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210 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgments
In addition to being actively engaged in the political intrigues of the Byzantine court of his time, the eleventh-century philosopher Michael Psellos (born Konstantinos) produced a vast corpus of writings that cover almost every field of knowledge and genre. Among modern readers, however, he is usually known solely from his masterly memoirs of the emperors of his time, known as the Chronographia. If this most fascinating of courtiers and thinkers is to be studied as broadly as he deserves—and not merely by professional Byzantine philologists who happen to specialize in his works!—it is necessary for more of his writings to be made accessible to a wider readership. The idea of a translation of works selected by genre, theme, or historical importance was accordingly proposed at the First Bi-Annual Workshop in Byzantine Intellectual History organized at the University of Notre Dame, 6-7 February 2004, by David Jenkins and Charles Barber on the topic of “The Play of Literature and Ideas in the Writings of Michael Psellos.” The idea was received enthusiastically and the present book is the first offspring of what it is hoped will become a long-term and more broadly collaborative venture.
This volume presents in translation all the texts that Psellos wrote concerning his family. All together they present us with the most complete picture we have of any non-imperial Byzantine family, tracking its fortunes over the course of a century. This book, then, is one of the first and most comprehensive on the topic of the Byzantine family. Each text is annotated and prefaced by a special introduction, while the volume as a whole is introduced by an essay on Psellos life, the history of his family, and the lives of women and children in eleventh-century Constantinople. Subsequent volumes in what we may loosely (and hopefully) call this “series” will focus on Psellos’ career as a teacher in Constantinople, on his writings on science and the occult, on literary criticism and aesthetics, and on friendship. No specific estimates can be offered yet regarding their completion, as much will depend on the schedules and initiative of the individual editors and translators. Obviously, these volumes will be finished sooner if additional qualified translators step forward and volunteer their services.
The author of this volume would like to thank David Jenkins (Byzantine Studies Librarian at the University of Notre Dame) and Stratis Papaioannou (Dumbarton Oaks Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at Brown University) for contributing one chapter each, including both introductions and translations; David Jenkins and Charles Barber for flawlessly organizing and graciously hosting the workshop that was the forum for its inception; and all who took time from busy schedules to check the accuracy of the translations: Stephanos Efthymiadis, Stratis Papaioannou, and Jeffrey Walker read the encomium; Panagiotis Agapitos the funeral oration; and Antony Littlewood Psellos’ address to his grandson. Alice-Mary Talbot in particular read the entire manuscript for the Press and made many suggestions for improvement. All saved me from errors and awkward expressions, especially Dr. Talbot, and none is responsible for the remaining imperfections. If translation is a thankless task, correcting another’s translation is a courtesy beyond the call of duty. My sincerest gratitude goes to all.
A Note on the Spelling of Names: Greek and Byzantine names are here for the most part transliterated directly, without Latinization or Anglicization. In an age when scholars are trying to overcome or resist the ideological legacy of colonialism and cultural imperialism, when even newspapers are making an effort to spell correctly the names of the most “exotic” languages, Byzantium is one of the last remaining cultures whose names are routinely “translated” into their modern equivalents. No reader should have any difficulty in knowing who 1s meant.
General Introduction
The study of Byzantine women has been seriously underway for the past twenty-five years or so, yet it suffers from a debilitating lack of evidence. The vast majority of studies focus on empresses and saints (or at any rate nuns) for the simple reason that they are the only women we know much about. Alternately, they scrutinize the provisions of the various legal codes, though admitting the limitations of this kind of evidence, which is normative, often highly ideological rather than descriptive, and sometimes very much out of date. One is reminded of the man searching for his keys at night under a lamppost not because he dropped them right there but because that was the only place where he could see to look. Empresses and saints, however, were statistically insignificant and their lives were characteristically and even purposefully different from that of the majority of the population. “We admire rare things more than common ones,” Psellos wrote in a playful treatise.’ That majority, however, which consisted of agricultural families and the poor, will probably forever remain beyond our reach, with the exceptions, perhaps, of Egypt in late antiquity and of Makedonia in the Palaiologan period. Evidence about them in other times and places may be laboriously gleaned from archaeology or by searching through hundreds of texts for scattered references, but this will probably never yield a systematic picture because of its wide geographical and chronological distribution.
