ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 discusses the issue of Byzantine Classical imitation and its relation to the education of people at the court. Then an explicit discussion of the sources that the author of the Sylloge Tacticorum used follows. The chapter explores the working methods of the author of the Sylloge Tacticorum in the light of recent scholarly debates about practices of imitation in Byzantine literary traditions, and it scrutinizes the sources of the text. It offers a new reading of the problem of the sources, arguing against the existence of the Tactica Perdita and preferring to see the author of the Sylloge Tacticorum as more responsible for collating, epitomizing and editing the sources. The chapter allows the reader to estimate whether it is safe to regard the narrative of the Sylloge Tacticorum as trustworthy evidence to determine the author and dating of the text, or whether it should be seen as an unsafe testimony which was the result of slavish copying from lost sources.
