ABSTRACT
Modern concepts of Byzantine literature regularly apply terms such as ‘authority’, ‘tradition’ and ‘mimesis’ in order to understand the ideological perspectives, narrative approaches and literary devices employed by Byzantine authors. In a historiographical context, authority is most often taken to mean ‘inuence’, tradition the ‘classics’ and mimesis ‘imitation’. Scholarly discussions on the topic have focused almost invariably on literary mimesis and evaluated the authority or inuence of the ancient tradition mainly in terms of the quantity and quality of imitation evident in linguistic traits and textual parallels.1 is approach leaves little room for discussion on historical methodology and outlook or philosophy of history – a topic which has been largely ignored in the underdeveloped eld of Byzantine historiography. Classical scholars, on the other hand, have developed an interpretive methodology to the study of mimesis based on criteria that include accessibility, order and density of textual parallels, situational analogies, distinctive traits and ideological perspectives.2 In addition to detecting literary mimesis, this approach can also detect similarities in values and perspectives and perhaps explain why a particular author selected a particular model for imitation. In this way, the study of mimesis becomes an important research tool in understanding the relationship of a particular author to the historical tradition as well as his/her techniques of employing that tradition.
