[This is the text of a paper read to the Leeds University Patristic and Byzantine Society on 25 April 1996. Comments are welcome: e-mail to m.f.heath@leeds.ac.uk. Copyright Malcolm Heath 1996.]
The emperor Manuel II Palaeologus was born in 1350, and reigned from 1391 until his death in 1425. So far as I am aware, he was the only Byzantine emperor who ever visited England. But that is completely irrelevant to what I am going to be talking about this evening. Equally irrelevant is the fact that Manuel was the son of John V. I know nothing about the emperor John's drinking habits: anyone who has come in the hope of sensational tabloid revelations about the late Byzantine royal family may wish to leave at this point. For the 'inebriate father' of my title is a fictitious character - the speaking persona in a declamation composed by Manuel.
To judge from my (admittedly limited) familiarity with the secondary literature, Byzantinists use this term 'declamation' rather loosely. (So, to be fair, do some classicists.) But it does have a fairly precise technical sense, and before we get on to look at Manuel's text, I think that we should set it context by saying something about the concept of 'declamation'.
However, declamation is tied up in turn with rhetoric: so we have to take a further step back, and fill in some background. We first have to be clear what was meant by 'rhetoric' in the ancient (and Byzantine) world, and in particular the place it had in ancient education.
'Rhetoric' is (in general terms) the art of persuasion. In the ancient world rhetoric was the key component of post-elementary education: that means that if you were an adult member of the educated male elite, then you had received in your adolescence a systematic training in techniques of persuasive public speaking. This is emphatically not just a matter of decorating what one wants to say. If you look at studies of the rhetorical influence on a classical or patristic author you will often find that it is, in effect, just a catalogue of the figures of speech they have used; but that is completely inadequate. Of course, that kind of thing is an important part of rhetoric: someone's speaking and writing will have less impact and be less persuasive if it falls short of their audience's stylistic expectations, or if it fails to match their assumptions about the way an educated and cultured person would express himself. But rhetoric goes deeper than this: it trains people in techniques for discovering what is worth saying, and in techniques for saying it cogently, as well as in techniques for saying it elegantly. The technical term in rhetoric for the aspect concerned with content is 'invention' (in Greek heuresis): 'invention' of course in the Latin sense of 'discovery' - the speaker is not required to make things up, but is taught how to find the potential for persuasive discourse latent that is in his subject-matter.
So rhetoric is a comprehensive concept: it covers everything from working out what one wants to say, through deciding how best to say it, to the performance skills needed to deliver the speech you have composed effectively. Such a comprehensive set of techniques needs a correspondingly complex theoretical framework, and one part of rhetorical education was the assimilation of a very elaborate system of theoretical precepts.
A second strand in rhetorical education was the study of classical authors - not just orators, but also poets, historians, philosophers and so on. Studying these authors would show students how the theoretical precepts should be applied in practice, and would also furnish their minds and memories (remember the important role which memorisation had in ancient education) with a stock of knowledge, ideas, allusions, expressions and so forth which could be redeployed in their own composition and imitated. 'Imitation' is a crucial concept in ancient and Byzantine literary culture, but a more subtle one than the English term may suggest: in the words of one ancient rhetorician, imitating (as it may be) Demosthenes does not mean doing what Demosthenes did, but doing things Demosthenically - doing your own things in the way that Demosthenes would have done them.
Their own composition was of course the third and most important strand in rhetorical training. Rhetoric is a practical skill, so the essence of rhetorical training was getting experience of composing and delivering speeches under the guidance of an expert practitioner. (The general term for a teacher of rhetoric was 'rhetor'; but rhetors, especially those who taught at the highest level, were also called 'sophists' - though obviously not in the pejorative sense that we are more familiar with.)
