Download PDF | Power and Subversion in Byzantium Papers from the 43rd Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 2010.
318 Pages
Contributors
Margaret Alexiou researched Greek laments from diverse ages and genres, with fieldwork in the villages of Thessaly and Epiros. She taught Byzantine and Modern Greek at Birmingham (1964-85), and at Harvard as George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature (1986-2001). Major publications: The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974; 2nd edn and Greek trans., 2002); and After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (2002); current projects include translation and commentary on the twelfth-century Byzantine Ptochoprodromic poems.
Athanasios Angelou taught Byzantine Literature at King’s College and Royal Holloway, London, and is now Dean of the Arts Faculty, University of Ioannina. He has published Nicholas of Methone’s Refutation of Proclus and the Dialogue with Helena Kantacouzena by Manuel II Palaiologos. Articles include ‘“Who Am I?” Scholarios’ Answers and the Hellenic Identity’ and ‘Rhetoric and History: the Case of Niketas Choniates’. He has been Artistic Director of events of Byzantine and Middle Eastern music in London, Venice, Brussels and Athens.
Dimiter Angelov is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Birmingham. His research interests lie in the political and intellectual history of the late Byzantine empire. His publications include Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204-1330 (2007). He has edited Church and Society in Late Byzantium (2009) and Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space (2013). He is currently completing a biography of the Byzantine emperor and philosopher Theodore II Laskaris.
Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the editor of Eastern Christianity (Cambridge History of Christianity V).
Bérje Bydén is a Senior Researcher in the Aristotelian Tradition at the University of Gothenburg. He has written a book and numerous papers and articles on various aspects of ancient and Byzantine philosophy. He is also the co-editor (with Katerina Ierodiakonou) of The Many Faces of Byzantine Philosophy (Athens, 2012).
Antony Eastmond is A.G. Leventis Reader in the History of Byzantine Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He is currently working
From Power and Subversion in Byzantium, ed. Dimiter Angelov and Michael Saxby. Copyright © 2013 by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.
on a book on women and art as diplomatic commodities in the thirteenth century.
Liz James is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex.
Anthony Kaldellis is a Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. He has published extensively on many aspects of Byzantine history, culture and literature, including the Byzantine historians, the reception of the classical tradition, and translations of Byzantine authors. His most recent books include Hellenism in Byzantium (2007), The Christian Parthenon (2007) and he is about to publish Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature (forthcoming).
Dimitris Krallis teaches history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. His first book, Michael Attaleiates and the Politics of Imperial Decline in EleventhCentury Byzantium, examines the uses of history and historiography in the context of eleventh-century political and cultural debates. Recently, with Professor Anthony Kaldellis, he translated the History of Michael Attaleiates into English for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series. He plans to keep working on Byzantine intellectual and political culture.
Demetrios Kyritses is Assistant Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Crete. He is mainly interested in the social, institutional and economic history of the middle and late Byzantine period. His research interests include the aristocracy, the agricultural economy, and cities. Currently he is researching the evolution of collective decision-making mechanisms in Byzantium.
Paul Magdalino studied at Oxford and from 1977 to 2009 taught at the University of St Andrews. He is currently Professor in the Department of Archaeology and the History of Art at Kog University, Istanbul. His extensive publications on medieval Byzantine history include The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143-80 (Cambridge 1993), L’Orthodoxie des astrologues (Paris 2006) and Studies in the History and Topography of Medieval Constantinople (Aldershot 2007).
Maria Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the contacts between Byzantium and the Arabs, the medieval reception of ancient Greek learning in the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds, and the history of Byzantine science.
Cécile Morrisson is Director of Research Emerita at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris) and Adviser in Byzantine Numismatics, Dumbarton Oaks. She is a corresponding member of national academies in France, USA and Greece. She has written on Byzantine coins and monetary history, and published with A. Laiou The Byzantine Economy (2007). She edited Le monde byzantin I: L’empire romain d’Orient (330-641) (2004), and with A. Laiou, its third volume: Byzance et ses voisins (1203-1453) (2011), as well as Trade and Markets in Byzantium (2012).
Margaret Mullett is Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
Vasiliki Penna, D.Phil. (Oxon.), is an Associate Professor at the University of the Peloponnese and has worked previously in the Hellenic Ministry of Culture for 23 years. Her research and teaching focus on numismatics and the economic history of Byzantium, historical geography and prosopography, and the history of money. She has organized exhibitions in Athens, Thessalonike, Washington DC, Vienna and Geneva. She has published a SNG volume, 3 monographs and over 50 articles in scientific journals.
Kostis Smyrlis is Associate Professor at the History Department of New York University. He is the author of La fortune des grands monastéres byzantins, fin du Xe-milieu du XIVe siécle (Paris 2006) and co-editor of Actes de Vatopédi, de 1330 a 1376 (Paris 2006). His current research interests include the examination of the Byzantine taxation system and state finances from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.
