An Author in search of his place in time: Mercurius the Grammarian and his texts

The poetic texts of Mercurius Grammatikos have been published in the past, more than once; however, despite their undisputed value, these editions display numerous editorial challenges. This book primarily aims to provide a new, improved edition of the four texts attributed to Mercurius, namely his two extended poetic martyrdoms of the saints Theodore Stratelates and Theodore Teron, which are based on the corresponding prose accounts by Symeon Metaphrastes, his translation into Byzantine dodecasyllable of a homily on the Annunciation mistakenly attributed to saint John Chrysostom, and his iambic canon dedicated to Chrysostom. The manuscript that preserves these texts had been incorrectly dated to the 15th century, but its recent re-dating to the 12th century now allows us to place this enigmatic author in the 11th or 12th century. These poems of Mercurius are didactic by nature, much like many of the metrical works of Michael Psellus, which translate into verse handbooks of rhetoric, philosophy, and even liturgical texts for use in the instruction and practice of his students. Thus, these texts can offer us a glimpse into the attempts of certain Byzantine authors of the second half of the 11th or 12th century to recover a sense of polyphony within select prose models by reconfiguring them into a distinct, poetic discourse. The polyphonic constitution of these texts appears to significantly intensify their performative dynamics, insofar as they are reconfigured within the framework of classical metrical structures and concomitantly subjected to a markedly archaizing linguistic register.