The practical exercises that the student would do in the rhetor's school were of two kinds. First of all, there was a graded series of elementary exercises known as gumnasmata or (later) progumnasmata. These progymnasmata basically enabled the student to practice one-by-one techniques that he would have to combine when he got to the stage of making proper speeches: for example, telling a story, testing the plausibility of a narrative, attacking or defending someone's character, and so forth. One of these elementary exercises was called 'thesis', and involved arguing on side or other of some general question: should one marry? should cities be fortified? Suppose you supply a set of circumstances and a concrete situation. For example, instead of arguing whether or not cities should be fortified, imagine that during the Persian invasion of Greece the Spartans are debating whether to fortify their own city. Now the question has to be argued not just in abstract terms, but also with reference to the strategic situation, the traditions of Sparta and so forth. The abstract thesis has become a concrete hypothesis. And this is the more advanced kind of exercise used in rhetorical training. The student is given a hypothetical situation (which may be based on myth or history, or may be imaginary), and has to take the role of a speaker in that situation, composing a mock version of the speech that one might deliver in reality. This kind of exercise, in which the student role-plays one party to a legal or deliberative dispute, is what is meant by declamation (in Greek, meletê).
So declamation was an exercise for students, but it was more than that. A teacher who had set a declamation-theme for his students as an exercise might do his own declamation as a model: either before the students did the exercise ('this is the kind of thing you should be aiming at') or after ('that's good: but here is something even better'). Beyond the schoolroom, adults used declamation as a way of keeping in practice; and many of them took a connoisseur's interest in declamation. Consequently, leading experts ('sophists') gave public displays of declamation to audiences that were sometimes large and enthusiastic. Thus declamation was also a kind of public entertainment (even, given the intense rivalry between sophists, a competitive sport); and since polished versions of sophistic declamations were published, it was also a kind of literature.
A good deal of technical material has survived from late antiquity, showing how declamation was used as a teaching tool. But we also have a number of published literary declamations, though it is only a fraction of the total number that was once in circulation. From the second century AD we have a couple of declamations by the satirist Lucian, and a number by Aelius Aristides. In the fourth century there are fragments of declamations by Himerius, and a large corpus of declamations by Libanius. (Libanius taught rhetoric in Antioch with great distinction, and was also a committed pagan and an associate of the emperor Julian; among his non-declamatory works is a defence of the pagan temples addressed to the emperor Theodosius, which is rhetorically brilliant, but politically ineffective - it was composed a couple of years before the temples were finally closed down.) In the sixth century, we have declamations by Choricius of Gaza.
After that, there seems to be a gap. I presume that declamation was still used as a teaching technique in Byzantine schools: at any rate, there is a lot of Byzantine technical literature on rhetoric, much of which would not make much sense if declamation was not still used in teaching. But the standard reference works do not seem to reveal any 'literary' declamation until the twelfth century. Then we have a spurt: in the twelfth century I know of (but have not necessarily read) one declamation by Nicephorus Basilaces; in the thirteenth century three by Gregory of Cyprus and thirteen by George Pachymeres; in the first half of the fourteenth century four by Thomas Magister and one by Nicephorus Gregoras. So there is a renewed tradition of this kind of composition lying behind Manuel Palaeologus, to whom we now return.
We know of two attempts Manuel made in this line. One is incomplete: this is a speech in the persona of the Trojan elder Antenor advising the Trojans not to give Helen back to the Greeks. The idea is that, just before the outbreak of the Trojan war, Odysseus and Menelaus have come on an embassy to demand Helen's return. Homer refers to this embassy, and Libanius wrote declamations which are the speeches of Odysseus and Menelaus on this occasion; Manuel's declamation is obviously conceived as a reply to Libanius' declamations [compare the anonymous declamation in the role of Paris published by C. Bevegni 'Anonymi Declamatio Paridis ad Senatum Troianum', SIFC 3 (1986), 274-92]. However, only the opening paragraph of this declamation was written (at any rate, that is all that has survived).
