CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RHETORIC AND PERFORMANCE

Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

–Roland Barthes

Byzantine texts have routinely been branded as “rhetorical” not in a bid to explain them, but to impugn their merit. Until recently, the pairing of “rhetoric” and “performance” in the title of such an essay would have signalled abiding prejudices against Byzantine literary culture and an unflattering portrait of its audiences. Such verdicts issued from long-standing biases, chief among them being the ill repute attached to rhetoric as a perversion of language’s capacity to convey truth and meaning. From its beginnings in antiquity, rhetoric has been under a sort of cultural indictment, charged with insincerity and the provision of an elaborate and ultimately decadent form of verbal theatre, inimical at once to truth and artistic authenticity. I wish not to disprove the charges against Byzantine rhetoric in this essay, mistaken though I find them, but to concede them, albeit provisionally, in order to consider the other side of rhetoric’s allegedly debased linguistic coin: performance.

While many scholars have been satisfied to label Byzantine literature “rhetorical,” that is, contrived and insincere, there has been a collateral failure to acknowledge the performative side of verbal artifice or the theatrics of insincerity which such a characterization necessarily implies. Not to mean what one says, a frequent accusation levelled at Byzantine texts, implies performance, albeit as barely disguised conceit. Similarly, the elaborate displays of linguistic virtuosity or dramatic form, however plodding and arcane they may seem to us at times, called upon no small measure of performative ability on the part of the author-orator, who composed with a view to oral delivery. To appreciate this, we need to bear in mind that both notions of performance, oratorical and theatrical, were essential before live audiences. The expert use of language aimed at by rhetoric in Byzantium was conditioned above all by the needs of performance at specific occasions. The better part of the texts which have come down to us, such as saints’ lives, funeral orations, wedding and birthday celebrations, inaugural lectures, praises of emperors, addresses to powerful men and women, as well as novels, and perhaps even some histories, were composed for some form of recital.

There were always a great many more listeners in Byzantium than readers. Hearing focused the attention on qualities of a text best appreciated when effectively performed. Byzantine audiences were not averse to transparently rhetorical elements in oratory. Language arranged according to prescriptions of rhetoric can aim at diverse effects, one of which is the display of rhetorical virtuosity itself. The performance of such rhetoric in Byzantium was undoubtedly a staged departure from the necessarily lackluster speech of everyday life. It was intended to mark an occasion as being out of the ordinary. Such rhetoric, which many modern commentators have assumed was almost absurdly unintelligible to most Byzantines, was probably facilitated by the effects of voice and performance broadly speaking.

Neither rhetoric nor performance, however, may be succinctly defined without surrendering the breadth of actual experience each represents. We need look no further than our own broad application of “performance” to such diverse occasions as theatre, music, speech or the “performance” of one’s duties, to appreciate that we mean different yet somehow related things. Each of these uses denotes something distinct, while all share significant connotations rooted in etymology, cultural practices and social history. The simplest definition may be the best: the fulfillment or execution of an act. We may then acknowledge that in some instances, the fulfillment of the act of authorship in Byzantium anticipated oral delivery before an audience. While this did not exhaust the life of a text, which might then be copied and studied privately by another author-orator, it did prove decisive in the marshalling of rhetoric for effective presentation to addressees.

Rather than insist on one definition of performance, I rely on examples drawn from Byzantine texts to illustrate a variety of performance types. All are linked to rhetoric as a means of arranging language for audiences of listeners. Other significant types of performance could be adduced. The performance of social, political or cultural identity, be it gender or ethnic affiliation, comes to mind.¹ The aim of the present essay, however, is not to exhaust the possible applications of performance to Byzantine society. It is, rather, to give voice to muted aspects of rhetoric in Byzantium by focusing attention on the performance of texts across a variety of genres. Likewise, the range of meanings one may attribute to rhetoric now exceeds the bounds of such a short essay. The simplest, and oldest, definition of rhetoric, the planning and ordering of discourse, was the one the Byzantines themselves inherited and assiduously cultivated. Rooted in an oral culture, rhetoric amounted to carefully delineated procedures for the choice and arrangement of words with specific occasions in mind. These procedures varied over time, but they remained consistently dependent on performance for their success.