1. Power and subversion in Byzantium: approaches and frameworks
Dimiter G. Angelov™
In 1982 Alexander Kazhdan wrote, ‘Under the flattering and coaxing surface of their writings they [the Byzantine intellectuals] concealed an ability to express candid ideas and opinions, to defend their friends, and to criticize not only single representatives of the imperial power but also the very essence of Byzantine autocracy. The history of Byzantine intellectual opposition has yet to be written’.’ The opposition to authority to which Kazhdan referred is subtle and judiciously crafted. It is the challenge of the critical and sceptical thinker inducted into a system dominated by coercive power —- a challenge different from popular heresy, such as neo-Manichaeism, whose millennial history in Byzantium was much studied by 1982. This intellectual attitude situated by Kazhdan under the rubric of ‘the ambivalence of reality’ has come to be viewed since as a characteristic of subversion in Byzantium.
Numerous studies over the last 30 years have illuminated the nonconformist actions and critical writings of Byzantine political figures, historians, philosophers, satirists, poets and others. The ‘discovery of subversion’ in Byzantine studies has been a sign of broadening methodological horizons and represents a reaction (one among many) against stereotypical and essentialist interpretations. Characteristics commonly attributed to Byzantine civilization are preoccupation with orthodoxy and order (taxis), infatuation with tradition and canon, and autocratic politics. A complex reality lurks behind these characterizations which are, to varying degrees, justifiable above and beyond the essentialist view. As an analytical concept, subversion helps to qualify and modify the picture.
The investigation of dissident activities, attitudes and writings in Byzantium has understandably taken place in different disciplines and led to different approaches. In the year when Kazhdan steered Byzantinists toward uncharted territories, Margaret Alexiou pioneered the study of subversion in Byzantine literature. In her work since 1982 she has consistently drawn attention to intertextual irony, subversive play with figures of authority, and erosion of cultural values in vernacular and high-register works composed in the twelfth century (the Ptochoprodromic poems and the Timarion).’ In 1983 Paul Magdalino followed Hans-Georg Beck in investigating a current of Kaiserkritik based on republican ideas and demonstrated vigorous intellectual resistance to authoritarianism in twelfth-century political thought and imagination.’ In more recent years subversion has become a vogue word without any sign of interest subsiding. Scholars have analysed the social logic of rebellions and usurpations;* have paid attention to the subversive tendencies of saints’ cults; have undertaken analysis of Michael Psellos, Byzantium’s arguably most complex author, in order to tease out subversion of the Christian faith; have studied the subversion of social values and genre of Byzantine apocalypses;’ and have even seen in subversion (understood as fomenting desertion and turmoil behind enemy lines) an operational code of the grand strategy of the Byzantine empire.* A little-known and attractive side of Byzantine political and literary culture has thus been uncovered: its capacities for critique and play with authority, rules and traditions. Yet subversion has remained an elusive concept. Its adoption as analytical category has generally not been accompanied by interdisciplinary dialogue and sufficient interrogation of its dichotomy with authority. All this is an ambitious task that we are still not equipped to carry out fully, at least not until the production of further studies on key authors and periods. The chapters in this collected volume contribute to framing the significance of subversion in individual disciplines of Byzantine studies and raise questions of wider importance. This introductory chapter gives an opportunity to the symposiarch to draw together salient interpretations and offer further thoughts. But at first, abasic and still unanswered question can set the stage for the discussions in this volume: did the Byzantines have a word for subversion?
Lexical observations
Subversion derives from the Latin subverto, a verb meaning ‘to overturn’ and ‘to cause to topple over from pressure from below or at the base’. The sense of toppling from underneath has engendered a metaphorical meaning, one which persists in English, ‘to cause to downfall, especially by insidious and underhand means’.’ The Oxford English Dictionary (in its second 1989 edition) demonstrates that the word has a long history of political usage; the expressions ‘subversion of law of the land’ and ‘manifested subversion of the truth of God’ are attested in 1399 and 1502. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (1961) features definitions, such as ‘to overthrow from the foundation’ or ‘bring to nothing, especially by insidious undermining’, while the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (eleventh 2003 edition) aligns the definition of subversion with clandestine activities reminiscent of the Cold War: ‘a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system by persons working secretly from within’. The distinctiveness of subversion as a form of opposition to authority lies in the combination of drastic goals and subtle methods.
