Representing Byzantine Society

Summary

Watch Discourse

PDF Version

Audio

Table of Contents

Names

Timeline

Search this Text

Representing Byzantine Society

In this paper I should like to explore how writers and artists of the Byzantine empire at various different times represented aspects of their society. It will be my contention that society in any breadth is never represented directly but always through a prism: of the past, the future, of fiction, of a part of the universe unreachable by mortals, of the alternative society of monasticism. Finally we need to come to terms with how Byzantine society viewed from outside may be contrasted with the view from within.

Representation (or perhaps we should call it mimesis) is a fundamentally human activity. Aristotle thought that “from childhood men have an instinct for representation and in this respect man is different from other animals in that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things.” How exactly mimesis may be defined is not so clear in ancient thought. Aristotle saw all the arts, verbal, visual, and musical, as modes of representation; Plato thought of literature as one form of representation. Elsewhere mimesis is distinguished from diegesis , or narrative, in that it presents things directly before the eye, as in drama, whereas narrative interposes the voice of a narrator. And both philosophers disapprove of them all as falling short of reality; all are to be banished from the ideal state.

This sense of “representation” as an inherently fallible cultural product postdating a preexistent reality is still current: Auerbach’s Mimesis was subtitled “the representation of reality in western literature.” But it is much commoner now to look at representation as one of the central practices which produce rather than reflect culture, whatever is distinctive about the way of life of a people, a community, a nation, a social group—or an empire. An influential way of looking at representation is to see it as producing the shared meanings of a society that is its culture, in tension with the forces of production and consumption, with or of identity and societal regulation. This view moved away from a reality which can be represented, a prototype and an icon of it, to something more dynamic, in which the giving and taking of meaning is produced by the words used, the stories told, the images produced, and the associated emotions, classifications, values, and conceptualisations. This could be seen in terms of communication, a profoundly intentionalist, one-way process (figure 1).

Or it can be seen as a process which in its nature cuts across communication (figure 2).

Or as one which engages diachronically with tradition (figure 3).

Or it could be seen much more dynamically as the construction of meaning in and through language and other cultural forms, whether semeiotically or discursively (figure 4).

Representation as interactive, ideologically charged, constructed by and for society, is a model more akin to our tastes. But we should remember that the truthfulness of representation was what the Byzantines looked for, the “truthful memory of forms.” And, after iconoclasm, they believed that images could do this better than words.

The context in which Byzantines came to this conclusion was the debate over the representation of the holy. But how about the representation of society? This raises questions about secular art which have been faced recently by Henry Maguire. But it also raises questions about representation current since Gombrich (figure 5). If the Egyptian life class draws Egyptian nudes, so Miriam’s dancers (figure 6) can also wear eleventh-century fashion. The secular world can be represented through religious art, just as much as religious truth can appear in through secular cultural forms. As we now consider the cultural constructions of Byzantine society, we shall also ask what economic, political, and psychological ends may be served by these representations, and what media most lend themselves to the representation of society. We shall touch on painting, mosaic, icons, manuscripts, nostalgic epic, psychopheleia, letter-collections, hagiography, and satire—so art and literature as well as performance, but I want to concentrate on three texts: the Pratum Spirituale of John Moschos, the Oneirokritikon of Achmet, and the Timarion of Anon. There are problems around this broad sweep of Byzantine literature, as there are in talking at all about “Byzantine society” or “the Byzantines. ” So before turning to more general issues of the structures of Byzantine society, their distinctive features, their subsets, their articulations—and their depictions—I shall offer a reading of each of these three texts as a representation of Byzantine society. One of them is apparently factual, but based on a rich vein of monastic story-telling; one works on the slight angle to reality which is dream; and the last is clearly fiction but in many ways is the most realistic.

The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos

(figure 7) This text ( Pratum Spirituale ), which still awaits a critical edition, has been read by Baynes as an example of the thought-world of the Byzantines, by Chadwick as a prime source for Mediterranean monasticism, and by Ashbrook Harvey as a drama of the desert between orthodoxy and Severan heresy. John Moschos was an ascetic who with his hetairos Sophronios, the future patriarch, travelled around the monasteries of the eastern Mediterranean in the first two decades of the seventh century to collect what John Wortley has called “the folklore of the desert.” Collections in Judeaea, Egypt, and Sinai were encouraged by Persian raids from 602, and the pair travelled north through Phoenicia and Syria to Antioch and from there to Cilicia and Alexandria; when the Persians reached Egypt Moschos and Sophronios left for Rome via Samos. In Rome John finished the Pratum Spirituale, and died soon after. Sophronios brought his body back to Deir Dosi probably in September 619 (though possibly 634).

The text is a gerontikon , described by John as a “meadow,” but it is more than a recital of the sayings and deeds of holy men. Ashbrook Harvey has argued that it is a spare narrative of the desert focused almost entirely on the issue of heresy, drawing our attention to the antics of competing stylites (chapter 29) like those of the wizards in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone . There are many desert stories, and the luminous and surreal Red Sea tales are in their own class, but the collection is far more than that, and resembles other great medieval frame-story collections. As Dalrymple saw, its frame is that of a journey, and it is a journey through the just pre-Dark Age Byzantine empire, secular as well as ascetic. Threats and dangers are present: wild animals, venomous snakes (124), the terrifying sea, the Justinianic plague (131, 132), robber bands (165–166), and grave robbers. Saracens roam this world ready to decapitate unwary travellers: they are variously swallowed up by the earth (99), carried off by a giant bird (21), immobilized (the Saracen’s Tale, 133), possessed by demons so that they cut one another to pieces (155), or befriended like the Saracen temptress in 136. We see people fleeing invasion and having to take desperate measures to baptize their fellows (176). We see barbarians overrun the Great Oasis, and the self-sacrifice of one of the monks who loses his life saving his friends (112).

