This chapter focuses on ethical training in Byzantium by examining texts from the tenth to twelfth centuries, including Theophanes Continuatus and works by Peter of Argos, Theodore of Nicaea, John Tzetzes and Constantine Manasses, while briefly discussing connections to works on ethical practice by Plutarch and Athanasius of Alexandria. Studies of hymnography, elite rhetoric and gender have displayed the central role of imitating past models in the cultivation of ethical habits and construction of the self in Byzantium. People in the Byzantine period both refined and displayed their character by patterning their emotions and responses on ancient and biblical models. Numerous historical texts presented classical figures as ethical examples to a medieval audience primed to shun or imitate those behaviours. The elite rhetorical habit of likening subjects to great characters of classical antiquity is explored in this chapter as but one aspect of a larger set of cultural practices that aimed at learning ethical behaviour through the imitation of valorised models.

There is a fundamental disjuncture between the ideals of proper female behaviour, which involved sitting quietly and stilly out of sight, and the variety of things that Medieval Roman women did, which included ruling the empire. The conceptions of gender explained thus far would seem to lead to a society in which women did quite little aside of child rearing and weaving. Yet this image of complete repression simply does not square with the rest of the evidence, in which women are seen as engaging in numerous other activities. Women served as doctors and attendants in imperial hospitals. Women owned and ran factories, mills, and estates. Women were investors and engaged in commerce. Women successfully conducted disputes with bishops and other prominent male landowners. Women built churches and endowed monasteries. Women wrote hymns, poems, and history. And women engaged in politics and occasionally ran the empire. Obviously, not all these options were open to everyone, but neither can the experiences of these women be dismissed as exceptional. Some of the churches built primarily by women are tiny structures reflecting limited economic resources. You didn't have to be a rich woman to leave a prominent mark on your community. Women apparently acted with relative autonomy and power continuously through the history of the Empire.

The answer to the apparent contradiction between the fundamental ideology of female subordination and the relatively abundant evidence for women's exercise of various kinds of personal authority, is that women were able to play with their society's ideas about gender in ways that advanced their own agendas. I see two main modes women used to act with independence and authority. One was to claim exceptional strength of character that allowed one to act with masculine levels of rational self-control. This was the mode used by female saints and their hagiographers to explain why they were able to be so staunch and courageous. With proper ethical training, women could be like men. The other mode was to act with the feminine weakness that called on men to protect and help them. This stance of exaggerated femininity could also be used to effectively empower women. Both modes rely on and reinforce the theories of men and women's natural capabilities and responsibilities outlined in chapter three, but they allow for outcomes in which women have far greater self-determination than casual interaction with those theories would suggest.

Byzantine men have a reputation for military weakness, cowardice, and deviousness in both western medieval texts and eighteenth-through early-twentieth-century historiography. More recent scholars of Byzantium have tried to rehabilitate the military reputation of Medieval Roman men somewhat through discussions of military history in which they defend the practice of hiring mercenaries or point to deceptive stratagems in ancient Roman military handbooks. These discussions dance around the driving issue of military honour and do not consider gender. I see the reputation for weakness as deriving more from differing conceptions of proper gender performance and male honour than from differing military tactics or strategies. Nearly all the Medieval Roman texts from which the details of military history are derived were using stories about war to comment on the morals and character of the leading men, so we need to bring the study of masculinity overtly into the conversation about military prowess. As this subject is in its infancy, this chapter does more to lay out problems than offer explanations.

Questions of the actual degree of militarism in the Eastern Empire, as opposed to the highly militarized and violent Western Europe, are entwined with Medieval Roman conceptions of the role of militarism in the construction of an ideal man. The later appears to have been a contested arena with different voices, in different eras, providing somewhat con-tradictory witnesses.

