ABSTRACT
Anyone who wishes to consider from a literary standpoint the last three, fully extant major historians in the chain of classicizing secular historiography, which late antiq uity bequeathed to Byzantium, will, sooner or later, be obliged to abandon, at least provisionally, many of the overriding critical objectives and much of the methodology of the modern historian of the ancient world. Not that the historian’s perspective and the reader’s field of vision are mutually exclusive. The difficulty lies entirely in the historian’s manner of reading and not necessarily in anything that he eventually decides to write. The modern critical historian’s professional approach to the reading of literature in general, and of historical literature in particular, is of necessity highly selective. So narrow, in practice, is the focus of this approach that it admits of virtually just two ways of reading a historical text: a) as a potential source of information (sub ject, of course, to critical examination) about the historical period it purports to deal with and/or b) as a historical document emanating from a historical personage (the author), to which document similar critical procedures may be applied in order to elicit information about the cultural and historical context obtaining at the author’s time of writing1. Moreover, the end-product of such readings is the reader’s own his torical reconstruction, that is to say, the writing of another and indeed alternative form of history.
