Initia Carminum Byzantinorum

This reference work provides a tool with which the scholar of Byzantine literature can speedily establish the identity, authorship and place of issue of a poem from its opening line. It provides an alphabetical listing of the opening lines of some 20,000 Byzantine poems – profane and religious, edited and unprinted, in the literary and the colloquial language – from the beginning of the 4th to the 15th century. Apart from broadly-based compositions and epigrams it also takes account of all types of poetic inserts, monosticha, notes by copyists, owners and readers of manuscripts, metrical work and chapter headings, marginalia and end-notes, together with metrical scholia. Each opening line is accompanied by all the necessary information on the author, subject, place of issue and length of the poem. The work is completed with a listing of all the Byzantine authors quoted.