4 ms·

Byzantine Laments

• mcguire 10y ago
  "Neville observes that in the 18th century, when the tale of attempted fratricide took shape, historians were less sensitive to the rhetorical strategies of their sources. In Anna’s case, however, the problem was not that Gibbon, Diehl and the rest failed to note Choniates’s bias, but rather that they shared it. A woman so intrepid as to write history, that most masculine of genres, must have been power-hungry enough to wish, as Choniates claims, that she had ‘the long member and the balls’. Paraphrasing the words he put in her mouth, modern historians took them not only as fact but as the key to her character." "But for modern historians, Anna’s histrionic grief for a father who had died thirty years earlier seemed so excessive that they sought a different explanation for her ‘bitterness’ – and hit on disappointed ambition."