But it introduces us, as few texts do, to the merchant class of Byzantium, and mostly in the provinces. There are a couple of Constantinople stories: the secret asceticism of Christopher the Protector, but most are from the Dodecanese and the eastern seaboard. Stories are told about heroes like John Chrysostom (191), Gregory the Great (151, 192), the emperor Zeno (and Apollinarios pope of Alexandria [193] ), and there are nasty stories of the ends of heretics (Arius and Nestorius [220] ), but most are of unknowns. We visit farms, taverns, the seashore, children at play, prisons, the theatre, the circus, and a school near Hagia Sophia, martyrs’ shrines, and the high seas. We meet philosophers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, gem-engravers, merchants of Tyre and Ascalon, stewards, goatherds, gardeners, money-dealers, shipmasters and their crews (91,174), actors, prostitutes, charioteers, cameldrivers, the doux of Palestine, condemned murderers, infanticides, soldiers and a standard-bearer, parishioners, travellers on the road to Jerusalem, labourers, orphans, lawyers, a patrikios , a senatorial lady, farmers, bathkeepers, diplomats, glass-blowers, and servants. There are a few animal stories; one where foxes address one another. We spy on village settings with their flocks and herds (227), the practices of hospitality (233), practices of letter-exchange (188, 220, 221), the acquisition of a book (134), the commission of a jewelled cross, and how the act of patronage turns into an act of adoption (200). Dancing can be good, as with Sophronios’s claque of dancing-girls (102), and bad, as with a Saracen boy possessed by a demon (160). There are miraculous baptismal fonts (214, 215) and cold baths.

Lay piety is very visible, and it does not always result in the heroes’ leaving the world. In 154, the forbearance with a bad master and the longsightedness of an estate servant impressed and edified the monastic visitors. In 171 Kosmas the lawyer lived an ascetic life for 33 years in the world, owning nothing but books, a bed, and a table, and seeking to convert the Jews. There are stories about inheritance (201), in which families accept the Lord instead of their expected windfall so that the paterfamilias can go on giving alms (it might have avoided trouble if the battered brides had done the same thing). There are stories of how great ladies learn humility or escape lust (through fever), a senatorial woman visiting the holy places (206), or a pretty woman in a Constantinople church (236). The famous story of the woman of Apamea, the icon, and the well is matched by other great deeds with icons. A standard story is how virtuous women repel seducers: one by putting her own eyes out, having determined that they were what attracted him; one by arguing (39); one by the ancient excuse that she was menstruating (205). Another is the saving of a virtuous and husband-loving woman from a life on the streets when her husband is incarcerated. A merchant of Tyre (186) picks up a girl, then gives her money and refrains from cashing in; she pays the debt by getting him released from prison when he turns up in Constantinople. A more complex story involves a merchant, his wife, a robber, and a pot of gold. Families call at friends’ houses to pick up the host. Women convert their husbands: in chapter 185 a pagan is converted by a miraculous stone in a fish, a story much padded out with the reactions of the jeweller who bought it. Courtiers wear hair shirts under their uniforms and do good by stealth.

So it is a world with ascetic superstars, but also lay heroes and heroines—and there are more desert mothers than you would think. The world, though, is under threat: the constant refrain is that ascetics aren’t what they used to be, and the insecurity of the empire forms a backdrop to many adventures. Ashbrook’s theory is supported by story 213, which attributes miracles in the world to the existence of Severan heretics who need to be converted. But the overall tenor of the text is that any walk of life may harbour brilliant examples of piety and virtue. There are virtuous animals, though few virtuous children (they mostly playact the liturgy and suffer accordingly). We see relations between husband and wife, patron and craftsman, servant and master, and we catch occasional views of local government or of traveling diplomats. Taxes don’t rear their ugly head, though debts do, and sin of course. There is a wonderful story attached to some manuscripts which deals with the Persian sack of Jerusalem in 614, the beginning of the end of that world, and how a young virgin chooses to be thrown from the roof rather than succumb to a Persian who befriended her (238).

The narrative device of the travels of John and Sophronios ensures that stories are told to them by ascetics in a particular monastery where they are staying. This means that the picture of lay life on the eve of the Persian conquests in the eastern Mediterranean is diffused through an ascetic lens, in which the values of the world are reversed. Desert and city were irretrievably opposed in early monasticism, yet here a portrait of a whole world shines through. Ideological control does not seem to have imposed a purely monastic vision, despite the impeccable monastic credentials of the collector. And the stories do not tend to have satiric import, though bishops and patrician ladies seem generally to be in need of training in humility. Perhaps they were simply stories too good to miss. As for production and consumption, the origin of the stories is of course unknown, but the collection was hugely popular, with a very large and complex manuscript tradition and early translations into many languages. It was a best-seller, perhaps because of this dual focus on the glories of the grand old days of the ascetic life and the perennial little victories of pious laypeople, albeit in a world about to undergo a radical transformation.

