Demetrios
Pepagomenos was the second of the four speakers at Cleofe's memorial.
I have written about these monodies at other times, in detail about those by
Bessarion,
the last speaker, and George
Gemistos Plethon, the first. (The order of the speakers has to be
deduced: Plethon was the oldest and certainly of the highest status
of the four, Bessarion the youngest and, being a monk, of the lowest
status. Cheilas probably has to follow Pepagomenos as he makes a
comment about him.)
Pepagomenos
was a
doctor specializing in gout.
We
do not have an absolute statement that he
was Cleofe's doctor, but
there is enough evidence to allow us to deduce it. For example, in
his
monody he
said, “There is need for all of us, and for myself especially, to
let our voices loose in the intensity of our suffering.” I read
that as a comment on his sense of involvement in, if not responsibility for her death. Later
he spoke of “the body of our holy queen, so well-formed, so
harmonious as to bring future happiness to the race.” As the
daughter of an obstetrician, I read that as saying her body was
suited for child-bearing, and
so something he would be the only man, other than her husband, in a
position to know.
But
when Cleofe died at noon on Good Friday, she had been fasting for
nearly forty days, and there is strong evidence to suggest that she
would have followed the most severe fast. She spent nights standing
in prayer. She had, unintentionally, prepared her body for a massive hemorrhage. Pepagomenos called it a
cataclysm, a deluge over the whole race – ἄλλον
τινὰ καταχλυσμὸν τοῦ γένους παντὸς,
and said it had come on suddenly. Bessarion
also refers to blood, saying that her husband (like Zeus) had wept
tears of blood (and, like Zeus, at the loss of a son in addition to
his wife).
I
think the dead child was a son, because
Pepagomenos said this birth was to have been such an even that “all
good and decent things might come to settle not only among us present
here but among all the entire race . . . that there might be skipping
and dancing . . . the singing of festival chants, the display of
general happiness.”
“All
the best for us came,” he said to her – sometimes he spoke to the
assembled mourners, and sometimes to Cleofe – “with your settling
among us. . . . But now everything goes the other way.” He
mentions first her husband, “our holy ruler,” and then “her
dear daughter . . . all her blood relations, her servants and
cities.” Pepagomenos speaks of her daughter three different times,
and then again of the loss to her subjects.
He becomes more specific about her subjects: “But the bellies of the poor mourn especially the hands of our queen,
which worked as it were to one purpose throughout her life, to
nourish those in want, not merely through instruction, and through
those of others', as might have been expected of such a queen, but
themselves performing the service of cookery, collecting wood from
wherever they had to, and lighting the fire, even roasting the food
of the poor over it and serving it to them, nourishing them daily,
taking no account of the heat of the fire, the intense burden of the
smoke, and the inescapable duration of this service. This is an
exceptional description. It was conventional for Renaissance and
Byzantine ladies of good families to feed the poor, but nowhere, I
think, do we learn that they carried firewood and cooked in the
smoke. Though I do wonder where she had learned to cook. All the speakers spoke of Cleofe's character: Pepagomenos spoke more than the others of what she actually did in her life.
He
specified other groups whom she nurtured: “The orphaned
children of her household mourn her, who acted as a mother to all,
sharing out to each of them what was right, and neglecting nothing of
their care; she made it possible for the women to live together with
husbands and men with wives, to act openly and to practice another
way of life, something that had in many periods over the years been
neglected. but was rightly and properly fostered during the reign of
our most holy queen, with all attention and concern, as one might
say. Widows, too mourn
their protector, and strangers the source of consolation from which
they often benefited--- all, in short, for whom she offered a respite
from loss.”
It
is possible that Pepagomenos himself knew the pain of losing a wife.
The cleaving of the one flesh that is a marriage was an easy topos
for the Byzantines, but he went further: “The cleaving apart of a
bodily union brings the unbearable pain of an amputation when a
mother dies in childbirth. This, more than anything else makes the
pain of the cut intense and presents the suffering as ever new in the
eyes of the husband, and becomes an inexhaustible fuel for the fire,
always displaying the newness of the loss, and never ceasing. But
the severing of spiritual attachment has an intense bite and makes
the pain even more unbearable, inasmuch as it is carried on in the
the present life, while the former pain, although it is, so to speak,
undying, continues to be associated with that material, though now
lost, companionship.
He
went on to raise topics that might have been considered better
unmentioned and, as with Plethon and Bessarion, the frankness of subjects towards their ruler is striking. There were aspects of the earlier relationship between Cleofe and
Theodoros that nearly led to his rejection of her, and we might
wonder if Theodoros had been repenting to Pepagomenos of his
stubborness. “When the time was
right, even before your marriage, you lighted the brand of
self-mastery with a little spark and disregarding paternal pride,
canceling maternal agreements, the petitioning of your sisters, and
the native innovations in religion of your homeland, you were pliant
in everything to your husband and lord, putting this before all else,
to follow his beliefs throughout your life and to practice them as
fully as you were able. (Had she confided to Pepagomenos the real facts of her "conversion"?) All of this scorches him the more intensely
and causes greater agony as he thinks of what consolation, aid and
assistance against this greater and more final loss he has lost.”
Theodoros
had apparently insisted that she change her style of dress as well as
convert, things directly opposed to the agreements he had made for
the marriage. “The wearing of clothes outside our habits of dress,
beyond our temperament and sense of what, so to speak, is naturally
required, was a matter of her unmaterial and spiritual nature, one
unassociated with worldly passion or any kind of bodily necessity,
because she aimed, in her unconcern with such matters, at what seemed
to her always to be a more perfect order and self-governance. Not
that there might ever be perfection more perfect than perfection, or
that clothing will change character, but nonetheless, there was some
length of time before the end, when, unless she was constrained by
official ceremonies, she wore the fashion of those who live
monastically, so that what was earlier unappreciated by outsiders,
was now obvious to all.”
Toward
the end of his monody, Pepagomenos embarked on a series of thirteen “O”s: "O dwelling-place of virtues . . . O all those
dreams . . . O charms of that holiest body . . . O lady, death loved
you . . . O terrible and lightless day.” These Os formed a transition from the main body of his monody to his conclusion, addressed directly to her, speaking to her as the representative of
all of them there listening:
“You,
most divine, pious and holy queen, who have made this translation
only under the instructions of God. . . you
have flown from us through the approval of the almighty . . . Do not
withdraw into this new world but, even before us, watch over our most
holy despot of the Romans, your co-worker utterly cast down by so
great strife, and by the onslaught of disasters, brought on him by
your death. For you were the best co-worker -- συνεργόν --urging him toward the
good, and consoling him for what was incurable, a good counselor, a
guide for action, and a harbor for all that is good, and all of this
is gone, flown away with you. (Here
it is clear that Pepagomenos had read the poem Theodoros had written
for her in which he had called her his ξυνεργὸς,
his
co-worker, though in the poem I have preferred “fellow poet.”)
“This
was not a good thing, and not how it should have been. Οὐ
καλῶς μὲν οὐδ’ ὡς ἐχρῆν γέγονε δ’
οὖν.
“It
would be in your power, either with your prayers to the divine, as
you stand immediately beside God, to alleviate the distress of our
ruler, and through this the misfortune of the entire Roman
people---you can do this, I know, with a mere nod of assent-- δύνασαι γὰρ τοϋτ’, εὖ οἶδα, εἰ κατανεύσειας μόνον -- or to
leave us to mourn and lament throughout life, as long as the sun
sends its rays over the earth.”
This
is astounding: he has put Cleofe in the position of the Panagia, and
has given her the nod – and so the authority – of Zeus.
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