Download PDF | Desire And Denial In Byzantium Papers From The Thirty First Spring Symposium Of Byzantine Studies
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Acknowledgements
The papers in this volume were presented at the Thirty-first Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held at the University of Sussex in March 1997. As is always the case, not all papers presented at the Symposium appear in the published volume, and I regret that space did not permit the inclusion of more of these communications. Summaries of these appear in volume 24 (1998) of the Bulletin of British Byzantine Studies.
Iam most grateful to the various foundations and bodies who most generously provided financial support for the Symposium. The A.G. Leventis Foundation, the Hellenic Foundation, the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies and the British Academy provided grants towards the cost of the Symposium. Variorum of Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, and the Graduate Research Centre in Cultural and Community Studies of the University of Sussex and the History of Art Subject Group all put up money for the Reception.
Organizing a conference such as this is always more than one person’s work. At Sussex, Karen Wraith, Martin Dench, Bev Barstow, Bente Kortegard Bjornholt, David Felton, Ed Davis all played a major part in keeping the show on the road, as did the assorted members of the student body who ran errands with a hitherto unimagined obedience and efficiency. Without these people, it would have been a nightmare. Dion Smythe and Tony Eastmond were unfailingly helpful and Robin Cormack unfailingly supportive. My thanks to all of these.
In the production of the volume, thanks are due to Ruth Peters at Ashgate Publishing for her hard work, patience and helpfulness (despite Forest), and to Julia Stevenson who had fun with the index.
Preface
Liz James
Sex, love and the erotic are not terms usually associated with Byzantium and Byzantine studies. Celibacy, virginity and asceticism more readily spring to mind as characteristics of Byzantine society. It was in an attempt to see if there was a balance between these two poles that needed redressing that the theme of desire and denial was adopted for this symposium.
Both desire and denial are problematic terms and it will become apparent that different papers define them in different ways. To paraphrase Freud, the question I began from was: what did the Byzantines want? To answer that, a series of themes were explored: writings about love, both secular and religious; images of sexuality and sensuality; the law; Byzantine attitudes to bodies and to the senses. The book is arranged in five sections. It begins with an examination of different types of text which discuss love and the passions, and from here moves on to the writings of the Church Fathers on different aspects of these topics. The final three sections focus more closely on the actual physical body. They look at different ways in which Christian, especially saintly, bodies were perceived and used; they look at depictions of erotic bodies; they ask how the evidence might offer accounts of ‘deviant’ bodies. These themes are not comprehensive. What the symposium seems to have revealed is that the question of Byzantine desires is a viable one and one of considerable scope: here, we have only begun to scratch its surface.
Traditionally, symposia volumes have begun with introductions laying out the themes and contents of the book. At this symposium, however, Averil Cameron was asked to sum up the proceedings and here, it is her concluding remarks that set out the case forcefully and eloquently for the further study of desire and denial in Byzantium.
1. From Byzantium, with love
Margaret Mullett
My brief is love-letters, and this paper will be concerned, by nature of the subject, with pothos rather than with porneia,’ and, by nature of my own interests, with the middle rather than the early Byzantine period. It will concentrate on what went on in the mind, or at least on the page, rather than the body, with what people felt and wrote rather than what they did or were, and with dyads rather than individuals. We shall see that if ‘letters mingle soules’, their potential is not always exploited or appreciated,” and that what constituted pothos in the period packs some surprises. I shall not deal with the issue of spiritual love in asceticism. There are three sections: fiction, damned lies, and statistics.
Fiction
If we look in the only theoretical literature on the Byzantine letter which has come down to us, the late antique Typoi epistolikoi attributed to Demetrios and the Epistolimaioi charakteres attributed to Proklos or Libanios, we have to search for help with love-letters. Demetrios does not list a type at all, and in Proklos-Libanios we find that the erotike type (no. 40) is that through which we Offer erotic speeches (logoi) to our beloveds (feminine). Two examples are given in the Charakteres, the first a simple declaration of love which hardly makes use of the epistolarity of the Byzantine letter: By the Gods, I love, I love your seemly and your lovely shape, and 1 am not ashamed to love it for there is no shame in loving what is seemly. Even if anyone were to blame me for being utterly in love, he would on the other hand praise me for desiring her who [or the shape which] is good.?