The Oneirokritikon of Achmet

(figure 8) In this text, the sense of an eastern centre of gravity is maintained. It is the most famous and longest of the eight surviving Byzantine dream books (i.e. manuals for the interpretation of dreams), written some time between the restitution of the icons in 843 and the earliest manuscript 1075–1085. It is a Christian adaptation of Islamic dream interpretation, probably based on more than one Arabic dream book. It follows its models at times very closely, and so falls into the category of texts which share an enthusiasm for Arabic science (in the ninth to tenth centuries) and narrative (Syntipas, Stephanites [in the eleventh century] ) and the kind of overlapping cultural world envisaged above: Byzantium was not always the culture which a given text represents.

Like all dream books it is mysterious; like all dreambooks it is straightforward (it says so). It purpose was to assist the kind of dream-interpreters we see represented in the Madrid Skylitzes helping the mother of Basil I, or to be taken along in its own right in a baggage train like that mentioned in the military treatise hosa deȋ gignesthai . Leo VI, in his treatise for his generals, says “nothing about dreams seems reliable to me. But in time of war it is useful and necessary to fabricate them and to persuade the soldiers to believe your dreams that fabricate victory for thinking that the dream you narrate is a portent from God, they will attack the enemy courageously and steadily and their bravery will be doubled by their eagerness.” Dream narratives might be viewed as fiction, then, but also as an indicator of the ready consumption of oneirokritika to make sense of the dreams the consumers believed in.

Achmet’s dream manual has 300 chapters, and opens with a claim to have come from different sources. It is systematic in the sense that it groups together certain kinds of dream phenomena: parts of the body all together, and associated features like perfume or the voice; then a more varied consideration of states like drunkenness, nakedness, marriage, and bestiality (usually good); then earthquakes, priests, and icons; then natural phenomena: clouds, wind, rain, oceans, spas, etc.; then a whole array of foods; then clothes and furnishings; then animals. But there is some slippage— clothing appears between the unnatural phenomena and the natural phenomena sections, as well as in a section of its own; beatings appear in the middle of clothes, cinnamon, eggs, and cheese in the furnishings section. All are features of everyday life common to Arab and Byzantine cultures. Sometimes there is a clear indicator at the beginning of the section of the lexicon: rain means mercy, or crosses mean joy and victory; the penis means a man’s reputation, power, and children. Dreaming of a woman means joy, commensurate with her beauty. (To our ears it is impossibly misogynistic, see chapters 62 and 63 on the tongue). Rabbits mean prostitutes, a mosquito is information about an enemy, a hyena is an evil woman or sorceress, hips mean the dreamer.

So it is an incredibly rich source for the kind of things that Byzantines might dream of, things that would be recognizable, if not everyday objects—elephants and panthers, for example. And finding a peacock is always good: it brings you wealth, a good job, and a beautiful woman (always wanted one of those). No other source is quite so encyclopaedic about the cognitive range of people in the past. And so historians like Michael Angold and Peter Hatlie have tried to use dream material to indicate Byzantine attitudes. But it is not so simple. Interpreting dreams was not supposed to be. For one thing we are working from the theoretical end, not the practical: as well as the collection of dream treatises and oneirokritika, we need a corpus of dream narratives from Byzantium so that we can put them together with the other kinds of text. Then we might be able to gain an overall view of dreaming in Byzantium.

But for now let us work with this text, in itself a very rich source for everyday life. It is clear that we cannot argue simply from dream experience to everyday life: there is a section on what it means if you dream you are flying, for example. And Achmet makes it very clear that the same dream means different things to an emperor, a rich man, a poor man, a slave—and a woman. Large tongues are good for everyone—except a woman. And it depends on what season of the year, and what phase of the moon. You weren’t supposed to be able to do it yourself with a dream book; merely get some idea of whether the news is good or bad, or like Leo VI fabricate a few dreams. Sometimes it is fairly straightforward, as for example with visions in chapter 150. Sometimes other factors come into play: if you have sex with a eunuch, whether you know him or you don’t (96-97). Sometimes the indicators seem entirely reversed: if a friend strikes you with a sword you will be treated well. If you dream of being hanged by the neck you will be loaded with honour; if you are crucified you will become rich. Having worms in the stomach has incredibly varied interpretations; so does bestiality, depending on the animal and whether you penetrate or are penetrated. Kissing depends on whether it is motivated by friendship, love, sex, or reconciliation. Being flogged has good meanings (218). Sometimes it looks as if there is a logic: cross-dressing is fine if you are a woman, bad news if you are a man; a woman dreaming she has a penis will bear a son. Nakedness in private is good for everyone except women—who will quarrel with their husbands. Sometimes there is even inconsistency within the text: a strong chest may mean for a woman that she will bear no more children—or that she will be happy with many children. Not an exact science perhaps. So to begin to read these texts we need a total reading, not just of the single text but of the other Byzantine oneirokritika, and possibly Artemidoros from the second sophistic and the five surviving Arabic treatises as well. Steven Oberhelman has begun to do this with a view to analysing masculinity, and Jane Baun for food, but there is a long way to go before we can read this kind of text with confidence.