But Manuel's other declamation we do have in its entirety, and in a manuscript with corrections in Manuel's own hand. The hypothetical situation is as follows:
A man who took considerable pleasure in wine, and who was married, longed to father a child of similar disposition to himself. Failing to achieve this ambition, he offered many sacrifices to the gods; they promised that his wish would be fulfilled, and his wife conceived and bore a son. The father realised that right from infancy his son found wine uncongenial; so he began to harbour suspicions about the mother, and could not stand the sight of the child himself. On reaching maturity, the boy (understanding that his father disliked him) emigrated to another country and there became utterly proficient in medicine. When a plague devastated his own country the people asked him to return, promising (in lieu of any other reward for the benefaction they received from him) to entrust the government of the country to him. On hearing this he returned home, bringing considerable distinction to the country by his skill. Here he found that his father too was ill, because of his excessive drinking. He persisted in doing and saying everything that he could to persuade him to give up drinking; but he would not pay any attention. So the son ordered all the vines to be grubbed up by their roots (they were publicly owned). The father is incensed by this, and goes to court disinheriting his son, prosecuting his wife for adultery, and denouncing himself. --- Let us take the role of the father.
This may strike you as bizarre: indeed, it is bizarre. The element of humour is in line with many classical models (as we shall see). But few classical themes need more than a few lines to state, unless they are deliberately constructed with a view to complexity; and this is true of the Byzantine declamations I have mentioned as well. This suggests that Manuel has gone out of his way to construct something unusually convoluted.
This complexity is in part a consequence of the way in which three different legal suits are combined. Let us look at these three elements separately, to see if we can trace the classical influences which Manuel is manipulating here.
First, the father disinherits his son. This is a very common motif in classical declamation. On the one hand, conflict between father and son is a highly charged subject, inviting an emotional treatment attractive to declaimers. But the subject also requires careful argument: the hypothetical law under which declamatory fathers disinherit their sons is conveniently vague - it subjects the father's action to judicial review, implying that his powers are limited, but it does not define those limits; so the declaimer has to use the technical resources of rhetoric to establish the equity of his character's position.
One classical declamation concerning disinheritance is Lucian's Disinherited Son. In Lucian a disinherited son becomes a doctor, and is reinstated when he cures his father of madness; subsequently, when he says he cannot cure his stepmother, he is again disinherited. The motif of the son becoming a doctor suggests to me that this was the core of Manuel's inspiration - the theme, at least: obviously Lucian's declamation has less to contribute, since he takes the role of the son, Manuel of the father. But another aspect of the theme has been contributed from a less obvious source: a theoretical tract of uncertain date mentions a declamation-theme in which the son of an alcoholic father cuts down vines and plant roses instead, and is disinherited. (The rather obscure theoretical tract is the only source in which this theme is attested - or at any rate the only source I have yet discovered.)
There are in fact quite a lot of themes in which a son is disinherited for doing something contrary to an eccentric or obsessive character-trait of his father. In one of Libanius' declamations a miser's son vows a large sum of money to the god Asclepius if his father recovers from a dangerous illness; when the father does recover he is so outraged by this profligate expenditure that he disinherits his son. Libanius takes the role of the father; one of Gregory of Cyprus' declamations takes the role of the son. I said a moment ago that disinheritance themes give scope for emotion and careful argument - emotion and argument being two of the three resources for persuasion available to the rhetorician. But the variants we have just been talking about are more slanted towards the third rhetorical resource, character. The miser is a stock character from comedy, and the point of Libanius' declamation is representation of this character. Other stock characters include the duskolos (anti-social man), the boorish rustic, the coward, the rich man's parasitical hanger-on and so on. The drunkard is not an established stock-character in the same degree, but the point is much the same. Maximus Planudes (in the thirteenth century) says: 'These questions [i.e. declamation themes based on character] are the equivalent of comedy, and do not bring any argumentative element with them; for example, a farmer divorces his wife for using perfume' (RG 5.240.11-14 Walz).
That has brought us from father-and-son conflicts to husband-and-wife conflicts, and thus to the second component in Manuel's construction: the charge of adultery against the wife. Obviously, if a son does not correspond to his father's character, the kind of eccentric or obsessive character we have been talking about will infer that he must be someone else's son. There is a parallel in Hermogenes (the author of what in Byzantine times were the standard handbooks on rhetorical theory), who has a theme in which a coward accuses his wife of adultery when his son wins an award for heroism.