The Byzantine vocabulary for subversion must, therefore, be sought beyond the usual words for usurpation and rebellion (e.g. tugavvic, OTAOIG, AVTAQOIA, VEWTEQLOLLOS Or ATIOOTACIA). A number of lexical choices in high-register prose convey ideas of underhand activity against authority, even though no word is the exact etymological counterpart of subverto. The phraseology can be traced with the help of the TLG and can demonstrate practices that were deemed subversive in Byzantium. To begin with, Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary based on classical usage renders subversive as AvateeTttucdc; it follows that avateomn might the Greek word for subversion.’ In the Synodikon of Orthodoxy cvateort indeed refers to heretics subverting Christian doctrine.’ But avateo7n’s other meanings unrelated to subversion predominate: annulment of a law or anynotarial provision related to property holding; refutation (notably including orthodox rebuttal of heresy);” and ruin.”
Closer to connoting subversion are words formed with the prefix U7t6, which instils a sense of underhandedness. Such are UmooxeAiCw (‘to trip up’, ‘to overthrow’, Lampe), UmtotQgéxw (‘to insinuate oneself into anyone’s good graces’, ‘to trip up’, LSJ), and Unomotovpat (‘to gain by underhand tricks, win by intrigue’, LSJ)."* Dimitris Krallis calls attention in this volume to UTtopL8vEiCw (‘to whisper softly’, LSJ), which the twelfth-century dialogue Timarion employs to refer to the clandestine circulation of rumours regarding the family origins of the Thessalonican governor. The overwhelming majority of the approximately 130 TLG hits for UmowiOveiCw are in authors after the eleventh century: the verb applies to the dissemination of rumours about an impending change in government," refers to covert criticism of an emperor and subversive prophecies abound the end of his reign,’® and is used in the contexts of political disturbances and evil gossip circulated by the emperor's detractors.” The rarer word UmotovOogvCw (‘to murmur in an undertone’, LSJ) conveys the impression of discreet complaint or criticism concerning a figure of authority."
But the word which combines most of the semantics of subversion seems to be UmogUttw. It means literally ‘dig under’ and metaphorically ‘undermine’, being composed morphologically in a way similar with the latter word (LSJ, with references to the metaphoric usage in Plutarch and Lucian). The TLG hits are in excess of 200 and mostly to authors after the fourth century AD.” The range of the verb’s meanings expanded in the Byzantine Middle Ages and included ‘deceive’, ‘subvert’ and ‘plot subversively’. In his Homeric commentaries Eustathios of Thessalonike considered it necessary to explain the metaphorical meaning of the word by referring to the ancient poet. He glosses broguttw as a synonym of doAtevourat (‘behave treacherously toward’, ‘use wiles’, Lampe) and connects its semantics to the verse ‘sowing murder and death’ (Odyssey, 2.165: Povov Kai Kknea mutEevEt), explaining that those who sow or plant (ot cutevovtec) resemble the people engaged in the activity signified by the verb UmogUttetv, presumably turning over the soil.”
Eleventh- and twelfth-century historians use the verb in the context of heresy and the subversion of political authority. Anna Komnene writes that the priest Blachernites, whom she describes as a Messalian heretic, was ‘undermining great houses in the capital and transmitting his evil doctrines’ during the reign of her father Alexios I (1081-1118). After the latter's intervention Blachernites was defrocked and anathematized.?! Michael Psellos admits in the Chronographia that he ‘knew the subversive designs’ of the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (1068-71), who felt contempt for the empress Eudokia and his officials. In a scriptural exegesis Psellos employs the word to refer to the biblical king David ‘undermining the marriages of others’ - an allusion to David’s sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah.”
In other historical works UmogUttw takes as direct object é7fovAai, that is, plots and machinations against authority.” The fourteenth-century historian Gregoras has a penchant for the expression UmogUtTtEtv TAs aKodc (‘deceive the ears’) used in descriptions of intrigues during the fourteenth-century civil wars.”
Rhetorical theory makes use of the verb Unogvttw to refer to a calculated strategy of the orator. The chief theoretician of Byzantine rhetoric Hermogenes notes in On Ideas that a truly forceful style can result from simple and artless diction that appears to ‘undermine somehow’ the constructed discourse. The rhetorical subversion described here is intricate: it is a deceptive self-subversion serving to enhance the persuasiveness of the speaker.** The emperor, too, was conceived as able to deceive and subvert his political opponents. Describing events in August 1258 immediately after the death of the emperor Theodore II Laskaris, Pachymeres constructs a speech given by the regent, the soon-to-be-assassinated George Mouzalon, before aristocrats and office holders. According to Mouzalon’s assuaging words, the child-emperor John IV Laskaris would not be able to follow the high-handed policies of his father Theodore aimed against a section of the aristocracy and ‘devise anything subversive (undév Umoguttetv) with respect to the affairs of the subjects’.*° As Michael Angold shows in this volume, erosion of the position of the emperor’s opponents was an essential political art in the first half of the fifteenth century.