It is here that Psellos comes to our rescue, by casting some light outside the relatively narrow circle of hagiography and court history. Though there has been no systematic treatment of his life and his importance as a source for Byzantine history and culture, Psellos’ name nonetheless appears in discussions of almost every aspect of Byzantine civilization. In particular, he often takes center stage in discussions of the family, although, because these discussions are almost always focused on the court or the upper levels of the aristocracy, he does so through his historical work, the Chronographia, and the letters and orations that he wrote to and for members of the court and aristocracy.
Our focus here will be different. In a number of writings Psellos discussed many of the women in his own life, including his mother, his prematurely deceased first daughter, and his second (adopted) daughter (though, oddly, never his own wife). Taken together, as they are for the first time in this volume, these texts present, through a variety of literary perspectives, the history over the course of a century of a Byzantine family belonging to what we may call the upper middle class of Constantinople. These were not members of the imperial family or great lords who commanded armies and provinces; rather, we are dealing with the class of court functionaries, high officials in the civil bureaucracy, and intellectuals, They were relatively wealthy (they employed servants and owned slaves) and cultivated an ideal of bourgeois respectability. The evidence that Psellos offers is crucially important because it enables us to understand the norms taken for granted by almost all writers during the apogee of Byzantine power, the standard, in other words, against which they measured the aberrant eccentricities of empresses and saints. The women and children we encounter in these texts led, by the standards of their own class, relatively unexceptional lives.
Certainly, it is ironic that we should find an exposition of this norm in Psellos, who otherwise conformed to few of the norms of his society. And yet it is only here that we may obtain a sustained look at the life of an average Byzantine family of this most important class, a topic that has received little to no attention in scholarship. Psellos’ evidence, coming as it does from the mideleventh century, is important as a corrective in another way as well. Too often historians assume that the paranoid and highly restrictive views about women expressed by the rather bitter Kekaumenos, a writer of advice-maxims of the exact same period, are indicative of Byzantine views in general. Like the works of Psellos presented here, Kekaumenos’ treatise remains untranslated into the major languages of modern research; nevertheless, his simple Greek and aphoristic style have ensured that he is quoted often by way of illustration of prevailing social mores, especially in discussions of women and the family. Psellos, as will be seen, not only had a very different attitude toward women, his account of the circumstances of their lives is very different in tenor.
The order in which the present texts have been placed reflects the chronology of their subjects rather that their dates of composition; the same is true of the letters that have been included here, though they are gathered together in one chapter toward the end of the volume. Thus we move from Psellos’ mother and childhood to the premature death of his daughter Styliane, the engagement of his second (adopted) daughter, and the birth of his grandson. Each of these texts, which vary greatly in size, purpose, and genre, is prefaced by a separate introduction. The introduction to the collection as a whole provides an overview of the background information that will be required by readers who are not specialists on Psellos. The topics covered here are (i) the life of Psellos; (ii) the history of his family from his grandparents to his grandchildren, so covering five generations; and (iii) a composite picture of the lives of women and children in eleventh-century Constantinople, with which topic all the following texts are concerned in one way or another. It is from these works that we obtain a more detailed and comprehensive picture of their lives than from virtually any other Byzantine source.
A Brief Biography of Michael Psellos
No biography of Michael Psellos exists in any language, though at least one has been formally announced and brief surveys of his life preface studies of specific aspects of his career and writings. None of these, however, is in English.’ It was therefore decided to begin this volume with a brief biography, which will provide the necessary context against which to discuss his family life. Konstantinos Psellos—the baptismal name of the later monk Michael— was born in 1018, so during the reign of Basileios II and the apogee of Byzantine power, to a “middle-class” family in Constantinople. Early on his mother Theodote perceived that he was a prodigy and encouraged his studies, possibly at the local monastery of ta Narsou, with which Psellos maintained a lifelong connection.
He later boasted that school lessons were child’s play for him and that by the age of ten he could recite and expound the entire Iliad.’ He was also a purely urban creature, sixteen years old before he even set eyes on the fields outside the walls (probably only in Constantinople could this happen in all of Christendom). By that age he had begun to study rhetoric and joined the staff of a provincial judge, but this internship was cut short by the death of his beloved sister.’ Psellos’ instructors in rhetoric were Ioannes Mauropous, who was famous as a teacher but would not make his mark as a writer until after Psellos’ rise at the court, and Niketas, who would later serve under Psellos in the reformed educational system.’ As far as philosophy was concerned, Psellos claimed to have studied it largely on his own: whereas he was “a perfect philosopher,” his friends were only “lovers of philosophy.”®
After serving in a judicial capacity in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor,’ around 1040 Psellos appears as a secretary at the court of Michael IV. Though only twenty, he already displayed a knack for making friends in high places, including Alousianos, son of the last Bulgarian tsar (Ivan Vladislav), who joined Deljan’s revolt against the empire, deposed its leader, and betrayed it to Michael IV in exchange for titles; and the captain of the guard sent against Michael V in the popular riot of 1042, an event of which Psellos later wrote a dramatic firsthand account.® His standing at the court rose sharply under Konstantinos [IX Monomachos (1042-1055), a charming if rather frivolous patron of the arts and of education whose wanton expenditures and neglect of the army would soon prove disastrous for the empire.
Psellos became one of his intimate advisors and personal secretaries, a position earned largely by “the grace of my language.... For I am told that my speech is beautiful, even when making routine statements.” He also acted as the emperor’s spokesman, writing eloquent speeches in his praise and in support of his policies (regardless of whether he agreed with them personally).? He had by then been befriended by Konstantinos Leichoudes, Monomachos’ “prime minister” and later a patriarch (1059-1063), whom Psellos admired for his urbane, philosophical, and flexible statesmanship. He had also facilitated the introduction to the court of his teacher Mauropous and his friend Ioannes Xiphilinos, another future patriarch (1064-1075), alongside whom he continued to teach privately. When a dispute broke out in 1047 among their students, the emperor intervened and granted official recognition to both schools. Psellos assumed the lofty title of Consul of Philosophers and seems to have exercised some supervision over higher education in the capital, though the institutional aspects of his position are unclear. Xiphilinos was made nomophylax (guardian of the laws) in charge of the new law school, whose foundation was chartered in a novel probably authored by Mauropous. Discussing these new foundations thirty years later, the historian Michael Attaleiates claims that Psellos “surpassed all of our contemporaries in knowledge.” The late 1040s witnessed the reign of the philosophers at Monomachos’ court."
In those years Psellos laid the foundations of his philosophical revolution. He delivered hundreds of lectures on philosophical, theological, scientific, and exegetical topics, taking charge of the education of many who would go on to serve in the administration and the Church. He boasted of the diverse origin of the students who attended his classes: “I have made Celts and Arabs yield to me and on account of my fame they come here .. . While the Nile irrigates the land of the Egyptians, my speech irrigates their souls. If you ask a Persian or an Ethiopian they will say that they have known me and admired me and sought me out.”!! Psellos projected an ideal of vast polymathy subordinated to the queen of sciences, philosophy, and often barely discriminated between pagan and Christian wisdom. He also began to wield influence at the court, contracting an advantageous marriage and amassing patrons, clients, titles, a fine town house, and enemies against whom he wrote defensive tracts. Yet for unknown reasons he was forced to resign from the powerful and prestigious position of protasékrétis (head of the college of imperial secretaries) and settle for the title of vestarchés, The regime of the philosophers began to unravel around 1050, under pressure by forces that we cannot identify: Leichoudes was dismissed; Mauropous was sent off against his will to serve as bishop of Euchaita on the Black Sea coast; Xiphilinos became a monk on Mt. Olympos in Bithynia; Psellos clung to the court, but came under increasing fire and suspicion for his beliefs. In late 1054 he was tonsured and took the name Michael, while Monomachos’ death in early 1055 only raised further suspicions: had Psellos predicted his death through astrology?”
Psellos detested both the false premises and hypocritical practice of Christian asceticism and so it is no surprise that his brief stay on Mt. Olympos (1055~1056) was not happy. He had previously composed a witty parody of the liturgy exposing one of the holy mountain’s heavy drinkers. While there he composed a philosophical funeral oration for his monastery’s recently deceased founder and a eulogy of the mountain itself, praising its natural beauties and defensively noting in the first few lines that the many stars of its night sky were only lifeless bodies! Unlike Xiphilinos, Psellos was not sincere in his new vocation and quickly returned to the capital when the empress Theodora (1055-1056) allowed it. For years afterwards he exchanged acerbic letters and poems with some of the monks on Olympos. “Father Zeus,” wrote a wit among the latter, “you could not endure Olympos even briefly, your goddesses weren't there with you,” to which Psellos responded with a torrent of abuse." Yet his friendship with Xiphilinos seems also to have been damaged.
Psellos’ return led to years of intrigue for him. Mistrusted at the court of Theodora, which was dominated by his enemies, he was appointed by Michael VI the Old (1056-1057) to head an embassy to the rebel Isaakios Komnenos. After two trips to Nikomedeia, Psellos finally negotiated an agreement, but meanwhile a faction in the capital, including the ambitious patriarch Michael Keroularios, deposed the weak emperor. After this was announced, Psel-los spent the night in terror at the rebel camp, but the next day Isaakios made him one of his advisors and appointed him a President of the Senate before they entered the city together in triumph, Some, of course, suspected that Psellos had simply betrayed Michael VI and joined forces with Isaakios."
The first Komnenos to rule Byzantium tried desperately to restore the army and finances. What endeared him to Psellos was his confiscation of monastic wealth and, above all, his deposition in 1058 of Keroularios, an arrogant, contentious, and bigoted prelate—in fact a failed claimant to the throne in 1040 — who had wrecked the empire’s relations with the West in 1054, and who was now encroaching on imperial authority. Keroularios was likely among those who had undermined Monomachos cabinet of intellectuals in the early 1050s and had humiliated Psellos by forcing him to produce a public confession of faith."° Philosophy now went on the offensive. In a heavily sarcastic letter Psellos cast Keroularios as the embodiment of “angelic” obscurantism, inflexibility, and boorishness that he associated with Christian asceticism. Isaakios appointed Psellos to direct the prosecution of the recalcitrant patriarch, who, however, died before the trial could begin. Psellos greeted this piece of news as an evangelia and went on to write a long prosecution anyway (probably to cancel the odium of having to write a panegyrical epitaph for Keroularios, whose memory was popular in the capital and therefore a matter of concern and appeasement for the emperor). Keroularios was replaced by Leichoudes, Psellos’ old friend and ally.'®
In 1059 Isaakios fell ill and abdicated under mysterious circumstances. As his personal physician, Psellos encouraged this decision against the wishes of the emperor’s wife and went so far as to personally invest his successor, Konstantinos X Doukas (1059-1067), even before Isaakios had made up his mind. Psellos then wrote the proclamation of the new emperor’s accession to be distributed to the provinces. Psellos was a close friend of the Doukai, especially the emperor’s brother, the Kaisar Ioannes.'? The good-natured, deeply pious, but unwarlike new emperor did little to halt the empire’s rapid decline as the Seljuks raided Asia Minor and sacked major cities. Psellos, now in his forties, spent the 1060s as an honored member of the imperial family, wielding considerable influence behind the throne. He was appointed to tutor Doukas’ son and heir, Michael, for whom he composed a number of didactic and relatively superficial works on legal, historical, and scientific topics, sometimes rededicating to him works originally presented to Konstantinos IX. We can safely detect his hand at work in the choice of Xiphilinos to replace Leichoudes as patriarch in 1064. In the early years of the reign he also completed the first edition of his Chronographia, covering the emperors from Basileios II to Isaakios. Beyond its ambitious philosophical message, this text employs masterly and virtually unprecedented literary techniques verging on the postmodern to demythologize the imperial position and expose the all-too-human qualities of God’s anointed. This by itself implies a political theory, as Psellos did not believe that “ideal” emperors were possible—all were both good and bad— but there is also a more subversive theme running through the work: the empire must be governed by soldiers, not civilians, and its resources should be used to support the army, not the civilian administration, the Church, or the monasteries.'*
Konstantinos’ death in 1067 precipitated a crisis in the Doukas regime. His widow, Eudokia Makrembolitissa, a niece of Keroularios and opponent of Ioannes Doukas and Psellos, broke her oath to her husband, marrying and elevating to the throne the handsome general and former plotter Romanos Diogenes (1068-1071). Romanos tried to restore the military situation by conducting long and determined albeit poorly planned and indecisive campaigns against the Seljuks. Joannes Doukas was forced to the sidelines and Psellos himself was distrusted, despite the fact that he continued, as always, to praise the emperor in public orations and to draft his pronouncements. Romanos even compelled him to accompany his second expedition to Syria in 1069, joining Michael Attaleiates in the emperor’s council of advisors. Psellos disagreed utterly with Romanos’ strategy and tactics and proffered his own, based on his superior understanding of the “science” of war.'” But it was intrigue that restored the Doukai and sealed the fate of Byzantine Asia Minor. Many suspected that Ioannes’ son Andronikos betrayed Romanos at the battle of Manzikert in 1071 (though there were additional reasons for the defeat). Psellos and Ioannes promptly deposed Eudokia, elevated her son Michael VII Doukas (1071-1078) to the throne, and declared Romanos an outlaw, refusing to recognize his surprisingly favorable agreement with Alp Arslan. A civil war conducted by the Doukai resulted in the surrender, tonsure, and brutal—in fact, fatal— blinding of Romanos. In the brief supplement to the Chronographia that he wrote in 1075, whose purpose was to expose the frivolity of his patrons the Doukai through sarcastic praise, Psellos boasted of the power that he personally wielded at the court in those critical days.”” A moving letter of consolation to the blinded Romanos—that referred to God as the “Sleepless Eye that watches over all,” encouraged him to find his “inner sight,” and that was written soon after a bombastic congratulatory letter to his conqueror Andronikos— cannot divert our attention from the damage done to the empire by the PsellosDoukas regime, nor does Psellos’ devastating sarcasm regarding his patrons mitigate his role in those events.”
Michael VII was an utterly incompetent and corrupt ruler. Attaleiates said that he was fit only to be a bishop! Psellos continued to write various treatises for his education and edification and to draft his diplomatic correspondence, but little seems to have been done to halt the decline of imperial authority.
Certainly, we do not know what kind of influence Psellos had at this time as the court politics of the period remain very little understood, yet contemporaries did complain that the emperor was spending all his time “on the vain and useless study of letters, trying constantly to compose iambic and anapestic verses ... deceived in this by the Consul of the Philosophers.” To this ignoble end had Psellos, charmed by the mystique of the palace, led a career that had promised so much for philosophical renewal under Monomachos, ultimately betraying his own astute analysis of the empire’s practical needs. Moreover, the consul’s days were numbered. The emperor’s favor was usurped by a crafty and hugely corrupt eunuch named Nikephoros, who led the empire to the nadir of its fortunes. The position of Consul of the Philosophers was eventually given to Psellos’ student Ioannes Italos. Psellos himself is not heard from again after 1075-1076, when he left off writing his sarcastic account of the Doukas regime, delivered a funeral oration for Xiphilinos, and welcomed back to the capital his old teacher Mauropous.” By his own arrangement, he was buried at a famous monastery of the Theotokos, the Zéodochos Pégé situated just outside the walls of the city.”
