‘Homeric’ Acrostics. Eudocia, Homerocentones (I), 452-455, 942-946

What is it about?

The article argues that two acrostics (‘vertical’ words created with the first letters of a sequence of verses) appear in lines 452-5 (ΚΑΛΑ: ‘beautiful [things]’) and 942-6 (ΑΠΑΤΗ: ‘deceit’) of Eudocia’s fifth-century Homerocentones (I), one of the most important late antique Greek poems. This constitutes a significant discovery, considering that they are the first acrostics to be detected in an ancient Greek ‘cento’. Centos are poems consisting of lines taken from pre-existent poems – lines that are re-arranged in order to tell a new narrative. In the case of the Homerocentones, the Byzantine Empress Eudocia (the best-preserved female author from classical antiquity) re-arranges verses from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to write a poetic Gospel. The discovery of the two acrostics sheds light on the complex and sophisticated nature of the Homerocentones’ engagement with Homer and compositional process (as well as the compositional process of centonic poetry more generally). The acrostics may aim to make their well-learned ‘intended’ discoverers reflect on the possibility that the Homerocentones are more than just a centonist’s collage. The message would be that, even if some Homeric lines do not follow one another in the Iliad and the Odyssey, they are meant to: the centonist’s only task is to ‘re-order’ them to light on the Christian messages – and acrostics – intrinsic to the Homeric poems.

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Photo by Kelly Brito on Unsplash

Photo by Kelly Brito on Unsplash