Frameworks of subversion
The lexical survey is brief and preliminary, but it clearly shows that subversion was a Byzantine word - or rather a number of possible words starting with the prefix W706 that carry nuances of covert and subtle challenge to authority. The excursus on lexicography can inform modern frameworks of analysis. Subversion is a challenge from the inside; it differs with its subtle methods from invective or openly expressed critique. In other words, not every critique is subversive. Strategies of subversion have also emerged: subversion of authority from below, as is expected, but also subversion issuing from imperial circles aimed at other loci of power and subversive bluffing that furthers the ultimate goals of the discursive authority.
In theory, a breeding ground for subversion can be sought in any milieu ordered through, or merely featuring, norms and authority. Subversion thus covers a wide ground: politics, religion, morality, the world of literary and artistic representation, to name only a few milieus. To pin down a potentially unwieldy concept, an initial typology of subversion in Byzantium can give us a sense of orientation. The chapters in this volume themselves suggest typological and classificatory criteria, such as the end goal of subversion, the nature of the power being eroded and the strategies employed.
The differentiation proposed by Anthony Eastmond between mere criticism and subversion as fundamental overturning of the established order is one based on the goals (explicit or implicit) of the challenge.” The difference is evident in the critique of the emperor by Byzantine historians. Much of this critique has been shown to employ the conventional image of the ideal ruler as yardstick for assessment. Such criticism does not revise the ideological language of authority and, rather than overturning the established order, assumes its eventual restoration with a new emperor in power.” A functionalist perspective can therefore be illuminating. At the same time, teleology should not restrict the analytical scope of subversion. Subversion is an end as much as a method that involves craft and artifice. Criticism is an integral part of political subversion. The strictly functionalist approach is useful as far as it distinguishes between relatively moderate and more extreme forms of subversion, between what I would call pointed and systemic subversion. Pointed subversion is mostly ad personam and can also target a normative value, discourse and tradition. Such concentrated attack does not threaten the continual functioning of a system; it chips away at only one of its non-essential elements and can, in fact, reaffirm the system, as we have just seen. By contrast, systemic subversion has the potential of introducing a radical transformation; it operates at a deeper level and targets the core or root of the system. A precondition for distinguishing between the two functionalist types of subversion is our knowledge of the configuration and operation of norms at a particular historical period. Systemic subversion might entail pointed attack or criticism; but what differentiates it from pointed subversion is that the challenge is not contained and can change the entire configuration of norms or authority. The difference between pointed and systemic subversion comes close to that between power and legitimacy, or power and authority, but does not correspond fully to it. Systemic subversion must operate at the level of legitimacy and ideology. Pointed subversion can operate at this level, yet without any broader significance for the eroding the system at large.
Classifying subversion in terms of types of norms and authority understandably leads to the confines of individual disciplines; it also shows the necessity of crossing disciplinary boundaries. In the Byzantine context the target of subversion can vary widely: the authority of an emperor, institution and social group; the enforced dominance of a religious doctrine; or the prominence of any cultural value, power discourse and normative convention. The most common plane where the volume identifies the working of subversion is the political sphere (chapters by Penna and Morrisson, Kaldellis, Kyritses, Smyrlis, Angold, Eastmond, Magdalino, Mullet, and Angelou). Another sphere is that of artistic norms, whether or not they pertain to a political message. Here the stress is laid particularly on the limits, or absence altogether, of systemic subversion (Penna and Morrisson, James, and Eastmond). The subversion of Christian values and the Christian establishment is a yet another theme (treated by Krallis and, with a different line of interpretation, by Mavroudi). One area in which this volume demonstrates in particular the need for transcending disciplinary boundaries is the close connection between text and subversion. The construction of subversion is analysed within the framework of a single literary work (Krallis and Angelou) and a single type of literary discourse, encomium (Mullett). But most chapters engage in textual reading in order to transcend the text and understand subversion in the worlds of action and ideas. They reconstruct aspects of the political praxis of subversion (Kaldellis, Angold and Angelou), unveil the nature of the subversive messages in politics and philosophy (Magdalino, Krallis, Krausmtiller and Mavroudi), and demonstrate the limitations of subversion in relation to religion and normative morality (Mavroudi and Angelou).
A summary of the chapters demonstrates the diverse subversive strategies employed in Byzantium. The political landscape in Byzantium was one of permanent revolution’, to use Theodor Mommsen’s catchy phrase; 205 rebellions and disturbances against authority are known from the period between 963 and 1204, of which around 21 per cent led to the elevation of a usurping emperor.” Numismatic iconography demonstrates how successful usurpers used visual propaganda in order to differentiate themselves from immediate predecessors on the throne. The coin iconography of usurpers generally followed the visual language of the imperial ideal, but in exceptional late Roman cases the political message undermined the core principles of Constantine’s empire and bordered on systemic subversion. The western usurper Magnentius (350-53) inscribed the legend of ‘freedom of the Romans’ on his coins and had himself depicted with a bare-headed bust evoking the ideal of the Roman republic, a radicalism only partly tempered by the inclusion of the Chi-Rho symbol on his coinage. By contrast, Julian (361-3), his relative Procopius (365-6) and the western usurper Eugenius (392-4) were portrayed with a philosopher’s beard on numismatic issues in order to signal pagan sympathies.’ Coin iconography shows the importance imperial authority assigned to its public image. But looking from the bottom up, one can notice that the opinion of the populace in Constantinople (‘public opinion’) mattered too for the stability and smooth exercise of imperial authority; it played an especially significant role at times of power transition. Intriguing questions about the political sphere in Byzantium thus arise.*!
