ABSTRACT
Orthodoxy was the single most distinctive badge of identity displayed by the Byzantine ‘intelligentsia’ from the ninth to the fifteenth century, whatever their other identities and interests. Crudely speaking, Byzantine elite culture passed from an age of classicism and encyclopaedism to an age of humanism and Hellenism, from which it never looked back. It is clear that during the age of encyclopaedism, Byzantine graduates were fully committed to working for the ideology of the imperial theocracy, whether in serving as bishops and civil servants, or in delivering occasional rhetoric, or in contributing to one encyclopaedic project or another. John Sikeliotes used the example of Gregory of Nazianzos to formulate an ideology of politikos logos, thus inaugurating the revival of the Second Sophistic that culminated in what has recently been characterized as the ‘civic humanism’ of the late Byzantine city.