The Family History of Michael Psellos
We know very little about Psellos’ grandparents and have only hints about ancestors prior to them. Our information comes from the Encomium for Psellos’ mother. His maternal grandparents were native Constantinopolitans who came into life and died at roughly the same time (2b), though Theodote, their first child (2c), died after her father but before her mother (24d). The dates of these deaths cannot, however, be established precisely (see the introduction to the Encomium, below). This side of the family, Psellos broadly hints, was not socially distinguished (2a). Theodote had at least two brothers, given that Psellos refers at one point to the youngest of them (5d).
Psellos’ father, on the other hand, came from a more distinguished family, which included both consuls and patrikioi among its ancestors (4b)—or so his son boasted. In this connection, we should note that a younger contemporary, the historian Michael Attaleiates, refers to the death in 1078 of “the monk and hypertimos Michael, who had been in charge of political affairs.” He goes on to characterize him as an “unpleasant” man whose family originated in Nikomedeia (296-297). Some historians— including the latest discussion—have taken this as a reference to Michael Psellos.** But the identification is doubtful. First, Attaleiates refers to this man elsewhere as Michael of Nikomedeia (181), though no source refers to Psellos in this way. Second, Attaleiates does refer to Psellos elsewhere in his History, in connection with his assumption of the post of President (i.e., Consul) of the Philosophers. Without naming him, which itself additionally militates against the identification, he says that he “surpassed all of our contemporaries in knowledge” and claims that he was a good teacher (21), This does not accord with the negative portrayal of Michael of Nikomedeia later in the work. In fact, Attaleiates may have studied under Psellos during the reign of Monomachos.” Third, in his voluminous and autobiographical corpus, Psellos never refers to a family link with Nikomedeia, not even in the treatise that he wrote regarding a puzzling natural phenomenon that occurred in that city which he claims to have witnessed personally.” In short, it may be a sheer coincidence that the monk Michael of Nikomedeia was politically active and held the title of hypertimos (which was not uncommon).
Allusions in the Encomium indicate that Psellos’ parents were affluent (4b, ud), though we know nothing of the source of their wealth. It was probably not agricultural, for Psellos claims that he was sixteen before he even set eyes on the fields outside the city (15a).
Theodote’s first child was a daughter. If we assume that the latter was some five years older than Psellos (cf. 13b—c), we may place her birth in ca, 1013. Psellos claims that his mother was only “a few years older” than this sister and that it was difficult to tell them apart (13b)—a universal compliment, it seems— so we may place Theodote’s own birth in ca. 998. Her husband seems likewise to have been a teenager when they married (4a), though we do not know for how many years, if any, they remained childless together. Her second child was also a daughter (4d), but given that nothing more is said of her we may assume that she died in infancy. Psellos was the third child and the first son, though it is not clear whether there were any more after him. He does not mention any in the Encomium, but his own death is the subject of a brief letter of consolation addressed by his student Theophylaktos Hephaistos, later archbishop of Bulgaria, to “the brother of Psellos.” Theophylaktos’ modern editor maintained that this is a mistake, as Psellos does not mention brothers in the Encomium. But the contents of the letter, especially its many uses of adelphos, indicate that a literal relationship is meant (see below, p. 176) and, besides, we should not rely too much on the silences of the Encomium.”§ In Letter S17, Psellos mentions how he took care of his parents in old age, loved his brothers, and treated his friends fittingly (see below, p. 169). The term “brother” in Byzantium, as in many other societies, was often used in a non-literal sense—this very letter in fact is addressed to a “brother” who is clearly only a friend —but here these “brothers” are clearly differentiated from friends and come between them and Psellos’ natural parents, so it is possible that natural brothers are meant. Can this refer only to a sole sister who had died decades ago? It is not impossible, as Psellos is speaking in very general terms, but it does seem unlikely.
Psellos’ sister was married (13a) and delivered a baby (14d) shortly before dying in Psellos’ sixteenth year (15a), so in 1034. We do not know her name or that of her husband or anything about the fate of Psellos’ nephew. Psellos’ father died “soon” after the death of his daughter (18b), his mother long afterwards (22d), but it is impossible to fix these dates with any greater precision (see the introduction to the Encomium, below).
