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Why did Byzantines Write History?

Leonora Neville – University of Wisconsin

Our desires and expectations for good history do not align with those of the medieval

authors of Byzantine histories. If modern historians and medieval Romans valued the same

things in history, we would teach Roman history by having students read Constantine

Manasses’s verse history, which appears to be the mostly highly prized medieval treatment of the

subject. The manuscript record indicates that the histories by Manasses and George the Monk

were the favorites among medieval Romans.1 Yet one could read a great deal of modern

scholarship on the Byzantine Empire and never see them cited as sources of historical

information, and I can’t hand my students a translation of either. In contrast, some of our favorite

histories, such as those by Psellos and Leo the Deacon, survived in a single copy.2 Clearly we

and the medieval Romans have different tastes in history. It is worth taking a step back from the

details of our research to consider how differences in our motivations for writing history may

affect our interpretations of Byzantine historiography. Here I would like us to consider the

reasons why Byzantines wrote history and start a conversation about how historiography fits in

with the rest of what we are learning about Byzantine culture.

While the reasons for writing history are complex and various, both now and in the

middle ages, a few examples can lay bare some fundamental differences in approach. When

medieval Roman and modern western historians treated the history of the Assyrian king

1 There are 30 manuscripts of one version of George’s history and over 120 of Manasses. D. Afinogenov,

Le manuscrit grec Coislin. 305 : la version primitive de la Chronique de Georges le Moine, in: Revue des études

byzantines 62/1, 2004, 239–246. Constantini Manassis Breviarium Chronicum, ed. O. Lampsides, Athens, 1996,

LXXVII–CXLIX. 2 Paris. Gr. 1712. K. Snipes, The “Chronographia” of Michael Psellos and the Textual Tradition and

Transmission of the Byzantine Historians of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, in Zbornik radova Vizantološkog

instituta 27/28, 1981, 43–62.

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Sardanapalus, they all knew about him mostly from the record of Diodoros, which contains

political and military details and a description of Sardanapalus’s character.3 Yet they used

Diodoros in different ways because they were asking different questions. For the modern

academy the animating question was whether Sardanapalus was really Ashurbanipal (we now

think he was Shamash-shum-ukin) and whether the politics described by Diodoros should be

added to our list of events of Assyrian history.4 This desire for precision in abstract knowledge

reflects the scientific impulse in history: finding the right place to put him in the tally of Assyrian

kings is a valuable exercise because all knowledge of the world is intrinsically prized. Desire to

learn about the politics of the Assyrian empire is also driven by the hermeneutical impulse in

contemporary history which strives for understanding the variety of human cultures and

societies, contextualization of experiences, and increased perspective about our relation to the

world. In addition to knowing for the sake of knowing, we want to get the details right because

better understanding of Assyrian civilization provides perspective, increases our capacity to see

differences, and resists setting current politics in a void. Both the scientific and hermeneutical

impulses lead to a desire for accuracy and precision in reconstructions of past events and

cultures.5 In contrast, when Roman historians, such as George the Monk or Manasses told the

story of Sardanapalus, the political details of Diodoros’s account (the ones our Assyriologists

fight over) are omitted completely.6 They focus on Sardanapalus’s rampant hedonism and self-

immolation along with his wealth and concubines, the subjects we left to poets and artists.7

Sardanapalus becomes a moralizing and entertaining story. His deeds were preserved because

3 Diod. Bk II 23-28 4 Sardanapalus, in: The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Edition, Cambridge, 1910; S. Ahmed, Southern

Mesopotamia in the time of Ashurbanipal, Paris, 1968, 43–45. J. Scurlock, Babylon, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of

Ancient Greece and Rome, Oxford, 2010. 5 For more theoretical reflections on the state the field: G. Spiegel, The Future of the Past: History,

Memory and the Ethical Imperatives of Writing History, in Journal of the Philosophy of History 8, 2014, 149–179. 6 Georgii Monachi Chronicon, ed, P. Wirth, Stuttgart, 1978, 13–14. Constantini Manassis, lines 624–644. 7 George even left out the immolation story. Sardanapalus was a subject for Byron and Delacroix.

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they were worth vilifying. The emphasis in the medieval chronicles is on presenting models of

good and bad behavior for emulation.