Husband-wife conflict enters into another of Libanius' character- based declamations in another way: the speaker is an anti-social man who cannot stand his wife's incessant chatter, and who has therefore applied for euthanasia. This request for euthanasia brings us to the third component of Manuel's construction: it is what is meant by the self- denuncation (heauton prosaggellei). There is in fact evidence that in some Greek cities there was a law requiring would-be suicides to apply to the city council for permission; such regulations may have been motivated by a fear that potential heirs might be tempted to help elderly relatives on their way and disguise it as suicide. But the rather thin attestation of the practice in reality is beside the point: declamation tends to be set in a fictitious world which follows its own, often far-fetched patterns. In this artificial setting the request for euthanasia is a far more common motif, and again it often used in character-based themes: I have mentioned Libanius' unsociable man with the nagging wife [cf. John of Sicily, RG 6.198], but one could also think of the miser whose neighbour wins the lottery and who requests euthanasia for that reason. What the miser really wants in that case is not to die, but to be given a share of the lottery money (actually, it is buried treasure in the original). The rhetorical theorists are agreed that (in general) the request for death is an oblique way of trying to achieve some other goal. The technical term for this is 'figured speech' (logos eskhêmatismenos), in which the speaker has a covert aim in addition to (or even contrary to) his overt aim. In Manuel's declamation, this implies that what the father really wants is to get the edict concerning the vines revoked.
So let us now look at the declamation itself. To achieve his overt and stated aims the speaker has to show basically two things: first, he has to show that the son is not legitimate - from which it will follow that his wife has committed adultery; secondly, he needs to show that life without wine is not worth living. His argument against the legitimacy of the son is based on the total contradiction between his own passionate love of wine and his son's hostility to it; now, his own love of wine is what makes life without wine not worth living for him - which takes him part of the way to achieving his second goal; but he has to go beyond that and show that this is not just a personal eccentricity - that life without wine is not worth living at all; and if he can show this, then he is also well on his way to achieving his covert aim of inciting the audience to resist the edict concerning the vines.
(1) The speech begins with a prologue contrasting the normal state of affairs, in which marriage and fatherhood are the height of happiness, with his own situation, in which these things have brought him to abject misery. Different people like different things - except when it comes to being a father: every father loves his children, and fathers are envied by the childless (even by those who wear the imperial purple). An only child, born late in life, an answer to prayer - such a child will be loved most of all. 'But in my case, members of the jury, what has happened is like this...':
Because I believed that everything which could do even a little to stir up the fire of love to burn most brightly had come together in my case, I loved my wife along with my child, and valued them as much as I do myself (I do not want to exaggerate, members of the council, and refrain from saying that I loved them more than myself). If only I had not. If only I had not desired in the first place what all men by nature desire most of all (I mean children - and a wife, since without her it is not possible to have children either). If the desire for children had been absent, I would never have desired to marry; and if I had not married, never would this man have seen the light of day, who is now forcing me to die of thirst; and if he had never lived at all, he would not have had anyone to love him (how could he?); nor, had he never been born, would all the things have come together which made my love vigorous and robust; and if love had been absent, which pours deep darkness over the souls of those it catches hold of, I would not have been deceived myself, but would have borne - as many do - the frustration of my hopes. So, if these things are bound one to another like a chain, I would not have fallen into such misery had the desire for children been absent. But, as it seems, I was fated to suffer the utmost misery; and for this reason it was not possible for me to escape the desire for children.
(2) The second part of the speech sets out to explain the reasons for his wanting to die:
You know how this wretch raged against me, how he decreed (on the pretext of love for me) that all the vines should be wholly uprooted, placing his confidence in the fact that they are publicly owned, and committing an outrage that brings ruin to humankind (alas!), and that calls on the gods (I believe) to exact the just penalty from the one who has perpetrated such an audacious crime. And though by this outrage he has touched yours hearts not lightly, but as if driving a spear through them, our fine leader has not as yet found anyone to restrain him. And I say this, members of the jury, not to convict you of any wrongdoing...