It is fairly cool, and were it not for the cfs popdiis we would have been very unsure that it was addressing the beloved at all; it is very much more concerned with the lover than the beloved. But we are instantly in the familiar Greek area of honour and shame in which sexual concerns are enveloped.* The second, found in five manuscripts, is longer and perhaps more interesting:
... My dearest ... soul, as ] display the scorching erotic disposition (towards you) which is in me, I feel more pride than shame. For I really love you, I love your angelic state, I love your prudent and most sweet gaze, I love your quiet voice which more sweetly than honey pours from your holy lips, and I prefer to throw myself upon your sacred footprints than to luxuriate in imperial apartments.°
Love again raises the spectre of shame, and the eye contact is virtuous but the sweetness of eyes, voice and step focus on what makes the beloved loveable. Yet the repetition, the insistence, €p@ €p@ vi Tovs Geous, of the first example (no. 40) is repeated here also. Neither of these prescriptions envisages a developing relationship, or the instrumentality of a letter in the progress of a passion. What we might categorize as ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ letters — the letter of seduction (the staple of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel), letters written during brief separations in the course of a relationship, and the letters of abandonment and recrimination, the Heroides type® — are each only one facet of the discourse of desire. If we wish to see this interplay between letters and loving (or lusting) relationships, we need to look to fiction, to the fictional letter-collections of late antiquity or to the revived fictional narratives of the twelfth century.
Two major fictional letter-collections have survived, fifty letters in the two books of Aristainetos dating from the early sixth century, and the eighty-five letters of Theophylact Simocatta.’” Both appear to be revival phenomena like the vogue for epigrams and for classicizing historiography, and both have yet to find a sympathetic interpreter, who will look at them in the context of sixth-century erotic epigrams and of contemporary rhetorical practice, and who will also read them against the major fictional collections of the second sophistic, Alkiphron’s letters from fishermen, farmers, parasites and hetairai and Philostratos’s Epistolai erotikai.8 Like these texts, the Byzantine examples are addressed to different persons, some historical, some mythological, some imaginary, women and boys, from men and women. They conjure up a landscape of easy promiscuous sex, of quickly sated passion, of agonistic wooing and world-weary advice, a whole social setting for the interplay of pleasure and longing, cynical, casual, gossipy and concerned. Unlike the ‘real’ Byzantine letter, they open windows into the populous community of their imagined life rather than portray what Barthes has called the language of an extreme solitude.” Though each letter is complete in itself, it depicts a full cast of characters and is set at a particular moment; it casts back and forward in time as the situation demands. Unlike the ‘real’ Byzantine letter, which concentrates on the relationship between writer and recipient, third persons litter the landscape, urban or rural. The simple declaration of love of Libanios-Proklos is found seldom, sometimes tucked away at the end of a book.!°
But even if these fictional letters are read in relation to the earlier collections, it seems unlikely that we shall be able to gain as much from this comparison as of late has been achieved in another genre by the reading of the four twelfth-century novels with the five ancient ones.!! The production and the reception of fictional letters in the new piety of the sixth century conjures up incongruous images of bishops and lawyers flicking through this classicizing pornography!? before setting off to preach a sermon or try a case of adultery. Yet stranger incongruities existed even earlier: both Brent Shaw and Patricia Cox Miller have commented lately on the habitual pornographic flavour of Jerome’s discourses, ‘a rhetorical mixture of erotics and outright pornography of which Jerome, a saint, was particularly capable’, and in particular on the ‘steamy memory’ of the erotic dream-content of letter 22 to Eustochium.!? What, we wonder, are the implications for Jerome’s conception of his relationship with her? Occasionally in late antiquity, these two worlds, of a classicizing and bucolic erotic playground and of the popular passion for ascesis now well established in the empire, converge, uncomfortably. In the letters of Procopios of Gaza,'* there is almost a sense that this erotic playground might sometimes gain a toehold on real life. Procopios’s letters are firmly in the tradition of the Byzantine letter, of the real letter, of real problems of communication, of the topoi of presence and absence which make Byzantinists feel at home and are so far from the knowing sophistication of the parasites and prostitutes of the fictional collections. Yet with some correspondents he flirts with the rhetorical and fictional models we have been looking at, and we gain a sense of danger — and emotion.!5
After this however, we search in vain for this erotic discourse in the Byzantine letter, despite the obvious advantages of the literary form: its monoaxial and dyadic nature, its concentration on emotion, its compressed charge and its illusory intimacy, and the exploitation Byzantine letterwriters made of this quality.!® This looks like denial indeed. The closest we come to the concentration on love in the fictional letters of the sixth and seventh centuries is in the fictional revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.!” In three of these works, letters of love play a part. Digenes Akrites may have been ‘a man’s man who lived on the frontier, never met an intellectual, and devoted his life to sex and violence’.!8 But in the Lay of the Emir, in Escorial as well as Grottaferrata, letters are prominent, most notably expressing the love of mother for son. In Book I the mother of the kore writes (12 lines) to her sons urging them to seek out their sister, and in the next book they reply (6 lines); after the wedding the emir’s mother also writes to the emir (full of mourning, accusation and blame, 46 lines). But there are also letters between the lovers: on the emir’s journey to visit his mother in Syria, ‘every day he sent letters to his love’.!? The example given is a speedy one-liner (don’t weep, I beg you, rather pray), a rather feeble effort compared with the dutiful effusions of maternal epistolary exchange: a reflection perhaps of Komnenian mother-power. But if we turn to the twelfth-century novels proper we can hardly complain of brevity of epistolary discourse.