From the time it began to be formally taught in classical Greece, rhetoric offered prescriptions not for abstractly persuasive argument, but persuasive performance of argument, the “staging” of speech. The range of meanings attached to “performance,” however, necessarily varied with the diversity of genres of oratory or literature. Bearing in mind this pluralism, I wish to focus here on performative aspects of Byzantine rhetoric in the sense of a text’s voiced and/or enacted display before an audience. What follows is not an exhaustive register of performative genres in Byzantium, valuable as that would be. I offer examples of texts whose rhetorical nature was underwritten by performance in order to make the case about the link between the two.

The range of performance supported by rhetoric was considerable. Its starting point in language was necessarily the voice. In the words of one scholar, “[a]ll the means, which … rhetoric employs [in Byzantium], is designed for acoustic perception.”² At its most basic, this involved the calculated distribution of vocal and syntactic elements in a manner which joined sound to sense. While the bond between oral performance and rhetoric went back to antiquity, its persistence in Byzantium should be understood as proceeding from the evolving occasions which called for elaborate verbal displays.

Written texts existed and sometimes even circulated in Byzantium, as in the rest of medieval Europe. But oral delivery before an audience, rather than private reading, dictated rhetorical norms, as it had always done.³ Publication, in a manner of speaking, was achieved through performance. The collections of surviving manuscripts and our preoccupation with their copying and transmission have long drawn our attention away from the significantly more common experience of oral performance and its attendant aural reception. The words of a text were precisely arranged and abetted by the sound they made when voiced aloud. We read the words in Byzantine manuscripts silently to ourselves today, as a series of propositional statements, and for that reason often find them wanting as literature. But when delivered with exact attention to its inscribed vocal requirements, a Byzantine text may well have achieved its purpose to entertain or edify an audience of listeners.

In fact, it may well be that the term “literature” is misleading, especially if it conjures up printed texts intended for individual reading. The Greek term for applied rhetoric, logos , had accommodated the advent of writing even as it remained significantly rooted in the vocal artistry of speech. In Byzantium, study and even use of the written word was still most often preliminary to elocution.⁴ Writing, as well as reading, buttressed the spoken word. “Without reading aloud,” one scholar has noted, “much of Byzantine rhetoric is not conceivable.”⁵ Imperial panegyrics, addresses to officials, orations for feast-days, funerary speeches, no less than homilies or sermons, were delivered before listeners. Rhetoric aimed at composition intended to be voiced and heard. Each genre had its own distinct performative needs, ranging from the annunciatory function of an imperial oration, in which the qualities of an emperor were laid out in a speech proclaiming his fitness to rule; or the public address to a high official, often used to make a plea; church sermons containing dramatic illustration of religious dogma; as well as vivid portrayals of a saint’s unwavering faith through quotations, dialogue and eyewitness testimony of miracles.

Each of the above was grounded in rhetorical prescriptions and examples whose basis was effective performance, frequently involving explicit dramatization and verbal theatrics on the part of the speaker-reader. No less dependent on rhetoric and its potential contribution to oral performance, moreover, were categories of literature not immediately associated with any ceremonial occasion at court or in church, and rarely considered performative genres, like historical narratives, novels or letters, which might be voiced by the author or someone else in private settings before a select audience. Indeed, much of what scholars habitually refer to as “literature” in Byzantium resembled a script rather more than a text designed to be read silently.⁶ Copies of such script-like texts were most often made as exemplars of the masterful application of rhetoric to speech for various occasions. In cases where the text itself formed the occasion, like the letters filled with wit and literary play, or narrative fiction, perhaps even historiography, the text would have still relied on a captivating performance.

A readership, in today’s familiar sense, was not entirely unknown, but all indications are that it rarely served as the basis for what we would call a literary career.⁷ The ability to write, or, more accurately, to compose, for an audience remained paramount. And while not every work contained in the surviving manuscripts was meant to be voiced before listeners, there is insufficient recognition that certain genres were patently and almost exclusively oral in character and aim.⁸ No doubt it would be a mistake to hear performance in every Byzantine text, a mistake as fundamental, however, as remaining deaf to it in those that clearly were.