A structural social explanation has been offered for why elite East Roman men often seem less warlike then their Western European counterparts. Compared with Norman elite men, for example, there is no question that the Medieval Romans were less frequently engaged in warfare. Mark Whittow attributed this, in part, to differences in the underpinnings of power. In Western Europe power came from possession of land which was maintained through armed conflict or the threat of it. Men became powerful because they were able to fight and lead men in warfare. In the East, men became powerful because they worked for the imperial government. Such work might be military, but it could also be administrative, leading Whittow to interpret Byzantine ideals of manhood as relatively independent from military valour. The masculinity of Byzantine men was not impugned within their society by their status as civilians.

We began by pointing out how some of the most common images of Byzantium are grounded in negative gender stereotypes imputed to that civilization by Western European commentators. Byzantium the exotic, decadent, cruel, corrupt, superstitious, Oriental empire is imagined as a place ruled by power-hungry women and eunuchs whose flaccid men fought by means of treachery and bribes. While this image derives largely from Byzantium's status as the negative foil that reinforces the positive values Western Europeans attributed to themselves, we have seen how Medieval Roman texts do contain descriptions of powerful women and cowardly men. I hope that you now will be able to read those texts with some understanding of the authorial intentions behind them. Texts were designed to tell readers both who to emulate and who to revile. Images of powerful women were intended to reinforce the value of female deference to male authority while stories of craven men taught the value of courage.

Since so many Medieval Roman texts depict traditional patterns of behaviour in order to teach men and women how to behave, we can reasonably suppose that at least some of the time they actually acted that way, or at minimum believed that they ought to. They seem to have been well aware that which roles they played, and how well they played them, determined whether they were seen as good or bad men, eunuchs, or women. Our texts revealing provincial disputes show people jockeying to avoid getting pushed into playing a negative role or deliberately taking on a role that would likely spark a particular behaviour in another. We have seen in the previous pages numerous examples of women and men apparently getting what they wanted through the deliberate performance of a particular gender role. The stock roles do not seem to have been straightjackets but rather a wide repertoire of behaviours that people could mimic or embody in order to craft the responses others would have to them. The traditionalism of Medieval Roman society and its love of modelling behaviour on ancient architypes seems in practice to have provided people with a rich toolbox for creative self-expression.

We are about to have lunch. You have to bring your food and beverage of choice because we are not actually in the same place. But the book you are about to read is modelled on those long, wonderful lunches when you can get a friend who is deep in the study of something to open up and tell you what is most important to know about her field. This is my favourite way to approach a new subject. I have no trouble tracking down the big definitive handbooks in the library, but often those books are just more collections of small specific studies that do not really tell you what the animating questions and keys to understanding are. When you can get a friend to stop worrying that the footnote, caveat, and nuance police are going to pop up from behind the salad bar and just tell you what he thinks, you can get a personal take on the entire field that gives you a frame of reference for approaching the articles and books that experts love producing.

This book is my lunchtime explanation of what I think would be most helpful for you to know about Byzantine gender so that you can study it further, compare it to your own field, add it to your lectures, or just enjoy a deeper understanding of the world. It deals with Byzantine performance of gender roles, ideas about what was normal for men and women, and how those ideas and performances affected the ways Byzantine people thought they ought to behave and interact with each other. It is based on several decades of studying Byzantine gender both from the perspective of a social historian, trying to figure out how the dead humans actually got along with one another, and from that of a cultural historian looking at elite texts with tools developed by scholars of literature.

I’m telling you what I think, not what I suppose a consensus opinion among scholars would be. Not enough people study Byzantine gender for there to be much consensus. At the same time, I do not expect anything I say here to be particularly controversial. I have focused on the topics where I have something useful to say, but occasionally you will find me offering a question without an answer.

