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Some Notes on the Monument of Porphyrios at Constantinople
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2013
Extract
The monument of the charioteer Porphyrios which stands in the Atrium of the church of St. Irene at Constantinople will no doubt be an object of interest now that the church has been thrown open to the public as a Military Museum. The description of it by Mordtmann which appeared in 1880 is still the best available, and except for some further remarks by the same writer nothing seems to have been published subsequently concerning it until the appearance last year of a short paper by M. J. Ebersolt who treats the sculptured reliefs from the artistic standpoint, and discusses the place which they occupy in the history of Byzantine Art.
The notes which I publish here consist of a few comments on the texts of the inscriptions as printed by Mordtmann, and small corrections in them, together with a suggested interpretation, which seems new, of one of the scenes sculptured on the stele, and a short account, kindly supplied by Professor J. B. Bury, of the language and metre of the inscriptions in popular Greek which appear on two of the four sides of the stele.
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- Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1911
References
page 88 note 1 Ath. Mitt. v. (1880), pp. 295 ff.
page 88 note 2 Esquisse topographique de Constantinople (1892), pp. 49, 68.
page 88 note 3 Revue Arch. xviii. (1911, juillet-août), pp. 76 ff, with a full bibliography.
page 89 note 1 Epigrammata Graeca, 935, where however [Πρασ]ίνοις is suggested as an emendation: this is not justified by the stone, for the upsilon is plain.
page 89 note 2 Ath. Mitt. v. p. 301.
page 89 note 3 Op. cit. p. 304.
page 89 note 4 Rev. Arch. op. cit. p. 84.
page 90 note 1 Op. cit. p. 305.
page 90 note 2 Op. cit. p. 306; Mordtmann would scan it μόνος ἐνίκησε Πορφ´ρις ὁ εὐδόκιμος
page 90 note 3 Ibid. scanned ἄγεται οὐκ ἄγε ται οὐ μέ λει μοι δὸς ἡμῖν Πορφύρω
page 90 note 4 Might we in any case credit the spectators in the Hippodrome with a sufficient taste for literary parody?
page 90 note 5 Anthologia Planudea, Nos. 340, 342.
page 90 note 6 Mr. Wace kindly informs me that from the cuttings visible on the top of the stele, B was clearly the front.
page 90 note 7 Cf. Anth. Plan. 345: ᾿Εγγύθι τῆς Νίκης καὶ ᾿Αλεξάνδρου βασιλῆος ᾿´Εστης . . .
page 91 note 1 Mordtmann, op. cit. p. 301, suggests that it is a dedication by the four Factions together, and thinks that we may see in the spectators acclaiming the victor in the lower reliefs on the narrower sides, five representatives each of Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites. Of this I am by no means convinced, though the spectators on A may probably be all regarded as Greens, in view of the words Δῆμος Πρασίνων written above them on the stone.
page 91 note 2 Op. cit. p. 307.
page 91 note 3 Op. cit. p. 80 f.