In an example from the monographic tradition of Greek historiography, we see similar

interests at play in the treatment of the battle of Mantzikert. Again we are animated by desires for

knowledge and understanding. Delight in knowing recently motivated the deployment of digital

simulations to model the logistics of the campaign, using new technologies to augment that data

of medieval histories.8 Desire to understand a foreign culture motivates others to study the battle

for the sake of learning about cultural responses to war that guided the decisions men made and

the ideals of honor, strength, and weakness that drove conduct in war.9 Michael Attaleiates and

Nikephoros Bryennios did not have our desire for logistic and tactical detail in mind when they

wrote their histories of the battle. I see their writing as guided by concerns about commemoration

of good and bad conduct, preservation of the memory of great deeds for posterity, and the

lessons to be drawn from history. While their moralizing is less overt than in the stories of

Sardanapalus, they tell a gripping and tragic tale of heroic and craven conduct. Their story packs

a moral punch. Fundamentally, they are as concerned with history as a vehicle for the

identification and commemoration of good or bad behaviors as the chroniclers who included the

story Sardanapalus.

The impression that medieval Roman historians wrote with commemorative and

educational aims accords with the reasons they gave for writing. Taking them at their word, their

project is primarily about preventing great deeds, worthy of being remembered, from being

8 J. Haldon et al., Marching Across Anatolia -Medieval Logistics and Modeling the Mantzikert Campaign,

in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 65/66, 2011, 209–235. 9 D. Krallis, Michael Attaleiates and the Politics of Imperial Decline in Eleventh-century Byzantium,

Tempe, 2012, 126–157; L. Neville, Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The “Material for History”

of Nikephoros Bryennios, Cambridge, 2012, 121–138.

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forgotten. Time is depicted as an uncontrollable stream relentlessly sweeping away the memory

of all things regardless of whether they are trivial or “great and worthy of memory.”10 History

provides a way of fighting the river of forgetfulness: “The art of history is the strongest bulwark

against the stream of time and, to some extent, it stays time’s irresistible stream…”11 Authors

commonly evoked the destructive effects of time and the value of history in fighting it.12 Leo the

Deacon holds that history is useful “inasmuch as it brings mortal affairs back to life or gives

them youthful vigor, and does not allow them to be swept away and concealed in the depths of

oblivion.”13 George Akropolites argued that historians should write “so that what has been done

by some, whether good or bad, is not relegated to the depths of oblivion which time is wont to

produce.”14 The concern with preventing time from erasing the memory of great deeds is a point

of commonality between Byzantine historiography and rest of the tradition of Greek history

writing stretching back to Herodotus. History was a matter of keeping memory of the past alive.

Writing a history was a way of saying that particular deeds and events were worthy of

memory. If something especially worthy of eternal memory happened, then an historian ought to

record it. Kritovoulos wrote his history to preserve the memory of deeds so great that they

10 Alexiad, ed. D. Reinsch, A. Kambylis, Berlin, 2001, P1.2. 11 Ibid., P1.1. 12 Ibid., P1.1. “Time, moving eternally with its uncontrollable streams, sweeps away and carries off all

things in creation and plunges them into deep obscurity, whether these matters are unworthy of mention, or great

and worthy of memory, and, according to the Tragedian, ‘[time] brings forth what was hidden and hides what was

apparent.’” Anna quotes Sophocles Ajax 646-647. George Pachymeres expresses a similar sentiment alluding to the

same line of Sophocles. George Pachymeres, Relations historiques, ed. A. Failler, Paris, 1984, vol.1, p. 23, lines 13–

16. Michael Attaleiates said his purpose was “to prevent noteworthy matters from slipping into the depths of

oblivion for the passage of time, and to grant them in mortal remembrance.” Michael Attaleiates: The history, trans.

A. Kaldellis, D. Krallis, Cambridge, 2012, p. 11. Skylitzes says that “reading provokes recollection; recollection

nurses and expands memory, just as, quite the contrary, negligence and laziness provoke forgetfulness which

darkens and confuses the memory of what has happened in the past.” John Skylitzes : a synopsis of Byzantine

history, 811-1057, trans. J. Wortley, Cambridge, 2010, p. 3.