Both physiological differences between men and women and what we would consider culturally constructed ideas about masculinity and femininity were thought to be products of nature. As such, they were the given constraints within which human lives were bounded. But nature was not always immutable. The practice of creating eunuchs allowed humans to modify the physical development of the male body. The supposedly natural inclinations and cognitive proclivities of men and women were open to manipulation through ethical effort or training. Medieval Roman conceptions of gender were formed, on the one hand, by a set of beliefs about male and female human nature, and on the other, by the conviction that humans had moral agency to modify their performance of their gender for good or ill. Nature dealt each human a hand at birth by endowing him with a male body and a proclivity toward steadfastness or her with a female body and a proclivity toward fickleness (for example). Yet those humans were not helplessly bound to live out those dispositions in their lives. Medieval Roman texts abound with stories of women overcoming their natural weaknesses and men whose vices make them unnaturally weak. Stories of female ascetics who so far conquered their nature that they passed as male monks were perennially popular and witnessed to a measure of human control even over the manifestation of physiological aspects of gender. The bonds of nature were powerful and the hand one was dealt at birth was clearly the central determinant of one's life path. Nevertheless, belief in the power of human moral agency made the performance of gender by Medieval Romans much more than merely a matter of doing what came naturally.

To understand Medieval Roman gender, therefore, we need to establish what they thought was given by nature, what was open to human manipulation, and the ideal moral and physical gender virtues to which they strove. This chapter takes on nature and its manipulation: what Medieval Roman people believed to be natural about the physical differences between male and female bodies, and about male and female spiritual and mental proclivities and inclinations, as well as conceptions of the processes of moral and ethical formation. This background will set us up to understand gender ideals in the following chapter.

This account has been a remarkably static image of Medieval Roman gender. I have culled information from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and amalgamated it into a common meatloaf. This is regrettable because Byzantine culture and society were not unchanging or monolithic. We know that many aspects of Medieval Roman society and culture changed. I just lack sufficient certainty about changes in gender for me to make unambiguous statements about them. Here I will outline some changes that have been posited along with my reasons for scepticism. The uncertainty does not arise from any inherent unknowability of the historical problems, but from lack of fundamental research.

Alexander Kazhdan and others suggested a major shift in Byzantine culture from glorifying civilian virtues and civilian leadership up through the eleventh century to glorifying military aristocracy in the twelfth. This has become generally accepted in the field and I basically think it happened. There is no doubt that there were many administrative and governmental changes in the eleventh century, and the depictions of emperors changed along with desires for what emperors should do.

It is natural to think of this shift in culture as also entailing changes in ideas about how to perform gender properly. It may have, but I think the evidence is less straightforward than it may seem at first sight. Eleventh-century cultural change was concurrent with a change in the style in which histories were written. Histories became more classicizing, and this entailed more concern with moral action of the key figures and more deliberation about what events meant and discursive elaboration of the characters. Histories shifted from relatively brief statements that such an emperor attacked so and so and who won, to long accounts of what happened that could include speeches debating the best course of action, descriptions of how the generals arranged their camps, how the troops were deployed, who led which division, and how everyone behaved on the field.

The discursive classicizing histories seem to use the details to craft a moral story of heroism and good and bad masculine behaviour. I am sceptical about how much more real information they provide about military history than the earlier bare-bones texts.

Personal virtue in Byzantine society had a great deal to do with the proper performance of one's normative gender role. Men ought to act like good men, and women like good women. This chapter deals with ideals of proper, morally upstanding behaviour for women and men in an effort to illustrate how Medieval Roman people thought they ought to be.

The masculine and feminine virtues in turn derived from the larger project of enabling order and keeping chaos at bay. The fundamental ideology undergirding Byzantine culture held that order was good, chaos bad, and men ought to be in authority. Men upheld the order of society and good women were called to support them in their efforts. Bad women worked to undermine the social structure by tempting men to lose control of themselves. Actions that worked to maintain the proper order of society, in which men were active and in control, and women were passive and obedient, were considered good and anything that threatened to disrupt that order was bad. The natural tendency of women to be ruled by their emotions and desires implied that they always wanted to indulge sexual impulses, and hence that they posed a dire threat to men's self-control. Although men were naturally predisposed to be able to govern their appetites, their self-mastery was seen as sufficiently tenuous that women needed to help them out by behaving in a demure and modest fashion. The greater degree of masculine strength that a man possessed, the greater his ability to remain unmoved in the face of either profound emotional distress or sexual temptation.

