ABSTRACT
Byzantine texts have routinely been branded as “rhetorical” not in a bid toexplain them, but to impugn their merit. Until recently, the pairing of “rhetoric” and “performance” in the title of such an essay would have signalled abiding prejudices against Byzantine literary culture and an unflattering portrait of its audiences. Such verdicts issued from long-standing biases, chief among them being the ill repute attached to rhetoric as a perversion of language’s capacity to convey truth and meaning. From its beginnings in antiquity, rhetoric has been under a sort of cultural indictment, charged with insincerity and the provision of an elaborate and ultimately decadent form of verbal theatre, inimical at once to truth and artistic authenticity. I wish not to disprove the charges against Byzantine rhetoric in this essay, mistaken though I find them, but to concede them, albeit provisionally, in order to consider the other side of rhetoric’s allegedly debased linguistic coin: performance.