13 The history of Leo the Deacon : Byzantine military expansion in the tenth century, trans. D. Sullivan, A-

M. Talbot, Washington, D.C. 2005, p. 55. 14 George Akropolites : the history, trans. R. Macrides, Oxford, 2007, p. 105.

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rivaled those of the ancients.15 Laonikos Chalkokondyles wrote the history of the events of his

lifetime “believing… that none of the events he included should be forgotten by future

generations. In my opinion, those events are in no way less worthy of being remembered than

any that have ever taken place anywhere in the world.”16 Once an event had been recorded in a

history book, it was set down “as if on imperishable columns” and the danger of its

disappearance was removed.17 As time passed, what was not recorded in histories would

inevitably be forgotten and lost. History was a fight against oblivion.

Beyond commemoration of the dead, there was a strong utilitarian purpose in preserving

the memory of great deeds of the past. The accurate assessment and understanding of past deeds

gave the audience models of action to emulate or shun. The important thing to learn from history

was how to behave.18 As Attaleiates explains, history “has proven to be exceedingly useful for

life, as it reveals the lives of those who were virtuous and those who are not, describes illustrious

deeds born of flawless planning and effort as well as inglorious actions caused by the faulty

planning or negligence of those governing public affairs.”19 The victories and defeats recorded in

histories “convey clear instruction and set patterns for the future. They simply lead us to imitate

what was discerned well and to avoid ill-advised and shameful deeds in wars, battles, and in all

other most necessary offensive adventures and challenges of defense.”20 Attaleiates’s sentiment

was common. The history of Basil I was told so that “a standard of virtue, a statue, and a model

15 Critobuli Imbriotae historiae, ed. D. Reinsch, Berlin, 1983, Book 1 chapter 1. 16 Laonikos Chalkokondylēs: The histories, trans. A. Kaldellis, Cambridge, 2014, p. 3. 17 Ioannis Cinnami epitome rerum ab Ioanne et Alexio Comnenis gestarum, ed. A. Meineke, Bonn, 1836, p.

3. 18 This is understanding of the value of history was common in the ancient world and through the

nineteenth century. A. Grafton, Historiography, in The classical tradition, ed. A. Grafton et al., Cambridge, 2010.

D. Afinogenov, Some observations on genres of Byzantine historiography, in Byzantion 62, 1992, 13–33, 16. 19 Michael Attaleiates, p. 9. 20 Ibid.

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for imitation, be erected for his progeny within their own halls.”21 Leo the Deacon explained that

history “ordains for men to strive after and emulate some deeds, while rejecting and avoiding

others, so that they may not inadvertently neglect that which is useful and beneficial, and attach

themselves to that which is abominable and harmful.”22 Michael Psellos’s history textbook

Historia Syntomos had an explicitly didactic purpose of educating a future emperor.23 History

was a teacher of character.24

The authors of history were therefore engaged in moral evaluation of the past as they told

their histories.25 Historians told their audiences who they should admire and emulate, and whose

behaviors they should avoid. They were bound to speak truth without favor or hatred, but they

did so with the explicit purpose of presenting models of behavior. In deciding which deeds to

commemorate and how to present them, historians became arbiters of morality and character, as

well as success and failure.26 In presenting models of behavior for emulation, the histories had a

21 Chronographiae quae Theophanis Continuati nomine fertur Liber quo Vita Basilii Imperatoris

amplectitur, ed. I. Sevcenko, Berlin, 2011, 10–11. 22 The history of Leo the Deacon, trans. D. Sullivan, A-M. Talbot, Washington, D.C. 2005, p. 55. 23 S. Papaioannou and J. Duffy, Michael Psellos and the Authorship of the Historia Syntomos: Final

Considerations, in eds. A. Abramea et al., Byzantium, State and Society: In Memory of Nikos Oikonomides, Athens

2003, 219–229. 24 Choniates “Whether the actions of a man during his lifetime were holy and righteous or lawless and

contemptible, and whether he lived a happy life or gave up the ghost in evildoing, are proclaimed loudly by history.”

O city of Byzantium : annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. H. Magoulias, Detroit, 1984, p. 3. 25 They of course had other interests as well, including cultural understanding and desire for abstract

knowledge. Manasses’s history does a superb job of explaining how the classical and biblical parts of Byzantine

heritage fitted together and so would be a great help in developing perspective. For other evaluations of the goals of

Byzantine history writing see: A. Markopoulos, From narrative historiography to historical biography. New trends

in Byzantine historical writing in the 10th–11th centuries, in Byzantinische Zeitschrift 102, 2010, 697–715; P.

