Rhetoric and the Philosopher in Byzantium*
Rhetoric and the philosopher in Byzantium* STRATIS PAPAIOANNOU The scene is familiar. A Byzantine ‘sophist’ enters the stage. The ‘philoso- phers’ are polite and graciously greet him, yet reject his company. In their eyes, he is not one of them. By contrast, the ‘sophists’ or, as the text also names them, the ‘rhetoro-sophists’ receive him with enthusiasm and grant him an honourable place among themselves. The (early?) twelfth-century author of the Timarion, to whom we owe this description,1 could not have imagined how his positioning of the Byzantine philosopher or, as he prefers to call him, ‘sophist’ would endure beyond the infernal stage of Hades, where Timarion’s oneiric experience takes place. Byzantine philosophers may still be valued today for their rhetoric and other technical skills (of, say, copying, collecting, or commenting upon philosophical texts), but rarely for their philosophy.2 The author of the Timarion did not, of course, have the future of Byzantine philosophers in mind. What his sarcastic pen was aiming at was to disqualify the philosophical aspirations of self-professed philosophers of his immediate present. He did so by referring to an age-old anxiety of pre- modern Greek writing dating back to, at least, the writings of Plato in fourth-century Athens. The anxiety pertained to the definition and regulation of the relation between discursive content and discursive form, between thought and language, or, as it came to be seen, between philosophy and rhetoric. The anxiety was provoked by the desire on the part of self- proclaimed ‘philosophers’—such as Plato—to mark a distinct, privileged space for their own discursive production within the highly competitive field of public discourse in Athenian social life.3 The negotiation between philosophy and rhetoric remained a constant point of reference for many generations of Greek writers.
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