IV - Eustathius of Thessalonica: the life and opinions of a twelfth-century Byzantine rhetor

Summary

LIFE

Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, was one of the most distinguished of all Byzantine writers, and the course of his life ought to be reasonably simple to establish. Immediately after his death two of his friends, Michael Choniates and Euthymius Malaces, wrote long and elaborate speeches designed to fix the image of the great man for posterity. However, true to the conventions of Byzantine rhetoric, both speeches overflow with epithets and rapturous praise, while plain facts are either absent altogether or else are veiled in an almost impenetrable fog of verbiage. Michael Choniates speaks of the ladder by which Eustathius ascends to heaven, or of how Eustathius casts off his earthly fetters and passes through the gates which open spontaneously before him (Mich. Ak. I, pp. 302/14–303/12). But he says not a word on those issues which the historian in our time might regard as more substantial: on when and where Eustathius was born, who were his parents, what was his employment. In the main, the biography of Eustathius has to be reconstructed not from the eulogies of his mourning friends, but from the occasional hints contained in his own works, and from fragments and scraps of information in the lemmas. Not surprisingly, therefore, our knowledge of his life remains patchy, and even the most elementary facts remain contentious.