Odorico et al. eds., L’écriture de la mémoire : la littérarité de l’historiographie, Paris, 2006; R. Macrides ed.,

History as literature in Byzantium, Farnham, 2010. 26 A. Markopoulos, Byzantine history writing at the end of the first millennium, in Byzantium in the Year

1000, Leiden, 2003, 183–197, p. 186.

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similar function to hagiography, which also commemorated great deeds of the past (and were far

more widely read than histories).27

We know that history was fundamentally not a scientific genre in Byzantium because it

was considered a form of display oratory, like epic and poetry. History was classified as

panêgyrikos logos, which included all written discourse meant to be entertaining rather than

utilitarian whereas the more prestigious politikos logos encompassed discourse having to do with

civic and legal matters.28 History in the Greek tradition was kin to epic. The ideas that history

should record great deeds, and great words, and celebrate them, are part of the legacy of Homeric

epic for historiography. Homer also lent history writing the third person narrative, and concern

with the sequence of events, their causes and effects.29 Both genres were commemorative and

morally edifying. Both were studied for the sake of learning proper expression.30 Commonalities

in the fundamental structure (sequential narrative in the third person) and the base purpose

(preserving the memory of great deeds) ensured that history and epic were classified as kindred

types of discourse. That history was a genre of entertainment did not make it unimportant. Like

epic, it taught people how to act and who to admire, as well as lessons in elegance of expression

and proper narrative.

27 Papaioannou emphasizes that hagiographies, icons, and ancient objects contributed far more to Byzantine

sense of history than the rarely-read formal histories. S. Papaioannou, Byzantine Historia, in Kurt Raaflaub ed.,

Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, Malden, 2014, 297–313, p. 298. G. Klaniczay,

Hagiography and historical narrative, in J. Bak, I. Jurković ed., Chronicon: medieval narrative sources: a

chronological guide with introductory essays, Turnhout 2013. 28 S. Papaioannou, Michael Psellos rhetoric and authorship in Byzantium, Cambridge, 2013, p. 103. On the

connection between history and entertainment: S. Papaioannou, The aesthetics of history : from Theophanes to

Eustathios, in R. Macrides ed., History as literature in Byzantium, Farnham, 2010, 3–21; P. Magdalino, Byzantine

Historical Writing, 900-1400, in S. Foot et al. eds., The Oxford history of historical writing II Vol., Oxford 2012,

218–237, p. 221. 29 R. Nicolai, The Place of History in the Ancient World, in J. Marincola ed., A Companion to Greek and

Roman Historiography, Oxford, 2010, 13–26; J. Marincola, Authority and tradition in ancient historiography,

Cambridge, 1997, p. 6. C. Fornara, The nature of history in ancient Greece and Rome, Berkeley, 1983, p. 31, 61–90. 30 Xenophon and Thucydides were studied more as models of rhetoric than out of interest in ancient

Greece. A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Role in the Making of the Corpus of Classical Greek Historiography: A

Preliminary Investigation, in Journal of Hellenic Studies 132, 2012, 71–85.

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Interests in presenting lessons in conduct reinforced interests in good story telling.

Diverting and morally edifying stories are so prominent in George the Monk’s history that he has

justly been called a short story writer.31 The entertaining value of his stories likely helped drive

home his intended lessons, or at least persuaded audiences to listen to them. Manasses makes

history richly entertaining. In telling the history from Creation to 1081 in 6734 lines, he gave 23

lines to the story of the Lydian king Kandaules foolishly letting his guard Gygas see his wife

naked. Kandaules was worthy of memory because his history conveyed good moral lessons

about the dangers of boastfulness and provoking a woman’s wrath, and it was an entertaining

story.32

Other histories seem to have prized a good narrative of an episode over a precise record

of idiosyncratic details. The characteristics that make episodes seem dramatic and entertaining

also can give them weight as moral exemplars. When grand villains clash dramatically with

valiant heroes, it is both easier both to get caught up in the action and to realize who you should

be like. Skylitzes rewrote his source material so as to offer homogenized episodes of cinematic

action. He did not change the upshot of what had happened, but he replaced specific

administrative terms with generic ones and subordinated geographic details to accentuate the

basic plot line.33 Modern readers searching for precise detail and particularities are frustrated, but

medieval readers probably appreciated the way his pruning of odd terms and extraneous detail

heightened the drama and characterization of the story. Nikephoros Bryennios’s history is