In Eustathios Makrembolites’s Hysmine and Hysminias, where the narrative technique is dominated by the discursive levels of dream and first-person narrative, a crucial point in the plot, the reuniting of the lovers at the end of Book IX, is marked with an included letter from the heroine to the hero. Why does Hysmine reveal her presence by letter rather than in a speech to Hysminias? (The obvious answer is because Leukippe in Achilles Tatios’s novel”? does so, but there are more subtle reasons why the parallel is followed.) This move is followed in the next book — in the complication of the plot which makes Rhodope falls in love with Hysminias and uses her slave Hysmine as go-between - by a love-letter from Rhodope to Hysminias.*! These two letters demand to be read together, as rare examples of inclusion of another genre in this romance, and in the parallelism of their composition. Both, true to the revival mode, use the formal Greek greeting which is no longer found in personal letters of the twelfth century: ‘the maiden Hysmine (the maiden Rhodope, daughter of Sostratos) greets Hysminias, the lover’. Both letters then inform Hysminias of something: Hysmine of her rescue by a dolphin from the sea and Rhodope that she has fallen for Hysminias. Both letters, in almost identical phrasing, emphasize the protection of the spring and bow of Artemis for the writer's virginity. Both bow in the direction of a love-letter, Hysmine with an echo of the second example of Proklos-Libanios: ‘on your account I dared sea and waves, and on your account tasted bitter death’ while Rhodope claims that Hysminias has drenched her whole soul in the spring of Aphrodite and shot her with erotic darts. Despite this both are very contractual, indeed Hysmine actually uses the word syntheke; herein lies the difference. Hysmine reminds Hysminias of their earlier understanding and calls upon him to honour the agreement: she has done her part by preserving her virginity. Rhodope has this card to play but also further transactions: she will exchange her patris for his and will surrender her comfortable life and Hysminias’s freedom in exchange for his erotike philia. A further exchange offers Hysmine’s freedom in exchange for the marriage of Hysminias with Rhodope. This contract looks a much better deal than that of Hysmine, and only the power of love, the memory of many erotic graces, can overturn its persuasiveness. The contrast between the delivery of the second letter (six kisses in fifteen lines under cover of a brother-sister relationship“) and the reciprocity and symmetry of the contract proposed in the letter is striking. Had the recognition scene been achieved without the first letter the reader would not later be able to compare them and so observe the parallelism of the women’s feelings and situations, or the nature of Hysminias’s options, or observe so closely the threat to the lovers or see love conquer instrumentality.
