ABSTRACT
This is a book about a text. A n d it is about reading that text. The text belongs to what used to be regarded as the unproblematic and privileged category of 'literature'. 1 But Byzantine literature should be regarded as anything but unproblematic. It has never had a good press, least of all from its own students. The inferior nature of Byzantine literature2 was for G ibbon an essential plank of his thesis of decline and fall, which has gone unquestioned unti l very recently. A n d it has been de rigueur for professors of Byzantine language and literature to echo Gibbon's harsh judgment. R o m i l l y Jenkins put it best:
The Byzantine empire remains almost the unique example of a highly civilised state lasting for more than a millennium, which produced hardly any educated writing which can be read with pleasure for its literary merit alone.3