31 J. Ljubarskij, George the Monk as a Short-Story Writer, in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik

44, 1994, 255–264. D. Afinogenov, Some observations on genres of Byzantine historiography, in Byzantion 62,

1992, 13–33. 32 Constantini Manassis, lines 813–836. 33 C. Holmes, Basil II and the Government of Empire: 976-1025, Oxford, 1999, 120–239. S. McGrath, The

battles of Dorostolon (971): rhetoric and reality, in Peace and War in Byzantium: essays in honor of George T.

Dennis, Washington, D.C 1995, 152–164. T. Sklavos, Moralising History: the Synopsis Historiarum of John

Skylitzes, in Byzantine Narrative, ed. J. Burke et. al., Melbourne, 2006, 110–119.

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similarly a series of fairly short dramatic stories in which characters play highly formalized roles.

There are repeated scenarios in which all the Turks and all the Romans play according to type.

The episodes relate what happened, but also provide moral evaluations about the actions of the

historical characters that lead to clear lessons for the audience.34

The suggestion that medieval Roman historians were concerned with commemoration of

great deeds, character formation, and entertainment does not imply that they were unconcerned

with truth. It is a truth that Sardanapalus either was or wasn’t Asherbanipal. It is equally a truth

that it is stupid to let a friend look at your naked spouse. It is true that you can learn a lot of

Greek by reading Thucydides. Which sort of truth historians ought to worry about is a matter of

cultural predilection. As with ancient historiography, Byzantine worry over truth was often about

avoiding bias, flattery, or false condemnation.35 Historians wanted to be accurate in the

description and evaluation of men’s deeds so that audiences could draw the proper moral lessons

from history. George Akropolites provides a classic formulation: “the author ought to write with

neither favor nor with malice, nor out of hatred or goodwill but for the sake of history alone…”36

Concern with truth can also be a worry about moral or dogmatic truth. George the Monk

expresses great concern for truth in his preface, but he was manifestly not interested in the truth

expressed through chronological accuracy—in one case we know that his chronological

placement of an episode was off by three hundred years. Rather it is clear that he envisioned

truth as what was morally right and ontologically true: he told the episode with a cleaner, more

incisive characterization of the principle characters and the lesson to be learned.37 George was

genuinely concerned with truth, but in a way that did not lead to an abstract desire for knowledge

34 L. Neville, Heroes and Romans, 89–103. 35 J. Marincola, Authority and tradition, p. 158–174. C. Fornara, The nature of history, p. 91–141. 36 George Akropolites, p. 105. 37 J. Ljubarskij, George the Monk as a Short-Story Writer, p. 259. D. Afinogenov, Some observations, p.

18.

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for its own sake.38 When we better understand what medieval Roman historians were trying to

do, we can appreciate how good they were at it.

So far my comments should not be controversial and, aside of a greater emphasis on

character formation, mostly work to align Byzantine historiography more fully with classical

historiography. I would like to go a step further in thinking about the relationship between the

way histories present models for emulation and what we have been learning about the formation

of the self in Byzantine culture. Simultaneously I may address some objections that may be

brewing, because at this point some readers will be thinking that I have gone seriously astray in

using as substantive evidence what any decent Byzantinist should recognize as literary topoi.

They will say that statements about saving memories from the river of forgetfulness are present

in texts because such repetition of expected literary tropes was a standard part of Byzantine

rhetoric and, since statements that have been repeated ever since Herodotus are simply not

evidentiary for the medieval period, I mistake mere rhetoric for reality.

My answer to this criticism goes to the heart of why I think historiography mattered in

Byzantium, or rather, how historiography fit into the larger cultural concerns of Byzantine

discourse. Our evolving understanding of the formation of identity in Byzantine culture indicates

that the topoi are not chaff to be sifted out, but the means by which medieval Romans expressed

their selves and their values. The Byzantine conception of ethics in the formation of individual

character relied on patterning one’s own behavior on idealized types. As Stratis Papaioannou

explains:

In this rhetorical tradition, to be oneself … one must reenact a set of typoi and topoi,

generic rhetorical types and patterns, for presenting subjectivity. … Rhetoricians learned

38 On historicity of Byzantine histories see R. Lilie, Reality and invention: Reflections on Byzantine

Historiography, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 68, 2014, 157–210.