The choice here is Hysminias’s: here and in Digenes we have a male discourse in which the women write; in another novel (not necessarily later)?> we see what kind of fist a man makes of describing a man writing a love-letter to a secluded girl — and reading it to his comrade. In Niketas Eugenianos’s Drosilla and Charikles, there is no shortage of literary interest with multiple included genres. Four love-letters, this time from Kleandros, the hero of the sub-plot, to his beloved Kalligone, form an important part of the main plot as a spur to the hero Charikles’s own analepsis.”4 The setting is a Parthian prison after the raid of Barzos which split the two couples, and at the beginning of Book II Kleandros attempts to console Charikles with the story of his own wooing. Charikles insists on full documentary detail. The letters are diffuse, bombastic, and unfocused: each begins with a conceit which is quickly forgotten (Charon, the song of the sirens, the moon, Akontios’s trick-apple), and Kleandros slips into hyperbolic self-pity, from which he recovers to express his ambition to hold one another beneath one cloak. There is a sense of male bonding in the intervening exchanges: Charikles comments on the ingenuity of the Charon conceit (in fact it warns the reader of the final denouement of the discovery of Kalligone’s death), he is advised not to repeat the more sexually frank passages, and by the end has given up asking whether Kalligone had replied to the letter. Kleandros, embarrassed by the lack of response, abandons rhetoric (or love-lyric?) for an interminable serenade, after which he receives a suspiciously speedy response. We must read, in Eugenianos’s highly sophisticated and literary mockery, a privileging of the power of the serenade over the combined forces of four varied and ambitious letters; we remember now that Digenes, rather than communicating by letter, himself speaks directly with the Girl; she in turn sends her nurse to speak, rather than entrusting her feelings to a letter; finally the hero resorts to a lyre in order to achieve her abduction.” In this milieu, it would seem, the loveletter as a medium of seduction is not greatly appreciated; it will take the fourteenth-century ingenuity of Libistros and Rhodamne to achieve love-letters which are both effective and remembered with affection by the lovers: the secret is the attachment of love-letters to arrows, shot over the battlements and through the windows of the Castle of Silver to succeed in persuading the beloved to a secret meeting, and so to bed.”6
Now it is clearly dangerous to make assumptions about the way loveletters were viewed simply from the medium of fiction. But we are hard put to it to find examples of real-life letters of the period which can throw this kind of light on Byzantine perceptions of the discourse of desire: the letters of the mother of the emir and the kore, and certainly those of Hysmine and Rhodope have no real-life counterparts. Not that there is any shortage of eleventh- and twelfth-century letters: the problem is that none of them meets any of the definitions of love-letters we have been working with so far. In fictional letters of an earlier period we have found letters to both male and female beloveds by men, in the included letters of twelfthcentury fiction we have found letters written by both women and men in lover, married and mother-son relationships. None of these types is clearly visible in ‘real’ letters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is not hard to find explanations for this, even at a time when changing literary and social circumstances might appear propitious.”” There are to begin with an enormous number of reasons why in any society love-letters may not survive. Frank and Anita Kermode clearly think of love-letters as central to the genre (as the only letters any of us write in manuscript any more, as the letters which might be kept as a bundle and preserved for sentimental reasons, as — with friendship and business — the reasons for which the vast majority of us exchange letters).?° But only in a society which gives romantic passion a positive and serious evaluation will writers collect their letters of love with other less frenzied compositions, and even then love-letters may be regarded as belonging to the private sphere, or regarded as ephemeral and instrumental, or as inferior to love-poetry, or as less important than the expression of other relationships. Or embarrassing: ‘one feels almost ashamed’, says its first editor, of a letter from Nelson to Lady Hamilton, ‘at eavesdropping on such intensity of emotion.’?? In a society like Byzantium where other kinds and objects of love had been privileged from the very beginning®° and where a very high proportion of literary society was expected and anxious to be celibate, the chances drop considerably, especially in view of the fact that almost all Byzantine letters survive because they have been collected for publication. And in a society where the difficulties of letter-exchange, the dangers of calumny and the public nature of the most private correspondence made restraint an essential feature,?! the opportunity to read anyone else’s love-letters may have been a specially titillating (because rare) voyeuristic attraction of epistolary fiction.
Fiction may play with chronologies, open out the options, validate alternatives, caricature life or allegorize it away — but so may other, less overtly fictional texts, especially autobiographical modes which deal with the recreation of self.>2 Fiction in Byzantium may have been not so much a sudden rediscovery in the eleventh century as a subtle colouring of all kinds of writing under the influence of rhetoric* in the exploration of possible worlds.*4
From the point of view of the scholar, one of the advantages of included letters in fiction, or what would develop into the epistolary novel, is that the context is assured, the relationships are spelled out, the instrumentality of a letter, or its failure to turn the plot as desired, is very clear to the reader (though the theorists of epistolarity rejoice in the ambivalence of the form, its exploitation of tension between trust and suspicion, presence and absence, letter and collection).°> When we deal with real letters, in real collections, we are on our own, and must detect relationships, their history and intensity, as best we may, in the hope that it may lead us to Byzantine expressions of desire in letters. This is what we must now attempt with the ‘real’ letters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And as a point of principle we should proceed by looking at the material which has survived from the period and recording the widest possible range of expressions of desire, of intense emotional longing. Rather than search for something which fits our concept of a love-letter and risk failing to find it, we should seek to identify and interpret whatever discourse of desire may be found there.
