One could begin this chapter by claiming that there never was a Byzantine Late Antiquity. The people we now call the Byzantines would most likely have felt puzzled by such a suggestion. The myth of a continuous and relatively unchanged Christian empire from the fourth century through to the fifteenth century was fundamental for Byzantium, as it has been fundamental for Byzantine Studies as well. In the first grand narratives of Byzantine historiography and historiography about Byzantium, the distinction between ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ and ‘‘Byzantium’’ is hardly ever made.
While, from a modern perspective, this myth of monolithic continuity has been dismantled, it is another matter altogether to locate the consciousness of a break with Late Antiquity within Byzantine culture. Not that the Byzantines were insensitive to change or discontinuity (see Magdalino 1999). We can demarcate, for instance, Byzantium’s Hellenism or, even, Byzantium’s romanitas, for those were categories from which people in Byzantium could distance themselves. Yet, the sense of continuity with much of what we now call Late Antiquity - its discourse and institutions - was for Byzantine culture absolutely rudimentary, an almost biological necessity. Byzantium recognized in the Christian Late Antiquity its fathering past, a past that was most ancient (archaiotaton) and yet its true origin. It was a past performed anew in imperial and ecclesiastic ceremony, remembered in feasts throughout the annual calendar, experienced in various places and spaces, viewed in images, rehearsed in public and private readings, narrated in hagiography and history. It was a past to which one gained access primarily by perception (Spiegel 1983) and memory (Klein 2000), rather than by cognition or critique. To perceive and to remember is to evoke a presence. To evoke a presence is to seek identity. Thus to write about Byzantium’s Late Antiquity is to write about Byzantium itself.
1 This essay was written while in residence at the Freie Universitat, Berlin with the support of a Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I am indebted to both institutions. I also wish to thank Diether R. Reinsch and Athanasios Markopoulos.
The overwhelmingly subjective relation to the past that Byzantium projects may obscure the fact that, like any other ‘‘past,’’ Late Antiquity was for Byzantium not only a reality but also a construction. On a closer look, it is possible to detect several Byzantine versions of Late Antiquity, which were fashioned and refashioned in order to serve various ideologies of power and technologies of culture - imperial, ecclesiastical, and personal. I wish here to make the case that the study of Byzantine Late Antiquity pertains not simply to the study of Byzantium. In its continuous as well as fragmented - in a word, dialogical - relation to the late antique past, Byzantium can indeed tell us something about that past. Historians of Late Antiquity cannot afford to ignore Byzantium - not only because much of the late antique material and discursive evidence depends upon the cultural choices made by generations of Byzantine individuals and institutions, but also because Byzantium’s continuity (or discontinuity) with Late Antiquity unfolds a historical hermeneutics that derived from the very same culture that we strive to interpret. The cultural processes that Byzantine society developed over time can tell us something about the cultural dynamics of Late Antiquity itself.
What follows is one possible example of such a historical hermeneutic. It pertains specifically to late antique discourse as received by Byzantium and to the ways in which this reception influenced Byzantine historiography about Late Antiquity. I will examine two separate layers of Byzantine writing: (1) metahistory (White 1973, 1987; Barthes 1981), namely Byzantine statements about the aesthetic principles that govern narratives about the past, and (2) literary criticism, namely aesthetic readings of late antique texts. One can trace a significant development in Byzantine metahistory and literary criticism. From an initial emphasis on the ability of discourse to mediate content - truth in general, but especially historical truth - Byzantine authors moved toward an increasing appreciation of form itself. This development influenced the ways in which Byzantine authors wrote about their late antique past. While initially Late Antiquity was regarded as a historical past immediately present in Byzantine historiography, gradually Byzantine authors became aware of how their writing about the past was mediated through form, and of how the past could therefore be creatively constructed to meet the demands or tastes of the present. What I wish to argue is that this development from valuation of content to valuation of form, and the parallel change from a perceived late antique presence to a constructed late antique tradition, represent the unfolding over time of a dynamic within Byzantium that was already inherent in late antique discourse itself. For, while the dominant view of discourse in Late Antiquity stressed the importance of content, in practice late antique authors pursued modes of writing that aspired to and were founded in the powers of form, the powers of rhetoric. By looking at Byzantine conceptions of how to write about the past and how to read texts from the past, I wish to argue that Byzantine discourse unravels the discursive contradictions and the variety of aesthetic potentials existent in Late Antiquity.
Some limitations are necessarily imposed upon this examination. Due to the constraints of space, I can only look here at a few Byzantine authors, a group of authors that date from the eighth through the early thirteenth century. They were united not so much by their social background or ideological standpoint as by their aspirations and their cultural context. They were monks and clerics, scholars and intellectuals, who strove for authority within their society and shared a culture that displayed cohesion, albeit subject to change (a culture dating from c. ad 750 to 1204: from iconoclasm to the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders). After ad 1204, that cohesion was substantially altered by a new European order. I shall also confine myself to a segment of late antique discourse that remained dominant in Byzantium - namely, patristic writing of the fourth and early fifth centuries. Authors like Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom were copied, read, imagined, and imitated in Byzantium. They were truly the fathers of a massive cultural production. Finally, a note about my theoretical presuppositions is in order. My approach is inspired by what has been termed ‘‘philologically grounded eclecticism’’ (Ziolkowski 1996: 530), especially by readings of premodern texts that treat their metarhetorical assumptions as indices and repositories of cultural tensions and negotiations. (Examples of such readings: Goldhill 1986; Winkler 1990; Halperin 1992; Spence 1996; Zeitlin 1996; and Bynum 2001.)
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