ABSTRACT

The career of Constantine of Rhodes is reasonably well-documented, for a Byzantine poet. A ‘Rhodios’ appears in written sources in 908 as a secretary of the eunuch Samonas, one of Emperor Leo VI’s favourite ministers, and it is assumed that this is the same man as the Constantine of Rhodes of the poem. Paul Speck, for one, as Ioannis Vassis has detailed, argued that these lines were an interpolation on the part of an editor engaged in putting together a copy of the works of Constantine of Rhodes. Speck suggested that the text in the Athos manuscript represents a posthumous edition of the poem produced on the basis of various poetic fragments written by Constantine and put together by a later editor. In Constantine’s poem, there are none of the explicit expressions of poverty and begging for support that are found in the works of poets such as Prodromos.