Damned lies
From the eleventh and twelfth centuries (depending where we draw the line) we have about twenty major collections (ten letters or more) and as many smaller ones, perhaps fifteen hundred letters in all. Most, apart from three important monastic collections, are published. Ten of the major letterwriters were at some point bishops, six at some point monks. Very few letters either to?” or from?8 women or to family members” exist. The overwhelming majority of letters are written by men to men in relationships whose nature we must infer from the context. If we compare this body of material with the eleven hundred non-literary letters sent by members of the French nobility between 1700 and 1860 examined by Marie-Claire Grassi* we see a very different balance. Only 48 per cent of her letters are man to man, 15.5 per cent are man to woman, 11 per cent woman to woman and 25.5 per cent woman to man. Just as with included letters in twelfth-century Byzantine fiction we sensed a primary reception of a male literary community, so with twelfth-century ‘real letters’ we must resign ourselves to a similar male-male discourse.
I shall now try to give the flavour of this male—male discourse at its surface level, exploring vocabulary and form and the uses of epistolarity to express emotion. I am not concerned to ‘get behind the topoi to the people who formed them’;*!] am interested in the relationships as portrayed in the texts, and the potential of the form to deal with desire.
While each major collection has its own characteristics and vocabulary, and while the discourse of love is restricted to less than 10 per cent of letters, there are certain features in common. Letters are in general short, built on a metron which varies from correspondent to correspondent, shorter in the eleventh century, around 400 words, rather longer later, and the emphasis is on the dyadic relationship of writer and recipient. Very few third persons, even fewer historical events appear in these letters. The most intimate of letters are sparkling, witty, darting wordplay, built on the model of a parable or a fable, a pun or a proverb, or framed with classical quotations, or built on a cento of biblical quotations, involving a shared culture often created in the schools of the capital. The correspondent is drawn into the letter with affectionate address, varying from collection to collection, potheinotate, pampothete, triphilete, tripothete, philtate, thaumasie. There is talk of love, of dreams, of epic journeys, of the fear of calumny, of the warmth of philia, the kindling of desire and the burning of pothos. The Aristophanes myth, Empedocles’s monsters, philophiloi and Zeus philios watch over relationships which are nurtured and nourished with letters of love. Letters fly to correspondents, cool their longing like dew, sweeten like honey, console the loss and cure the sickness of separated lovers, are a feast, a gift from God, the icon of the soul; medical reports were expected in order to give a truer picture of the soul. Eyes and mouths, kisses and embraces, bring correspondents together in the mind’s eye; cinnamon and sheep’s cheese, furs and fishes remind the other of the sender. Spiritual sons and relatives, ex-pupils and fellow-sufferers are caught in nets, welcomed with joy to talk stoma kai stoma and sent off with tears. Eros, agape, philia and pothos, especially pothos, fill these letters. The intrinsic epistolary precondition of separation is exploited to the full, even where that separation is the result of anachoresis. Bishops and monks, teachers and bureaucrats cultivated relationships and polished communications recognizably inhabiting the same universe but marking individual personality and style. There is an intensity, a compressed charge, an intimacy, common only to this small subset, and thus not all of the making of the genre. It is this sense of intense longing which seems to define for the Byzantines the use of the word 1680s. These, not the letters of the romances or of fictional collections, are the true love-letters of the middle Byzantine empire.
