Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 312 - Past Masters - Byzantine Historiography.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Past Masters – Byzantine Historiography. Regrets, I've had a few, and not too few to mention. I might start with that unnecessary second helping at dinner last night and finish with every article of clothing I wore between the years 1977 and 1989. Frankly, this podcast is also an inexhaustible source of potential regret. Many of the puns I've made, some of the puns I almost made and thought better of, okay that hasn't actually happened but it might at some point, and of course things I didn't cover but really should have covered given my without any gaps slogan. At the top of this list would be Herodotus and Thucydides, towering intellectuals of ancient Greece whose approach to writing history could and really should have been part of the story of classical philosophy. Their work has directly or indirectly influenced all later European historians, including historians of philosophy like me. I'm not going to fill that gap retrospectively in this episode, but I am going to look at a few of the Byzantine historians who read Herodotus and Thucydides and carried on their legacy. History writing is among Byzantium's greatest cultural achievements, and perhaps the genre of medieval Greek literature that is best studied in modern scholarship. Beginning in late antiquity, a series of intellectuals compiled and summarized the works of earlier historians, sometimes adding material of their own. The tradition goes down to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans and beyond, with Calcocondylis, a student of the philosopher Platon, writing a chronicle in the 1480s. This was not the only time that history and philosophy were found in such close proximity. Two central figures in the story we're telling in this series are, if anything, better known as historians than as contributors to the history of philosophy. There was, of course, Michael Pselos, whose Neoplatonic thought and eyewitness historical treatise the Chronographia we've already had occasion to discuss. And there was Anna Komnene, sponsor of a philosophical circle and author of the Alexiad, a historical account of the reign of her father, Alexios. We might also mention the later George Pachimeris, who worked on completing his teacher's treatise on Byzantine history and also wrote about science and Aristotelian philosophy. As with the shirts I wore growing up in the late 1970s, the pattern is too striking to be a coincidence. I have two explanations to offer, one that's rather speculative and one that's pretty obvious. The speculation is that history, like philosophy, offered independent-minded authors an opportunity for being creative and original. If you are writing on a previously unchronical period of history, you are positively required to break new ground, and this was the case with a number of Byzantine historians. They might first draw on, summarize, or simply repeat earlier histories, but then add further material to take their story up to the recent past. This is what we have, for example, in the case of the Epitome of Histories by an author named Zonaras. Despite its title, it is an enormous work, longer than any previous surviving historiographical treatise. Contributing to the genre of world histories, already devised in antiquity, he started his epitome at the creation of the world and went all the way to the year 1118. For almost all of this, Zonaras drew on earlier histories, in the process preserving much that would otherwise now be lost. But he did write his own account of the recent emperor, Alexios, one far more critical than that of Alexios' daughter, Anna. Anna, by contrast, was no compiler. She tells us that in producing the Alexiad, she drew on her own memories, court documents, and interviews conducted with eyewitnesses, especially for covering military engagements, which as a woman she could not have experienced first-hand. The approach of Salas had been similar in that he relied on his own personal impressions to present the series of imperial political portraits that makes up his Conographia. In between Salas and Anna Komnene there was Atelaeates, whose history was completed in 1079 and dedicated to the emperor Naciferus III. These were the three great historians of the Middle Byzantine Age, notable for an opinionated and personal style which has been called subjective and individual. We should probably give special credit to Salas for inspiring the writing of history in this mode, because Atelaeates and Anna Komnene were both aware of his work. Anna drew on him extensively, citing Salas in her Alexiad more often than she cited the Bible. Another text that appears in her history more often than the Bible is Homer's Iliad, which brings me to the more obvious explanation for the link between philosophy and history. Both genres of writing were deeply engaged with the classical tradition by way of the study of rhetoric. The practice of gathering together earlier historical materials may already have reminded you of those philosophical compilations by scholars like John of Damascus. Some histories, rather than repeating or condensing the work of earlier authors, transpose material from older histories to describe recent events, as when Thucydides's famous account of the plague in Athens was recycled more than once to describe epidemics in Constantinople. Even when our historians are not regurgitating or repurposing classical sources, they take great pains to write like their much-admired antique forebears. This includes even the use of grammatical constructions that had fallen out of use in normal Byzantine Greek, for example the special dual ending used for talking about exactly two things. My favorite remark on Byzantine classicizing comes from Warren Tredgold, who reports that Anna Komnina quotes a popular jingle praising Alexios' ingenuity, but she carefully translates it into literary Greek in case an ancient Athenian should return from the dead to read it. Of course, one of the most profound effects of