* * *

Over the centuries occasions for the performance of rhetoric in Byzantium fluctuated. Even when they diminished, as they did during the instability caused by iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries, social and political venues for rhetoric never entirely disappeared. The imperial court, with its wealth and jealously guarded prerogative over most promotions in Byzantine society, offered the greatest opportunities for a man of skill in composing and performing speeches. The innate virtues and accomplishments of the emperor and his benevolent stewardship of the empire were regularly articulated in meticulously staged oratory at court. Orations in praise of the emperor and his policies combined technical virtuosity of vocal performance with the necessarily theatrical display of unstinting sincerity. It was the role of performance to inflect the occasion with the appropriate drama and verbal decorum. Just as ecclesiastical festivals and liturgical rites symbolically reenacted the events they celebrated, imperial ceremony had to incarnate the events and figures it set on display, through symbolism as well as language.⁹

After the eleventh century, a number of these speeches were usually composed and performed by the “master of rhetoric,” who occupied an imperially sponsored chair of rhetorical education.¹⁰ But other, equally skilled, men of letters could answer a commission, or perhaps offer to compose a speech for an audience at court or at a patron’s home.¹¹ In return a rhetor might hope to gain a sponsor. The desire to outdo peers with consummately crafted speeches elicited rhetorical exhibitionism from author-orators, and this competition added the drama of rivalry to that of rhetorical hyperbole.

With characteristic self-confidence, the eleventh-century polymath Michael Psellos, arguably the most versatile rhetorician up to his time, trumpeted his superiority over his rivals in the art of rhetoric. Psellos took pains to portray himself as a respected counsellor to emperors, like the Homeric figure of wise Nestor, renowned for his sweet-sounding words, counselling the great warrior kings of the Greeks on the plains of Troy:¹²

But I also addressed the public as often as was appropriate and more nobly than the old man from Pylion [Nestor], and I proclaimed and declared no less than if I had been a prophet and commanded to do so by God … and the whole audience stood up at once … and expressed its preference for me over both the allies and the Trojans as one “of glancing helm” [like Hector], and decorated me with the laurels of excellence more than the others.¹³

Competition among rhetors in Byzantium was not decided on the basis of texts alone; the brilliance of a speech was a function of the performance it enabled. Psellos employs the metaphors of contests, such as the wreath of victory, because it was apt to the public displays of rhetorical athleticism performed before appreciative audiences.

Refusal to put one’s rhetorical talents on display, on the other hand, appears not to have been an option for a man skilled in rhetoric. In a work which may, ironically enough, have been intended for performance, the twelfth-century writer and bishop of Athens, Michael Choniates, questions the motives and intellectual integrity of those who yearn to flaunt their skill in language. The title of the work, An Address to Those Who Accuse Me of Having No Desire for Exhibition, adapts the Platonic opposition of genuine learning as against superficial display of rhetorical prowess. The premise of the dispute, a culture of rhetorical exhibitionism served by sophistic mercenaries, tells us something about the perceived correlation between rhetoric and performance in the twelfth century, the time of Byzantium’s greatest literary flourishing.¹⁴

Beginning in the title, Choniates employs variants of the verb deiknumi whose root forms the basis of epideictic, used to designate the largest portion of Greek rhetoric for celebratory or commemorative occasions. Choniates’ text opens with a revealing analogy between the mythological figure of Proteus and present-day sophists in Byzantium. At issue here is the rhetorician’s agility in “putting on display any and all forms.” Choniates takes his fellow rhetors to task for a variety of intellectual shortcomings and moral or ethical flaws in their unprincipled exploitation of rhetoric. But the leitmotif of the essay is a culture of unbecoming rhetorical self-display and theatricality:

If he [the rhetor] should ever succumb to performance and should surround himself with an audience, then he will have carried off the honour of being like a monkey and will present himself in ridiculous fashion and he will end up imitating those things by which the spectator and listener is overcome; and in sum because he chose to be subservient to the opinions of others he could end up “dancing the Kordaks”¹⁵ if he intends to entertain those before whom he performs.¹⁶

Choniates, or the persona he adopts here (in good Protean fashion), rejects rhetorical display as the only viable end of education and learning. He is not interested in a reputation acquired through spectacle and pandering. He will not betray the lofty promise of philologia, love and mastery of language, for the base rewards of epideiksis, ostentatious performance. Whether in fact Choniates held to such a view, or the text was itself a consummate rhetorical act, is not easy to say. The work bears many signs of epideictic rhetoric, not least its dramatization of his accusers’ arguments addressed to him in the course of the argument. As Paul Magdalino notes in his history of twelfth-century Byzantium, Choniates’ reproach to his peers implicitly confirms that “for all the variety of genres, occasions and venues, in which and for which [rhetorical] compositions were produced … they were all recognized as corresponding to the institution of rhetorical ‘theatre’.”¹⁷ Choniates’ complaints about the shamelessly ingratiating aims of rhetorical performance, whether earnest or not, trade on the perception that a reputation for display, epideiksis, and its concomitant rewards, fuel rhetorical composition.

