Chapter 8 - ‘Singing with David and Contemplating Agesilaus’

Summary

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.