studying history, and for that matter history of philosophy, is that it allows you to step out of your own time and inhabit a past worldview. The Byzantines' enthusiasm for classical culture put them in an excellent position to enjoy this benefit. A spectacular example is provided by several so-called novels written in the 12th century like Eustatios, Macrembolitis, Hisminae and Hisminias, and Theodor, Prodoromos's, Rodante and Dosikles, which works in some passages imitating Plato. These novels are set in the archaic past and the authors seem to revel in the pagan setting, Christian religious disapproval set aside for this fictional context. Something similar happens in the works of certain historians whose study of the distant past has given them an appreciation for other older ways of organizing society. When discussing Byzantine political philosophy, I said that the absolute monarchy embodied in an imperial rule was uniformly taken as the ideal constitutional form. While this is true when it comes to explicitly political treatises and, naturally, speeches in praise of the emperors, we also saw that emphasis was given to the people's support for the emperor. More generally, republican Rome could still cast its spell for many Byzantines, something we see reflected in the historical chronicles. Already in classical imperial Rome, many aristocrats pined for the days before monarchical rule, as well you might if you were in the senatorial class since back then senators had had real power. This sentiment was still being expressed at the twilight of antiquity, as we can see from the bitter reflections of a historian named Zosimas, who lived in the 6th century. As a pagan, Zosimas blamed Christianity for the final decline of the Roman Empire, but he thought things had already been going downhill before the Christians took over. For him, the rot set in with the change from republicanism to imperial authority under Augustus. With this system, as he put it, the Romans effectively threw dice for the hopes of all men through the risk of entrusting such a great empire to the energy and power of one man. In medieval Byzantium, positive comments about the republic can be found in Psalos, and even Anna Komnina compares her emperor father to heroes of the republican period. But the most interesting case is Michael Atalaetes, who accords the people of Constantinople a significant and legitimate role to play in political life. Whereas most Byzantine historians would describe popular uprisings strictly in terms of mob violence, Atalaetes recounts in rather approving terms how the people of Constantinople deposed the emperor Michael V in 1042. In another display of his remarkably detached perspective, Atalaetes is able to admire the moral character of non-Christians, even enemies of the empire. Between the 11th century, a formidable threat to Byzantium had emerged in the shape of the Seljuk Turks, sometimes referred to anachronistically by our historians with classical names like Persians, Scythians, and even Huns. Atalaetes commends their Sultan for having a natural tendency to love his enemies, as Christians are commanded to do on religious grounds. Looking further back, he even argues that faithful devotion to pagan religion was key to the success of the Romans. Of course it is best to be a devoted Christian, but in practical terms a committed pagan may outdo a half-hearted or hypocritical Christian. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that religious beliefs play no role in the Byzantine histories. The exceptional Atalaetes proves the rule. In his rather positive description of the way the people overthrew Michael V, he remarks that they were an instrument of divine justice. The Byzantine chroniclers were in general confident that the study of history reveals the workings of God's plan. Again, it's a tendency that can be traced back to antiquity. Alongside the classical histories and the world histories of the kind recreated by Zonaras, another model was provided by religiously oriented works like that written by the 4th century bishop Eusebius. His ecclesiastical history focused on the story of Christianity from the apostles through to late antiquity and the triumph of the new faith over paganism. This was not history as just one thing after another. Rather, world events were understood as the stages in God's plan for humankind. Eusebius still respected the ground rules of traditional historical writing to some extent, as we can see from the fact that he never associates miracles with Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, in his ecclesiastical history, despite speaking of such miracles in a separate life of Constantine. But once we get to the Byzantine historians, we frequently find miracles invoked to explain military victories, while wonders and natural disasters are taken as having portentous and divinely intended meaning. An interesting case is found in the History of Atoleides, in his account of an earthquake that struck in 1063. He mentions a naturalistic theory of earthquakes endorsed by some philosophers, namely the building up of wind under the ground as the result of underground waterways. He allows that there may be something to this explanation, but insists that in this case the calamity was sent by divine providence to restrain and control human urges, not utterly to destroy humankind, but turn it to a better path. As we've seen many times in this podcast series, most recently in episode 306 with Fodius's report on a treatise about divine providence by the Neoplatonist Hierocles, medieval philosophers were fascinated by the tension between human freedom and God's ordaining of all things. It was, appropriately enough, inevitable that this tension would show itself in the historical chronicles. Back in the 6th century, an author named Theo Philaktos approached the topic from both a philosophical and historiographical perspective. In addition to writing a historical treatise with an explicitly religious approach, he produced a dialogue on the question whether God predetermines how long each of us will live. Theo