Figuren und Wortspiele in den byzantinischen Bettelgedichten und die Frage der Autorschaft

The aim of this paper is to highlight some characteristic features in the use of poetical figures and puns in three corpora of Byzantine begging poems (Theodoros Prodromos, Manganeios Prodromos and Ptochoprodromos, mid-12th century) and to examine whether their analysis would shed light on the question of the authorship of these texts. At the beginning the two types of parallelism (antithesis) are presented - binary and triple -, characteristic not only for begging poetry but for the Byzantine "political verse", a fifteen-syllable accentual iambic verse in general. The paper continues with the analysis of the differences and similarities in the use of figures among the three collections. In Manganeios Prodromos the very frequent occurrences of paronomasia, figura etymologica and other (pseudo)etymological puns can be observed. Many similarities in the use of figures can be found between the poems of Ptochoprodromika and Manganeios Prodromos. On the other hand, Theodoros Prodromos' literary techniques are more varied and often without parallels in the other two collections. The paper also briefly discusses some hitherto unrecognized lexical and motific parallels between Manganeios Prodromos and the Ptochoprodromika collection.