What, though, is represented, and what can we say about it? What is represented of course is the Byzantine subconscious, or the potential Byzantine subconscious (in that nothing at all in the text may have been dreamed by anyone), conveyed in terms recognizable to a Byzantine: probably a man, certainly a dream-interpreter, probably a military officer, possibly a woman. Oberhelman’s work suggests that it is possible to use Achmet’s Oneirokritikon to see that sex is a simple formulation of gain and loss, as regards who penetrates whom; that human worth is measured in terms of a masculinity predicated on power and male superiority. He was also able to see that sexual codes had not changed much from the time of Artemidoros. This kind of text is very much about identity, and also about regulation: dreaming you find a cross (interpretable among women only for empresses) has a great deal to do with the dominant ideology; its construction and consumption is more tricky since it makes sense in the long term only with the other related texts, produced by dreamers.

The Timarion

(figure 9) My final text is another whose centre of gravity is outside Constantinople. It is set in Thessalonike (to begin with), and emanates from the exile community after Manzikiert. It is probably a product of the early twelfth century, and probably the early years of the emperor John. It is the Lucianic satire of Timarion. It is perhaps a little eccentric to take this journey to Hades rather than others, about which Jane Baun has recently written. I think that all journeys to heaven and hell allow the writer to reflect on the earthly life, but for our purposes that freedom is increased in satire, in which “prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule.” The story begins on a journey to visit St. Demetrios’s Fair in Thessalonike, when the author falls ill and is forced down to Hades, where he finds his old teacher, complete with familiar gout, ready to give him the tour, and after surveying the scene in Hades he has to face a full-scale trial before Aeacus, Minos, and the emperor Theophilos, in which Theodore of Smyrna manages to argue him out of his sentence and, as in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), though without the pretty girl, allow him to return to earth. It is a brilliant tour de force, and it is not surprising that the most brilliant writers of the period—Theodore Prodromos, Michael Italikos, and Nicholas Kallikles—have been suggested as its author.

So far, though Kaldellis has just published a reading of it as expression of Hellenism, and Marciniak is working on a reading of it among other satires, there has been no really satisfying overall reading of the text. Meg Alexiou looked at the episode of the doux , in which (though she didn’t see it as this) an adventus of the local official is celebrated. She did see it as parody, and there may be some element of it. Roddy Beaton has seen it as a parallel to the exile milieu of Digenes. But otherwise it is commoner to pull out individual episodes from the text: Romanos Diogenes if you are looking at the reception of Manzikiert, Theophilos and his eunuch if you are studying eunuchs, Italos if you are looking at heresy in the period. I have a suspicion that only a reading which comments on the place of rhetoric (and tragedy) in twelfth-century Byzantium would make sense of this text: the role of the adventus which dominates the Thessalonike opening; the appearance of Theodore of Smyrna and the prolific “Byzantine professor,” probably Psellos; the savage criticism of Italos, and of the unidentified pupil of Italos and composer of iambics who all hang out with the rhetoricians and are shunned by the philosophers—who talk to everyone except Diogenes the Cynic.

Of course no satire, “a medley of ingredients,” has to restrict itself to a single target. If there is one here, a fair guess might be the conduct of legal cases in Constantinople, and there is obvious mileage to be made of the juxtaposition of Byzantine and ancient personalities: Philaretos of Armenia (how the Armenians were hated!) shovels shit with Alexander of Pherrae the tyrant and the emperor Nero; Theophilos of all emperors, the hated iconoclast, takes his place as a respected judge not long after Leo of Chalcedon’s affair. And as a Cappadocian, Timarion might have had clear views about the loss of Anatolia. Food is another element, so often a matter for satire: Theodore’s butcher’s list to replace the mallow and cress of Hades, the great meals Timarion was eating on the way to Thessalonike, the banquet Theodore remembered from the City. And the mice. How about the mice? All in all this is a text which takes advantage of the timelessness of Hades to pass comment on recently dead literary figures and political events of its day, creating a sense of the place of rhetoric and its outpacing of philosophy in twelfth-century Constantinople. It presents (despite the exile references and the provincial setting) a Constantinopolitan world in which identity and status are awarded on rhetoricity, emperors and barbarian tyrants could meet unpleasant punishment, and an iconoclast emperor could be awarded a guardian angel and the chair of judges. It is a smaller, more focused view than the panoramic considerations of Moschos (geographically) and Achmet (systematically), yet its fictional status makes the author no less sharp an observer of the Byzantine scene. A twelfth century of economic growth, self-important local government, and the growth of rhetoric and legal extortion seem to be envisaged through the beautifully anachronistic combinations taught in the classrooms of the progumnasmata .

With these readings in mind, we can approach the structures and makeup of Byzantine society and see how and why they are represented in the Byzantine media.