Most Byzantine rhetors had few ethical, let alone intellectual, compunctions about placing their skill in rhetoric at the service of the powers that be, much less about deriving the acclaim and opportunity for advancement which their ability to compose speeches could bring. Michael Choniates’ own mentor, Eustathios of Thessalonika, a prolific and accomplished Byzantine rhetorician, earned himself the archbishopric of Thessalonika on the strength of his years of service to the court of Manuel I Komnenos as the author of orations in praise of the emperor. He was also, by Michael Choniates’ own reckoning, an influential teacher of rhetoric.¹⁸ They were both part of a circle of intellectuals who came to prominence through the composition and performance of rhetorically impressive works (pace Choniates’ claim to have eschewed such self-display). These orations are read today with a view to their so-called content, that is, whatever verifiable references we may glean from them. It rarely occurs to anyone to reconstruct them as oral performances whose contents were bound up with their aural effects.

This last point has been persuasively made by D. Roderich Reinsch, who has called for the editing of Byzantine texts in a manner which allows us to configure sense and sound as closely as they were intended and received by author and audience.¹⁹ Reinsch has made his case by demonstrating that the punctuation in the manuscripts of various Byzantine texts served as a notational system for oral delivery. Punctuation organizes the words for recitation, marking intermissions in time as well as sense, thus controlling the rhythm of the text’s presentation. Most Byzantine punctuation was in accord with the organization of the text as an oral medium. This would not be so surprising a discovery were it not for the long-standing habit of forcing Byzantine texts into the syntactical arrangements common to modern European languages in the age of print and silent reading. Reinsch’s reordering of the syntactical pacing of his sample texts reveals the role of vocal artistry in their composition. Intonation and other oral devices – subtleties of volume, pitch, tempo, silence, timbre – are not transmitted in the manuscripts, though it is safe to assume that rhetoricians routinely used them to convey character, humor, irony, excitement or admiration.

Rhetoric provided the organizational principles for such oratory: the support lent to sense through sound in patterns of alliteration and assonance; techniques of amplification through carefully timed parenthesis, periphrasis and synonymia; variations of balance, antithesis and paradox; as well as less discernible but no less vital qualities of performance, such as tone, gesture and demeanor. Byzantine handbooks survive detailing some of these rhetorical principles studied by authors, though they can hardly begin to convey the thoroughness with which rhetoric permeated the teaching and handling of language.

The most common, and suggestive, term to designate both the setting and the audience for such performances, at least in cases of non-liturgical texts, was the logikon theatron perhaps best translated as “literary recital.”²⁰ As the passages by Psellos and Choniates above indicate, more than just a hint of “theatricality” could still be implied in the word. A somewhat elastic term, theatron described the occasion of a rhetorical performance, as well as the audience and the setting for such performances.²¹ In a typical reference to such an occasion, the twelfth-century rhetor Michael Italikos describes the impression made by a letter at a logikon theatron in terms which underscore the performative aims of rhetoric:

[T]he Caesar’s letter dripped like honey onto my ears; delivered at a literary recital, the letter was read and let out a resonating sound and melody, Oh oratory, Muse, and refined rhetoric, I know not the extent and manner, … how it delighted, how it inspired everyone with pleasure. Had it not possessed a temperate melody, stately and steady rhythm, and appositely dignified diction, we, both the letter’s herald and the audience of its contents, might have been transformed into Dionysian revelers!²²

The insistence here on the letter’s formal properties, its appeal to the senses, instead of what we might call its contents, underscores the extent to which rhetoric aimed at sonorous effects dependent largely on performance. The letter’s subject matter was often the vehicle for showcasing such talent in composition. But the qualities listed above – resonant sound, melodic effects, rhythm or cadence, even diction – were only latent in the text and required the performer’s alertness to their potential. Italikos no doubt exaggerated the effect on the audience in order to flatter his powerful correspondent, the son-in-law of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118). But his choice of Dionysian imagery, with its enduring ties to theatre and poetic performance, tell us something of the cultural terms of reference employed by these medieval rhetoricians.

