International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Milena Repajić
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia; 
[e-mail]
Intellectual (Self)advertizing: 
Some Remarks on the 
When
and 
Why
of Psellos’ 
Chronographia
Michael Psellos is a paradigm of self-promotion in Byzantine literature. He blatantly emphasizes 
his many skills – physical, intellectual and political – in almost every work he’s written. 
Synepainein 
heauton 
(which translates as 
praising oneself alongside the encomium of others
) might be the most 
striking characteristic of his 
encomia
. This particular trait of his writing has brought him most 
severe criticism of contemporaries and modern historians, but also a lucrative carrier in court, 
which seems to have started with a barefaced claim for a position in the palace at the end of a praise 
dedicated to emperor Michael IV around 1040 (Poem. 16).
Psellos applied a similar technique, although in a much longer praise and in a more self-promotional 
manner, attempting to procure a job of an (official) historian for emperor Constantine Monomachos 
(Or. Pan. 2). This oration, which can be called 
historical encomium
, shows striking structural, lexical 
and theoretical similarities with author’s later and more famous 
Chronographia
. Psellos constructs a 
historiographical narrative within a rhetorical piece in order to stress his competence to write history, 
and he does not hide his agenda – the speech ends with a note on the importance of historians for 
creating ruler’s image for future generations, and an open plea to the emperor to chose one, preferably 
the rhetor himself. Not coincidentally, Psellos’ narration in the encomium begins with Basil II, the 
first protagonist of his history-to-be. The first part of my paper will be dedicated to mapping the 
connections between the two texts and attempting to date both the speech and the history, using inter- 
and intratextual references Psellos makes. My thesis is that the historian has a clear notion of his future 
history already while writing the 
encomium
(around 1043 or later in the forties?) and that, therefore, 
his original plan was to cover reigns from Basil II to Constantine Monomachos.
The second focal point of the paper will be self-referentiality as one of the most important traits 
of Psellos writings. Several scholars have touched upon this phenomenon, with very fruitful results, but 
this might be one of the most understudied aspects of Psellos’ work. Throughout his vast opus, he makes 
more or less subtle references to his other works and, while changing his authorial persona and stating 
contradictory facts, remains, as I will argue, consistent in his most important arguments. I will take up 
the example of Monomachos, comparing speeches and a biography the author dedicated to this emperor 
in his 
Chronographia
. Just as he constructed a historiographical narrative within a rhetorical piece in 
the oration 2, the author created a rhetorical narrative within history in Monomachos’ biography in the 
Chronographia
. In this part of the paper I will examine ways in which his self-referentiality operates and 
the reasons he had for composing said narratives in such a manner.
Finally, I will raise (rather than answer) the question of the means eleventh-century Byzantine 
intellectuals had at their disposal for advertizing their knowledge and skills to those holding power. 
This was the time of unprecedented rise of the intellectuals in political life, often based solely on their 
education. It was a period of the revival of epideictic rhetoric, paving the way for the Comnenian so-
called 
third sophistic
. What enabled such emergence of men of letters and how they acquired their 
positions is a question important for understanding Byzantine social mobility, education, rhetoric 
(both as literature and in its wider social context), and power structures.

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