... which of course is precisely what he does want to convict them of: this is the first step in his provocation of the audience to resist the edict. The strand of invective against the son-cum-ruler continues: a little later the father refers sardonically to 'this fellow here, who has gained so much profit from his supposed medical expertise - thanks to the fact that no one can come back to life and bring a charge of murder from the underworld'; this theme will be taken up later in the speech - as will another motif that is introduced at this point, the attack on the gods:
I have come before you to request hemlock instead of the wine I love - why? Because the gods, to whom I have made lavish and varied and unceasing sacrifice for the sake of a quick death, have been slow in yielding to my prayers and granting release.
The gods, he goes on to point out, have a vested interest in not letting him die, since that would cut off their supply of sacrifices. This satirical image of the gods as sacrifice-junkies and as unscrupulously self-seeking is a classical one: it is reminiscent of passages in Aristophanes' comedies, and also of the satirical sketches of Lucian.
But has he not yet shown why he attaches so much importance (or why it is right to attach so much importance) to wine: so he goes on to argue that there are three things which distinguish human beings from animals. The first of course is rationality; the second (and this, though less obvious, is a mark of humanity that was noted by some ancient philosophers) is laughter; the third (for which I do not know any parallel) is their taste for wine: so the person who is most devoted to wine and who drinks the most of it is on this criterion the furthest removed from the animals, and the most fully human.
So the speaker has started with an image of his own misfortune as deriving from what in general is most desired and most envied - fatherhood; and he has explained why he is making his petition for euthanasia.
(3) The next stage of the speech concentrates on the illegitimacy of his alleged son, which is established from their utterly opposed lifestyles. This section is in essence the narrative section of the speech. What has preceded would I think in technical terms be the prokataskeuê, or 'preliminary confirmation'. But it has to be said that the formal structure of this declamation is not easy to discern - not I think becuase of any clumsiness on Manuel's part: it is a deliberate ploy, since he wants to portray the father as an unskilled speaker. Thus after saying that he wants to disinherit his wife's son he breaks off to apologise for the imprecision of his terminology: he cannot disinherit someone who is not his son anyway; but he leaves concern for precise diction to 'these clever rhetors standing round here' - he is not one of them.
When we get into the broadly narrative section we work our way gradually from his own life through the birth and infancy of the son to the maturity which has finally convinced the speaker that the young man is not his son. But what makes the progress gradual is the way the underlying narrative is interspersed with answers to imagined objections, comments on what he has just said, and so on. These interjections make the text livelier, and contribute much of the characterisation of the speaker. For example, after making one provocative statement he anticipates scepticism:
Or am I full of wine even now, and is all this idle chatter? Not at all. Yesterday I squeezed all my wine-skins with my hands expecting to get at any rate a drop dripping out of them into my mouth - but my hopes were dashed, and I found them more than stone-dry. I found one jar full (not that small a jar)... which I drank... and went to bed thirsty.
The narrative itself contains some delightfully grotesque images of his obsession:
I was brought up drinking wine. That has been my sole pleasure to this day - and I have grown very old, as you can see. My tunic (which is the only thing I use as a napkin) takes the place of a deodorant, so far as I am concerned, and stands in for every kind of perfume. I never ever smelled anything else. And if I ever needed to wash my head (only my head, mind: I've never been inside the doors of a bath-house), whether for reasons of health or cleanliness, wine has served the purpose instead of water. Because I am sworn enemy of water I have kept away from bath-houses. But it would have been possible, by Zeus, even in a bath-house to fill the need using wine, just as I do everywhere else. What a clever idea! What could possibly be plainer madness than that? My pleasure in drinking in diminished when I reflect that I am depleting the supply of wine, so surely I would have been out of my mind if I had poured away so much wine profligately in a bath- house.
