Philology and Empire in Michael Choniates

Abstract

This dissertation presents the first serious interpretation of the rhetorical production of Michael Choniates (ca. 1138-1222 CE), the last Byzantine bishop of Athens. Working with inadequately edited, entirely untranslated, and largely neglected texts, it reveals this author as a stand-out figure in the reception of antiquity with exemplary significance in the long-term trajectory of Greek literature. A period of extraordinary creative effervescence, the twelfth century forms a watershed in Greek literary history; Choniates’s work incisively critiques the social basis of this culture even as it takes over and extends its conceptual innovations. Bringing the era’s experimental dynamism out of spaces of urbane play and into the ritual heart of medieval discourse, his writing dissolves barriers between the classical and Christian legacies previously constitutive for Byzantine intellectual life. It then takes this ethos of innovation out of the capital of Constantinople and implants it in a provincial place, acting on the opportunities of Athens’s standing in the ancient canon to reimagine relationships between imperial center and periphery. Overall, Choniates characterizes this project in terms of philologia (devotion to language and learning): the semantic unit which yields modern “philology,” and of which Choniates is the most frequent and programmatic employer in all extant Greek literature before the eighteenth century. Over seven chapters divided into two parts, the study proceeds in a series of readings which follow the arrangement of the authorial collection assembled by Choniates himself, whose texts, encompassing a variety of rhetorical genres, trace the chronological development of the writer’s career. In his early years in Constantinople, Choniates articulates a distinctively synthetic vision of learning—breaking down long-standing divisions between rhetoric and philosophy, prose and poetry, pagan and Christian—in order to assert the autonomy of literary speech from the systems of imperial and aristocratic patronage in which it was embedded. After his appointment to Athens, this same authorial project provides the framework for compositions which strikingly anticipate modern responses to the classical past while reinventing civic oratory during a crisis of imperial authority which ended in the collapse of the Byzantine state under the attack of the Fourth Crusade of 1204. In pursuing these connections between the love of learning (philologia) and empire across a literary culture very different from our own, the dissertation develops a new approach to the combined capacities of writing, language, and thought to bind together communities, centered on the links between ritual and literature as means of creating human worlds.