Download PDF | The Letters Of Psellos Cultural Networks And Historical Realities, Oxford University Press ( 2017)
479 Pages
Preface
This volume consists of two uneven parts: a number of papers presented at a workshop dedicated to the correspondence of Michael Psellos, held in Oxford on 6-7 November 2010, and the summaries of all the letters of Michael Psellos compiled over many years of sustained research for the Prosopography of the Byzantine World project by Michael Jeffreys. The second part is obviously the most important one because it offers Byzantinists a shortcut into the often bewildering, and sometimes incomprehensible, letters of Michael Psellos; but it is hoped that the first part, too, may shed light on Psellos’ fascinating correspondence.
In an ideal world this volume would have come out after, not before Stratis Papaioannou’s forthcoming edition of the letters of Psellos; but as this world is far from ideal, we can only pray that this long-awaited edition will appear sooner rather than later. A negative result of our impatience in procuring this volume is that the studies and summaries refer to Psellos’ letters by what hopefully will soon become the old numbering. But the concordances in Papaioannou’s edition should solve this problem.
As this is the work of more than one person, readers will soon realize that there are disagreements between the various contributors. Disagreement is good: it is the lifeblood of true scholarship. In the case of Michael Psellos’ letters, where even the best Hellenists occasionally raise their hands in despair, pretending to know it all would be ridiculous. To quote my co-editor: “Few of those who have spent years reading Psellos are confident of getting him right: the writer of these summaries is not one of them’; neither am I.
If I have a concern, it is not disagreeing with my colleagues. Nor is it the precariousness of any interpretation in an author as difficult and elusive as Michael Psellos. It is that in an increasingly Greekless world fewer and fewer people are able to read this marvellous epistolographer in the original and understand why he deserves to be reckoned as one of the best stylists in the history of the Greek language. Psellos’ letters are, together with the Chronographia, his claim to immortality. Please read them. If you can’t, at least take the shortcut and read the summaries—and then, for heaven’s sake, learn Greek.
Marc Lauxtermann
Introduction
Marc D. Lauxtermann
Psellos was born in 1018 and died in 1078. From the decade of the 1040s until his death he was a public figure, a widely read writer on a vast array of subjects, with a role in government. Some modern commentators make his political role consistently dominant, an impression Psellos himself cultivates in the Chronographia, his major historical work. Other commentators (who will find some support in this book) claim that the extent of his power varied and was sometimes minimal. Both in outline and in detail his biography is contested in multiple ways. Nearly all the multifarious scraps of information available come from his own writings, but they are usually undated, frequently allusive, and often irreconcilable.’ Readers may be directed to the recent book by Stratis Papaioannou for an up-to-date summary of work on Psellos, with excellent bibliography; but they should be warned that although it offers splendid analyses in the literary and philosophical spheres, it is not meant to provide a systematic biography of Psellos.” We will see in what follows some of the reasons why writing such a biography is so problematic.
Psellos’ baptismal name was Constantine; his monk’s name, which he acquired in a curious monastic intermezzo on Mount Olympos, Michael. Mount Olympos is the one in Bithynia, across the Sea of Marmara—not the homonymous seat of the Olympian gods in Thessaly. Psellos was tonsured there in the monastery of Horaia Pege in late 1054 and, as a witty little poem tells us, left the place within less than a year:
“Oh lord Zeus, oh father Zeus, rod-bearer, bull-shaped braggart and loudthunderer, thou couldst not bear Olympus, not even for a year, because, father Zeus, thy goddesses were not there’.
The author of this witty lampoon is a certain Sabbaites, a monk whom Psellos in letter S 35 accuses of slandering not only himself and his son-in-law, but also the metropolitan of Amaseia (the recipient): the scoundrel even had the temerity to abuse the emperor and, worst of all, insult God. Likewise, in Psellos’ equally abusive reply to the lampoon, poem no. 21, we read that Sabbaites was in the habit of vehemently criticizing all and sundry, including the emperor and the patriarch. It is clear from the description that the maligned emperor and patriarch were Isaac I Komnenos (who abdicated in November 1059) and Constantine III Leichoudes (who assumed the patriarchate in February 1059), respectively:* so both the poem and the letter date from between February and November 1059, and it is reasonable to assume that Sabbaites’ lampoon which triggered the angry reaction, dates from the same period in Psellos’ life.
