Mesebeszéd
Storytelling

Lessons from a Byzantine tale

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the work titled From the Exemplary Stories of Syntipas the Philosopher, a late 11th century Byzantine translation of a Syriac collection of 62 fables, attributed to Michael Andreopulos and considered to be descended from the Greek tradition. Following a review and the analysis of the collection in the context of the extensive tradition of the Aesopic corpus I focus on fables that are not known to occur anywhere else in the Greek fable tradition, examine the words of the protagonists and minor characters, then related to this analysis I discuss the moral concluding each fable (epimythia), several of which differ in the Syriac ‘original’ and its translation both in form and content and are often difficult to relate to the moral seen through the eyes of the modern reader. In the Appendix I present a Hungarian translation of the Byzantine collection of fables.

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