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Could George of Pisidia be considered the spring of Byzantine poetry? It has been argued that he did not create anything entirely new, but rather renewed various aspects of both religious poetry and the epic encomium. Although he wrote poetry for his high-ranking patrons, rooted in his own theological view of the world, he blazed a highly personal trail, proselytizing his metaphysical interpretation of the key historical events that shaped the period of Herakleios, but also describing the individual’s struggle against earthly passions. Laying aside traditional hexameter, he made almost exclusive use of the prosodic iambic verse in his lengthy poems, adapting its metrical shell to the needs of his contemporary audience with an impressive sense of rhythm. He handled his figurative language skilfully, enriching his predecessors’ rhetorical techniques with new elements, while simultaneously reconceptualizing the epigram as a Gebrauchstext. The fact that George of Pisidia —a doctus poeta with undeniable talent and a profound familiarity with both classical and Christian literature— would exert a decisive influence on the form, content and function of Byzantine poetry, as this took shape in the centuries that followed, may justify answering the question posed at the start of this abstract in the affirmative.
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