The twelfth-century Byzantine author Gregory Antiochus was, until recently, almost unknown. His works remained unpublished, or inaccurately attributed. Krumbacher, in his monumental history of Byzantine literature, mentioned the existence of manuscripts with Antiochus' speeches and letters, but recorded only one work which had appeared in print. Gradually, more information came to light. In 1917 W. Regel published a speech by Antiochus to Isaac II Angelus (Fontes, II, pp. 300–4). In 1940 Dölger and Bachmann produced an annotated edition of another speech, this time to Isaac's brother Constantine. Twenty years later P. Wirth established that two ‘anonymous’ speeches published by Regel were in fact written by Antiochus. And finally, J. Darrouzès published three more works by Antiochus, compiled a list of all his known compositions (thirty-five items), and attempted to sketch the outlines of his biography.

Yet long before the editions of Dölger, Bachmann, Wirth and Darrouzès, the works of Gregory Antiochus had been studied by the eminent Russian classicist N. I. Novosadsky. Novosadsky copied several speeches and letters from the invaluable Byzantine miscellany Escorial Y-II-10 (E), apparently with the intention of publishing them with Regel in some future volume of Regel's Fontes. But Regel died, circumstances changed, and Novosadsky's files lay untouched at his home until they were eventually passed by his widow to the Byzantine department of the Institute of History at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

One relatively minor incident in Byzantine history – the failed coup of John Comnenus the Fat in a.d. 1200 – is documented in the works of four contemporary rhetors: Nicetas Choniates, Euthymius Tornices, Nicephorus Chrysoberges, and Nicholas Mesarites. All four authors lived through the events; but while three of them provide roughly similar accounts, one, Nicholas Mesarites, stands apart from the rest. In the present study we shall examine the discrepancies between Mesarites' atypical narrative and that of the other three writers. Rather than look in detail at all three ‘orthodox’ accounts, we shall take one of them, that of Nicephorus Chrysoberges, as their representative.

Mesarites and Chrysoberges do not differ in their basic assessment of John Comnenus' initiative: both of them (and, indeed, Choniates and Tornices) are firmly on the side of the victor, the legitimate ruler, Alexius III Angelus. The differences are not, in the first instance, political, but aesthetic: Mesarites and Chrysoberges have fundamentally different ways of presenting events, of constructing a narrative.

Again, therefore, one faces the vexed problem of variety in Byzantine literature and, by implication, in Byzantine social and aesthetic perception. If two contemporary Byzantine authors differmarkedly in their narrative method, in their approach to the task of constructing a text, then one is bound to conclude that there was a measure of variety, perhaps even of division and argument, in Byzantine literary life.

Earlier generations of scholars have sought to understand the Byzantine empire primarily by turning to its political history. But the modern world has grown lukewarm to the history of events. It is surprising to note that the standard work on Byzantine political history, George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State (‘the best handbook on Byzantine history’, as Cyril Mango rightly calls it) was first issued in 1940, albeit with adjustments in 1952 and 1963. Ostrogorsky's book has survived for over forty years not because it is flawless: many aspects of his concept of Byzantium have since been challenged. The book's longevity is due, first and foremost, to the fact that our generation does not relish the history of wars, upheavals and religious disputes. We no longer believe that the core of the past can be reached through even the finest analysis of political events. Instead, the fashion is for the history of civilization, the history of man in a broader perspective. It is no accident that the first part of Alain Ducellier's Le drame de Byzance (Paris, 1976) is entitled ‘A la recherche de l'homme quotidien’.

The first book specifically devoted to Byzantine culture was produced more than a century ago, by J. H. Krause. As one would expect, Krause's sources are pitifully meagre by comparison with what is available today. For example, he writes about Byzantine trades without any knowledge of the Book of the Eparch;, he discusses taxation unaided by the publications of Ashburner and Karayannopulos; in 1869 very few items of Byzantine art were known or studied; and Krause's description of the administrative system piles error upon error.

In another age, in another place, Nicetas Choniates would truly have been a man to be envied. Conspicuously successful in all walks of life, privileged by birth and education, gifted by nature, he was a distinguished orator and historian, and he attained the very highest offices of government. Yet in Byzantium, in the dying years of the twelfth century, success could be devastatingly hollow. Choniates, one of the most powerful men in Constantinople, was powerless to stop the empire lurching to its own destruction: he saw the signs of its fatal weakness, lived through (and only narrowly survived) the calamity of the fall of the city in 1204, and ended his days in impecunious obscurity. His life, no less than his works, is a mirror of the age.

Nicetas Choniates was born in the early 1150s, in the town of Chonae in Asia Minor, of a well-to-do family. He was baptized by the local metropolitan. At the age of nine Nicetas was sent to Constantinople for his education, following his older brother Michael. Michael made a career in the church, and in 1182 was appointed metropolitan of Athens. Nicetas was trained for government. On completing his studies in rhetoric and law, he was posted to the provinces as a tax official (as Michael wrote in a letter c. 1180). After this administrative apprenticeship he returned to the capital and to the court, where, under Alexius II, he served as an imperial secretary.

LIFE

Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, was one of the most distinguished of all Byzantine writers, and the course of his life ought to be reasonably simple to establish. Immediately after his death two of his friends, Michael Choniates and Euthymius Malaces, wrote long and elaborate speeches designed to fix the image of the great man for posterity. However, true to the conventions of Byzantine rhetoric, both speeches overflow with epithets and rapturous praise, while plain facts are either absent altogether or else are veiled in an almost impenetrable fog of verbiage. Michael Choniates speaks of the ladder by which Eustathius ascends to heaven, or of how Eustathius casts off his earthly fetters and passes through the gates which open spontaneously before him (Mich. Ak. I, pp. 302/14–303/12). But he says not a word on those issues which the historian in our time might regard as more substantial: on when and where Eustathius was born, who were his parents, what was his employment. In the main, the biography of Eustathius has to be reconstructed not from the eulogies of his mourning friends, but from the occasional hints contained in his own works, and from fragments and scraps of information in the lemmas. Not surprisingly, therefore, our knowledge of his life remains patchy, and even the most elementary facts remain contentious.

The eleventh-century Byzantine historian Michael Attaleiates was no faceless annalist, no impersonal and impartial recorder of heterogeneous and disconnected facts. The story he tells is subjective and individual. He himself was both an observer of, and a participant in, the events which he describes. He passes judgement on these events, and he manipulates his material with all manner of artful artifice, such as speeches, episodic digressions and rhetorical invective.

The modern reader is faced with a problem: are Attaleiates' views peculiarly his own, or are they typical of the views of some broader social group? Does Attaleiates merely articulate an arbitrary set of personal opinions on specific events, or do his attitudes reflect, in any way systematically, the interests, prejudices and aspirations of an identifiable section of Byzantine society? Nobody has examined these questions in great detail, but some scholars have nevertheless produced answers. The result is confusion. Ostrogorsky sees Attaleiates as a supporter of the feudal military aristocracy; Tinnefeld proposes that his views are those of a rich landowner who idealizes the emperor Nicephorus III Botaneiates (Botaneiates came from the military aristocracy of Asia Minor); and Litavrin suggests that Attaleiates ‘expresses the interests of the senate’, but is at the same time not absolutely opposed to the military aristocracy.