Two virtues of self-control were profoundly important in Medieval Roman culture: σωϕροσύνη, sophrosene, and φρόνησις, phronesis. Sophrosene meant discretion and moderation, and hence chastity. Phronesis meant understanding and wisdom, but chiefly the wisdom not to do something, prudence. It was the wisdom to maintain self-restraint. Βoth virtues had to do with keeping oneself under control and moderating one's response to stimuli. The discreet and wise person was supposed to keep it together and not be swayed by animal impulses. These virtues of self-control relate strongly to gender because of the belief that men had a natural capability to master pathos.

Gender in the Medieval Roman Empire has been rarely examined as such, which is odd given the prominent role played by ideas of gender in creating common images of “Byzantine” society. Since the early ninth century, when Pope Leo and Charlemagne deemed the office of Roman Emperor to be vacant because the Eastern Emperor was a woman, Byzantium has been a foil for Western European cultural self-understanding, and distinctions between east and west were often drawn in terms of gender. Eastern Romans have been seen as less masculine than the Franks and their successors. Western Europeans have perceived Byzantium in various and changing ways, yet two themes are dominant and consistent: the Byzantine Empire was filled with effeminate men and powerful women. Odd gender, by western European standards, lies at the heart of what makes the Eastern Empire seem queer.

Eighteenth through early twentieth-century western European scholars routinely denigrated Byzantine culture as Oriental, despotic, superstitious, decadent, and culturally stagnant. While these criticisms are well known, we have not appreciated how they all contributed to an implicit gendered critique of Byzantine men as insufficiently masculine. Superstition and extreme religiosity were considered female traits, and so the overly pious Byzantine men were womanish. Faith in crazy miracle stories, magical rituals, or demons marked the believer as devoid of rationality, which was characteristic of men. Byzantines who believed this stuff must have been more like children and women than men. Oriental despotism was denigrated for instilling slavish behaviour in the servile Byzantines. Again, this is partially a complaint about gender since the problem with servile men is that they take the submissive and docile role that is appropriate to women rather than standing up for themselves like real men. The construction of Byzantium as an Oriental state activated ancient associations of the east with excessive luxury, sexual indulgence, and softness. Going east could cause even a great Roman like Mark Antony to lose his virile strength amidst the temptations of the flesh. Byzantine men were soft simply because they were Oriental. The attack on the supposedly imitative and derivative Byzantine art and culture—the complaint that they mindlessly repeated fossilized forms of ancient culture—rests on an implicit valorization of innovation as real creativity. Whether from painters or poets, originality and invention marked proper masculine creativity, while the aesthetic and decorative crafts of women employed skill but not generative Art.

The detailed History of George Akropolites covers events from 1203 to 1261, and is an indispensable source for the history of the empire of Nicaea. The main narrative opens with a discussion of the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. It then follows the reigns of the Byzantine emperors in Nicaea: Theodore I Laskaris, John III Vatatzes, Theodore II Laskaris, and Michael VIII Palaiologos. The history ends with events following Michael VIII's conquest of Constantinople in 1261.

The text focuses on the lives of the emperors and diplomatic and military history, dwelling particularly on the attempt to reconquer lost territory. It provides an extensive account of the trial of the future emperor Michael VIII for treason. Akropolites presents autobiographical details frequently throughout the text. He was an eyewitness to many of the events he describes. Aside from his own personal experience, he appears to have drawn on official documents and may have relied on other historical accounts, but he never names these explicitly. Akropolites's writing style has been described as concise and unadorned, as well as carefully organized along chronological and geographic lines. Although Akropolites claims to provide an objective account, Macrides has argued that he used the History to dissociate himself from the Laskarid dynasty, whose members he sharply critiques, and to present Michael VIII as the empire's legitimate ruler. He did so, Macrides believes, in order to retain the latter's favor at court.

The History as we have it seems incomplete. It ends in mid- sentence while covering the events of 1261, and in other ways seems unrevised. It is possible that Akropolites intended to write more. Alternatively, part of the text may have been destroyed by Akropolites’ anti- unionist detractors.