Most commentators (but not Floris Bernard) skip the first two lines and focus on the last two, with its witty equation of the Bithynian Olympos with the seat of the gods and of Psellos with Zeus, always lusting after his paramours. The emphasis is usually on the incompatibility of Hellenic philosophy and Christian asceticism: had Psellos only been sent off to that other Olympos, then things would have turned out quite differently!” Some have suggested that the goddesses are Empress Theodora and her dead sister Zoe; but there is little to substantiate this,° and Psellos does not seem to have been on good terms with Empress Theodora after his escape from the monastery.’ The first two lines make use of mock Homeric gibberish to underline the Zeus-like qualities of Michael Psellos, but also a vulgar hapax legomenon: Bakdéas, which clearly derives from Baxdov (Latin ‘baculum’), ‘stick’, ‘rod’—and though, apparently, a dirty mind is a joy forever, one does not need to have one to grasp the sexual connotation.
Sexual slurs are obviously very common in Byzantine invectives, and thus there would seem to be no reason to pay attention to Sabbaites’ description of Psellos as an oversexed satyr, were it not for a curious letter, KD 198, that appears to date from the same period as the lampoon because it refers to Psellos’ dignity as proedros of the senate (a title he acquired under Isaac Komnenos) and tells us that the great philosopher, on his perambulations through Constantinople, is forced to wear a monk’s frock.” Let me quote Michael Jeffreys’ excellent summary of the beginning of KD 198:
He told a lay friend he was not completely free of the leopard. The leopard was still running wild, not in foreign Assyria, but in Psellos’ usual haunts—the Academy and the Stoa (so to say), the palace, worse still his home, even his bed, cutting off all escape, roaring alarmingly and changing shape. If he had submitted to it, so as to tame it, it was ferocious enough to savage him in the middle of the city. Any sudden movement, even a conciliatory one, would have made things worse. It was making him a monk, having escaped from its keepers, but God via his correspondent brought him to safety, or he would have been totally exposed, not to its claws, but its slanders and dangerous innuendos.
What on earth is Psellos on about? Stratis Papaioannou, the future editor of the letters, assumes in his monograph that Psellos kept a leopard as a pet,'° which, given the ferocious nature of this feline, hardly seems likely; even if it was a cheetah (7dpéaArs can mean both), a more tractable animal that can be trained for hunting, it would still not be advisable to let it roam free.'! In my co-editor’s view, the letter should be read against the background of ‘the persecution Psellos suffered as he left the monastery’;'” but though there certainly is a touch of paranoia, I am not entirely convinced that the letter refers to widespread persecution rather than a one-person campaign of harassment.
Further on in the letter (225.21-226.10), the leopard miraculously morphs into another animal: now the creature pursuing Psellos right into his bed, is likened to a female snake, sloughing its skin and creeping inside ‘with naked and tender flesh’ and ‘attacking him in his buttocks and groin’. This snake has a male companion (a serpent named zapeias) who feels no jealousy at all, but permits her to engage in bacchic frenzies.'* In the final paragraph (at 226.19) Psellos explicitly calls her pursuit an ‘erotic game’, and in the middle part of the letter (at 225.13-17) he compares himself to the beautiful Joseph, tempted to sin by the adulterous wife of Potiphar. Psellos is being sexually beleaguered.
What are we to make of this? As Stratis Papaioannou has brilliantly shown in his monograph, Psellos loves to play with the concept of rhetorical gender, sometimes emphasizing his more ‘feminine’ side, sometimes declaring a huge interest in ‘female’ affairs, and sometimes engaging in a daring erotic discourse presenting himself as the object of desire.'* I do not think this is the case here. The erotic metaphors are too explicit, and the sexual innuendos too blunt and unsophisticated, to be brushed aside as another of Psellos’ forays into the minefield of rhetorical gender. Although he calls his own letter a maida Aoyxy, ‘an intellectual game’, and tells its recipient that it is meant to make him laugh (226.25-9), there is little reason to doubt that the épwrixy madid, the ‘erotic game’, to which he had been subjected and which he saw as harassment, was far from amusing to Psellos.
