Prodromos, Theodore

Byzantine sources place the Orphanotropheion on the eastern-most hiU of Constantinople, where as Anna Komnena says the access to the sea opens up. The tenth-century historian Joseph Genesios stated that the orphanage stood on the city s acropolis, and, as we have seen, Theodore Prodromos referred to its location as Sion. Although the ridge that Constantine selected for his Church of the Holy Apostles was higher, the Orphanotropheion occupied the citadel of ancient Byzantium, the hill that travelers by sea would first see as they approached Constantinople. ... 

At the beginning of the twelfth century, after her father Alexios I had refurbished the Orphanotropheion, Anna described the complex as a city -within a city. Several decades later, Theodore Prodromos hailed the Orphanage as Mount Sion, the citadel of the New Jerusalem. Byzantine rhetoricians firequently employed such biblical allusions, but in this speech Prodromos composed such a long and detailed metaphor that it is difficult to believe that he did not conceive of the Orphanotropheion as the premier symbol of the empire s spiritual superiority. "... 

This dual nature of the Orphanotropheion not only effected its legal status, it also shaped the administration of its school for orphans. Several twelfth-century sources describing the Orphanotropheion s teaching staff state that both the emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople enjoyed supervisory rights over the school. In a speech retracing the career of his former teacher, Stephen Skylitzes, Theodore Prodromos mentioned that the emperor had initially appointed Skyl-... 

In his excellent study of twelfth-century schede, loannis Vassis has published two of these puzzles composed by Theodore Prodromos. Since Prodromos spent most of his life teaching at the Orphanotropheion, students at the orphan school probably used these schede or ones similar to them. Moreover, the first of these two compositions, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, begins by addressing the students as a... 

The best information we have about the organization of the teaching staff at the Orphanotropheion comes firom the pen of Theodore Prodromos, who himself spent much of his life as an instructor at the orphan school. When Stephen Skylitzes died, Prodromos composed... 

Prodromos, Gedichte. Theodores Prodromes. Historische Gedichte. Wiener byzan-tinische Studien, ii. Edited by Wolfram HOrandner. Vienna Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1974. 

Prodromos, "Monodie. "Monodie de Theodore Prodrome sur fitienne Skylitz m tropoUtain de Tr6bizonde. Edited by R. P. Louis Petit. Bulletin de Vinstitut archiologique russe d Constantinople 8 (1903) 1-14. 

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