The limits of autocracy and the ever-present possibility of subversion manifested themselves in the methods of imperial governance. The imperial council (a quasi-institution different from the group of senatorial court titleholders and with continuity between the eleventh and the fourteenth century) curbed the arbitrariness of decision-making, but was also an instrument of imperial political control.” The massive concessions of fiscal privilege were a distinctive tool of governance during the reign of Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282-1328). The policy of tax-exemptions undermined the resources and effectiveness of imperial military policy in the fateful period of the Turkish conquest of most of Byzantine Asia Minor, but served at the same time as an effective power tool that attracted support for Andronikos II’s contested regime and enabled him, against the odds, to become one of the longest ruling emperors.* In the early fifteenth century the Palaiologoi could rely on insignificant economic resources. Successful governance now meant ‘exploiting and accommodating a range of discordant interests’ — an interpretation that emerges from the satires Mazaris and Katablattas as well as the political behaviour of leading figures. Character assassination was common and carried out with the approval of the emperor as, for example, when supporters of the imperial line booed the anti-unionist Markos Eugenikos during a session of the Council of Ferrara-Florence.™
Subversion in Byzantine art is considered to be a slippery subject, whose methodological difficulties are partly shared with the study of texts. ‘So much depends’, Liz James remarks, ‘on intention and perception, the intentions of the artists and patrons, the perceptions of the audience and what they choose or expect to see’. The question of intentionality is brought into sharp focus in the analysis of political art (understood as public images of officials and rulers). Could such political art be subversive? Antony Eastmond argues that it did not - and furthermore could not - subvert the ideology of power and engage in systemic subversion, even though other types of images commented critically on people and events. It was the meaning of political art that was interpreted subversively.* A comparison between the amount of surviving images and texts critical of authority, Liz James observes, shows a quantitative imbalance. A visual invective against the emperor — the artistic equivalent of Procopius’ Secret History — has not come down to us, if such existed at all. The playful and sometimes indecent world of the tenth-century Veroli Casket (Figure 7.1 and 7.2) is an ‘alternative unreal world set tangentially in a version of classical mythology’, not an artistically or socially subversive world.*
Scholars working with texts are more prone to detect subversive criticism. The contributions to this volume in the fields of literature and philosophy cover a wide range of topics, such as the association of literary genres with political subversion, the nature of the subversive messages, the manner of their articulation and communication, and their reception and function within specific circles. Political subversion may not have been the main goal of the patriography of Constantinople, which often presents the imperial city as an ‘eschatological theme park’, but both the Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai and the Patria are subversive insofar as they tell ‘the story of Constantinople from the point of view of statues, philosophers and factions’. By contrast, the genre of apocalyptic prophecy carries messages of political insubordination. It undermined the authority of emperors, was capable of serving as pamphlet literature of rebellion, and was subversive of the imperialism of both Rome and Constantinople by assigning Jerusalem a special role in political eschatology (the legend of the last Roman emperor).*” Literary subversion worked its way in one of the most common and widely taught modes of writing in Byzantium, the laudatory or encomiastic. As is well known, encomium influenced hagiography, historiography and many other genres of Byzantine literature. Scholars have increasingly noted in recent years that texts fashioned as laudations could contain tactful and carefully crafted criticism. The laudator in Byzantium had at its disposal an array of tools to subvert the laudandus. The tools ranged from composing an encomium suspiciously close to a textbook one to making significant omissions and substitutions to using inappropriate comparisons and descriptions borrowed from other genres.**
A new treading of the Timarion shows how profoundly this work can be seen as challenging the Komnenian political and religious establishment (an act of systemic subversion). Not least intriguing is the interpretation of an important message of the satiric dialogue: dissimulation was a way of survival of contemporary intellectuals.” The Histories of the ex-emperor John VI Kantakouzenos (r.1341-54), with their notable abundance of speeches and focus on two major civil wars and other internecine conflicts, can be read as an ongoing discourse on subversion. The characters constantly accuse themselves of subverting authority and act duplicitously, an individual conduct which Kantakouzenos presents positively if it furthers the public interest. The Histories delineate non-crossable boundaries for subversion and envisage norms to be cherished: the legitimate imperial hierarchy, the common good (as interpreted by Kantakouzenos), and a moral code in which friendship and ‘magnanimity’ (ueyadowvx ta) play the most important role.”