In short, I suspect that one of the ‘goddesses’ mentioned by Sabbaites in his lampoon is the leopard/snake forcing her unwelcome attentions on Psellos in letter KD 198. And whereas Sabbaites portrays him as a latter-day Zeus, in the letter Psellos assumes the role of Dionysus, riding his leopard and surrounded by maenads who reach bacchic frenzy point while holding a snake (the infamous zapeias) above their heads.
Where I find traces of erotic mischief, Michael Jeffreys senses an atmosphere of persecution and Stratis Papaioannou discovers an exotic pet. The letter consists of roughly 850 words, written in fairly artificial, but not incomprehensible Greek, decked with a number of literary allusions (not all of them spotted by the editors),'° brimming with stylistic creativity and narrative gusto, and very enjoyable to read. But although the text is relatively short, there are at least three different interpretations, and probably many more, for this letter alone. The same holds true for the other 515 letters, which, insofar as they have attracted attention, have generated a vast array of speculations and interpretations. Every reader creates his own Psellos.
There are broadly speaking three reasons why it is so difficult to pin the letters down to a single message. The first is the most obvious: the combination of historical distance and epistolographical intimacy—the fact that Psellos and his correspondents share inside knowledge and therefore take background information for granted, while we are unable to follow the colloquy on paper because we are not in the know and have an outsider’s perspective. Reading Psellos’ letters is like walking in on a conversation halfway through.
The second problem is that the generic conventions of Byzantine epistolography demand a certain degree of abstraction and literary finesse: “The letter was [...] expected to be highly polished and much worked-over, not yielding its secrets to a superficial reading. The recipient was ready to spend some time on it, decoding and appreciating it for all its virtues, discussing it with his friends’.'° It is precisely because of these arcane literary codes that the Byzantine letter has had a bad press in the past and is still generally overlooked by historians, who tend to view the genre as a vacuous, trivial pursuit, verbose and of little significance other than to keep the philologists occupied. In fact, many of Psellos’ letters may be regarded as documents: they do not have standard documentary forms, but they form part of real negotiations, as is assumed throughout this volume. Despite their obvious ‘literariness’, they have an immediate bearing on the lives of the persons and communities involved. Stratis Papaioannou, after intensive investigations, has found no evidence of an authorial edition of any letters'” that could have been designed to impose on them motivations different from those of their original moment of composition. This means that there has been no editorial tampering, at least not by Psellos, with the texts of his letters which read like originals.
The third reason why Psellos’ letters allow for multiple interpretations is his much-vaunted irony.'* In Chapter 6, Diether Roderich Reinsch discusses the use of irony in a number of letters to Leo Paraspondylos as well as his portrayal in Psellos’ Chronographia, rightly pointing out that, in the case of Psellos, one must always reckon with the possibility that he is not telling the whole truth, but is playing a literary game with the reader. The joke is really on those who take him at face value, ignoring all the signs that, as Reinsch puts it, shout out loud: “Watch out! Irony!’ The search for irony is complicated by Psellos’ insertion of unmarked quotations from others, particularly lines from letters previously exchanged with his current correspondents.
It is worth noting that Psellian irony has not only proved a stumbling block for modern scholars. Already in his own time it led to misunderstandings and accusations of dishonesty. In letter KD 229, for example, he reminds his good friend John Mauropous that, rather than taking him too literally, he should read between the lines and interpret his letters in the spirit in which they were intended. It is clear from the context that Mauropous felt let down by Psellos at a time of crisis and had accused him of betraying their friendship. Not at all, says Psellos: like Mauropous, he too had to ‘adapt himself’ to the changed circumstances (272.13-14). The term used here is cuppetaBéBAypar, which is related to a key term in Psellos’ vocabulary: peraBodn, ‘variation, change, adaptation’.
Whereas, in other writers, it denotes the skill of rhetorical variation, for Psellos it is more than just a literary guidance on how to write a poem, an essay, or a letter. In his view, it is a moral imperative for true philosophers to be flexible and versatile if they wish to better the societies they live in: moral firmness is admirable outside the domain of politics, but if one truly engages with this world, one has to adapt oneself constantly to changing circumstances, all the while sticking to one’s inner principles but without always appearing to do so.’* Psellos has often been accused of hypocrisy by posterity: his reply to the critics would probably have been that they fail to understand the virtue of adaptability and to acknowledge his lonely mission as a philosopher in unphilosophical times.