And the sarcastic polemic against the son is carried on: the son's birth is announced in the fifty-ninth word of a sentence that begins with a wonderfully disimissive description of 'this hero here, the great god Asclepius - as he supposes, although in fact he is no better than fishes and frogs, such is his unaccountable liking for water...'. This son has turned out to be a relentless enemy of wine. (In the Greek he is wine's polemios aspondos- an enemy who will not enter into a treaty. I have to engage in that most thankless of tasks and explain a pun here. Greek treaties were not signed but sworn to, and the oath was ratified by pouring a libation of wine to the gods; hence the Greek word for 'treaty' (spondai) is the plural of 'libation' (spondê); so an enemy who won't enter into a treaty is one who will not pour libations - a very apt characterisation of an enemy of wine.) It would be as unnatural for such a person to to be the speaker's son as it would be to get grapes from a water-melon.
The father, of course, had prayed not just for a son, but for a son like himself: and a description of how the gods had promised through their oracles that this prayer would be granted leads into four pages denouncing their bad faith - continuing the theme of satire against the gods (pagan gods, at any rate) that we saw earlier. But this portrait of religious disillusion is put to use: it helps to explain why the speaker had not disowned the son before now (a point which might be turned against him). He concedes that all the evidence of his illegitimacy was there all along: 'but, I suppose, my firm trust in the powers above incited me to disbelieve the very facts.'
(4) Since the declamation is primarily interested in character, argumentation plays a relatively limited part - and what argument there is has largely been embedded in the narrative. But there is a residual argumentative section, which begins with a hypothetical objection: 'But he is like his mother.' Now this is a surprising objection - the father is not denying that the son is his wife's child, he is only denying that the son is his own child. But this is not a mistake: there is a purpose to the seeming illogicality. The fathers' response is to insist that the son is unlike his mother: she shared his taste for wine - he would never have married her otherwise. In fact, the son is unlike all the other citizens as well: they all like wine - though admittedly, not as much as they ought: and they ought to come out into the open about it. So the seemingly illogical way the argumentative section is introduced has a point: it suggests that the city's present ruler is in fact a complete foreigner (and thus, by implication, not a legitimate ruler at all); and it resumes the incitement to the audience to resist the attack on the vines. And to further that end he continues with a little encomium of wine - how it drives away sorrow, brings happiness, and makes people speak the truth; and he upbraids the judges for their attitude: the son has never tasted wine, so he does not know what he is missing and his attitude his to that extent understandable; but the judges have tasted wine, and know how wonderful it is - so how come they are not as passonate about it as they should be?
(5) The speech concludes with an extended epilogue. The first part consists of social satire: the speaker explains to the jury the benefits they will be conferring on everyone by bringing the hearing to a speedy end - he points, for example, to all the onlookers who have been wearing themselves out standing listening to things that are none of their business, and in particular to the ruler's entourage, who from the description he gives have clearly been trying to impress their boss by putting an exaggerated show of all the right reactions. (Assuming that Manuel delivered this declamation before an audience, it is amusing to contemplate his own entourage's feelings at this point.) Among other reactions, they have been visibly horrified by the fact that he has told the truth so outspokenly, and they have been astonished by the fact that he cannot bear to live without wine; but:
I think they have completely failed to understand themselves. It is obvious to everyone, you can be sure, that they give up, not jut their official positions, but their very lives, if anyone deprived them of their salaries. It is not possible, truly it is not, for the virtues - or vices - of rulers to remain hidden for very long: in time, brighter than the son, the ruler's true character will be revealed and made clear - to the eyes of people of good sense... The stars adorn the heavens, and the earth the variety of many different flowers: but for those who hold public office, the proper adornment is a stable character.
But of course the person who will benefit the most is the speaker himself. He has nothing to live for, especially since he realises that it is because of him that his fellow citizens have suffered this disaster - not just the loss of the wine, but all the diseases that will follow on from that. He suggests that the edict against the vines (an abuse of the authority that was given to be used against enemies and criminals) is really motivated by profit: as a doctor the son stands to gain from the professional fees he will earn when people deprived of wine fall ill; as ruler, he stands to gain from the death-duties that accrue when he fails to heal them. So again, the covert purpose of inciting the audience against the edict, and against the ruler who enacted it, is being pursued here.
