Twelfth-Century Writings about the Late Antique Past

By the twelfth century, such sentiments are commonplace. For instance, Theodoros Prodromos (c. ad 1100-c.1170) admits that pure meaning (‘‘mind’’: nous) may be of

Some value for its unmediated contemplation ( theoria) of‘‘naked’’ things (Letter 7, PG 133: 1261b-5b); but rhetorical language (the ‘‘tongue’’: glOtta) is equally if not more valuable, with its swift movement, multiplicity, and mediation of sight. Such views generate a variety of remarkable literary phenomena in the twelfth century. That century is, after all, the time when the conscious production of fiction and interest in sculpture are revived in premodern Greek culture, after a silence of several centuries (Beaton 1996, Agapitos and Reinsch 2000, and Roilos 2005; Mango 1963 and Grabar 1976). What pertains to my discussion here is that such views enabled a new understanding of historiography and a new writing of the past (Macrides and Magdalino 1992; Agapitos 2004; and, for comparison, Spiegel 1993). Four illustrative examples are texts by loannes Zonaras (late eleventh century AD-after 1159?), Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonike (c. ad 1115-95/6), Konstantinos Manasses (c. ad 1130-c.1187), and Niketas Choniates (ad 1155/7-1217).

Loannes Zonaras composed a universal chronicle sometime after ad 1118 (see Grigoriadis 1998). In his introduction, he surprisingly declares that his historiography will not be characterized by precision (akribeia); rather, his text will be varied, while its author (whom Zonaras calls ‘‘its father’’) will assume the voices and styles of others ( Epitome Historian 1-6). By such a statement, Zonaras wishes to ward off the possible criticism that his work is not precisely truthful by pointing out that the truth of his history depends upon the truth of his sources. Simultaneously, however, such a statement asserts Zonaras’ consciousness of the unavoidable discursive qualities and likely fictionality of his creation. He knows - or says that he knows - that his text does not make the past transparent.

This consciousness allows Zonaras to criticize both his sources and the past itself (Magdalino 1983). Neither the past nor the sources are presented as a series of unmediated images. Zonaras’ history has characteristics often markedly different from earlier Byzantine chronicles. Like Theophanes the Confessor, he mentions the statue that Constantine erected during the foundation of Constantinople (ed. Buttner-Wobst, pp. 17-18); but here, the statue is not inscribed within the context of a competition of signs, as in Theophanes, but is exhibited, rather, as a beautiful product of Greco-Roman culture. The statue is originally a depiction of Apollo, brought from Ilion, the ancestral city of ancient Rome. Most importantly, it is a statue that ‘‘displayed the precision (akribeia) of an ancient hand, that creates objects that are almost breathing.’’ Akribeia here is restored to its original, Hellenistic, meaning. Zonaras stresses the artistry and verisimilitude of a Greco-Roman and late antique object. It is no coincidence that this statue also falls, killing several Constantinopolitan pedestrians. This collapse, however, which happens during Zonaras’ lifetime, is not a sign of a mysterious force, as in the Parastaseis, but functions, rather, as a metaphor for Zonaras’ fierce critique of contemporary imperial power.

A similar awareness of the discursive qualities of historical discourse is expressed by Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonike, an author most famous for his extensive commentaries on the Homeric epics. Eustathius wrote a historical narrative On the Capture of Thessalonike sometime after ad 1185. In the prooimion (3-4), Eustathius distinguishes at the practical level between the narration of past events and the narration of contemporary ones. The historian of the past, according to Eustathius, often theologizes, expands his discourse, and unsparingly applies cosmetics to his expression for the sake of beauty. He becomes infatuated with descriptions, and presents much for the sake of pleasure. He might even ‘‘behave like a dancer,’’ and he places in the foreground ‘‘strange stories,’’ while he artistically contrives discourses for ‘‘showing off.’’ Eustathius, being a historian of the present, will do something different. For him, the history of the present is to be a mixture of styles, ranging from simplicity to elaborate rhetoric. That the historian of the past is charged with profuse rhetoricality may be equally a rhetorical gesture by Eustathius himself. It is founded, nevertheless, upon the same notion that we encountered in Zonaras: history writing cannot but be affected by rhetoric’s ornate and varied forms.

It is in the context of such metahistorical consciousness that a new late antique past is produced in the twelfth century. In Konstantinos Manasses’ universal chronicle, the Chronike Synopsis (see Jeffreys 1979; Reinsch 2002; Nilsson 2006), late antique theological signs, semeia, have receded (the word semeion is virtually absent). They are replaced by the distinctive ingredients of premodern fiction: heroic acts, statuesque bodies, powerful men who express their suffering and emotions, beautiful and attractive women, women actively involved in the making of history, dialogues, dreams, love stories, poisonous apples, terrible eunuchs. The chronicle also displays the distinctive stylistic devices of contemporary fiction (it should be remembered that Manasses is the author of one of four fictional romances produced in the twelfth century). The chronicle is written in verse, like the majority of the novels in this period. It also contains elaborate Homeric-like metaphors, several short digressive narratives, encomia, rhetorical addresses, and evocations of the audience (a marker of likely public performance). Furthermore, with several maxims of timeless morality that usually conclude the narration of an event (sententiae), Manasses enters the fabric of his history, expresses his opinion, and allows his audience to distance themselves from the past by looking at their own present condition. With such themes and rhetorical techniques, the historian exposes the rhetorical character of his historical work. Manasses turns the past, Late Antiquity included, into a stage for rhetoric.

My final example is Niketas Choniates’ Chronike Diegesis, a history of the twelfth-century Byzantine Empire and its collapse. This history includes a description of several statues of Constantinople’s late antique past in an appendix to the main narrative also known as De Signis (647-55; see Cutler 1968; Saradi 2000). The statues that Choniates describes could still be seen at the end of the twelfth century, but were destroyed by the crusaders, ‘‘people ignorant and untouched by beauty,’’ in Choniates’ words. A remarkable distance separates Choniates’ narrative from the story of the Parastaseis with which I began. Choniates’ statues are not inhabited by miraculous powers and awesome materiality, in need of control by moral methods of viewing. Rather, his statues display an aesthetic variety (poikilia); perform ( hypokrinesthai) beauty; they evoke pleasure at their sight and sorrow at their destruction. These are artistic objects that should invite the amazement (thauma) and the softening ( malthattein) of their viewers. The signs of Late Antiquity are here fully transformed or, as it were, exhumed and restored.