ABSTRACT
When questions of literature and aristocracy arise an automatic response is to add the two together and make patronage. That this is not the only right answer to the sum is shown by two other papers in this volume, that of Alexander Kazhdan, which by charting the sometimes imperceptible shifts in the topoi of encomia, history and parainesis beautifully documents changes in aristocratic values under the Comneni, and that of Paul Magdalino, which divertingly lays bare the social illusions, aspirations and fantasy-life of (who else?) writers. But the question still poses itself: who paid for Comnenian literature, or, as I should prefer to phrase it, what was the social base of Comnenian literature?
