Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short ethopoiia, or rhetorical personification, of a former teacher at the Patriarchal School of Hagia Sophia who was passed over for the see of Antioch in the years immediately after the Fourth Crusade, comes to us from the pen of the Byzantine bishop and literatus Nikolaos Mesarites, transmitted, along with the rest of his works, through Ambrosianus Graecus F93 and Ambrosianus Graecus F96. It is a critical corroborative source for some of the dimensions of Byzantine ecclesiastical politics in the earliest years of the Empire of Nicaea, as well as for the intrigue surrounding the appointment of an Orthodox Patriarch to the see of Antioch in 1205-1206. Effectively, during a succession crisis in the principality of Antioch, the Patriarchate had become vacant, and an Orthodox bishop, Symeon II, chosen from among the local Melkite community had been appointed by the Latin prince without reference to the exiled Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Evidently, the subject of the poem would have been endowed with the office by the Laskarid court, but the appointment of an Orthodox Patriarch in the person of Symeon II forced the emperor, in reluctant deference to the whims of a prince of the Outremer, to withdraw his candidate. The ethopoiia, therefore, is best read as a rhetorical device meant to salvage the reputation of those concerned by imputing to the candidate an unsuitable and preening fixation on astrology as a pretext for the retraction of the offered benefice. Likewise, in a context in which Nikolaos Mesarites and his brother Ioannes, in concert with those Byzantines who still remained in occupied Constantinople, were advocating for the appointment of another patriarch to the throne of the Latin-held capital, an action that relied on the case of Antioch to demonstrate precedent, it follows that it would have been in Mesarites' interests to discredit the subject of the ethopoiia. The tone of the piece, written in the voice of the failed candidate, is profoundly misanthropic, and fixated upon astrology as a means by which to deal with his own overweening ambition and moral turpitude, while also promising to assume a host of ailments in order to put a stop to the scorn of his associates. An aspect of the text which is not immediately obvious is the way in which it attests, albeit indirectly, to the diverse fields of knowledge in which a Byzantine bishop might be thought, however slanderously, to dabble, and bears out the critical place which astrology held in Byzantine understandings of their world even among the elite and those within the religious establishment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.065 | 0.025 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".