The Individual

The smallest unit of society is the individual (figure 10), and Byzantine culture developed various ways of depicting the individual, and of articulating identity. Although portraits of individuals other than saints and the imperial family become rare after late antiquity, they do exist, and even images of intellectuals and writers (other than evangelists and hymnographers) survive (figure 11). Most often individuals other than the holy and the ideologically significant appear in order to underline the latter’s economic power, as donor images. These operate in an economy of exchange, personalizing the commission and immortalising the donor. There was a Byzantine sense of the portrait, as Charles Barber has shown in his discussion of Symeon the New Theologian’s attempt to get his mentor Symeon Eulabes canonized, though it is frequently difficult to know whether it is an individual who is depicted rather than a representative or a concept: the narthex image in Hagia Sophia is a case in point. Does it matter who it is, we often ask, and often the answer is that it does not—that the office, or the ideology, is what counts. There is also a sense that resemblance mattered, that the truth in representation could be found in resemblance: important if you wanted to be able to recognize a saint who appeared to you, but also perhaps to be able to remember a child at the age the saint appeared and healed him (figure 12), or a lost husband who is commemorated in the work at hand. In these cases the production was commissioned by the receivers, and meaning was imbued through this relationship. Regulation could be found in codes of who could be represented, in what medium and where: we have no “ancient faces” or Aphrodisias sculptures (figure 13) in Byzantium, and three-dimensional work disappears from the culture fairly early. Empresses conform to an ideal of beauty; emperors to a simple message of hegemony.

Inwords , many different genres make room for the individual in his or her own right (Martin Hinterberger has refused to talk about a single “autobiographical” genre for this reason). Hagiography concentrates on the portrait in a land- or cityscape; imperial biography and the speech to the emperor concentrate on the individual as demonstrating imperial virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and modesty. Letters are icons of the soul, and letter-collections are often reorganized to present a better portrait. Descriptions of individuals, both eikonismoi (what Robert Browning described as police descriptions of wanted men) and rhetorical ekphraseis , which brought the image o f the one depicted vividly before the listener, were included in narrative. These are of course ascribed identities, and self-identified portraits tend to work in two ways: exclusion and assimilation.

Exclusion works by positioning the individual vis-à-vis those persons and groups in society who are labelled as “the Other.” The barbarian, the heretic, the ill-born, the woman, or the eunuch are all there to provide a foil for Byzantine personal identity. (For examples of how this is done in narrative texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries I refer you to the forthcoming book of my former colleague Dion Smythe.) Assimilation allows the individual to demonstrate or appropriate membership of a prestigious club through similarity, typology, or metaphor: John II Komnenos the identity of monastic founder, or Cyril Phileotes the role of ascetic hero through parallelism with the prophet Elijah and earlier monastic heroes, or Hierotheos monakhos the identity of a member of the greater Constantinople monastic community.

In both there is a clear sense of how the individual relates to society as a whole, to shared values and to community membership. Village communities, monasteries, confraternities, family, the elite group of the rhetorically educated, all could form a primary identification, as could functions or roles. Anna Komnene chose to define herself in terms of her family, her imperial aspirations, and her learning, in that order. Naming systems meant that individuals could be identified not only by family but also by place of origin, office, or nickname, and there is similar leeway in the construction of identity through text. Production of these identities could be inimical through psogos , but most which have survived show more signs of encomium, and may have been commissioned by the subject or his or her family, or have been the choice of the author. Reception could be oral, in a theatron , or inscribed on a work of art, or read privately, as the Byzantines practised. Regulation is found in generic expectations, in level of style, or in the level of education necessary to write some of these forms at all. The twelfth-century patriarch who ordered a substandard saint’s life to be burned is notorious.

Performance could unite many media, and though it was most frequently employed for universals, as in the liturgy, or for grand concepts of empire, as in palace ceremonial, music and words and flower-petals and images came together in ceremonies where individuals were celebrated, whether for the installation of an abbot, the distribution of a consul’s diptychs, celebrations of a birthday, or more sombrely at the graveside. The entry of the doux in Timarion is a rare description of such a performance. The long days of baptism in Moschos’s Konan story should be seen in the setting of a local festival where each individual had his or her moment of glory in a long queue of katekhoumenoi . Here the production relied on artisans, tekhnitai , of many forms, and on people charged with making the performance work, like the circus factions or the master of ceremonies. The reception was all: the audience packing the streets or the aristocrat’s audience hall, or cheering at the circus for the charioteer celebrated in epigrams and stēlai .

Individuals, then, were praised in terms of the dominant values of the society, pictured as themselves because they conformed to an idea or to a community, appropriating a role for which they wished to be remembered, epitomizing virtues, or demonstrating the wise use of economic power. Women’s virtues were different, but their appearance is comparable with men’s; metropolitan practices were different, but perhaps only in scale, from those in the provinces.

The Dyad

(figure 14) Byzantine personal relations were also represented in words, in images, and in performance. We can see a system of relationships built on family relations, through fictive kinships to relations of patronage and power. Master-slave relations appear in the will of Eustathios Boilas; courtier-emperor relations in the letters and poems of Romanos Straboromanos; some of the dynamics of a confraternity in the Nauplion document. But it is through the interactive genres that we can see relationships develop and change: given the intellectual milieu, it is teacher-pupil relations, friendship, and patronage, as well as some family relations. They are presented for us in collections of letters, some personal poetry, and some rhetoric, shown not told, and we can begin to understand through the forms of address the personal histories and dynamics.

