Milena Repajić
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia;
milenarepajic87@gmail.com
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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