Homeric scholarship in the pulpit: the case of Eustathius’ sermons

Many classicists are familiar with Eustathius (c.1115–95) through his huge Homeric commentaries or Parekbolai. He is thought to have composed these, along with studies of Pindar, Aristophanes, and Dionysius the Periegete, while working as a teacher in Constantinople, and he continued to revise them later in life while Archbishop of Thessalonike. Quite different parts of Eustathius’ output, however, have attracted attention from Byzantinists, particularly his formal orations delivered before Emperor Manuel I once Eustathius attained the position of Master of the Rhetoricians (c.1168), his ecclesiastical writings as archbishop from c.1178, and his history On the Capture of Thessalonike (1186).

Few attempts have been made to bridge this disciplinary divide and to discuss the continuities between the philological and non-philological parts of Eustathius’ oeuvre, as noted in the call for such work by the editors of a recent volume dedicated to him. Our investigation of twelve texts by Eustathius which have a good claim to be sermons delivered in church identified over 100 plausible connections to Homer, of which only 28 had been catalogued in the apparatus of source texts provided by Schönauer (2006) and Wirth (1999). We present here some case studies that illustrate the mutual benefits of reading Eustathius’ Homeric scholarship and sermons side by side. The commentaries often elucidate Eustathius’ intention when he deploys words or ideas derived from Homer in the sermons. Conversely, the sermons show how Eustathius put into practice the rhetorical advice on alluding to Homer that is a recurrent feature of his commentaries. Moreover, divergences between the two sources speak to wider questions about how applicable Eustathius thought certain Homeric values were within the society of his own day.