Abstract:
The Byzantine dialogic poem Christos Paschon has long been controversial, even and most notably in its date and authorship. It was at the heart of the twentieth-century debate over Byzantine drama, and its genre has been disputed. Is it a tragedy? A cento? A Virgin’s lament? We have now arrived at a position where Walter Puchner has argued that it is not a tragedy and is indeed unperformable. I should like to attempt to walk back this position by looking at the place in the text of lament, which occupies about one third of the whole, and in so doing cast some light on lament more widely in Byzantine society and the issue of performability of this text.