ABSTRACT
In societies that possess a historiographical tradition, historiography is only a small part of a much larger framework. This is the cultural mechanism of the making of ‘history’, the various ways in which a society produces its own past, its collective memory. The main thrust of this production is usually of an ideological nature: it empowers communities, groups and individuals, and is manifested in institutional structures, performed ritual, and other forms of representation.1 In Byzantium, the state, church, monasteries and schools – to name the most significant Byzantine social formations – brought forth various historical pasts with their concomitant ideological baggage. That production was accompanied by rituals and representations that made the past present in Byzantine everyday life and served to form communal and personal identities. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that, from imperial and monastic ceremony to church homiletics, from iconography to school rhetoric, narratives of a historical past were one of the main products of Byzantine culture.2