Philaktos tries to take a middle course here, affirming that God does foreknow all that will happen, including human actions, but insisting that God knows we will perform our actions freely. Atoleides' approach to this question is not unlike his attitude towards earthquakes. He is open to both natural and divine modes of explanation. He follows Pselos in emphasising the moral character of individual rulers to explain their success or failure – indeed, we just saw him doing that with the Seljuks Sultan. Yet, he is also happy to credit providence with giving victory to the Byzantines against their enemies. Anna Komnena frequently mentions how God's benevolent protection helped her father. At one point, she even asserts that divine power inspired his horse to leap to safety during a battle, though characteristically the very same sentence shows her classicising sensibility as she compares this horse to the winged Pegasus. Her pious respect for providence also ran in the family, given that according to her, Alexios himself always credited his own successes to God's will. Was such faith in heavenly governance shaken when earthly governance failed altogether? To answer this question, we can turn to the later historian Nikitas Koniatis, who reflected on the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204. He witnessed this event first-hand, but managed to escape with his life and join the new court at Nicaea. Though Nikitas had the misfortune to live through extraordinary times, he was in some respects a typical Byzantine historian. Like his predecessors, he saw himself as participating in an unbroken chain of scholars who built on each other's chronicles to tell the continuous story of the world. He was also highly classicising, using a style so ornate that it prompted one medieval reader to scrawl a complaint about it in the margin of a manuscript of Nikitas' work. His explanation of the 1204 sack of Constantinople was also typical in its assumption that this disaster was a sign of God's anger, which was, however, itself brought on by human failure. He traces the decline back to Anna's family, the Komneneoi, and their foolish foreign policy. The recent emperor Alexios III, who reigned until 1203, drew Nikitas' anger for having put the empire in such a weak condition that it was ripe for the despoiling it received at the hands of the Western Franks, who of course get an archaic nickname. Nikitas calls them Celts. In one telling passage, Nikitas both invokes Providence and makes clear that it is possible for humans to act freely, indeed against God's will. It's also a remarkable passage for its general condemnation of Byzantine emperors. Nikitas writes that these rulers by themselves in tranquility as their own ancestral inheritance, to treat free men like slaves. Such outright criticism was nothing new. I've already mentioned that back in the 12th century, Zonaras provided a far more critical assessment of Alexios I than we find in Anna Komnene's Alexiad. For Zonaras, Alexios was too focused on lining the pockets of his friends and family and not sufficiently attentive to the needs of the rest of his subjects, meaning of course other aristocrats who were not fortunate enough to be in the emperor's inner circle. As Zonaras put it, Alexios did not act like an ideal household manager but like the master of slaves. Zonaras wasn't alone in this assessment. You might remember that about a century later, Theodore II Lascaris was still making this complaint about Alexios and his successors. This kind of opinionated history writing was not to everyone's taste. Another middle Byzantine historian, John Skelitsis, complained in the introduction to his wholly derivative synopsis of histories that other historians were insufficiently accurate. Rather than just telling us the facts, they grind their various axes, being either favourable or critical or just writing to please the sitting ruler. Comparing these wildly diverging accounts, the reader is, as he put it, plunged into dizziness and confusion. We've seen that Anna Komnenos' history was partial, even worshipful, towards Alexios. She anticipated this potential critique, arguing that it was perfectly possible for her to be fond of both her father and the truth. But in another passage, she shows that she's aware of the conflict between writing a personal account and setting down a neutral historical record. Coming to tell of her father's death, she writes, Such emotional restraint was impossible for the later Nikitus Choniates. Like many of our historians, he inserted fictional speeches into his chronicle, which is another imitation of the ancient historians and of course another sign that in Byzantium history writing was closely related to rhetoric. Nikitus puts one invented speech into his own mouth, a despairing monologue he supposedly uttered upon seeing the fall of Constantinople. And what is it that especially prompts him to this lament? Antiquarian that he is, he dwells especially on the destruction of the capital's classical monuments. Though the residents of 1204 Constantinople might have had a hard time feeling that God does benevolently guide all things, the thematic sequence of our podcast series tells a different story. By happy chance, and maybe a bit of planning on my part down here at the level of human affairs, this topic of history writing has given us an ideal bridge from Michael Pselos to Anna Komnina. If he were listening, Zona Ras would probably be annoyed by the way that Pselos has inspired so many apparent digressions from our main story. As promised, we've been circling around him for several episodes, seeing how he was one of numerous scholars to write on politics, rhetoric, and history. But with Anna Komnina, we will finally be getting back to some good old Aristotle, as she gathers together some scholars of her own to produce the greatest workshop for philosophical commentary in Greek since late ancient Alexandria. You'll have something to regret if you miss the next episode dedicated to Anna Komnina and her circle here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps