Joy, Sorrow, Wrath: Some Considerations over the Byzantine People’s Emotionality in Literary Sources

Abstract

The people’s emotions make up a phenomenon not measurable in objective way. This paper’s author has confirmed this conclusion by the cases of accounts on treasons and violent deaths of the emperors as described by several Byzantine historians. This paper addresses the accounts of Theophylaktes Symokattes on the death of Maurice, Michael Psellos and John Zonaras on the revolt against Michael V, and Niketas Choniates on the death of emperor Andronikos I Komnenos. Since the Byzantine literature expressed emotions by rhetoric, the description of events followed the norms of the genre. When the author described certain events, he supposed the reaction from particular individuals or groups and reproduced it by clichés describing the people’s behaviour in specific situations. This paper has analysed linguistic and literary ways the Byzantine historians used to reproduce the people’s emotional reactions on the events related to rebels and murders of the emperors. The analysis of the accounts on the events under study has uncovered that the emotions ascribed to the people were as varied as the author’s position towards the story he was telling. The conclusion has been made that the persons’ emotions always reflected the author’s own emotions.