It might however be argued that this language of yearning has nothing to do with either desire or with love-letters, and that what we have been finding is simply philia in the most philikos of Byzantine genres.*? This might be sustainable if we were certain that a clear demarcation line exists in Byzantine usage between philia® and other kinds of love. Greek is very rich in affective vocabulary, and some texts do try to distinguish among kinds of love, allotting one word to each kind of love. But there are also indications — or maybe only straws in the wind — that the vocabulary of love and friendship in this period in secular writings is rather less clearly demarcated than we might have imagined, or find delineated in the classic treatments of eros and agape, philia and storge.“ One is that in three places in Grottaferrata Digenes there is a description of the role and function of love showing an organic integration of the basic vocabulary rather than a segregation into types of love,» and that elsewhere in that text eros, pothos and philia seem to be used interchangeably, even if ‘each keeps its proper rank’.46 Another indicator is the second example of an erotike type of letter in five manuscripts of the Epistolimaioi charakteres which I quoted at the beginning of this paper.*”
This example is clearly to a eunuch, to a boy or to a monk,® and is much more in keeping with our twelfth-century letters than the first erotike example. It claims to be an example of an eroticized pneumatikos eros, an emotion hard to detect in practice in eleventh- and twelfth-century letters.” In three of these manuscripts there is a balancing type pros filon aspastike,>° which touches on the role of agape in philia; its very existence sets up an opposition between the relationships expressed in the two typoi, love and friendship. But when these models are compared with real examples from the eleventh and twelfth centuries the distinction crumbles. No eleventhor twelfth-century writer addresses any correspondent as*Q. $.é, as in the pros philon aspastike, whereas they do address people as*Q @iATaTH LoL wuxT as in the erotike.°! And in the treatment of the philikos type in Demetrios the author makes a point of saying that not all those who write letters of this type are friends: what he goes on to describe is epistolary acts of patronage.° So the language of eros may express philia and the language of philia may conceal a relationship of patronage. The appropriateness of the erotic is certainly not excluded from the emotions and intimacies inscribed in our twelfth-century letters. But we have yet to discuss what these, the transactional content of our intense relationships, actually are.
Students of medieval Latin letters of this period met this problem some time ago: in 1965 Morey and Brooke noted the potentially illusory intimacy of personal letters: ‘a kindly, diplomatic and charitable man like Peter the Venerable seems to be on terms of close friendship with everyone in Christendom’ .* And in 1972 Colin Morris, in comparing troubadour lovelyric with learned letters of the twelfth century, complained that modern readers have sometimes concluded that the monk was in love with his friend and the poet not in love with his lady.*4 There is of course an answer to this conundrum which was suggested by John Boswell in 1980: the monk was in love with his friend. Ever since then students of western monasticism and Latin epistolography have been trying to distance themselves from this view, even those who might be forgiven for feeling themselves to be above the debate.°© When Anselm writes to a friend
And so it is that because I am not able to have you with me, while I desire you and you me, I love you more not less.
For what is sweeter, what more pleasant, what is a greater consolation for love than love?5”
is it possible that he meant it, in terms of physical as well as spiritual love? A closer look raises certain problems: one is the promiscuous nature of his eloquent and poetic love-making. This is how he addressed two young relatives he had not yet met:
My eyes eagerly long to see your faces, most beloved; my arms stretch out to your embraces; my lips long for your kisses; whatever remain of my life desires your company, so that my soul’s joy may be full in time to come.
And if we follow through any of the friendships for which he was famous we find that he may have couched them in the language of love, but he seems more interested in the idea than the reality: with Gondulf and with Gilbert Crispin he is accused of coldness and a lack of concern for their feelings, a willingness to abandon them with a homily on caritas. This could be a shift of power within a relationship, but it looks far more like the vocabulary of love expressing a reality of acquaintanceship. When I compared his approach with a contemporary Byzantine writer, I decided that Theophylact was more concerned with an alethinos philos, but for Anselm what mattered was verus amor.>? This suggestion that Byzantines may have privileged the relationship over the concept is why I want to devote the last part of my paper to the detection of relationship in Byzantine letters with reference to the network I know best, that of Theophylact of Ochrid.
Statistics I take as my text this cautious advice:
{t will be obvious to thoughtful readers that a considerable problem in conducting an investigation of this kind is presented by the inevitable difficulty of assessing through the alembic of written sources a thousand or more years old the emotions, feelings and desires involved in human emotional relationships. Most English speakers will feel that they can recognise, intuitively, distinctions among feelings that might be characterised loosely as ‘erotic’, ‘friendly’, ‘fraternal’ or ‘parental’. In actual fact however such feelings are often confused both by the subject who experiences them and by the person to whom they are directed,
a fortiori, we might add, by over-confident historians. The cautious historian I quote is John Boswell in the brilliant first chapter of his last book, though it did not stop him proceeding by the end of the chapter to a particular interpretation of the word adelphos in a particular kind of source.® It is a difficult word: we know that non-kin uses the vocabulary of kinship®! and that in some authors adelphos can mean close friend. But it can also be used for cosons of a spiritual father, co-pupils of a teacher, and regularly, and as standard, for colleagues, particularly episcopal colleagues.® I believe we have to proceed systematically, making our criteria as clear as possible, recording always what is said in the sources: to guess at a problematic relationship elsewhere attested on the basis of a different kind of source is a recipe for disaster.®°
The first stage in the detection of relationship is to demonstrate acquaintanceship. With a letter-collection, anyone addressed (in Theophylact’s case sixty-three individuals) or referred to (in Theophylact’s case forty-six individuals) may be counted an acquaintance; other writings of the subject are then included (in Theophylact’s case eight and nine individuals respectively); certain other criteria (succession in post, family membership, reference together in narrative source) are also accepted to indicate acquaintanceship.
