Class Struggle in a Byzantine Farmyard: The Entertaining Tale of
Quadrupeds
[Presented by Nick Nicholas -- Canberra, April 1997]
The Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds is a vernacular Greek poem,
dating from the fourteenth century which George Baloglou and
myself have recently translated into English. Together with the
Book of Birds ( Poulologos ), believed
to have been written
somewhat earlier, the Tale belongs to the class of poems known as
Animal Epics (Tiereposen) or, as we have termed them, Epic
Bestiaries: they share with bestiaries an encyclopaedic tendency to
rattle off facts and factoids about the animals (many of them
culled from the bestiary par excellence, the Physiologus), but they
also tell a story of a conference of beasts, with a few fairy tales
and insults mixed in, and even attempt to convey a moral. The
beasts of the Tale are land-locked (in contrast to those in the Book
of Birds, which features pelicans, swans, and herons, some
unfortunate enough to be castigated as "bred in lakes"), but a close
look at the Tale can sail us indeed a good deal closer to
Byzantium.
In this talk, I consider what light the poem can cast on its
troubled times, and more generally on the lives and thoughts of
commoners in late Byzantium. While not advocating that the Tale is
a Roman a Cle (if there are any allusions to specific
contemporary political figures, they are too well concealed to be
noticed by modern researchers, and the style of the poem does not
bear such an intent out), it seems clear that someone along the
chain of transmission intended for the poem to be a comment on its
troubled times. Along with Alexius Makrembolites' Dialogue, and to
a lesser extent the Belisariad, the Tale is unique as a late
Byzantine work protesting against the status quo. Vasiliou has
recently proposed that the prologue and conclusion of the Tale are
not authentic, although they are present in the entire manuscript
tradition of the poem (which dates back to 1461). I evaluate the
evidence for this claim. I also consider the evidence for the poem
originating from a region under Turkish, rather than Byzantine
dominion.
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