This is one of several translated
excerpts from Byzantine sources produced and mounted with
historical introduction and commentary by Paul Stephenson.
The chronicle of Symeon Logothete has been preserved in three forms: an original written to magnify the deeds of Romanos Lekapenos; as the continuation to the Epitome of George the Monk; and as the so-called Chronicle of Pseudo-Symeon. It is also preserved in a Church Slavonic translation. The work has been preserved in more than 30 separate manuscripts: a large number for a Byzantine text, which suggests that Symeon's was a very popular history. (The parallel history, known as Theophanes Continuatus, has been preserved in a single manuscript.) The edition in the Bonn corpus (as Georgius Monachus Contiunatus, ed. Bekker, 1842) is attributed to Leo Grammatikos, a scribe known to have been active in 1013.
Symeon's chronicle covers the period AD 842-948, and consists of three sections which differ in style and perspective. The third section, with which we are concerned, is a description of the period AD 913-48; that is, from the accession of Constantine Porphyrogenitus to the death of Romanos Lekapenos. It must be read alongside book six of Theophanes Continuatus.
Beyond his name, rank and office we know little, with certainty, about the author. Scholarly opinion no longer identifies Symeon the Logothete with Symeon Metaphrastes, although both held the elevated rank of magistros. Alexander Kazhdan (ODB, III, p. 1983) maintained that Metaphrastes, who died c. 1000, was of "the next generation and worked in a different genre". The Logothete was a more modest author, not versed in the high style Greek employed by Metaphrastes. His account was written in the sort of language one would associate with a functionary: a "mandarin" style. Its coverage is geographically uneven, focussing on Constantinople at the expense of the provinces. More fundamentally, it presents a eulogized version of the reign of Romanos I Lekapenos. Symeon Logothete, we might conclude, was an official at the court of Romanos Lekapenos, who was commissioned to produce an official history of that emperor's reign.
However, an alternative identification is
possible. James Howard-Johnston
has argued convincingly that the core of the Logothete's account
was culled
from an earlier hagiographical account of Lekapenos' reign, which
stopped,
naturally, with his death. The centrality of Lekapenos to the
text, the
attention paid to his spiritual development, and the emphasis
placed on
his charitable deeds and abasement before monks, all suggest that
the Logothete
had access to a lost biography of the emperor. Therefore, since it
incorporates
at least one text completed after 948, the Logothete's chronicle
may have
been compiled significantly later than is generally supposed:
Howard-Johnston
has suggested that it was produced in the 980s, in the context of
the struggles
between provincial aristocrats and the young 'Macedonian' emperor,
Basil
II. The Logothete's chronicle, with its provincial style, might
then have
served as a corrective to the view of recent history promoted by
the 'Macedonian'
dynasty.
Since I wrote this introduction, a new edition has appeared: S.
Wahlgreen, Symeonis
Magistri et Logothetae Chronicon, CFHB XLVI/i
(Berlin, 2006). I shall produce some translated excerpts from this
edition in good time.
Paul Stephenson, October 1998
Revised January 2012