ABSTRACT
Tzetzes' complaints about Thucydides are old and may well have been drawn from the criticisms made by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first century. But it is tempting to take Tzetzes' final two lines of advice to Thucydides, on the qualities that his history ought to have contained, as a brief statement about the ideals of twelfth-century Byzantine historical writing. The Byzantine histories, from the tenth century on, are often about an individual or a family, or at any rate the focus is on the individual or family. The point of sprint through Byzantine historiography is to suggest that it has a distinct tradition quite separate from classical Greek historiography. Educated Byzantine writers, such as Anna and Kantakouzenos, obviously did draw on their classical reading and made good use of their training in rhetoric. There is, however, still the Latin tradition which must at least be considered as a possible source of the Byzantines' biographic and propagandist or apologetic approach.