As Paul Magdalino has observed, the occasions of rhetorical performance identified as theatron constituted “the ritual by which the man of learning paraded his credentials and aspirations.”²³ No greater opportunity for such display of eloquence existed than an oration in praise of an emperor. Examples of such panegyrics from different periods abound. The following, composed and presumably delivered by Euthymios Tornikes, in praise of Alexios I, employs the highly theatrical pretext of deliberation about how best to describe the many virtues of the emperor, thus simultaneously enumerating said virtues while drawing attention to his own rhetorical skill. Appropriately enough, Tornikes refers to himself as “standing in the middle of all, putting on a performance before so illustrious and great an audience, about to ‘commemorate in song’ the emperor’s achievements.”²⁴ Here again, the words theatron and theatrizõ (“to perform” or “act before an audience”), together with the quasimetaphoric hymnigorizõ (“sing the praises” of someone), play on the performative character of such oratory. As the subject of such verbal spectacles, the emperor shared in the success of the rhetorical entertainment; as the vehicle for the praise of the emperor’s virtues, the orator, in turn, had a share in the success of his subject:

To which one should I then turn, which beautiful order shall I praise? Which of the good emperor’s [virtues] shall I make the subject of this part of my address? Shall I marvel at his courage and his firmness and fervor toward the barbarians and his burning ardor, so to speak, or his compassion and leniency to his subjects, the temperateness which King David displayed, the avoidance of conflict credited to Solomon, the gentleness, the humaneness and, to sum up, the absence of rage? … Both the apt words and the successive arrangement of the forms of address would fail me in my desire to call the emperor by terms suitable to his accomplishments.²⁵

All the rhetorical figures in this text, though evident on the page, gain considerably from performance: the feigned deliberation of the opening questions (known as aporia), which enacts the appearance of spontaneous composition, followed by the antitheses and parallelisms of the subsequent clauses, as well as phrases of near equal length (known as isocola), reinforced by an almost rhythmical alliteration and other repeating sound patterns in words. A text such as this would have called upon no small measure of oratorical ability, over and above the verbal skill required for its composition. To describe its performance as mere “reading aloud” amounts to a grossly underestimated sense of the vocal elements necessary for its successful presentation, especially before an audience whose attentiveness to rhetorical detail was likely to have been more pronounced given the limited repertoire of themes.

So ingrained was the expectation and appreciation of rhetorical proficiency throughout Byzantine history, that the fourth-century Church Father John Chrysostomos, an early archetype of the successful Christian rhetorician, is said to have tried to discourage his congregation from applauding after sermons.²⁶ Whether in fact he did so matters less than the presumed plausibility of the anecdotal story. Worshippers were not supposed to fix their attention on the formal display of the sermon but on its spiritual and doctrinal contents. Moral edification, not entertainment, was the presumptive aim of the Christian homily. The church was not supposed to resemble a theatron.²⁷ But Chrysostomos’ resolve that the pulpit not become a venue for performance, or at least not applauded as such, could not turn the tide of dramatic declamation bequeathed by Greco-Roman antiquity to Byzantine society.

Christianity, a religion founded on biblical texts with no shortage of engaging oratory, did not eschew rhetoric. There was, to be sure, an anti-intellectualist strain in some quarters of the Church for many centuries. Refined eloquence was associated with urbane paganism. The purificatory asceticism of the Christian body found its rhetorical counterpart in a stripped-down form of expression. But, more often than not, this too was a rhetorical strategem. Having developed its own oratorical occasions in sermons, Christianity could no more renounce rhetoric than it could neglect the value of performance for its doctrinal teaching. Many of the rhetorical devices which lent dramatic immediacy and engaged the audience’s attention found their way into the sermons of Byzantium. Besides the rhetorically demanding oratory of the early Church Fathers, priests and bishops made frequent uses of dramatic techniques designed to bring the characters of a story to life before an audience. While no religious or liturgical drama such as that of western medieval Europe developed in Byzantine lands, there was no shortage of dramatic performance incorporated into religious oratory.

Sermons often took their point of departure from lections or liturgical readings drawn from the Bible, such as that for the Eucharist. In addition to the vocal skills necessary to fulfill the rhetorical prescriptions of the texts, the changes in voice required the priest or lector to impersonate, as it were, the holy figures as they appeared on the narrative stage of the sermon. Christian stories, in particular events surrounding the life and death of Jesus, offered abundant material for the performance of providential truth.

