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This comprehensive study of Michael Psellos unravels the rich history of authorship, literature and self-representation in Byzantium.
This chronicle of the Byzantine Empire, beginning in 1025, shows a profound understanding of the power politics that characterized the empire and led to its decline.
This is the first edition of ten Funeral Orations of Michael Psellos based on all the manuscripts preserving those works and accompanied by a full apparatus fontium and the necessary critical apparatus. Some of those texts had been published by the Greek scholar Konstantinos Sathas at the end of the XIX c. Those editions hardly correspond to the contemporary standards. The same applies to several more recent editions, prepared by P. Gautier, which also leave much to be desired. The most important texts of our collection are the funeral orations for the patriarchs Michael Keroullarios, Konstantinos Leichoudes and John Xiphilinos, a personal friend of Michael Psellos. All the texts offer valuable details concerning Psellos’s early life; at the same time they constitute an important testimony to the survival of the Late Antique Rhetoric in XI c. Byzantium. They constitute a necessary supplement to Psellos’s more famous work, his Chronography, verifying and shedding a new light on the events narrated there.
The papers of this volume highlight the intellectual and literary contribution of Michael Psellos (1018-after 1081?) by offering readings of his original texts from a variety of scholarly perspectives.
The death of Basil II in A.D. 1025, after fifty glorious years as sole emperor, ushered in decades of turbulence, corruption, and incompetence. For the following half-century of extraordinary decline, our main source is Michael Psellus, one of the greatest courtiers and men of letters of the age. His vivid and forceful chronicle, full of psychological insight and deep understanding of power politics, is a historical and literary document of the first importance. Recent scholars have shattered forever the view that the Byzantine Age was just a shabby and disreputable appendage to the Roman Empire; Psellus, a man of striking refinement and humanity, both portrays and exemplifies at its best the Byzantine way of life.
This chronicle of the Byzantine Empire, beginning in 1025, shows a profound understanding of the power politics that characterized the empire and led to its decline.
Character is the single most important feature of the Chronographia written by Michael Psellos (1018-1081?). It is an historical account of the events at court from the time of Basil II (986-1025) to Michael VII Doukas (1071-1078) with the insight of someone whose career developed within the imperial court and his unsurpassed eye for details of personality was enlightened by his intellectual interests. During his lifetime, Psellos was considered the forefront of philosophical studies in the capital and therefore was named consul of philosophers in 1047 and he credited himself with reintroducing Plato on the cultural scene of Constantinople. It was his attractive manner of speech which led hi...