Other kinds of text illumine other relations. Husband-and-wife relations can be read from legal material in the Peira and Chomatenos, but also in saints’ lives like the battered brides and the spiritual marriage kinds. Sometimes imperial marriages figure in chronicles and histories, and Old Testament couples figure in Romanos, like the imagined Sarah in Abraham and Isaac . Father-son relations sometimes shine out in paraenetic collections; it is one of the Byzantines’ most standard kinds of advice literature, after advice to the emperor. Alas, we don’t see with as much clarity the uncle-nephew relations which underlay a great deal of eleventh- and twelfth-century intellectual society. Sibling, or at least brother-brother relations can be seen in threnoi and other poems, and in some narratives: the fact that many other fictive kinhorizontal relations are described as adelphotes is perhaps an indicator of the importance of the relationship. Ritual kinship tends to be mentioned in passing rather than presented under a spotlight, but the relationship of spiri tual father and spiritual son is one of the great concerns of monastic literature in Byzantium. The desert mathētēs and his abba, the sewing circles of women and their holy m-an, the late Byzantine correspondences between princesses and their confessors, all testify to the abiding significance of the relationship, and the pleasure taken by authors in presenting it. In the Life of Cyril Phileotes , chapter 17 is an etiquette class for an aristocratic lady entertaining a holy man in her koitōn : how to recognise the saint from the letter of introduction, body language (who bows to whom?), what to ask for, how to confide her logismoi , whether to tip him. Adoptive relations, both parent-child and brother-brother, tend to be presented in narrative and legal sources, and we have seen friendship and patronage relations most clearly in letters, but they also appear in some narratives. Their identity is clearly differentiated, and production and consumption are for the most part sited in the same group, which was delicately proficient in reading the codes that determined and depicted relationships. Regulation is found in canon law determining kinship relations, but also in ascetic theology, which envisages a norm of spiritual relations of the kind seen in apophthegmata , lives, and letters, in the tupika and ascetic treatises which by their proscription of certain personal relations show how significant they were in the world outside, and again in the codes of rhetoric which determined what could and could not be said in every situation.

Dyadic relations are less dominant in visual sources. Images of Joseph and Mary are more concerned with demonstrating their apartness than their marriage (figure 15), as are those of Ruth and Boaz (figures 16 and 17); Sarah appears on the edges of Abraham’s big scenes (figure 18). Joseph’s episode with Potiphar’s wife in the Vienna Genesis is surprisingly diffused, showing Joseph several times over rather than the drama and conflict of the attempted seduction (figure 19). The model of the Visitation (figure 20), of two figures running into an embrace from either side of the picture, is copied and matched in images of St. Basil and Gregory Nazianzos (figure 21), and rather less convincingly St. Peter and St. Paul (figure 22): are these images of friendship?

Relationships that we see as eternal triangles, and that appear to be highlighted as such in the texts, are by illustrators depicted in images in very different ways. In Skylitzes and the chronicle tradition, the triangular relationship between Basil I, Michael III, and Eudokia Ingerina is seen as primarily sexual: the ambiguity over the parenthood of Leo VI and the homosocial carousing of the men paint an erotic picture. In the Madrid Skylitzes, the relationship is seen as power-sharing and in terms of the marriage (figure 23). Again in Skylitzes and in Psellos much is made of the triangle of Constantine Monomachos, Zoe, and Skleraina, but the illustrator is more concerned to show the solidarity of power sharing, with Skleraina tucked up with the sisters in the imperial box (figure 24). In art the relationships are ambiguous and mysterious, given that the body language is still, and in any case we are ill equipped to read it. A kiss (figure 25), sleeping in the same bed, eating from the same dish, were notoriously difficult to read in the Middle Ages. But close relationships of various kinds were represented and appear to have contributed to identity, and been regulated by custom. The manuscripts of the Octateuchs appear to have been seen by groups similar to those who produced them.

Dyadic relationships also appear in performance, in imperial ceremonies for marriages and the birth of children, and in liturgies for marriage and adelphopoiia (figure 26). Poems and music were written for the former, and the liturgies for the latter have survived in many different forms. The fuss over the precise nature of these relationships (which we can’t and perhaps shouldn’t seek to know) has obscured the fact that some parts of Byzantine society prevailed upon some parts of the Byzantine church at some times to bless with vows a relationship other than marriage or compadrazgo, a remarkable feature of the rich relationship system of the Byzantines. Ceremony may have been directed outwards to the populace and the liturgies of brother-making were known by chroniclers (figure 27), suggesting a public consumption of some of these performances. The private was pretty public in Byzantium.

Social Groups, Communities, and Subsets of Society

If we look at some Byzantine images we can see that one concern was to break down society into its constituent parts. At Ravenna, the processions of Justinian and Theodora are broken down into the procession of the church of Ravenna, senators, and bodyguard in the case of Justinian (figure 28); women of the court, bearded men, and eunuchs in Theodora’s (figure 29). In the Last Judgment at Torcello (figure 30), in the fourth register down, on the south side, there are four groups of people closely congregated: bishops; then emperors and aristocrats; then monks with long shaggy beards; then women, led apparently by Mary of Egypt (figure 31). (The composition as a whole of course is an exercise in sorting sinners from saints, good on the right hand of Jesus and bad on his left hand, and these appear to be among the saints.) Some groups are regularly represented: the family is the commonest perhaps, underlining the potency of the genos and its future potential. The much-disputed imperial family scene in the Barberini psalter appears to celebrate the coronation of a co-emperor, whoever he is, and his taking his place in the imperial family (figure 32). Other family representations represent the coherence of provincial aristocracy (figure 33), or the strength in children of neighbours of Byzantium (figure 34), or the Byzantine delight in genealogy, as in Jesse trees in Chora and on Romanian narthexes (figure 35).