The liturgical ritual of the sermon might thus frame a highly dramatic episode whose success depended on the priest’s oratorical skill.²⁸ The fifth-century homily for the Virgin Mary, by Proclus of Constantinople, for example, contains parts which could arguably be presented as a self-standing religious play.²⁹ In it, Joseph confronts Mary with accusations of adultery. The voice of the priest apostrophizes the audience in a hortatory address: “let us learn the meaning of Joseph’s ignorance,” he says to his congregants.³⁰ The relationship struck in the first-person plural “us” goes well beyond any straightforward notion of reading a text aloud. The text combines alliteration with assonance, coordinating synonymous clauses which expand on the same point and varying the theme slightly with each new phrase:

He did not know the mystery accomplished in the Virgin,
he did not recognize the miracle he was serving as deacon,
he did not know that the prophesied Christ had been born of his betrothed wife.
He was not aware that the prophet in accordance with Moses would
proceed from the maiden who had not known the marriage bed,
he did not keep in mind that [she] could become a temple of God.³¹

In a patently theatrical verbal gesture, the priest then turns to speak directly to Joseph, telling him “you heard the words of the angel, ‘do not be afraid to receive your wife’.” After this he quotes Joseph’s extended reply before he resumes in his own voice and addresses the congregation once more: “let us hear what he said to her, disbelieving in the divine birth.” The text thus sets the stage, in more than simply metaphorical terms, for the dramatic exchange between Mary and Joseph:

     “Do you think me sacrilegious
     because you see me heavy with a child?”
And to this did Joseph once more say:
     “It is not fitting for a decent woman
     to behave out of keeping with reverence”
The saintly woman says:
     “Accusing me of prostitution
     will you not grant me opportunity for defence?”
And Joseph:
     “So you insist on denying it
     pregnant though you are this way?!”
The saintly woman:
     “Demand the truth believing in the prophetic pronunciation
     and you will learn exactly from it
     the uniqueness of the lord’s conception.”³²

Instead of channelling the voice of a narrator, the priest must speak with a semblance of sincerity, then assume the parts of Mary and Joseph. Furnished with rhyming patterns and other sound effects lost in the translation, this homilia, or dialogue, takes up a significant part of the sermon. The necessary “staging” it elicited from the speaker points to an additional sort of performance as part of the most commonly attended ritual in Byzantine life.

The homily was but one of the genres of religious literature which depended on effective performance for its message. Religious texts composed for a variety of occasions routinely availed themselves of the rhetorical means to introduce dramatic immediacy. The most common such device, studiously practiced in rhetorical exercises, was the adoption of the first-person perspective of a persona. Thus, in the sixth-century popular collection of edifying vignettes by John Moschus titled “The Spiritual Meadow,” in which important Christian lessons are narratively illustrated, we find a passage such as the following:

Polychronios the abbot told us a story, saying, “I used to see one of the brothers at the monastery of the Towers of the Jordan who neglected himself, never fulfilling the rule of holy Sunday. Then after some time, I see the one who [had] thus neglected, applying himself with all seriousness, and a great deal of ardor. And so I say to him, “You do well to do so, taking care of your soul, brother.” And he replies to me, “Lord abbot, I shall die soon.” And three days later he passed away.³³

Even the least dramatically inflected telling of such stories would have involved some fidelity to the shifts in narrative perspective. When recitation is taken into account, such passages reveal themselves as terse dramatic moments whose impact depends on the performance of the text. The virtual designation of speaking parts introduced by verbs or other markers of speech serves as cues for performance, not reading. The author endows the text with rhetorical devices such as dramatic pacing and strong verbal gestures of immediacy, while the speaker fulfills the rhetorical demands of the text and lends his voice to the different perspectives and shifts in tone required by the unfolding narrative.

Audiences did not just hear stories about people who had led inordinately pious lives, they often heard the holy man or woman speak and be spoken to. Performing a text could mean not just attentiveness to its eloquence, but enactment of its contents. The dialogue in saints’ lives, to name but one prominent genre, points to a popular culture of religious drama in all but name in Byzantium.³⁴ While such texts were not composed with the same archaizing rhetorical flourish of more profane genres, like imperial orations or literary works for theatra, religious texts were no less rhetorically controlled, since they, too, aimed at effective oral delivery.