It is odd that the woman in Psellos’ life we know the least about is his wife.” She is mentioned (though not by name) in the Funeral Oration that Psellos composed for their daughter Styliane, who died around the age of nine (68). What we have for the most part are generic references to her moral qualities, but one passage stands out: Psellos claims that Styliane was descended from em-perors on her mother’s side, specifically from “the fathers of emperors” (63), 1.e., presumably from the father of an imperial bride. Various suggestions about his identity have been made, including that of Stylianos Zaoutzes, one of the fathers-in-law of Leon VI (886-912), who gave his name to Styliane.*® At the end of the text, Psellos notes that he and his wife had long been without children (87), and twice suggests that Styliane was their only child (80, 81), but he also hints that she had siblings (86). It is, however, difficult to be certain about the latter passage given the rhetorical nature of the praise that it contains (and we will see below that shortly after Styliane’s death Psellos had no other children left to him). His wife was certainly alive when Styliane died, as numerous references in the oration attest.”!
It is difficult to assign dates to Psellos’ marriage and the life of Styliane, It is likely that the girl’s death occurred before Psellos left the court of Monomachos in late 1054 to become a monk, because his account of her sickness suggests a normal household life and conjugal relationship. In a letter written probably soon after his tonsure, and possibly on Mt. Olympos in Bithynia, Psellos wrote that new monks do miss their wives and native lands.” As we saw, he himself would later be compared to Zeus and ridiculed by a fellow monk for being unable to endure Olympos without his “goddesses.” Though Psellos did take up politics after his return from Bithynia, it is unlikely that he took up residence with his wife. Still, in a letter from the 1060s to his friend Konstantinos, nephew of the former patriarch Keroularios, he sends the greetings of his “women,” children, free dependents, and slaves, including his oven-man and baker. It is unclear who these “women and children” are.*’ Another letter to Konstantinos, in which Psellos contrasts his friend’s household to his own lack of conjugal company, dates to an even later period. This is shown both by what we know of the career of Konstantinos, whose elevation to the post of epi ton kriseén (ajudicial office) occurred after 1074, and by Psellos’ reference to his dear ones, some of whom were dead —was Styliane on his mind twenty-five years later?— while others—his wife?—were lost to him. This letter, in any case, cannot be used to question the historicity of his marriage and, by extension, the authenticity of the Funeral Oration.** After all, in the Encomium Psellos admits that he has not conformed to his mother’s exaltation of virginity (8b), which may refer only to marriage.
Moreover, Psellos’ (feigned) concern in the Encomium to avoid praising his mother’s physical beauty on the ground that such non-spiritual topics must be avoided now that he has become a monk (see the introduction to that text, below), has no counterpart in the Funeral Oration, which, in sharp contrast to the Encomium, gives no rhetorical sign that Psellos has formally renounced worldly life. This allows us to conclude that the Oration was written prior to 1054. Subtracting nine years and, say, five years of childless marriage, we arrive at 1041 as the latest date for Psellos’ marriage. He would then have been about twenty-two, so an even earlier date may be postulated given the early date of marriage among the Byzantines (e.g., Psellos’ father was probably in his midteens when he married Theodote). By 1040 Psellos had already secured a post as secretary at the court of Michael IV, a secure enough position from which to plan a marriage and obtain a good match (to say nothing of the possibly independent financial standing of his parents). This means that the death of Styliane may have occurred as early as 1050.
The third text translated in the present collection is a hypomnéma, a court memorandum regarding the dissolution of the engagement of Psellos’ adopted daughter to a certain Elpidios Kenchres, the son of the high official Ioannes Kenchres. This is perhaps not the only text in which we hear of this daughter, who unfortunately also remains anonymous, as the three texts that relate to Psellos’ newborn grandson probably refer to her as well (see below). The details regarding her engagement, its dissolution, and her fiancé, may be found in the hypomnéma and the introduction below.*> What interest us here are chiefly questions of chronology and family history. The memorandum, then, specifies that Psellos had no other children when he made the adoption (144), late in the reign of Monomachos, Pained by the death of Styliane before the age of marriage, a fact plaintively noted in the very title of her Funeral Oration, Psellos moved quickly to arrange the engagement of his new daughter, as he notes, “when she was still a child and not yet old enough to marry.” Her fiancé was exactly twice her age (144). From the fact that Psellos used his influence to obtain titles and posts for him, we may postulate their ages at about nine and eighteen. In other words, after the death of Styliane, Psellos immediately adopted a daughter of exactly the same age and rushed to arrange for her marriage, a sequence of events that affords curious insights into his state of mind. The memorandum, interestingly, makes no mention of his wife, from whom he would have been separated when he was tonsured. There is no reason to believe that she had died in the meantime.
