To some extent, then, the non-specialist is quite well served, and translated
letter-collections or poems of major figures or government employees
occasionally supplement the forementioned narratives. Letters collected
for publication were partly intended to show their authors’ membership
of the politico-religious elite and their familiarity with both the scriptures
and classical lore. But their stylised qualities and contrived archaisms do
not necessarily void them of straightforward historical content. This is
especially so with the collected letters of the patriarchs Nicholas I Mystikos
(901–7, 912–25) and Athanasios I (1289–93, 1303–9) and of Emperor
Manuel II Palaiologos, while other writers such as Leo of Synada, John
Mauropous and Gregory Akindynos disclose something of the goings-on
in the imperial-ecclesiastical complex.38
One ‘statesman by day, scholar by night’, the grand logothete Theodore
Metochites, sought consolation for loss of effective power through his
Poems ‘to himself ’.39 There are no worthy successors to Procopius’ Secret
history,40 but the pomp and pieties of court provided an arena for political
differences, personal rivalries were keen, and undercurrents of criticism
and satire flowed on. The currents occasionally surface, as in Psellos’ penportraits
in Fourteen Byzantine rulers, where Psellos states that all emperors’
actions are ‘a patchwork of bad and good’, and proceeds to lampoon emperors
such as Constantine IX whom his orations had praised to the skies.41
Former emperors’ foibles and misdeeds were fair game after a change of
dynasty, asMichael III’s (842–67) posthumous reputation attests (see below,
pp. 292, 295–6). And whole dynasties of emperors are castigated by iconodule
writers such as Patriarch Nikephoros and Theophanes the Confessor.
World History