And the monastery is represented in three portraits of a community: of six apparently undifferentiated monks at St. Sabas in Rome (figure 36); of a group of monks in the crypt of Hosios Loukas, including abbots portrayed elsewhere in the crypt (figure 37); and the image of Euphrosyne among the nuns of Bebaia Elpis in the Lincoln College Typikon (figure 38). Sometimes images mix past and present unexpectedly (though not as unexpectedly as when patrons spring into the scene itself), like the icon of Orthodoxy (figure 39): the present-day bearers of the Hodegetria on its weekly procession rub shoulders with the heroes and heroines of iconoclasm, the delicate imperial pair, the characteristic stone-throwing women, and the supreme iconodouls the Graptoi, Theophanes, and Theodore of Stoudios. These images attempt to make sense of society in terms of roles and functions, but their consumption was very different: in Ravenna, the church of Ravenna had to make sense of the processions of Justinian and Theodora which they had never seen; at Torcello of a public view of a divided society; at Osios Loukas and St. Sabas of monks looking at monks; and in the Lincoln College Typikon very restricted viewing of a monastic image which accompanies a family album. There is a sense that these images are rather unusual and devised for their own purposes, rather than determined by iconographical norms: why did those communities need those identities defined?

In terms of performance, both liturgy and ceremony demanded splitting the performing group: antiphonal choirs in the liturgy, the blues and the greens in hippodrome entertainment and imperial ceremony. And in the ceremony of dining, the quintessential social virtue of taxis, order, was laid out in the seating plans for the great banquets in the room of the nineteen beds. There bishops and generals and bureaucrats and eunuchs were intermingled in the pecking order of the day; but in the images they cling to their own kind for company, similarly showing a society where division rules. But it is something consumed by an elite, who were also the producers of the culture, and the regulation of taxis has no room for the untidy, the dirty, the beggars. The poor appear in Torcello only as Lazaros in the bosom of Abraham (figure 40).

Texts tend to show us less these divided groups (figure 41) than detailed views of particular communities or specialist societies: provincial society, or frontier society or literary society or court society, or monastic society or the urban artisanate. We think of the provincial society of the free villages as best represented in hagiography, particularly the agricultural detail of Philaretos, and his village elders and the great dining table. But other texts offer the provincial polo-playing elite, and socially differentiated clients of stylites in the newly developing cities of the late tenth-century revival. Frontier society in the areas won by the Byzantines and represented in the Taktikon Oikonomides is sketched in the will of Eustathios Boilas, in the after-dinner stories of Kekaumenos about stratēgoi and toparchs, and above all in the frontier epic of Digenes. That text shows a society that has more in common with its cross-border counterparts than with the emperor who comes to visit. It is a world of cattle-raiders and Amazons and wild animals, but also of the stratēgos with his nice house, and it is a very family-conscious world. Wonderful Euphrates palaces dripping with ornamentalism were much conjured up in the nostalgia after Manzikiert, and the wedding presents, much like the procession of presents from the widow Danelis to Basil, signalled conspicuous consumption.

We have seen Timarion as reflecting urban ceremony and church panēguris, as in Mauropous’s Euchaita, but his Hades is fundamentally the Hades of the people who could appreciate a Lucianic Höllenfahrt , defined in terms of eloquence and wit. It offers us a view of early twelfth-century literary society, such as we can work out from the networks of the deacons of the great church and their predecessors, already bishops, and their less fortunate colleagues living off monastic favours. Monastic society is harder to see, though it is easy to see what founders expected monastic society to be like: peaceable, hard-working, hard-singing, appreciative of the monastic classics and supportive of the founder’s family: some hagiography allows us to see that this was not always so. And court society is surprisingly difficult to see. The prescriptive texts take us only so far, and supporting texts of the period are rather few. It may be easier to look at narrative texts of and about the reign of Alexios I Komnenos, together with synodal attendance lists, necrologies, and contemporary rhetoric, in order to get a sense of what it was like to be a courtier, or what constituted court society. The Last Judgement in Torcello (top register) may be yet a better view. Of the Constantinople of ordinary people we know scraps from self-consciously literary texts like Ptochoprodromos and also the Book of the Eparch; to these should be added the urban labouring class of the Miracles of St. Artemios, who suffer hernias from their labours.

Oppositions we know are not always what they seem: Rosemary Morris long ago showed that “the powerful and the poor” is really about the emperor and the powerful; Makrembolites’ dialogue between the rich and the poor has a super-rich interpretation of social distinction. And texts cross the borderlines. Philaretos tells us about Constantinople and Paradise as well as about Amnia. Women and men, in the dialectic of iconoclasm, are designed to present particular emperors and their regimes in a better or worse light; eunuchs, as against bearded men, can be presented as male or as a third sex; virtuous or vicious depending on the text and its subtext. Some social groups are used as a means of illuminating something else entirely. This literature was produced at a level of society where consumption and regulation and the construction of identities were very close to one another. Can the subaltern speak? In Byzantium, it must be said, if the answer is yes it is with a very small voice. The Byzantine voice we hear through these texts is male, bearded, Constantinopolitan, highly educated, competitive, religious, and cynical, with a built-in interest in maintaining the status quo. Yet our three key texts, as well as many of the others we have touched on in passing, manage to subvert as well as buttress. The world in Moschos is a much less worthy place than the networks of little monasteries where Sophronios and John were taken in and told stories by the gerontikon of the house. The dream interpretations of Achmet constantly surprise and are constantly counterintuitive, offering an alternative world in which the professional dream-interpreter will have a place. The satiric world of the Timarion undermines every level of society, especially through its location in Hades: we keep expecting to see the monk in Hell with his foot on a bishop’s head, and we find emperors and failed rhetors wherever we go.

