However, it is in the embedded uses of rhetorical techniques that the all-pervasiveness of rhetoric in Byzantium is apparent. This can be considered in terms of the use of the larger units that have been discussed thus far, as well as on the small scale, in the use of tropes and figures of speech that have not yet been referred to. What follows is a necessarily incomplete and rather random set of examples designed to stimulate curiosity.
The area of literature for which Byzantium is justly renowned is in the writing of history. There is an almost unbroken sequence of historians and chroniclers from the earliest centuries through to the last, working with varying degrees of artistry but almost without exception drawing on an interesting range of rhetorical and literary techniques.86 The usefulness of the progymnasma as a tool for expression and a unit of composition is plain. Procopius in two of his works provides, as has been suggested already, extended versions of both the ekphrasis (in Buildings) and the psogos (in Secret History). However, the Buildings itself also has inserted passages of carefully worked up ekphrasis, on the city of Antioch, rebuilt following an earthquake, and on the great church of Hagia Sophia.87 An ekphrasis of the plant and animal life that came into being at the beginning of the world is a conspicuous part of the verse chronicle of Constantine Manasses, which was written in about 1140 for an aristocratic patroness.88 The carefully artless history by the former emperor John Kanta-kouzenus (reigned 1347-1354) includes a number of set piece descriptions, amongst them a vivid word picture of the prokypsis scene at the marriage of his daughter to the Turk Orchan, a forerunner of the Buckingham Palace balcony appearances.89 Psogos also makes an appearance, slyly in the case of Psellus and his Chronographia, much of whose apparent admiration for Constantine Monomachus can be read not far beneath the surface as criticism. Psellus is also master of the ethopoia, for example in his depiction of the empress Zoe.90 That the diegema, or ‘story’, another of the pro-gymnasmata though not one discussed so far, was a useful building block is clear from its ubiquity: neatly constructed episodes can be isolated in virtually every historian. Much discussed recently has been the use made of these by the generals Cecaumenus (mid-eleventh century) in his Precepts and Anecdotes and Nicephorus Bryennius (early twelfth century) in his Materials for History, neither of whom are the sort of individuals who might be expected to be well versed in literary techniques (fighters rather than pen-pushers), but both of whom produced a well told ‘story’.91 Amongst the most obvious ‘set-piece’ scenes one might expect from a historian are battles, noteworthy being several of those by Procopius; though some later writers may be accused of slipping into formulas, in the case of Scylitzes (c. 1090) the reason would be that he was consciously summarising his sources.92 Histories also provide their authors with opportunities to debate issues through their protagonists’ speeches, as in Procopius’ presentation of the fraught debate on how to deal with the Nica Riot (Wars 1.24), or in the countless cases of generals exhorting their troops to battle; Leo the Deacon in the late tenth century has some particularly effective ones.
A similar list could be drawn up for, for example, that most typical of Byzantine literary genres, hagiography, that is, saints’ lives. Examples of hagiography also come from all stages ofthe Byzantine millennium and from a wide range ofauthors and with a surprisingly disparate set of agendas.93 Conspicuous are ekphraseis of festivals, epita-phioi for the central figures, dilglmata on the saints’ exploits. For homilies or sermons, the evidence is again abundant: leaving aside the skills of the well-trained fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers, one might point - more or less at random - to the eight-century patriarch Germanus, with his lyrical depictions of the spring morning of the Annunciation and his lively dialogue between Gabriel and Mary with its use of anaphora.94 Much could be said too of the techniques found in the hymnographers, whether the rhythmic kontakia of Romanus from the sixth century with its inventive word play governing the sequence of ideas, or the complex imagery of the iambic canons of John of Damascus in the eighth, or the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete.95
Perhaps the most conspicuous examples of the embedding of units of the rhetorical tool-kit into a continuous composition are provided by the ‘novels’ from the Com-nenian renaissance. These were produced by four of the ambitious and underemployed literati of the early part of the 1140s, and were modelled on the novels of the Second Sophistic, notably the Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius (on which, see R. Webb, Chapter 34). Although long derided as feeble pastiches, these works are now attracting increasing attention in their own right. For a modern readership they are amongst the most approachable texts in the Byzantine literary oeuvre, and are beguilingly open to critical decoding.96 But their linear plot-lines are decorated at intervals with show-stopping pieces of rhetorical tours-de-force, from the ekphraseis of gardens, Virtues and Vices, and the seasons of the year in Macrembolites’ Hysmene and Hysminias to the verse mock-Platonic dialogue on why only the best (including one’s friends) should be sacrificed to the gods in Theodore Prodromus’ Rhodanthe and Dosicles to the speech ‘What a young man should say when persuading his sweetheart to elope’ in Nicetas Eugenianus’ Drosilla and Charicles.9'7 These read like nothing so much as a set of ‘fair copies’ produced by a teacher to encourage his pupils. A similar set of romances, this time all in verse and all anonymous, appear in the early fourteenth century, to some extent modelled on the Comnenian examples, and notable for the spectacular, and potentially allegorical, ekphraseis of castles, their legendary inhabitants and their gardens.98
Inevitably embedded into a work are the small-scale tools of rhetoric, the rhetorical figures or the tropes and schemata,99 of which Byzantine writers made ample use, at times perhaps to excess. Knowledge of these was transmitted by a number of handbooks, some from antiquity (such as that of Tryphon), others - of obscure date and authorship - from the Byzantine period: the names that appear are Choeroboscus (ninth century) and Gregory Pardus (twelfth century), though Pardus’ work is in fact to be attributed to Tryphon.100 The list of tropes in these ‘Byzantine’ handbooks has been extended to twenty-seven, to include allegory, ellipsis, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, metonomy, pleonasm, simile, synecdoche, riddle. Examination of virtually any Byzantine writer would demonstrate how commonplace these turns of speech had become: for metaphor, perhaps a supreme master is Nicetas Choniates in his History of the Comnenian emperors;101 for a glorious mix of allegory, anaphora, hyperbole, metonomy, simile and synecdoche, with a liberal admixture of punning etymologies, it is hard to go past Manganeius Prodromus, though there were indeed many more skilled and learned practitioners in court rhetoric than he.
Little has been said so far about the interaction between the secular literary traditions in which education took place and the religious environment. A classic statement of the cultural problem is the fourth-century treatise by Basil of Caesarea, Address to Young Men, on how to interact with secular classicism (with caution),102 but there is little subsequent development of these ideas apart from statements that the ‘simplicity of the fisherman’ is to be preferred to the complexities of the Atticist. Elements of a theory to support this attitude can be seen, for example, in Photius’ statements that Saint Paul is to be emulated rather than secular authors (Ep. 156) or in Psellus’ judgements of the style of Gregory of Nazianzus, a model of impeccable orthodoxy from all points of view.103 There are signs here that a rhetoric of theological discourse is being developed: this is a topic which deserves further investigation.
World History
