A poem addressed to Demetrius, Metropolitan of Cyzicus

Our obscure 11th century Greek cleric, Demetrius, Metropolitan of Cyzicus, had the good fortune to have a poem addressed to him by Christopher of Mytilene. The latter was a contemporary poet who wrote a collection, Various Verses, of which this poem is number 22. Even more fortunately the collection then had the good fortune to be edited and translated in the excellent Dumbarton Oaks series: Floris Bernard and Christopher Livanos, eds. and trans., The Poems of Christopher of Mytilene and John Mauropous, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 50 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). This reprints the 1903 Kurtz edition with an English translation and commentary.1 Christopher’s verses do not seem to have been popular. As the editors remark: Only one manuscript transmits the collection in its entirety: Grottaferrata Z.α.XXIX, which was copied in the thirteenth century, in a milieu of Greek-speaking poets in southern Italy. This manuscript is heavily damaged, because, as Christopher…