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rhetoric by staging the first person speech of stock characters, thus imagining themselves

as another. … Biblical exegesis also promoted identification of the characters of biblical

stories. …readers were urged to fashion themselves according to model biblical figures.39

Byzantine people did not express their identity by explaining how they were unique, but who

they were like. The practice of patterning self on models was taught to laity through participation

in liturgy and the singing of psalms. Derek Krueger’s study of the formation of self through

liturgy confirms the centrality of patterning self on models: “the interiority that emerges in

conformity to the Psalms proceeds not through a discovery of the individual, but by absorbing

the subject into preexistent models.”40 Christian selves were formed through purposeful

enactment of scripted patterns:

Hymns and prayers provided models for the self, offering access to interior lives,

focusing introspection, and patterning affect. Byzantine liturgy provided a venue of the

merging of speech and subjectivity, where Christians might immerse themselves in

scripted performances, becoming themselves through the making or doing (to poiein) of

the self.41

Repeating often repeated phrases was an aspect of the formation and performance of self in

Byzantine culture.

The pervasiveness of the liturgical calls to form self through patterning on models

implies that the attention to topoi and typoi we see in highly crafted rhetorical texts is not merely

a product of classical education. Rather than trickling-down from the classically educated to

everyone else, the attention to modeling self on patterns was a common aspect of Byzantine

39 S. Papaioannou, Michael Psellos rhetoric and authorship in Byzantium, Cambridge, 2013, 135–136. 40 D. Krueger, Liturgical subjects : Christian ritual, Biblical narrative, and the formation of the self in

Byzantium, Philadelphia, 2014, 18. 41 “The songs of the sinner conveyed identities that could be produced and inhabited through repetition.

Implicit in such practices of chanting, singing, or prayer lay theories of how subjects formed. The Stoudite hymns

rendered the personas of the lectionary as roles to be played. The monastery became a sort of Actors Studio to teach

the poetics of the Byzantine Christian self through ritual.” Krueger’s work also emphasizes the workings of this

process of self-formation among laity through liturgical prayers and hymns, participation in the lectionary cycle, and

the calendar of feasts. Ibid., 197.

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culture. While the bulk of our evidence comes from highly educated circles, I see no reason to

think that people in other arenas had a culture that operated in fundamentally different ways.

Certainly our rare glimpses of provincial non-elite people suggest they worked hard to embody

recognizable positive archetypes.42

Acknowledging the role of ancient models in the formation of character and culture in

Byzantine society requires that we see the topoi and literary mimesis, not as inconsequential

rhetorical dressing to be scraped off and disregarded, but as the touchstones for self-expression.

Because identity was expressed by saying who one was like, the topoi speak to the truth of one’s

character. The topoi are not what should be ignored, but what were considered most important.

When historians talked about how they wanted to stave off the river of forgetfulness by

preserving the memory of great deeds, they were imitating ancient historians, but this imitation

was a significant, purposeful statement about who they wanted to be and what sort of history

they prized. Nothing about the repetition of an expected topos made it unimportant. Of all the

possible ways to imitate ancient historians—and there were many—this particular metaphor had

power because that sentiment was appealing and satisfying. There is nothing inevitable in the

choices medieval writers made. Medieval historians could choose to be like the author of the

biblical Books of Kings, or like Eusebios, or like Procopios. When they chose to be like

Polybios, it was because they found resonance in those ideas. Topoi were repeated because

authors used them to powerfully express what they thought mattered. Histories began by

asserting that their purpose was commemoration, because their purpose was commemoration.

Historians said that the memory of good and bad gave valuable models to praise or shun because

they believed that teaching character was an important function of history.