The next move is to establish on the basis of criteria like symmetry, duration, directional flow, and taxis the relative roles of the participants in the relationship, and then it can be seen whether relations are simplex or multiplex and a final relationship can be decided upon. So in Theophylact’s network we can detect one brother, two other family members, fourteen suffragans or other subordinates, eight senior churchmen, five metropolitans or suffragans of other metropolitans, nine patrons, ten clients, eight opponents, six contacts (instrumental friends in the anthropological literature), seven officials, six ex-colleagues, some relatives of ex-colleagues and teachers, forty persons whose role-relation to Theophylact is undefined; thirty of these are candidates for friendship. In this stage forms of address (despota, adelphe) are used to establish symmetry and role. In contrast Grassi appears to have had no problems in assigning roles to her correspondents: 41 per cent are non-family (lovers, friends); 34 per cent close family (parent/child, sibling, grand-parent/child) and 25 per cent wider family.
The next stage is to group these members in terms of intimacy. This is done by analogy with an anthropological method devised during the late 1960s by Jeremy Boissevain;® persons known directly to Theophylact are his first order zone (127); those known to them are his second order zone (40 from personal cell only) and so on. Persons mentioned by him in the letter-collection or in other sources are his nominal zone of the first order network; those whom he addresses without evidence of affect are his effective zone; those where there is some evidence of affect are his intimate zone and of these ten were selected as the closest, his personal cell. This method dovetails well with the intimacy zoning system used by Grassi and deriving from E.T. Hall:© intimate, personal, social and public distances.
But affect is itself a necessary stage of analysis and influences the zoning of the innermost zones above: how do we decide whether someone is a friend or just an acquaintance? There must be some positive evidence; to assume that anyone who is not a relative, a superordinate, a subordinate or any other defined relation must be a friend is to ignore the vast role of affect in many other personal relations in Byzantium, as well as in the theoretical literature.°” Symmetry is not essential for affect: there is no reason why a close relationship cannot be built up with a patron: indeed he or she may do a better job. (Nor is erotic charge ruled out in an asymmetrical relationship: compare Theophylact’s letter to Maria of Alania with accounts of cabinet members’ flirting with Margaret Thatcher in her heyday.®*) Evidence needs to be sifted with and without the forms of address, so as to avoid the danger of circular argument. What we find if we privilege affective forms of address is a few very close relationships, not perhaps enough to construct an ascending scale of affection,©’ but enough to see that Theophylact’s relationship with his brother Demetrios is the most valued (and there is some supporting evidence from the period”®), then with two young officials posted to Bulgaria, then one ex-pupil (others are used as contacts) and a fellow-bishop. Affective vocabulary in Michael Psellos’s much larger collection also seems to cluster in the young officials Weiss and Ahrweiler identified as ex-pupils.”! If we privilege the polish, delicacy and intricacy of the writing we arrive at a very similar result: a group of ex-pupils and young people Theophylact calls his ‘sons’. If we were to privilege discussions of philia and use of friendship topoi’? we would find a very different short-list;73 we can almost assume that if Theophylact talks of the law of love it is to someone he wishes to influence. The intimate correspondents who are addressed without forms seem to come in intimacy after those addressed with affective forms and before those addressed with taxis-indicators. So forms of address are crucial tools of analysis, but not perhaps in as straightforward a way as one might wish. Grassi found an unwillingness to use the word ‘love’: the same cannot be said for Theophylact and his contemporaries.