I should explain at this point that in ancient Athenian law-courts the litigants were allocated a set time for their speeches, and they were timed by a water-clock. This device causes our inebriate father some problems, since he hates water - but all this talking has made him thirsty. He then has a bright idea: if they will not give him the hemlock he could drink the water instead: a glass of that will surely be enough to kill him. But the hemlock will be quicker - and in any case, if he has to drink something he hates as much as water, that will spoil the pleasure he takes in his death.
I should probably apologise for introducing such a frivolous text into the proceedings of a society more often concerned with the weightier matters of theology, demonology and anthropology. You can console yourselves, if you like, with the critique of pagan religion and the moralising reflections on the duties of those who hold public office.
But remember that the Greek word for declamation (a much better word than the Roman one we have inherited) is meletê, which means simply 'practice': one might as well have fun when one is practising - and a sense of humour was probably a great asset for someone with unenviable task of a late Byzantine emperor. But what was being practised for in declamation was something to be taken with complete seriousness, namely the ability to speak persuasively and eloquently. I conclude with a quotation from a much less frivolous text - the beginning of the first of Manuel's seven ethico-political discourses (Patrologia Graeca 156.385a):
Nothing could be more beneficial than the knowledge of how to speak well to those who wish to be good rulers, who have sound sense and look towards the common interest, who love what is good and value nothing more than truth. This to these men is superior straightforwardly to wealth and far excels the treasures of Croesus so far as security is concerned; it is stronger than Xerxes' multitude of soldiers, and has more force together with honour than Gyges' fabled ring; and in sum it is more efficicious than these and of more value.
1. Manuel: John W. Barker Manuel II Palaeologus: a study in late Byzantine statesmanship (New Brunswick 1969); L. Petit 'Manuel II Paléologue', in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique IX/2 (Paris 1927), 1925-1932.
2. Declamation: D.A. Russell Greek Declamation (Cambridge 1983); G. Anderson, 'The pepaideumenos in action: sophists and their outlook in the early Roman empire', ANRW II.33.1 (1989), 29-208, esp. 89-104; in rhetorical education: M. Heath Hermogenes On Issues (Oxford 1995), 1-27 (and 156-230 for selections from Lucian, Aelius Aristides, Libanius).
3. Byzantine declamation: H. Hunger Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaften XII/5, Munich 1978), I 93ff.; cf. id. 'On the imitation (mimêsis) of antiquity in Byzantine literature', DOP 23/4(1969/70), 17-38 (= Byzantinistische Grundlageforschungen (Lodnon 1973), no.15) and 'The classical tradition in Byzantine literature: the importance of rhetoric', in M. Mullett & R. Scott (eds) Byzantium and the Classical Tradition (Birmingham 1981), 35-47. Late classical and Byzantine rhetoric: G.A. Kennedy Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton 1983); G. Kustas Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric (Thessalonica 1973).
Nicephorus Basilaces: A. Garzya 'Una declamazione giudiciaria di Niceforo Basilace' EEBS 36(1968), 81-103. Gregory of Cyprus: Libanius 6.52-82 , 7.142-79 Foerster (cf. P. Maas 'Gregorios Kyprios und Libanios', in Kleine Schriften (Munich 1973), 486f.), and A. Schmidt Indices schol. Jenens. (1875-7). George Pachymeres: J.F. Boissonade Georgii Pachymeris Declamationes XIII (Paris 1848, repr Amsterdam 1966), and cf. Boissonade Anecdota 5.351ff. Nicephorus Gregoras: P.L.M. Leone Nicephori Gregorae Opuscula nunc primum edita (Rome 1971), 751-66.
4. Manuel's declamations: (a) reply to embassy speeches of Odysseus and Menelaus (= Libanius Decl. 3-4, cf. Homer Iliad 3.203-24): J.F. Boissonade Anecdota Graeca (Paris, 1830; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1962), 2.308f. (= Libanius, ed. R. Foerster, 5.226f.); (b) inebriate father: Boissonade 2.274-307.