Some Notes on the Monument of Porphyrios at Constantinople
The monument of the charioteer Porphyrios which stands in the Atrium of the church of St. Irene at Constantinople will no doubt be an object of interest now that the church has been thrown open to the public as a Military Museum. The description of it by Mordtmann which appeared in 1880 is still the best available, and except for some further remarks by the same writer nothing seems to have been published subsequently concerning it until the appearance last year of a short paper by M. J. Ebersolt who treats the sculptured reliefs from the artistic standpoint, and discusses the place which they occupy in the history of Byzantine Art.The notes which I publish here consist of a few comments on the texts of the inscriptions as printed by Mordtmann, and small corrections in them, together with a suggested interpretation, which seems new, of one of the scenes sculptured on the stele, and a short account, kindly supplied by Professor J. B. Bury, of the language and metre of the inscriptions in popular Greek which appear on two of the four sides of the stele.