Inscriptions and the Byzantine beholder

In the year 565 the deposed patriarch of Constantinople Eutychios was sent to the island of Prinkipos in the Marmara Sea by the Emperor Justinian in order to be detained. The reason for the three weeks’ detainment and subsequent exile in a monastery near Amaseia (today Amasya in northern Turkey) was Eutychios’ opposition to aphthartodocetism, a form of monophysitism stating that the body of Christ was divine and therefore naturally incorruptible and impassible, a heretical view endorsed by Justinian.¹ In the vita Eutychii (BHG 657), composed by the presbyter Eustratios, Eutychios’ student, at the end of the sixth century, one is informed about the former patriarch’s arrival on the island in full detail:² Eutychios arrived on the island in winter time, on a Saturday and in the middle of the night. The first thing he saw the next morning was a cross on the wall – perhaps of his prison cell – with a text (ἐπίγραμμα) reading Χριστὸς μεθ᾿ ἡμῶν· στῆτε, ‘Christ is with us. Stand!’.³ This saying, which – coincidentally or not – forms the first part of an iambic trimeter (or a Byzantine dodecasyllable),⁴ is a text that is also attested elsewhere. The chronicler Theophanes the Confessor, when reporting the devastating earthquake in Antioch in November 528 and the death of many of the city’s inhabitants,⁵ states the following: ‘It was revealed in a vision to one pious man that he should tell all the survivors to write on the lintels of their doors Χριστὸς μεθ᾿ ἡμῶν· στῆτε. When this was done, God’s anger ceased.’⁶ Such lintel inscriptions indeed existed as evidence proves: an epigraph on a marble plate found in Antioch and now preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris reads ὁ Χριστ[ὸς] μεθ᾿ ὑμ[ῶν].⁷ Though the end of the inscription is not preserved, one can easily imagine that it too originally ended with στῆτε.