International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Daria Resh
Brown University, Providence RI, United States; 
[e-mail]
From Ioannes of Sardeis to Symeon Metaphrastes: 
Rhetorical Rewriting in Its Social Contexts
Starting from the ninth century onwards, circles and writers within the Constantinopolitan 
literary elite engaged in the rhetorical rewriting of old Saints’ 
Lives
, a practice that was later labeled 
with the generic term 
metaphrasis. 
From a social perspective, this production brought hagiography 
to a different level of discourse: first, the composition of new renditions of Saint’s 
Lives 
became an 
important accessory to an intellectual’s portrait; and, secondly, hagiography itself developed into a 
type of high rhetoric.
The present paper seeks answers to the following questions: by whom, when, and why 
hagiographic rewriting was introduced within the array of elitist intellectual practices; how a 
previously marginal activity ascended to the highest level of literary hierarchy, and later, represented 
by Symeon Metaphrastes, became an object of imperial attention; furthermore, how a genre, which 
by default was preoccupied with the past, served the current interests of its authors and readers, 
and how hagiographic 
metaphrasis 
corresponded to similar trends in historiography. By answering 
these questions, I hope to reconstruct, to the degree possible, the social contexts of the metaphrastic 
activity in the ninth- and tenth-century Constantinopolitan school milieu, patriarchate, and 
imperial quarters.

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625
Jovana Anđelković
Belgrade, Serbia, 
[e-mail]
Epistolographic Memoirs
– 
The Case of Storms in John Mauropous’ Letter Collection
This paper relies on two well established premises in contemporary Byzantine studies – 
autobiographical framework of eleventh-century literature and the understanding of storm imagery 
as a frequent symbol for both private and public turbulences. Guided by this outline I will try to 
analyze which events John Mauropous chose to reveal through an epistolary form (rather than 
through poetic, oratory or even historical compositions), and what rhetorical techniques are 
used to construct a continuous narration of his downfall. With a careful employment of tempest 
metaphors this story emerges clearly and as a whole, regardless of apparent vague, ornamental and 
commonplace rhetoric formations.
In accordance with the questions – the 
why 
and the 
how – 
the approach must be twofold. 
Firstly, it requires some structural remarks. Having a fully preserved master copy from the XI
th
century at hands, the possibilities for understanding the author’s intentions and conceptions are 
vast. Vaticanus Graecus 676 is a carefully edited manuscript that contains a collection of selected 
poems, letters and orations. Therefore, it is a three-part, three-genre and three-function work. 
Mauropous chose to illustrate and emphasize different aspects of his life via three different genres. 
The biographical logic is recognized behind the smaller circles of his epigrams, even though they 
often seem as a discontinuous sequence. Having in mind the observations on genre and on other 
books or authors (apparent in poems 51, 93, 96) while also contemplating the matters of truth that 
are, from Mauropous’ point of view, not guaranteed even in chronographic works, epistolography, 
being the relic of an actual event, serves this truth-loving intellectual better. In an arranged and 
enumerated collection, we are presented with a line of “evidence” that holds some information on 
the author’s actions. Standing behind his moderate principles, and by that amplifying the presumed 
veracity of the text, he left out almost all the names and dates from the letters, since they are of no 
use in this allegedly purely aesthetic-purposed collection.
Like in the case of epigrams, the arrangement of letters seems discontinuous. However, if 
we assume that the author – who personally arranged his work, counted 24 verses per each page, 
demonstrated at length the importance of utmost precision in reading and writing (letters 17, 18) 
and included in his edited selection a poem on the grammatical correctness of his previous work 
(poem no. 33) – is a man who did not, in fact, leave his letters scattered randomly in the book, we 
can find certain regularities. That brings us to the second part of this analysis, i.e. writer’s rhetorical 
techniques. The 
Storm storyline
is one of the threads of his careful narration. The circle of downfall 
is framed by the verb καταποντίζω, and the undisrupted plotline of Mauropous’ journey to his 
metropolitan see is grouped to a number of letters, conjoint by the storm-based mileposts in letters 
44, 54 and 64. Within such a cycle some of the previously vague accusations can be set in context. 
In this way, the narrator keeps his moderate and modest authorial persona, leaving at the same 
time his own version of truth. Combining veracity of the genre and rhetorical skill Mauropous puts 
persuasion to its best use subtly, knowing its true power. As he himself states: 
if I bring myself to obey 
someone, I do so because I have been so persuaded, and not because I have been compelled.

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