This article examines the last moments of the emperor Theophilos and how his dying moments are related in Byzantine historiography. His religious policy is central here. In fact, Theophilos’ stance on images is what allows us today to categorize narratives of his final moments, based on whether he repented for his iconoclastic policy. Three groups of narratives can be distinguished; those that claim that the emperor repented, those that claim that he did not, and those that are silent on the issue. Death narratives in historical writing constitute a commonplace in Kaiserkritik, and Theophilos’ dying moments are no exception.

Xenophon participated in the March of the Ten Thousand, but in the Anabasis, instead of parading his autopsy, he keeps his narratorial persona separate from his character. This separation, however, is subtly blurred when, on the one hand, the narrator adopts the perspective of the character, who is by far the most prominent focalizing instance in the narrative, and, on the other hand, the character appropriates narratorial functions: Xenophon the character comes to the fore as embedded narrator and commentator of the events. Furthermore, his references to the past can be read as meta-historical, i.e. they shed light on the commemorative act of the Anabasis. While the choice of a hetero-diegetic narrator helps Xenophon to enhance the credibility of the account of his deeds, the intricate entanglement of narrator and character contributes to the characterization of himself as the privileged agent in the March of the Ten Thousand.