Byzantine political theorists saw their empire and its ruler as a New Rome that was part of a seamless and unchanging continuity with the empire of Old Rome, though now divinely supported by the Christian God.3 Ritual and ceremonial was devised to reinforce this and to convince the empire’s citizens no less than the visiting outsider.4 Yet that there were changes and developments is an inescapable fact. The empire’s boundaries fluctuated: at their greatest in the mid-sixth century under Justinian (527-565) and the early eleventh century under Basil II (963-1025), at their most attenuated in the seventh century during the Arab onslaught and again in the fourteenth when facing both Latins and Turks.
Similarly, the intellectual climate fluctuated. Here there are two aspects to consider: the secular, and the ecclesiastical or theological. The secular, drawing on the literary traditions of pagan antiquity, inevitably made use of the genres in which rhetorical techniques had originally developed; the ecclesiastical, developing Christian traditions in the third element of the mix that made up Byzantine culture, also, and also inevitably, put these initially secular techniques to use though alternative theories and attitudes developed.5 In practice there was a messy divide. Thus it can be said that Byzantine literary culture was vibrant in the sixth century (when it was largely but not entirely secular and classicizing, with figures like Procopius and Paul the Silentiary), withdrawn into itself in the seventh (when a characteristic text would be the Hodegos of Anastasius of Sinai), to emerge in the eighth with a different set of preoccupations, largely theological and bound up with issues to do with Iconoclasm or the use of images in worship.6 Then come a series of ‘Renaissances’ or revivals, by which is meant a resurgence of interest in aspects of the secular, classical past - and with it a revival of the rhetorical techniques thereby implied.7 Thus in the ninth century the patriarch Photius both read widely, as can be seen from the books recorded in his Biblioteca, and reflected on the processes of what he had read.8 In the tenth century, the activities of Photius and his pupils led up to the so-called Macedonian Renaissance that culminated in the encyclopaedically humanist interests of the intellectuals around the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (ruled 945-959).9 The eleventh century was dominated by the all-encompassing intellectual explorations of the polymath courtier Psellus.10 The twelfth century, a period of high self-confidence under the Comnenian dynasty, witnessed a lively interest in the literary past and the appearance of cohorts of rival writers such as Theodore Prodromus, Eustathius of Thessaloniki and John Tzetzes.11 Following the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the thirteenth century was a period of consolidation and regrouping in the replacement capital of Nicaea, but one in which the scholar emperor Theodore II Laskaris (reigned 1254-1258) himself practised what he had been taught, and encouraged his student proteges. The fruits of these endeavours were seen in Constantinople following its recovery in 1261 by Michael Palaeologus (reigned 1259-1282). In what has come to be called the Palaeologan Renaissance, which lasted well into the fourteenth century, scholarship flourished, the court provided a welcoming environment for literary experiment, while monks such as Maximus Planoudes explored the classical heritage, statesmen such as Theodore
Metochites examined their souls in soi-disant Homeric hexameters and emperors turned monks wrote their memoirs with Thucydidean echoes.12
However, before focusing on the uses made of rhetoric in Byzantium there are some further background issues that need to be clarified. These involve Byzantine attitudes towards language, the nature and purposes of Byzantine education, and the extent of literacy in the Byzantine world.
World History