Knowledge of George Akropolites's biography mostly derives from his History, in which he frequently incorporates his own life's story into the narrative. He was born in Constantinople in 1217 to a relatively wello off family with a tradition of working in the civil service, although his father's precise occupation is not known. Akropolites began his schooling in Constantinople. At the age of sixteen, his father sent him to Nicaea.

The Synopsis historion provides one of the only political narratives for later tenth and early eleventh- century history. It covers the period from 811– 1057 and survives in nine manuscripts. The text is a compilation of selections from older histories, sometimes copied word for word, sometimes with deletions or embellishments by Skylitzes. It was composed in the late eleventh century. The text is a narrative of political and military history focusing on the lives and choices of emperors, revolts, and occasionally ecclesiastical politics.

The Synopsis opens with a prologue in which the author criticizes much of recent Byzantine historical writing, which he accused of being too focused on recent events, too rooted in personal prejudices, and lacking in detail and factual accuracy. Instead, Skylitzes praised the work of George the Synkellos and Theophanes Confessor. He claimed that he would omit passages from his sources that he believed contained more emotion than fact. In the prologue, Skylitzes names fourteen histories that he used as sources for his own. Most of these texts have not survived. It cannot be confirmed that he used all of these, and he may have relied on other sources that he does not mention explicitly.

Scholars have worked to understand the sources Skylitzes used because some may have been more contemporaneous with the events they describe. Demetrios Polemis and several other historians have questioned whether some of Skylitzes's statements were invented by the author, rather than derived from now- lost sources.

Skylitzes based his account of the reign of Romanos Lakepenos on the third part of Theophanes Continuatus (known as Text III or Book VI). Since this text survives, we are able to compare it to Skylitzes to see how he adjusted his source. The result of this analysis shows that Skylitzes omitted precise details and minor characters in order to streamline the plot and heighten the drama of the particular episode.

This fifteenth- century history, entitled “The total of years from the first man until our generation” begins with Adam, but covers the world's first 6,712 years up to the Latin capture of Constantinople (1204) in a few brief paragraphs that list the lengths of time between major figures. A further five paragraphs bring the narrative to the fourteenth century where the author switches to a fine- grained level of detail. The history covers in earnest the period 1341– 1462. The text breaks off suddenly in the midst of describing the Ottoman siege of Mytilene. Originally, Doukas's history contained no internal divisions, however, the text's first editor, Boullialdus, divided it into chapters.

Doukas's descriptions of various characters in his history are morally judgmental, so that history becomes a series of clashes between the virtuous and the wicked. John Kantakouzenos is noble and good, while Mehmed II is bloodthirsty and depraved. Fortune plays a recurring role as an irresistible force that explains why success and failure do not track neatly with virtue and vice. Simultaneously, the sins of the Romans ultimately account for their misfortunes. Doukas provides lurid descriptions of Turkish atrocities during the capture of Thessaloniki and Constantinople. His history does, however, admit virtuous Turks, such as Murad II, and corrupt Romans, such as Alexios Apokaukos.

The text argues ardently for the need for union between the Catholic and Orthodox churches and portrays Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople as divine punishment for the failure of the Romans to support the Union of Florence. It is Doukas who attributed to the anti- unionist Grand Duke Loukas Notaras the famous line that “it would be better to see the turban of the Turks reigning in the center of the city than the Latin miter.”

Our knowledge of the historian Doukas derives from his history. The author's grandfather, Michael Doukas, was a supporter of John VI Kantakouzenos in the civil war of 1341– 1347. Michael was forced to flee Constantinople in 1345 and went to Ephesus where he was protected by the Turkish emir of Aydin. Doukas the historian mentions that he was employed as a secretary by the Genoese magistrate of Nea Phokaia, Giovanni Adorno, in 1421. Later he worked for the Genoese Gattilusi family, owners of the island of Lesbos.

