michael Psellos thought enough of it to compare it to the poetry of Euripides.2 It echoes many classical writers, including Plato, Homer, Horace, Cicero and Seneca, and it frequently refers to episodes in Greek mythology. It even uses technical vocabulary from ancient medicine and biology to a degree of specificity not reached in the scientific handbooks.3 It also contains abundant theoretical discussion of astronomy, presenting the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic theory of the shape of the heavens, for example, in a favorable light alongside the biblical model.4 The poem also takes a firm, polemical stance where basic Christian doctrine is at issue. It is uncompromising, for example, in its position that the universe was created and not the product of eternal emanation.5 It makes frequent professions of faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation.6 In addition, despite its freedom from the narrative sequence of Genesis, biblical passages play a key role in its structure. Psalm 103 (LXX) in partic

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.