42 L. Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950-1100, Cambridge, 2004, p. 156–164.

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That self in Byzantine culture was created and expressed though pattering behavior on

models allowed histories to play a role in the moral formation of their audiences. People

practiced in forming character through patterning themselves on biblical models and

performance of psalms, or through composing ethopoeia, would naturally perceive the characters

presented in histories as potential models to emulate or avoid. Historiography likely had a

secondary place in ethical formation insofar as other kinds of discourse and material culture were

more common, but in that histories provided multiple examples of great or horrible behavior they

gave their readers powerful, memorable lessons in how to be virtuous and effective. When

Skylitzes and Bryennios homogenized individuals into examples of particular types of

characters, they were making their histories more useful, by making the important patterns

clearer. As different authors chose who to exalt and who to condemn in their histories, or how to

tell the stories so that their audiences knew who they should be like, they nudged their

contemporaries to adopt a particular kind of moral formation and politics.

A sense of self is formed in conjunction with the development of a sense of community.

Histories could help form an individual’s character, but when read in community, they could also

play a role in the formation of shared culture. Since the formation of self in medieval Roman

culture was made in reference to past models, communities and societies were likewise inflected

by engagement with the past. Studies of cultural memory help explain how communities can be

created and made more cohesive through perceptions of common experiences and common

pasts.43 Histories, and other texts that memorialize past experiences—such as hagiographies or

liturgical poetry—can bring a particular vision of the past to the minds of people within a much

43 J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization : Writing, Remembrance, and Political

Imagination, Cambridge, 2011; J. Assmann, Religion and cultural memory : ten studies, Stanford, 2006; A. Erll and

A. Nünning, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, Berlin, 2010.

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later community. If the later community perceives that past as a part of their own living cultural

memory, that memory can shape the community’s self-understanding of who they are, and

provide an interlocutor for intellectual and artistic creation of culture.44

This conception of cultural memory as a means of making past events and cultural

products living sparks for the constitution of later communities is helpful in understanding

Byzantium because it explains how these people were able to be both Romans and singers of

Psalms despite yawning gulfs of time and place. People who consider the Byzantines’ belief that

they were Romans as a form of false-consciousness sometimes appeal to vast stretch of time, or

breaks in social continuity, as making it somehow impossible for the medieval Romans to really

be Romans. But it is entirely possible to have gaps in continuity—even centuries-long gaps—

because once a text is picked up, and perceived as expressing truth about one’s own past, and

that vision is shared within a community, that vision of the past can become living cultural

memory. People who sincerely sing along with the Lenten Triodion, ventriloquizing Adam’s

self-accusation and penance, become the type of the penitent sinner.45 The expulsion from Eden

becomes living memory as Adam is perceived as a progenitor whose experiences were formative

for the current community. Actual breaks in social continuity between Adam and the medieval

Romans have no impact on this construction of their relationship to the past. So too when

classical Romans are taken as models for self, worry over continuity is meaningless.

Medieval Romans’ creation of self through patterning on models heightened the sense in

which their culture was formed in relation to memory. Biblical and classical figures were chosen

44 “…the history of thought cannot be completely grasped if reconstructed solely in terms of evolution and

progress. The concept of evolution, that is, of an accumulation by which the old is absorbed in the new, has to be

complemented by the concept of memory, through which the old remains present and valid, and progress is matched

by recursion and even regression. The hypoleptic constitution of cultural memory implies not only reception and

elaboration but also rejection and a return to once abandoned positions.” J. Assmann, Cultural Memory, p. 266–267. 45 D. Krueger, Liturgical subjects, 164–196.

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as models of behavior, and community was created in relation to history. The modeling led to

some conservatism and uniformity, as we saw with multiple authors in different centuries using

the same metaphor. At the same time, individuals chose who to emulate. Not every classical or

biblical figure made the cut, and not every medieval person made the same choices. Romanos the

Melodist had strong ideas about who Christians should model their behavior on, but Polybios

also provided enthralling exemplary characters. Nothing compelled exclusive loyalty to any

particular model, to the contrary, it seems people interacted with whatever strand of their

perceived heritage was useful in the context of the moment.46 Writers and artists were beholden

to common ideas of culture insofar as they needed to work in a context that made sense to

themselves and others, but they also produced works that reflected their own values and asked

readers and witnesses to admire and emulate particular traits.

