ABSTRACT
This is one of the seventy-seven letters that John Mauropous included in acollection of his rhetorical work – poems, letters and speeches – sometime in the last quarter of the eleventh century.1 Mauropous (c. 990-1092?) was a wellestablished Constantinopolitan intellectual figure: he was a teacher and court rhetorician in his early career, then for about twenty years bishop of Euchaita, a city in the eastern parts of the southern shore of the Black Sea, and, toward the end of his life, he retired to a Constantinopolitan monastery.2 The letter, cited here in its entirety, is perhaps not the most spectacular of Byzantine communications. Still, it is quite representative of medieval Greek epistolography and can serve well as a site upon which to map this most common Byzantine discursive practice: letter-writing.