* * *

The studied ease with which Byzantine authors composed works for performance proceeded from a relentlessly rhetorical education, one of whose key “preparatory exercises” (progymnasmata) was the “speech in character” (ethopoiia). This required the student to produce a text in imitation of a persona, usually in the midst of some highly dramatic situation. The subject could be biblical, like What David might have said while persecuted by Saul and awaiting execution; What Death might have said in reaction to the raising of Lazarus; What the Mother-of-God might have said as she embraced her son, God, and Christ the Saviour at his burial. Just as often, the setting was ancient myth or literature, and thus afforded an opportunity to rehearse rhetorical stratagems without the constraints of Christian dogma and decorum, like What a sailor might have said seeing Ikaros flying high above while Daedalus grazed the surface of the water with his wings, or Andromache’s mournful words at Hector’s tomb or Niobe bewailing the fate of her dead children.³⁵

As a school exercise ethopoiia was meant to foster a sense of plausible character portrayal. Taken up by accomplished authors, it served as a vehicle for virtuoso display of wit and pathos. When voiced, however, these texts would have been out and out theatrical monologues. Above all, they instilled an alertness to the performative side of literature, broadly speaking. After all, the inclusion of such exercises in the curriculum did not aim simply at perpetuation of the exercise itself. Practice of ethopoiia could also help the future rhetorician prepare for other, less obviously invented roles. The funeral oration, Byzantium’s preeminent rhetorical genre, was one such occasion. It might in fact be argued that impassioned yet rhetorically controlled expressions of mourning were so commonly found among the Byzantine exercises of ethopoiia because rhetors were frequently called upon to compose orations for funerary occasions.

Deceased emperors, bishops, powerful notables, as well as dear friends and family members, had to be mourned and fittingly memorialized in word as well as deed. In the case of emperors, affecting the appropriate grief was part of a larger rhetorical task in political propaganda. Sorrow and remembrance had to be verbally enacted before the mourners in attendance. The speaker had to wed high-minded eloquence to the pathos of lament. Since it often functioned as the last bid to shape the legacy of the deceased, as well as contribute to the reputation of the rhetor, funeral oratory was invested with memorable passages meant to fasten the attention of the audience on the verbal surface of the speech while simultaneously dramatizing the mournful recollection of the deceased’s absence from life.

In a funerary speech for his father which must have called upon considerable performative talent, Euthymios Tornikes goes so far as to pretend the text itself is speaking to both audience and author:

The oration takes pity on this good logothetes and wishes to string together words free from sorrow … And if I might turn to address you, oh Logothete … How long will you grieve so bitterly? How long will you groan from the bottom of your heart? How long will you place such pains in your heart, suffering day and night? How long until you wipe the tears from your eyes? But do you weep because your father was wise and has left you and [because] he was “a man of great intelligence” and has gone away? You sigh, saying “woe is me, for a reverent man has perished from the earth.” … For this reason you are downcast and you weep, so that your gloominess fills the theatron with sorrow?³⁶

It is tempting to imagine what performance of such a passage would have entailed. Besides the theatricality of attributing a point of view to the oration itself, the Greek text contains various puns and rhetorical figures which would have invited emphasis and precise delivery. The acknowledgement, moreover, of an audience with the word theatron in the last line signals the marked self-consciousness of performance found in so many genres of Byzantine literature.

CONCLUSION  

Though it requires some conjecture and imagination on our part, we must try to locate the meaning of various Byzantine texts within their performative setting; in effect, to correlate not just sense and sound, but ceremony, scenery and social surroundings, all the elements of spectacle which lent purpose to rhetoric in Byzantium. Questions about performance should be posed, even when no answer appears forthcoming. Do we possess even a silent record of the experience of Byzantine rhetoric? Are the texts in the manuscripts faithful copies of originals meant as an aide-mémoire or are they transmitted revised and rewritten for the scrutiny of a much smaller audience of readers? Answers, when they do come, are likely to vary from text to text; but they will come only if we pose the questions. To say that many texts had originally served their speakers as a sort of script is not to say that we read them as transcripts, as a reliable record of the details of performance. The texts may nevertheless tell us a great deal about the rhetorical underpinnings of performance.

Rhetoric was prized in Byzantium for many of the same reasons it has fallen into disrepute (though not disuse) in recent times: an inordinate attention to the verbal surface of the text, composed in accordance with the sound of words and the figures of syntax. At the heart of most characterizations of a text as “rhetorical” is the implication that it lacks substance, that its author has replaced argument and fact with artifice and ornament. Genres of literature constituted by formulaic elements, whether at the level of individual phrases or whole plots, are assumed to be a form of pretense. Such claims are neither wholly justified nor are they entirely without truth. Another, equally rhetorical, aesthetic bequeathed to us by the Romanticism of the past two centuries has made much of what animated Byzantine literary performance culturally inimical. We are embarrassed by transparent rhetoric. It was not so in Byzantium. A patently rhetorical style did not seek to disguise its origins in artifice, but asserted itself through performance in a bid for recognition. The wider, cultural and political circumstances and outlook which underwrote such literary taste remain to be fully understood. As one historian of rhetoric has observed, “[t]he rhetorical view of life conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, and man fundamentally a role player.”³⁷ It may be that in aiming for and acknowledging performance of rhetoric, Byzantine culture was simply more honest with itself.

