The Kallos of the Byzantine City: The Development of a Rhetorical Topos and Historical Reality

Abstract

The term "beauty" is among those cited by Henry Maguire as central to "Art." Beauty is regularly ascribed to the city in the Greek rhetorical tradition. This article explores the use of the topos of urban beauty and its associated expressions for conveying aesthetic concepts, and relates them to the actual physical appearance of the late Roman and Byzantine city. Applied initially to the natural setting of a city or the accomplishments of its citizens, the topos of urban beauty shifted by the fourth century to the cities' architectural appearance, a usage that peaks in the sixth century. It is, then, at precisely the time that the ancient architectural structure of the cities was gradually disintegrating that the cities were increasingly praised in terms of their ancient aesthetic value. The article proposes reasons--both rhetorical and aesthetic--for this disjunction, and then pursues the topos of urban beauty as it is incorporated into Christian literature and transformed in the classicizing conventions of the late Byzantine authors.