A sweeping examination of anti-Aristotelianism in late antiquity and Byzantium highlights the diverse trends in the history of Byzantine philosophy. The anti-Aristotelian arguments were Platonist and early Christian in origin. The two branches converge in the philosophical writings of Psellos, but the intensification of anti-Aristotelian critique in the fourteenth and the fifteenth century did not depend on Psellos. The radicalized anti-Aristotelianism influenced Greek scholars, such as George Gemistos Pletho and Bessarion, whose ideas entered the intellectual world of fifteenth-century Italy in a period when Aristotle’s philosophical authority in the West was challenged. Byzantine anti-Aristotelianism and Western philosophy were related in another way too. Growing acquaintance with High Scholasticism and the philosophical dominance of Aristotle in the West prompted late Byzantine philosophers to embark on proving their ‘cultural superiority’ and ‘privileged access’ to the sources of ancient philosophy, as they preferred to stress those ‘parts of the tradition with which the Westerners were not conversant’. In other words, the late Byzantine critique of Aristotle was partly motivated by concerns of cultural identity.*t The examination of the subversiveness of Pletho and his reception in the Islamic world shows similar concerns of identity. Pletho’s ‘pagan’ ideas in the Book of Laws parallel fifteenth-century cultural preoccupations in neighbouring civilizations: the search for a single purified religion among Muslim mystics and the competing definitions of Christianity during the Italian Renaissance and the pre-Reformation. The Arabic translation of Pletho at the court of Mehmed the Conqueror stands out for the interest of the Ottoman milieu in theurgic magic and fits into the context of the Neoplatonic strand in Islamic philosophy. One should not see the translation automatically as a vehicle for dissidence and subversion. Like Sufism, Pletho’s ideas could serve the authorities and the intellectual elite aligned with them, or could become subversive in the hands of charismatic religious figures.” Subversion, Maria Mavroudi points out, is not ‘teleologically encoded in the DNA of ideas’ — a further reminder of the important role played by context and authorial intentionality for the detection of subversive meaning.
Future directions
This volume as a whole confirms and enriches the picture of a pervasive cultural tendency in Byzantium for play with authority and tradition. A new angle of approach looks at subversion as a power game played out among multiple loci of authority beyond the emperor, such as church factions and aristocratic groups. Emperors undermined, in coercive but also in more subtle ways, the position of their opponents and emerge as statesmen engaged in Realpolitik rather than as all-powerful autocrats. The focus on strategies and tools employed in literary subversion is another novel approach with much potential for further study. The volume urges caution on several occasions against hasty assumptions in the detection of subversion. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the most vexed question concerns the intentionality of subversive messages in texts and art objects. In the absence of sufficient sources on authorial or artistic intention and subsequent reception, it is methodological considerations that are often of key importance. As Margaret Alexiou notes in the Afterword with regard to literature, authors such as Romanos Melodos in his moving laments hardly had subversive intentions in mind. It was the ambivalence of texts loaded with meanings and registers, ambivalences accentuated and enriched in performances and dialogues, that raised subversive doubts. In other words, subversive meaning could be one among many meanings, and it could be discovered and even invented in the process of reception. Deviancy from norms could occur without the conscious intention by an author or an artist to undermine, disparage and overturn norms. Furthermore, there is evidence of considerable tolerance toward norm-breaking in specific contexts and settings (discursive, temporal and spatial). Two examples of tolerated deviancy — the first drawn from the Byzantine countryside of the twelfth century and the second from the Constantinopolitan court in the same period — can be instructive.