NOTES

1 The exemplary study of the performance of rhetoric in the pursuit of social and cultural identity affecting gender is Gleason 1995. The seminal text for the social analysis of performance was Goffman 1959, which was once remarkably influential and widely read. Subsequent approaches in this vein have been legion. For an instructive example of how far performance has come as an analytical category, see Schieffelin 1985 and 1998.

2 Hörandner 1981: 50 (author’s translation).

3 Coleman 1996; none of the conjectures about the extent of alphabetic literacy in Byzantium cast doubt on the predominantly aural reception of literature.

4 Hunger 1989.

5 Hunger 1989: 126 (author’s translation).

6 A similar point has been made by Mullett 2003b: 151, who writes of rhetoric “as the screenplay … for a fundamentally performative society.”

7 That audiences for most Byzantine literature were made up principally of listeners, rather than readers, is confirmed paradoxically in scholarly works whose titles, at least, emphasize writing and reading: Hunger 1989; Sevcenko and Mango (eds) 1975; and most recently Cavallo 2006.

8 Fatouros 1973 identified four such orations by the fourteenth-century rhetorician Michael Gabras, probably meant as rhetorical exercises; all four, however, are consonant with the performative demands of rhetoric for live audiences.

9 For the significance of such ceremonial reenactments, see McCormick 1986.

10 Imperial support for rhetorical education formed the subject of a number of important articles by Browning 1962; for a summary of Browning’s most important conclusions about rhetorical education, see Browning 1989.

11 Magdalino 1993: 336–7 cites two notable instances of sardonic caricature of such patently ingratiating efforts by rhetoricians in the twelfth century.

12 Iliad 1.247–9.

13 Littlewood 1985: Or. 9, 42–53; cf. Aerts 1990: Hist. brevis, 85, 65–75.

14 Mullett 2003b: 152.

15 A proverbially ignoble theatrical display which catered to the lowest tastes of the audience mentioned by Athenaeus (IΔ’, 630E, 28; 631D) and Lucian, among others; cf. the entry in the Byzantine lexicon known as the Souda.

16 M. Choniates, , in Lampros 1880, 1968.

17 Magdalino 1993a: 339; for “rhetorical theatre” see below.

18 See n. 11 above; see also “Eustathios,” in Kazhdan and Franklin 1984.

19 I thank D. R. Reinsch for his advice in this matter. See also Reinsch in this volume.

20 The varying and evolving significance of this term in Byzantium is partially documented by many scholars: Hunger 1978: I 210f.; cf. Mullett 1984, esp. 175.

21 The term had been inherited from Greco-Roman times. See Pernot 2000: 440, n. 103: “le mot theatron désigne par l’extension tout salle de conférence, l’epeidixis et le public lui-meme.”

22 Gautier 1972: 17.154.

23 Magdalino 1993: 339; cf. n. 21 above. See also Mullett 1984.

24 Darrouzès 1968: Or. 1.3.22–4.

25 Darrouzès 1968: Or. 1.3.

26 Gregory of Naz. Or. 42.24; PG 36: 488B.

27 Eusebius, another fourth-century Church Father, complained about Paul of Samosata’s “antics” before his flock: Eccl. hist., VII, 30.9.

28 For a survey of the dialogue in early Christian literature broadly, see Hoffman 1966.

29 Attempts to see primitive scripts for actual plays in such homilies have floundered. Piana 1912 bears study since it accentuates otherwise neglected dramatic qualities of early Byzantine homiletic rhetoric; see also Piana 1936 for a survey of similar but less successful approaches to the question of Byzantine drama.

30 Leroy 1967.

31 Leroy 1967: 9.1–4.

32 Leroy 1967: 9.5–16.

33 Joannes Moschus, Pratum spirituale, in PG 87: 2852–3112.

34 The inclusion of such dramatic dialogue in Byzantine sermons continued unabated for centuries to come, a point well documented by Cunningham 2003: 101–13.

35 Hunger 1978, 1.92–120; Kennedy 1983: 54–70.

36 Darrouzès 1968: Or. 3.22.

37 Lanham 1976: 4.