It might be helpful to look outside the empire and see what view of it can be offered. The 574 illustrations of the Madrid Skylitzes represent the multiculturalism of Sicily, in that they were executed by a group of artists; some western, some working in a Byzantine idiom, and others aware of Islamic conventions. Much is standard subject matter, consistently represented across the artists: armies with bristling spears, ships, sieges, embassies, marriages and consecrations, deathbeds, punishments and tortures. In general protagonists are represented with a few men to show that they are acting in public, or that they have retinues, pointing out their status. Installation scenes are usually very thin: emperor and empress with a group of six on each side. The court is male, but it may be differentiated, as at the wedding of Constantine Monomachos, into clergy and nobility (figure 42). Groups of women only appear as sisters, or as in the tonsuring of Theodora by Zoe (figure 43). The treatment of eunuchs is notoriously uncertain. Some scenes show more interest and a larger cast: the dragging of the body of Leo V at the hippodrome for instance (figure 44). Other compositions appear less standardised: dream sequences for example (figures 45–47), processions (figure 48) and translations, court intrigues (figure 49) and provincial rebellions, special events like the arrival of the Mandylion (figure 50), and vulgar curiosity like the Siamese twins (figure 51). Though much happens on the streets of Constantinople, only twice is a mob represented: the stoning of Nikephoros Phokas (figure 52), and Constantine Monomachos being rescued by the Macedonian sisters (figure 53). The view of Byzantine society offered in the manuscript is in no sense a critical view of Byzantium: it is very emperor-centred. It signals the regime changes, heading each book with an installation scene. It records the coming and going of patriarchs, revelling only in the lovely story of patriarch Theophylact and his horses (figure 54), and the sad tale of patriarch Tryphon. It shows the court simply as an entourage, and offers a very few figures to represent even a mob. There are two groups of musicians (figure 55 and 56). When numbers are significant, as in the release of hostages, they are represented, noticeably in force. But in general it is a story of emperors, patriarchs, ambassadors (figure 57), holy men, and clergy, a series of images which reinforce the status quo.

Subversion comes more appropriately perhaps from within the empire. But as a function of representation, subversion could only ever come second to propaganda. If we ask again what economic, political, and psychological ends are served by these representations, we must accept that the first function of culture was to represent the state to the outside world, to show Byzantium at its best to visiting ambassadors, mercenaries, and merchants. Rhetoric, music, liturgy, processions, icons, and great public buildings were all used to represent a society with distinct reminiscences of Heaven—as the emissaries of the Russians noted. They were duly impressed.

So Byzantium represented itself (and was represented from outside) through its texts, images, and performances as a complex society with a strong state and a very clear view of its role in the world, but with robust and multiplex personal relations which formed powerful networks of influence, and with subgroups and communities with strong identities. It had a respect for taxis and for the genos , but was from time to time meritocratic and open to social advancement, discouraging trade but developing both a local gentry and an urban middle class. Our problem is of course that we know this empirically from precisely the same texts that constitute our evidence for Byzantine representation. We can’t compare “reality” with “rhetoric,” even if we believed in this view of representation; we can only try to see the construction in process.

What is noticeable is that the clearest views of society as a whole are achieved when the focus is ostensibly on something different. In Moschos, the attention was on the journey within the monastic world of the Mediterranean, divided as it was between monophysite and orthodox. Yet within the frame story of the journey, the monastic storytellers spread their nets wide beyond the monastery gate. In this world view, seen at its best in the surreal Sinai stories, the desert and the city were opposing societies, and we see the city through the haze of the desert. In Achmet, the different level of perception, which in narrative becomes a different level of discourse, finds its exegesis in this handbook. We may see an everyday world which every night can transform itself into signals for the future. We think of dreams as being about the past: to the Byzantines (apart from Leo VI, and even he saw their uses) it was clear they were about the future. But that concentration on the future allows us to see the Byzantine present as viewed by Achmet’s readership, if we can only crack the codes and learn to interpret the genre. In Timarion , past and future come together in the eschatology of satire. Like the Last Judgment at Torcello , apocalyptic material often comments on the society in which it resides. And the scene of the Last Judgement was also commented upon by writers: Alexios I Komnenos was obsessed with an image of the Last Judgment in his palace, drawing from it lessons on justice in this world and the next (figure 58). In Skylitzes there is a story about a Bulgar tsar who commissions paintings on his wall, supposedly of his awesome feats, but the artist when told to choose the most terrifying selects the Last Judgment instead. Timarion’s Hell was more comfortable than any in Gregory Dialogos or the Byzantine apocalypses, and it bears a distinct resemblance to real-life literary society.

Byzantine society was best and most vividly represented through the prism of analternative existence: the world of monastic renunciation; the apocalyptic world of satire; and the topsy-turvy world of dream, where everyday logic is overturned, but everyday reality is sharply observed and transformed into a newly constructed Byzantium.