This book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is an overview of Greek drama and theatre from the Classical to Byzantine periods, ending with a consideration of the cento form as reception of Classical drama in Byzantine literary culture (pp. 5–60). Part 2 comprises a miscellany of remarks on the Euripidean cento Christos Paschon. I say miscellany, because the second part does not amount to a sustained study or analysis of the poem, but is rather a rehearsal of the various issues this poem presents.
The first part provides non-controversial information about the history and development of Greek drama from the Classical through Hellenistic to Roman Imperial periods (pp. 5–23). Pages 24–43 cover the history of theatre in the Byzantine period.
V. dates the Christos Paschon to the twelfth century, seeing in it differences of compositional technique sufficient enough to distinguish the poem from the ‘Blützeit des Centos’ in the fourth and fifth centuries where the model espoused and delineated by Ausonius in the preface to his Cento Nuptialis held sway (i.e. duos [versus] iunctim locare [est] ineptum). V. also sees the influence of works by Prodromos, Manasses and Tzetzes (p. 166), which precludes Gregory Nazianzus as the attributed author. Taking his cue from this, and from the repetitions of borrowed verses in the text, V. entertains the possibility of multiple authors for the Christos Paschon cento – ‘zwei oder mehrere verschiedene Authoren … das Werk könnte in einem Kloster als en von Mönchen vollbrachter Auftrag entstanden sein’ (p. 100).
What V. does not provide, however, but what seems most needed in a study of this sort, is a thorough presentation/analysis of the poetics of the poem, as has been attempted, for example, for Latin secular centos by S. McGill (Virgil Recomposed: the Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity [2005]), and for the Eudocian recension of the Homeric Centos by Usher (Homeric Stitchings: the Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia [1998]), neither of which appears in V.'s bibliography.
What analysis we do get from V. is an Aristotelian reading of the Christos Paschon (pp. 140–52). Why Aristotle? Is he proffered because he is thought to be universally prescriptive for the genre, or as somehow authoritatively descriptive for the form and plot of tragedies tout court? To what degree was the Poetics known to, or relevant for, dramatists, much less centonists in this period? To my mind, the choice of Aristotle as a template against which to measure the Christos Paschon is not adequately explained or justified. The conclusion in this section that in the Christos Paschon ‘nicht Jesus Christus ist der Protagonist, sondern die Mutter Gottes’ (p. 148), is not in itself a revelation. M. Alexiou (The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition [2nd ed., 2002], pp. 64, 215 n. 25, 54–5, 68, 70, 214 nn. 31, 33), whom V. does cite briefly, has said more of substance on this topic in a few paragraphs and footnotes than the reader gets here. Similarly, the non-classical use of the chorus (in both form and structure) and the absence of stichomythy in the Cento come as no surprise either (pp. 145–8).
There is a short chapter on the kinds of changes made to the Cento text in order to situate the Euripidean lines in their new narrative context (pp. 153–62), but the problem is posed as if the primary interest in such changes were to determine the extent to which one can use Cento readings as a witness to establish the text of Euripides. Be that as it may – and it seems many more interesting questions could be asked about the nature of such verbal accommodations – some sort of sigla or other method of underlining/highlighting the words and phrases in question would have helped the reader parse V.'s synoptic comparisons of passages.
Other reviewers have commented on the book's stylistic shortcomings (BMCR 2012.07.56) – of which I am no judge. In terms of structure and approach, however, this volume reads too much like the dissertation it began as, and could have profited from more thorough revision and further probing. A genuinely useful part of the book, however, especially to readers who are not familiar with the Christos Paschon, is the structural outline and synopsis of the poem on pages 105–39, and the history of the text since the editio princeps, features which really do help orient the reader to this unusual work.