The betrothal was finally dissolved in court in August of 1056, following the intervention of the empress Theodora. Psellos’ adopted daughter would then have been about thirteen. It would seem that Psellos did subsequently manage to find her a more acceptable husband than Elpidios Kenchres, as she produced ason whose birth Psellos announced in Letter § 72 to the Kaisar Joannes Doukas (see p. 172) and whose infancy he described in the charming address To his grandson and then again later in Letter S157 to his friend Konstantinos (these are translated below, pp. 162 and 173). We know of no other child by Psellos to whom this grandson can be assigned; such a child would have to have been born between the adoption of Psellos’ second daughter in the early 1050s and 1054, which seems unlikely and is in any case unattested. A recent study has argued that Psellos’ son-in-law was Basileios Maleses, a close friend and colleague of the historian Michael Attaleiates who made his career in the 1060s as a provincial judge, benefiting from Psellos’ patronage at the court of Konstantinos X Doukas. Though Maleses was away for most of that decade at his posts in Anatolia and the Peloponnese, he may have fathered children in the mid to late 1060s.*° In his Letter $157 to Konstantinos from the mid10708, Psellos alludes to the children (plural) of the vestarchés, probably a reference to the grandchildren fathered by his son-in-law. This use of the plural may be only a rhetorical trope, but Psellos refers to his great concern for the “children of the vestarchés” in Letter KD 268 as well (for the circumstances, see p. 160), In Letter S 146, probably from the 1060s, Psellos informs his son-in-law that the magistrissa-—the wife of a magistros*’-—was both physically sick and worried about the slanders being spread about her husband. The casual manner in which Psellos here discusses his close relationship to another man’s wife indicates that she was almost certainly his own daughter. There is no reference to children in this letter, though there is no reason why there should be. The history of the relationship of the two men is a matter of ongoing speculation and need not detain us here (see below, p. 159). What matters for our purposes is that from Psellos’ loving address To his grandson, who was still an infant, we may infer that the child was born into a fairly prosperous household, with a nursery, servants, a doting grandfather, and, through Psellos, a connection to the court, most probably that of Konstantinos X Doukas and Eudokia Makrembolitissa; the latter in fact sponsored the child’s baptism.
If Maleses really was Psellos’ son-in-law, Maleses’ son would have been involved in Maleses’ own disgrace by the emperor Michael VII in 1074 and the gradual destruction of the faction of Psellos and the Kaisar loannes Doukas. Attaleiates specifically states that Maleses was deprived of his property and children, probably for being captured by and then seeming to join the renegade mercenary Roussel de Bailleul (see below, p. 159). We have no way of knowing exactly how harmful and how permanent this turn of events was for Psellos and his grandchildren. By 1093-1094, his grandson had fallen on hard times or was seeking advancement by evoking pity (a common enough solicitation). A letter of the aforementioned Theophylaktos Hephaistos, archbishop of Bulgaria, pleads with the official Gregorios Kamateros to find a job for the son of the daughter of the great Psellos, to whom Theophylaktos felt that he owed a debt.** This, then, is the last reference in the record to the family of Michael Psellos, whose fortunes we have traced for exactly a century. There is unfortunately no way to know whether the teacher and philosopher Michael Psellos, active in Constantinople in the mid-twelfth century, was descended from his illustrious namesake. He is mentioned fondly in a letter of loannes Apokaukos, bishop of Naupaktos in the early thirteenth century.”
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