In the same letter, having stated that he adapts himself to changing circumstances, he frankly admits that ‘in my previous letters (to Mauropous) I have been feigning quite a lot (od« dXlya... cipwrvevoduevos), just as I often provoke my friends to a more genuine disposition (towards me) by pretending’ (272.14-16). Mauropous’ angry reaction seems to have surprised Psellos, or was that irony as well? But one does not have to be a Mauropodian to understand that all the feigning, dissembling, and pretending Psellos readily admits to was not exactly the basis for a solid friendship. And yet, despite all appearances, these two intellectuals continued to correspond down the years, from the 1030s when Psellos studied with Mauropous, until 1078, the year in which Psellos died.
Since Mauropous has left behind a collection of letters, some of which are addressed to Psellos, we are in the unique position of having access to both sides of the correspondence. We do not have the replies from any of Psellos’ other correspondents: his letters are mostly a one-way conversation. Even in the case of Mauropous, however, it is rare to find a direct exchange of letters: as I argue in Chapter 5, Psellos M 12 (=G 33) is a reply to Mauropous'’ letter 23, and the same goes for Psellos S 203, appropriately called an avréypappa (reply) to the preceding one, S 202, a letter from Mauropous that, curiously, ended up among the letters of Psellos. What we are left with are the fragments of a substantial correspondence that spanned more than forty years. There are so many gaps in our knowledge, and the bits and pieces of information that we do have are often so contradictory, that it is clearly impossible to reconstruct the various stages of their tumultuous friendship without a fair amount of imagination.
There is obviously nothing wrong with historical imagination as long as it is grounded in solid scholarship: without it, historians might as well shut up shop.”° In Chapter 4, Michael Jeffreys reconstructs the biography of Constantine, nephew of the patriarch Keroularios, an important member of the ruling class from the 1050s through to the late 1070s. Constantine hardly ever appears in Byzantine narrative sources, but he is well attested on lead seals, which allow us to follow his cursus honorum but do not give precise dates. The letters of Psellos to Constantine provide a possibility of putting flesh on the skeleton of his career and relating the changes in the titles and forms of address to major moments in the political history of mid- to late eleventhcentury Byzantium. The aim of my co-editor’s chapter, in his own words, is ‘to set parameters for discussing the changing dynamics of Byzantine political society and their impact on government’. Michael Jeffreys’ reconstruction of the course of events differs significantly from that of Wassiliou-Seibt.”’ Readers may decide for themselves which of these two reconstructions seems more plausible, but what I wish to stress here is the fact that the letters of Psellos easily lend themselves to alternative narratives and competing interpretations.
The other two contributions to this volume, by Floris Bernard and, once again, Michael Jeffreys, focus not on individual correspondents, but, more broadly, on Psellos’ social network and the ways in which he used it to further his personal interests. Networking in Byzantium finds its moral justification in the concept of guAia, ‘friendship’, the social and cultural ties that bind the ruling class together and keep others out.” The concept of guAca also establishes codes of civilized behaviour, not only in real life, but also on paper—and this is why Byzantine letters often seem both formal and formulaic. To quote the eminently quotable Margaret Mullett, “Ceremonial was involved in the intricate exchange of compliments, abstract forms of address and superlatives which reflected precisely the relationship of status and intimacy between correspondents’.”?
In Chapter 2, Floris Bernard discusses Psellos’ letters to teachers, fellow students, and former pupils and shows how he ‘used educational networks as efficient channels for mutual services’. It becomes clear from his analysis that Psellos advocated an ideal of intellectual giAva which, like other forms of social exclusion, served the interests of a small group of higher civil servants, either employed in the provinces as kritai or in the imperial administration. And it is also clear that, as the arch-intellectual, Psellos played a leading role in this educational network, establishing and maintaining contacts with fellow intellectuals over long periods of time. One of the main themes in his letters is mutual assistance: he repeatedly asks for favours, either for himself or others, in return for services rendered to his correspondents when they were studying with him. Michael Jeffreys’ study of the letters that deal with monasteries and the monastic life, in Chapter 3, illustrates this very well because many of the requests Psellos makes to his former students, especially if they are serving in the provinces, relate either to the financial management of the monasteries of which he was in charge as charistikarios, or to possible acquisitions of new ones. It is manifestly clear from the letters that it is the system of charistike that keeps the great philosopher financially afloat.
