History as Literature in Byzantium: Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, April 2007

351 Pages·2016·3.25 MB·English

by  Ruth Macrides

HISTORY AS LITERATURE

IN BYZANTIUM
Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies
Publications
15
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
IN BYZANTIUM

Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of
Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham,
April 2007
edited by
Ruth Macrides
SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF BYZANTINE STUDIES – PUBLICATION 15
First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (40th : 2007: University of Birmingham)
History as Literature in Byzantium: Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of
Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 2007. – (Publications of the
Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies)
1. Historiography – Byzantine Empire – Congresses.
I. Title II. Series III. Macrides, R. J.
907.2’049502–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (40th : 2007: University of Birmingham)
History as Literature in Byzantium :Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of
Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 2007 / [edited by] Ruth Macrides.
p. cm. -- (Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. Byzantine Empire – Historiography – Congresses. 2. Historiography – Byzantine
Empire – Congresses. 3. Byzantine Empire – History – Sources – Congresses.
4. Byzantine literature – History and criticism – Congresses. I. Macrides, R. J.
II. Title.
DF505.S67 2007
949.5’02072–dc22 2010021507
ISBN 9781409412069 (hbk)
Contents
Foreword vii
Editor’s Preface ix
List of Contributors xiii
List of Abbreviations xvii
List of Illustrations xxiii
Note on Spelling of Names xxv
Section I: Aesthetics
1. Stratis Papaioannou The aesthetics of history: from
Theophanes to Eustathios 3
Section II: Audience
2. Brian Croke Uncovering Byzantium’s
historiographical audience 25
3. John Davis Anna Komnene and Niketas
Choniates ‘translated’: the
fourteenth-century Byzantine
metaphrases 55
Section III: Narrator
4. Michael Jeffreys Psellos and ‘his emperors’:
fact, fiction and genre 73
5. Teresa Shawcross ‘Listen, all of you, both Franks and
Romans’: the narrator in the
Chronicle of Morea 93
Section IV: Story-telling
6. Roger Sco(cid:308) From propaganda to history to
literature: the Byzantine stories of
Theodosius’ apple and Marcian’s
eagles 115
From History as Literature in Byzantium, ed. Ruth Macrides. Copyright © 2010 by the Society
for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court
East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.
v
vi HISTORY AS LITERATURE IN BYZANTIUM
7. George T. Calofonos Dream narratives in historical
writing. Making sense of history in
Theophanes’ Chronographia 133
8. Nicole(cid:308)e S. Trahoulia The Venice Alexander Romance:
pictorial narrative and the art of
telling stories 145
Section V: The Classical Tradition Reinterpreted
9. Stephanos E(cid:286)hymiadis A historian and his tragic hero:
a literary reading of Theophylact
Simoka(cid:308)a’s Ecumenical History 169
10. Martin Hinterberger Envy and Nemesis in the Vita
Basilii and Leo the Deacon: literary
mimesis or something more? 187
Section VI: Sources Reconfigured
11. Dmitry Afinogenov The story of the patriarch
Constantine II of Constantinople
in Theophanes and George the
Monk: transformations of a
narrative 207
12. Elena N. Boeck Engaging the Byzantine past:
strategies of visualizing history
in Sicily and Bulgaria 215
13. Konstantinos Zafeiris The Synopsis Chronike and
hagiography: the presentation of
Constantine the Great 237
Section VII: Structure and Themes
14. Anthony Kaldellis Procopius’ Persian War: a thematic
and literary analysis 253
15. Paolo Odorico La chronique de Malalas entre
li(cid:308)érature et philosophie 275
16. Athanasios Angelou Rhetoric and history: the case of
Niketas Choniates 289
Index of Proper Names, Places, Terms 307
Index of Modern Authors 309
Foreword
The contributions to this book derive from papers presented to the
Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies on ‘Byzantine History
as Literature’, held in Birmingham, 13–16 April 2007. Participants
from three continents converged on the original home of symposia
where, for once, truly spring-like weather conditions held, so that
the daffodils blossomed in record time. The symposium coincided
with the annual Classical Association meeting, as it had done 28
years earlier when Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott organized the
Thirteenth Spring Symposium, from which Byzantium and the Classical
Tradition emerged. That was still a time when every symposium met in