What remains to be detected is erotic charge. Intimacy, affect, eros and desire are closely interrelated in this literature and it is very difficult to disentangle them. The evidence for intimacy may be the complexity and level of allusion in the writing (shared allusions, jokes) and also the lack of ceremonial forms of address; the evidence for affect may be direct (use of endearments) or indirect (some kinds of gift-exchange, some kinds of visiting). The evidence of desire I have sketched may be evidence for affect and intimacy, but pothos is more an intensification of emotion than an emotion in itself, the result of an intense relationship in separation. I have to confess that in Theophylact’s network, or any of the twelfth-century networks, I have failed to detect for certain any specifically sexual erotic charge. Intimacy yes, a delight in and a desire for the other’s presence, yes, a light-hearted teasing and flirting with the young, an intense, even romantic love possibly, but I cannot identify anything more —- and I do not at this point know what possible criteria I could evolve for a textual relationship of this kind. Objectivity seems at a premium here, for we all carry our own sexuality into the texts that we read, and openness is the greatest desideratum.
But I am equally sure that this search for erotic charge is a valid and necessary process, as necessary as the analysis of symmetry or reciprocity or multiplicity. There are all kinds of reasons why we are reluctant to do it. One is the aspect of tabloid scholarship: does it really serve the aims of scholarship to put two medieval innuendoes together and come up with an affair (as I and others have done with Maria of Alania and Alexios Komnenos,”4 and with Michael Ill, Basil I and Eudokia Ingerina”>)? Sometimes the texts are clearer, as with that other triangular relationship of Zoe, Constantine and Skleraina.”° But it is interesting to note that the images of these triangles in the Madrid Skylitzes are far more concerned with taxis and validation than with romantic or erotic relationships: the marriage of Basil and Eudokia is sanctioned by the presence of Michael in full regalia; Constantine alone receives the opprobrium of the crowd while Skleraina is shown among, and indistinguishable from, the imperial women.” These interpretations deserve record as much as the phrasing of a chronicler or the more or less salacious imaginations of twentiethcentury scholars.
In view of the monotonously male gender profile of Byzantine letterwriters, we may also find ourselves, if we persist in this pursuit of the erotic, engaged in outrageous outing in the medieval world, and we would be wise to be wary of this approach. At its crudest, we learn that Ailred was gay, Anselm was straight — and on these grounds we are asked to rethink all their relationships.’® Perhaps the rehabilitation of Michael II] and Alexander has provided some immunity from homophobic whistle-blowing,”? but on the basis of Ailred, what about Symeon the New Theologian?®9 Does it make a difference when we have their letters, or when they are hailed as gay icons and sympathetic role-models? (We are unlikely, at any rate with the surviving evidence, to find equivalents in Kecharitomene or Bebaia Elpis to Judith Brown’s Renaissance nuns®! and reach female-female erotic pothos in Byzantium).®? After Foucault®? (and Goldberg)®+ we find this approach particularly difficult, and are suspicious of attempts to see through misrecognitions of the evidence to a ‘real’ sexual identity —- or even of a ‘real’ sexual practice.® This is why I have posed the problem not in terms of persons or practices but in terms of textual relationships and their erotic charge, not aiming to surprise real Byzantines in flagrante, but to catch the echoes of expressed emotion.
It may however be as crass, or insensitive, to fail to ask the question as to answer it too salaciously. We may then be screening out what was there (emending as it were ‘burglary’ for ‘buggery’®®). There are surely just as many problems with a determined unwillingness to ‘be a dirty old man [or woman)’ and read sex into romantic or spiritual relationships: Robert Brain’s otherwise dazzling command of the anthropological literature®” suffers from this unwillingness, which seems perverse: how can we know if David fancied (or had sex with) Jonathan? We are certainly not in a position to say that he did not. But a discourse of desire does not automatically mean a real-life passion.°8 With Byzantine texts also we are the prisoners of their generic concerns: in some we may see porneia, in others logismoi, in yet others pothos and the family of loves, each requiring a different persona. In crossing these boundaries as well as in other activities of interpretation we risk imposing our own sexuality — or ethical presuppositions — as much as any previous generation of scholars who may have regarded Sappho as a frustrated spinster.®° So are we reading in? Or are we screening out? As David Lodge might have put it, How far can we go?
The most potent criticisms of Boswell are those™ which accuse him of being an old-fashioned historian, in that his homoerotic readings in the last book failed to take account of the explosion of research over the last ten or fifteen years into gender studies, queer theory and the history of sex. Byzantine studies is only very slowly beginning to take note. But some of this recent work?! may help us to revise our own concepts of the erotic and to locate these largely male, close-knit, intimate networks of Byzantine letter-writers (and novelists) and their range of emotion and common values somewhere on a spectrum of male homosocial desire, in which eros, agape, philia and storge overlap and merge, intensified by pothos, in a pattern of multiplex relations we are only slowly beginning to understand.
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