ABSTRACT
Although circumscribed by the strict and sometimes monolithic conventions of a long-established tradition, rhetoric in Byzantium always remained a potentially “double-tongued” (ἀμφοτερόγλωσσος 1 ) art which allowed its practitioners to exploit the ambivalences of language and, sometimes, even to undermine the authority of their models 2 . Rhetoric has invested Byzantine literature with a dialogic potentiality and an allusive intertextuality whose aesthetic appeal should be estimated not on the basis of our own criteria but according to the horizon of expectations of its original public — to the extent, of course, that these horizons can be reconstructed. If the appreciation of this kind of creativity demands considerable mental agility on the part of the general reader or even the specialized scholar, this by no means should be considered as an inherent flaw of Byzantine literature itself 3 .
