Hum (Jan 2019)
Style Levels in the Works by Constantine Porphyrogenitus
Abstract
The question of the authorship of the literary corpus preserved under the name of Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII. Porphyrogenitus (913-959) has preoccupied scholars for more than a century. Uncertainty in the emperor's authorship arose for the most part due to the multitude of style levels of his writings, which in recent research has resulted in a disputation of the authorship of Porphyrogenitus involving most of the works attributed to him. This paper deals with the stylistic features of those parts of the Corpus Constantineum in which, according to experts, Porphyrogenitus had his own creative share. The results show that Constantine wrote using approximately six different style levels, and that the appearance of different stylistic expressions was conditioned by the literary genre, the subject matter and the circumstances addressed by the work in question. The common stylistic features present in the segments of the emperor's writings covered in this paper point to the fact that, in this case, it is possible that they were written by the same author, one who varied his writing style.