Birmingham but not every symposium resulted in an edited book. To
commemorate that earlier convergence of classicists and Byzantinists,
Margaret Mullett addressed the 2007 joint meeting with ‘History and
truth, lies and fiction: Byzantium and the classical tradition, twenty-
five years on’.
The symposium theme was divided into four sessions, each named
after a prominent man or woman who has made pronouncements on
literature and/or historical writing: David Lodge, Anna Komnene,
Henry Ford and Steven Runciman. Fourteen speakers examined
classicizing histories and chronicles from the sixth to the fourteenth
centuries, asking questions about audience and aesthetics, narrative
and narrator, stories and their reinterpretations and reconfigurations.
Eighteen communications were given on topics related to the
symposium theme. Some of these speakers were also Birmingham
student assistants who took care of all manner of needs, with smooth
efficiency.
The symposium certainly could not have taken place without the
kind and generous support of a host of institutions and individuals.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge their sponsorship here and thank the
AHRC (doctoral training funds), Ashgate Publishing and Variorum,
the British Academy, the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, the Cyprus
Ministry of Education and Culture, Nicholas and Matrona Egon, the
Greek Ministry of Culture, the Hellenic Foundation, the Hellenic
Society, the A. G. Leventis Foundation, Oxford University Press, the
St Hilary Trust.
From History as Literature in Byzantium, ed. Ruth Macrides. Copyright © 2010 by the Society
for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court
East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.
vii
viii HISTORY AS LITERATURE IN BYZANTIUM
Warm thanks are due to John Smedley and Kirsten Weissenberg of
Ashgate Publishing, for their exemplary support throughout the editorial
process, and Rowena Loverance, series editor and head of the Publications
Commi(cid:308)ee of the SPBS.
Ruth Macrides
Birmingham, September 2009
Editor’s Preface
The words ‘history’ and ‘literature’ have been appearing in close
association with each other with greater frequency in Byzantine studies
over the last decade.1 Although it has been the case that Byzantinists have
always treated ‘the literature of the empire as a body of historical source
material’, they have not always treated their historical source material as
literature.2 In 1990 Margaret Mulle(cid:308) wrote that it was rare for ‘literature’
to be given a section of its own at symposia and congresses, although
she thought that historiography was an exception – ‘it should now be the
best understood area of Byzantine literature’.3 The emphasis here is on
‘should’.
‘Still’ is another word that must be emphasized. The literary analysis of
historical works, chronographies and historiographies, is still in its early
days for Byzantine studies. The literary dimension of historical writing is
still considered the domain of others. The historian’s work, it is thought,
lies elsewhere, in the accumulation and corroboration of information
about the past. Even though ‘historiography was cut away from the
branches of literature’4 relatively recently, in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and made a discipline only then, we like to impute
to medieval authors and medieval historiography characteristics of our
own times – history as a discrete discipline of learning, and the historian’s
goal as that of uncovering, recording and explaining the past. Likewise
we understand ‘literature’ to be separate and separable from history.
Literature does not make for good history; it lacks ‘the seriousness of
1 See the papers of the Third International Literary Colloquium at Nicosia
in 2004: L’écriture de la mémoire. La li(cid:308)érarité de l’historiographie, eds. P. Odorico,
P. A. Agapitos and M. Hinterberger (Paris, 2006); the Fourteenth Conference of
the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, Melbourne, 2004: Byzantine
Narrative: Papers in Honour of Roger Sco(cid:308), eds. J. Burke, U. Betka and R. Sco(cid:308)
(Melbourne, 2006).
2 M. Mulle(cid:308), ‘Dancing with deconstructionists in the gardens of the muses:
new literary history vs ?’, BMGS 14 (1990), 258–75, here at 268.
3 Mulle(cid:308), ‘Dancing’, 261–2, 263.
4 C.F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, 2004), 84.
From History as Literature in Byzantium, ed. Ruth Macrides. Copyright © 2010 by the Society
for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court
East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.
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