ABSTRACT
Men dominate accounts of Byzantine history. As emperors, administrators, sol-diers, clergy, monks, writers, traders, artisans and peasants they are inescapable. But when it comes to the subject of men as men, Byzantine men vanish. It is Byzantine women who bask in the attention of Byzantinists. In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have already appeared the general study of Connor and the edited volumes of Kalavrezou and Garland.1 Empresses in particular have reason to feel appreciated: obviously the flavour of the late twentieth century, within a short period of time they were the subject of a string of monographs.2 This striking instance is made all the more peculiar by the fact that the field does not even have the equivalent of Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World.3 It seems that Byzantine studies is playing the usual game of catch up; the field of Classics and Ancient History, for instance, has already witnessed a series of volumes placing Roman men and masculinity under the microscope.4