The History of the Romans by Nikephoros Gregoras is a detailed classicizing history in thirty- seven books. It begins in the year 1204, when Constantinople was captured in the Fourth Crusade, and ends in 1358 or 1359. The first seven books cover 1204– 1320, drawing from Akropolites and Pachymeres. Thereafter the text becomes a detailed continuation of Pachymeres's history. It includes an exhaustive account of the hesychast controversy and the synod of 1351, in which Gregoras opposed the hesychast theology of Gregory Palamas. Books 30– 35 deal primarily with Gregoras's theological stance. Unlike most works of Byzantine historiography, Gregoras included extensive discussions of astronomy and geography. The History of the Romans was left unfinished at the author's death.

The dates of composition of Gregoras's history are a matter of speculation. Van Dieten has suggested it was written between the 1330s and 1350s, contemporaneously with many of the later events described in the narrative.

Gregoras's own works are the chief source for his biography. The following account, ultimately derived from Gregoras's self- description, reflects how he would have liked to be remembered. He was born in the 1290's to a family about whom little is known. Following the death of his parents before his tenth birthday, he was brought up by his uncle, Bishop John of Heraclea Pontica, who provided him with an education in theology and philosophy. He continued his studies in Constantinople under Patriarch John XIII Glykys. Subsequently, Gregoras enjoyed the patronage of Theodore Metochites, advisor to the Emperor Andronikos II. Under Metochites, Gregoras studied many subjects, including philosophy and astronomy; in return, Gregoras tutored Metochites's children. At the age of twenty- seven, Gregoras had his first audience with Emperor Andronikos II (1282–1328). At Andronikos's request, he participated in a scholarly convention investigating the date of Easter in 1324, and in 1326 journeyed to Serbia with an official embassy to King Stefan Uroš III Dečanski. During this time, Gregoras continued his academic studies and published profusely on a wide variety of theological and scientific subjects. He also had a successful school and by age thirty was considered one of the leading intellectuals of his day.

This is an anonymous text describing the history of Epirus in the fourteenth century. It focuses on the rule of Thomas Preljubovi ć (1366/ 1367– 1384), his widow Maria Angelina, and her second husband Esau Buondelmonti in Ioannina. The text is relatively brief, covering roughly thirty years in nearly thirty pages in the Bonn edition. In one manuscript the story ends in 1399. An Oxford manuscript continues to 1417/ 1418. The text depicts Thomas Preljubović as an evil tyrant and Maria Angelina as a pious and virtuous wife.

An 1845 edition by Andre Moustoxidis identified the monks Komnenos and Proclus as the authors of the history. These names only appear in the title of one of the manuscripts, and upon closer inspection it is clear that they in fact indicate the surnames of Thomas Preljubović. The text is published in the Bonn Corpus as the second item in a miscellany of notices on the history of Epirus. A vernacular summary survives in a late nineteenth- century manuscript.

Publication History and Manuscripts

We lack a critical edition and thorough description of the manuscripts for this text. Leandros Vranousēs published a preliminary volume which surveyed the previous publications of the text, and announced a second volume which would contain descriptions of the manuscripts and a critical edition. This was never published. He did publish a version of the medieval text, with the parallel text of the vernacular version, but the edition of the medieval text was not based on examination of the surviving manuscripts. The history was first published in 1821 as part of a collection of historical texts dealing with the history of Epirus, found by the French consul in Ioannina, François Charles Hugues Laurent Pouqueville. Pouqueville's collection was reprinted in the Bonn Corpus in 1849. In the Bonn edition, the chronicle of Ioannina is text number two of the collection. Another edition of the text, based on a different manuscript, was published in Nauplion in 1831. In 1845, Moustoxidis published an edition based on the Nauplion publication and that of Pouqueville, but without consulting the manuscripts in person. In 1896, Uspenskii published an edition, based on yet another manuscript found in Meteora. The Moustoxidis edition, however, formed the basis of later editions by Gabriel Destounis in 1858, Šafarik and Avramović in 1862, and that of Sebastian Cirac Estopan a n in 1943.