In his twelfth-century commentaries on the canons Theodore Balsamon describes folk customs outside Constantinople. One of them, the Rosalia, is a pre-Christian annual feast for the dead after Easter that survives in the Balkans until the present day.** Balsamon dismisses such popular practices as a ‘bad habit’ or ‘long tradition’, but leaves the distinct impression that they were allowed to continue because they did not pose a significant threat to the established order. This tolerance contrasts to the persecutions carried out in Constantinople during the twelfth century against highly educated and powerfully positioned individuals, relatively few in number, whose ideas were seen as running against orthodox doctrine and subverting the establishment. More remarkably perhaps, the court culture of literary performance could accommodate critical voices. Alexiou concludes in her study of the performative aspects of the twelfth-century Ptochoprodromic poems that the emperors ‘enjoyed a little slapstick and coarse humor, even if they were sometimes themselves the indirect targets’.“ The gist of this observation is valid also for court panegyrics composed in high-register Greek. Notes of criticisms in imperial encomia have been identified in works composed from late antiquity until late Byzantium.*
Why would performances raising subversive doubt be tolerated in the halls of the palace? It is perhaps possible to detect here ‘contained subversion’ of the kind Stephen Greenblatt has identified in some of Shakespeare’s historical dramas. The subversive message is ‘contained by the power it would appear to threaten’, partly because the literary form is an expression of Elizabethan power.” The recitation of panegyrics was related to the ceremonial celebration of the persona of the Byzantine emperor and expressed a relationship of patronage and dependence. In this context safe difference of opinion was permissible, without ever being endorsed. At the same time, as Alexiou has proposed on the basis of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, popular culture may have influenced the climate of theatricality at the court.” In a description precious for its rarity Balsamon mentions actors impersonating priests and monks, clerics wearing masks of soldiers, women or beasts, and law students masquerading in the streets of Constantinople on the feast day of the notary saints Markianos and Martyrios.“ In the eleventh century Christopher of Mytilene describes the festival of the notary saints on 25 October as an event when even a poor man could wear the royal purple.” Such carnivalesque displays reversed the social order on set occasions and may have served as a social pressure valve, but their broader message was probably not socially subversive. One could nevertheless interpret it so. For this reason or for another, the rowdy procession on the feast day of the notary saints was banned by a decision of Patriarch Loukas Chrysoberges (1157-1169/70), Balsamon informs us.
What are, then, some of the desiderata in the study of subversion as a cultural phenomenon in Byzantium? Clearly we need more studies of specific authors and their contexts. But what is needed too are in-depth investigations of norms traditionally considered to be ‘incubators of subversion’ and analyses of the historical patterns of their enforcement. Orthodoxy (literally ‘right belief’) and taxis have been seen as two Byzantine cultural ideals which were fertile grounds for systemic subversion. There is still a way to go, however, until we can understand the function and development of these norms over time. Orthodoxy has elicited increased attention in recent years. Its essentialist, narrowly doctrinal interpretation has rightly been questioned, and the contours of a different picture have begun to emerge, one of orthodoxy as fluid, diverse, contested and continually redefined.” Beck and Magdalino, who both have laid groundwork for the study of subversion, have come to stress the dynamism of orthodoxy and the strong link between orthodoxy and identity. Beck considered ‘political orthodoxy’ to be a cultural attitude that included certainties and tolerated ambivalence and non-doctrinal diversity.°' Magdalino has embarked on developing and expanding Beck’s general and largely intuitive observations. Orthodoxy assumed its doctrinal form, the one expressed at the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, at the time of the defeat of Iconoclasm. Its understanding as a norm-setting principle was extended in the tenth century into the fields of politics and ceremonial as well as into that of literary culture: the massive project of the production of collections of ancient knowledge (the so-called ‘Macedonian encyclopaedism’).” At the same time taxis, an ideal famously enunciated in the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies, became a widely recognized cultural norm; systematic studies of the concepts of ta&t¢ and evtaéia are yet to locate their semantics, origins and reception over the centuries. The eleventh century marked by Psellos’ versatile intellect saw further broadening of the frontiers of orthodoxy, yet new conflicts broke out when the educated urban elite, growing in numbers, entered into a symbiotic alliance with the Komnenian regime and enforced its views as normative.™
The picture of expanding and contracting orthodoxies raises new and challenging questions about the place and role of subversion. Subversion in the blurred frontier zone between philosophy and orthodox theology has attracted considerable interest, but less attention has been paid to the climate of enforcement of orthodox doctrine - and the concrete doctrines persecuted — in specific periods. The patterns of enforcement supply a much needed context for grasping authors’ agendas. Subversion is usually detected through textual or intertextual analysis of writing strategies, such as concealment, deliberate contradiction and intentional dissimulation, based on the assumption that authors needed to hide their true views, because they wrote in an environment of persecution, censorship and suppression of dissent. This method of philosophical writing, and the concomitant necessity of adjustment of our reading, is lucidly articulated in Leo Strauss’ essay ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ published in the ominous year 1941 when the clouds of totalitarianism had gathered over Europe.® Strauss’ approach is one of sharp oppositions: originality versus conformity, philosophy versus religion, reason versus irrationality. These dichotomies have been considered rigid and inflexible for understanding medieval Islamic philosophy at least.*
What about the climate of persecution and tolerance in Byzantium? The enforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy has been seen as operating continually from Constantine’s empire until the fifteenth century.” But the existence of high and low tides of persecution has also been recognized. Once having been formulated at the end of Iconoclasm, the anathemas against heretics in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy saw additions only twice in its Constantinopolitan version: during the Komnenian period and in the fourteenth century at the time of the Palamite controversy. The kind of dissidence suppressed in each wave of surging persecution — as well as the means and effectiveness of the enforcement — varied. The late antique era has received most attention. A comprehensive study of the enforcement of orthodoxy in the middle and later periods can reveal a great deal about the agendas and methods of authority as well as about changes in intellectual climate. Steps have already been made in this direction, but more work remains. The case of Theodore of Stoudios has revealed a keen desire of the authorities during the second phase of Iconoclasm to suppress dissidence with the official position on icon veneration, but this policy was compromised by the lack of efficient methods of enforcement. During his imprisonment in Bithynia Theodore communicated successfully with his supporters and sent out at least 309 letters between 815 and 818.” In the twelfth century Byzantium appears to have come close to the kind of persecuting society emerging in the same period in the medieval West. In 1975 Robert Browning famously counted about 25 cases of repression of ‘intellectual heresy’ (quite aside from popular dualist belief) in the Komnenian period.” The causes that provoked each act of repression can perhaps benefit from a closer look. In any case, scholars nowadays widely agree that repression did not suppress enlightenment in a period that saw advancements in literature, historiography and art — and, indeed, in intellectual subversion. One notices a dialectical relationship emerging between repression and subversion in the twelfth century, in the same way as Magdalino has observed a dialectical process linking enlightenment and repression.*' The repressive methods themselves provoked a subversive reaction. Krallis’ reading of the Timarion suggests that the means of articulation of the subversive message, at least within the satiric tradition in learned Greek, may have become more deeply concealed.
