ABSTRACT
In the spring term of 1986, Margaret Alexiou, having just arrived at Harvard as the new George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, gave a seminar on death in Greek culture. The passionate, humorous, and scholarly manner in which she discussed cultural, anthropological, and literary issues in the seminarwithout disturbing the educational aim of the course-proved one of my most important academic experiences at Harvard. It was during that seminar that I first attempted to approach Byzantine funerary texts as literary works of art, and it was out of that attempt that my first article on a literary topic came into being. Gradually, the idea of a broader study on the Rhetoric of Death in Byzantine Literature of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries emerged; the present paper forms part of this study in progress.