It is also clear that, however much Psellos may have hated his stay on Mount Olympos, monasticism retained a strong pull: he keeps returning to the subject in his letters, to the point where it becomes obsessive and even slightly perverse. In letters KD 59, KD 141, and KD 30, for instance, he tells the great general Katakalon Kekaumenos who had become a monk and had asked for the arrears of his pay as kouropalates, that he should be grateful that the emperor of this world had withheld his salary because it would be repaid many times over in the next. Irony is never far away in his ‘monastic’ letters. The problem is, however, that irony masks and unmasks at the same time. It is like a double bluff: making fun of monasticism by saying that it is so wonderful may conceal the fact that the speaker deep down really does think it is wonderful. In his analysis of the ‘monastic’ corpus, Michael Jeffreys discusses three letters (S 1, S 83, S 84) that deal with the wedding of Constantine, the nephew of Keroularios, in c.1073. In these letters we read that Psellos as a philosopher and a monk was initially reluctant to attend the wedding ceremony, but once persuaded to take part in it, thoroughly enjoyed it because it was such a philosophical event. He is eager to show his competence in wedding customs, but also eager to keep his distance from worldly frivolities as a philosopher/monk (giAdcogos can mean both). What are we to make of this? Does he or does he not like to listen to bawdy songs, get pelted with apples and roses, and attend the wedding banquet? Watch out! Irony works both ways!
The ambiguities of Psellos’ prose should not stop historians from using it to their advantage. As Michael Jeffreys’ Summaries show (see Part II), Psellos’ letters are a truly marvellous source of information on political events, the court, civil administration, the provinces, monasteries, the charistike system, dignities and offices, prosopography in general, the educational system, social codes, religious beliefs, customs, popular culture, and so on and so forth. The only excuse for why the letters of Psellos have not yet been fully exploited (except by our colleagues across the channel: Gautier, Lemerle, Cheynet), is that the Greek is difficult, and sometimes incomprehensible. The Summaries constitute a quantum leap in our understanding of Psellos’ letters: suddenly what seemed abstruse and impenetrable is within reach of us all, ready to be used without further discussion, where appropriate, or amended where summaries have proved unequal to Psellos’ intricacies.
Use the Summaries, but use them wisely. Their primary purpose is as a guide preceding serious research for those who find Psellos difficult (and how many will place themselves outside this category?). They will help readers select the letters from among the 516 that they need to study in full and in the original Greek. The Summaries are far from being the last word on the letters to which they correspond, as indeed are the Studies in this volume (Part I). As I have argued throughout this introduction, Psellos’ prose is deliberately ambiguous, tongue-in-cheek, and ironic; there is always a hidden twist somewhere, serving as stimulus for any number of interpretations. Whatever interpretation one favours, one has to recognize this fluidity of meaning. Psellos loves to confuse his readers.
All the contributions to this volume contain one or more letters in translation at the end. They give full, explicit support to the articles to which they are appended. But another reason why my co-editor and I insisted on having these translations is that they at least convey an inkling of the sublime beauty of Psellos’ letters. Psellos is a master of the art of epistolography. The Byzantines loved reading their Psellos, and they were right. His letters are immensely enjoyable. That is why so many have survived: 516 in total, scattered over various collections.** It also explains why the anonymous mid-thirteenth-century author of the treatise ‘On the Four Parts of Perfect Speech’ recommends Psellos (together with Gregory of Nazianzos, Libanios, Synesios, and other late antique authors) as the ultimate model for letter writing: as he explains, “These days if you want to be successful, you have to combine rhetoric and philosophy in your writings: if your only aim is to be an accomplished rhetor, they will dub you a second-rate author; on the other hand, if you are a bit too philosophical, your writings will appear dry and out of touch with modernity. So you are advised to do both. For examples of authors combining both virtues, see [...] the essays and letters of Psellos’.
One can accuse Psellos of many things, but not of being dry and out of touch with real life—still less of being a second-rate author. He never bores his readers, he never disappoints. While his Chronographia is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece, the essays and letters mentioned by our thirteenthcentury colleague have yet to receive the modern readership they so richly deserve. It is time to change this.
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