As the empire collapsed in 1204, the new political authorities of the thirteenth century generally avoided enforcing orthodoxy with regard to intellectual heresy (except for the controversies following the Union with the papacy in 1274) and parted ways definitively with the historical trajectory of Western persecuting society that led to the foundation of the Inquisition. The two autobiographical works of the leading Nicaean intellectual, the scholar and monk Nikephoros Blemmydes (1197 — c.1269), show that he was often perceived as controversial. He was charged before the imperial and ecclesiastical authorities of the empire of Nicaea with various accusations: homosexuality, Manichaeism, unspecified ‘unorthodox principles’, insult of the emperor and Trinitarian heresy. He was cleared of every charge and leaves the impression that the accusations were slanders motivated by intrigue.” Blemmydes himself was the author of treatises on the Trinity and was involved in a renewed expansion of the frontiers of orthodoxy. He strikingly opened his influential textbook on logic by stating that ‘logical science is of no small use to the holy utterances and all arguments of truth’. This view of the relationship between logic and theology, so prominently advertised here, was punished in the reign of Alexios I, when John Italos, his disciples and Eustratios of Nicaea were condemned on charges that included the application of Aristotelian logic to the interpretation of revealed truth.“ Looking for subversion along the expanding and retreating frontiers of orthodoxy faces us with the variety of ways in which Byzantine authors approached intellectual tradition. As a cultural ideal, orthodoxy creates the impression of uniformity and consensus, the kind of consensus displayed in the constant recitation of the Nicene Creed in church services. The comfortable sense of agreement is one related to communal identity. It was possible nevertheless for new cultural preoccupations, based on traditions appropriated as Byzantium’s own, to be brought to the fore and internalized afresh in the name of the same uniformity and consensus. In the process key values in philosophy, theology and political thought could be — and were — looked at with fresh eyes and revised.
The above observations lead to another aspect of the relationship between orthodoxy and subversion. Orthodoxy, as redefined throughout the centuries, functioned both as a norm and as identity. Ideas which pushed the frontiers of orthodoxy could serve — and can be interpreted today — either as subversion of established norms or as attempts at new cultural self-definitions. The alternative is, in my view, a real one. Subversion erodes norms and highlights a relationship with power. Cultural self-definition creates an ‘imagined community’, to use Benedict Anderson’s classic phrase, and highlights an understanding of the self. One does not preclude the other. The search for identity, for instance, can undermine cultural norms and authoritative figures. But its main aim and thrust lies elsewhere, beyond a game of power and subversion. The line is difficult to draw, yet always important to keep in mind. Careful consideration of contexts holds, as ever, the key.
The study of subversion in Byzantium has derived inspiration from comparisons with modern totalitarian regimes. The intellectual attitude described by Kazhdan, with which this introduction began, resembles unmistakably the ways of dissidence in the Soviet Union well known to him from his Moscow years. The parallel with the former Eastern Block has its limitations, as scholars have pointed out, but it can still be useful in demonstrating the thin line separating subversion and the quest for identity. Once the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe were weakened in the 1980s, public discussions of history, philosophy and religion in the era of glasnost suddenly became relevant to a new search for cultural self-definition. These discussions had only recently been considered subversive on account of running against the party line. Nothing in the DNA of ideas determined that they should have been subversive — it was the enforcement of conformity that had done so. The study of subversion in Byzantium has a lot more to achieve. The scholarly efforts would certainly benefit from an increased focus on the development and nature of the norms that provoked contrary reaction as well as on the climate of enforcement and reception of these norms over time.
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