Anna Komnene and Nikephoros Bryennios provide an example of contemporaneous

historians presenting history as offering divergent lessons. They told the same stories about

Alexios Komnenos, but in such a way that their audiences would take away opposite moral

valuations of his behavior. Bryennios presented Alexios’s generalship as craven, duplicitous and

un-Roman, while Anna told essentially the same stories about the same events in such a way that

Alexios appeared as a clever master strategist in the ancient Greek style. While historians could

not control reader’s responses to their texts, they could certainly try to shape what their moral

messages would be. In reinventing Alexios as a morally virtuous trickster, Anna Komnene

created a new model of action for her grandchildren to emulate.47 It was an attempt to nudge the

morality and politics of her contemporaries. The decisions that historians, and other authors and

46 S. Papaioannou, Byzantium and the Modernist Subject, in Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine and

Method in Modernity, R. Betancourt and M. Taroutina eds., Leiden, 2015, 195–211, p. 206. 47 L. Neville, Heroes and Romans, 182–203.

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artists, made about which deeds to preserve for eternity and which to hold up as models

encouraged the culture of their contemporaries to adopt particular values.

The vast trove of possible models—Biblical, Greek, Roman—allowed for remarkable

variation of culture and morality all while maintaining the practice of cultural formation via

relationship with the past. The shifting fashions of exemplars are changes in the formation of

Byzantine culture, always created in concert with an understanding of the past. I see the

interaction of personal choices and past models as giving Byzantine culture both its constantly

shifting mutability and its appearance of stasis. This understanding of medieval Romans as

constantly creating themselves through choosing various bits of their immense ancient heritage

to emulate seems a far superior way of conceiving of cultural shifts than the old metaphors of

decline and rebirth. Scholars who like Byzantine culture have often described their favorite parts

as revivals or renaissances. We have identified “revivals” and “renewals” of classical culture in

the ninth, tenth, twelfth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Since only what has died or decayed

can be reborn, the intervening moments are necessarily ones of decline, and the story of

Byzantine high culture becomes a continuous flux of vitality and decay, birth and death. Yet the

interstices of decay of classical culture are more often than not seen by scholars of Orthodoxy as

moments of hagiographical or theological flourishing. The scholars who chart the revivals

generally want to defend Byzantium, but the metaphor of new birth and revival—from death and

decay—rather reinforces the impression that this was a culture with health problems.48

Rather than being passively subject to the vitality of classicism, medieval authors and

artists, responding to changing challenges of their society and culture, shifted their appraisals of

what in the past held meaning for them. Nothing was reborn or and nothing died as medieval

48 Ibid., 194–198.

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Roman creators of cultural products altered their appreciation of what aspects of their ancient

heritage were engaging. The ability of Byzantine authors to shift their stances relative to their

various ancient models frustrate the efforts of modern scholars to marshal Byzantine culture into

neat trends or fashions.49

I would like us to see historiography as one of the many forms of discourse that were

used by medieval Romans in their process of self-expression and self-formation. Liturgical and

hagiographic discourse was undoubtedly more common, but historical discourse could be

powerful: one reading of Plutarch is enough for us to remember lives of Tiberius and Gaius

Gracchus, or Attaleiates on Romanos Diogenes. The reach of historiography was small and elite,

but elites are influential.

Regardless of how many people took historical types as models of action, understanding

the process of self-formation in Byzantine culture lets us see better what historians were doing.

Bryennios fitted the majority of characters in his history into recognizable roles and types,

because he thought that was good history, and, more importantly, because that was how he was

taught to think. He made Anna Dalassene look like Theodora, Cornelia, and a martyr facing

down a judge (not at the same time)50 because those patterns revealed true things about who she

was, and it was the natural way for him to organize and explain experience. Further, within her

culture, how could Anna construct a personality without aligning her behavior with such ideal

49 “Byzantine writing (similarly to, but more pointedly than, Byzantine art) operated within the various and

often contradictory series of inherited vocabularies and registers of discourse – bodies of language, texts, forms, and

knowledge that originated in the earlier Greco-Roman tradition. Byzantine writers were trained to switch between

these registers in almost imperceptible ways that cannot satisfy the double impulse of modern historiography to

identify coherent systems of thoughts and linear histories of form.” S. Papaioannou, Byzantium and the Modernist

Subject, 206–207. 50 L. Neville, Heroes and Romans, 139–158.

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types? Byzantine history writing took place within Byzantine culture, and we need to apply all

that we have learned about that culture to the study of historiography.