ABSTRACT
Panegyrics and descriptions of cities were based on the rules found in rhetorical handbooks, the best known example being the late 3rd century AD treatise How to Praise a City by Menander the Rhetor. Encomia and ekphraseis of cities were written either as independent texts, usually orations given on some special occasion, or as descriptions of urban landscapes embedded in various types of literary works. Visual representations of cities were very widespread on mosaic pavements in churches of the Middle East. The motif of an enclosed fortress, from which densely packed rooves of houses with the dome of a church in their midst projected, which constituted the typical iconographical convention for depicting cities in Byzantine visual culture from the 8th century on, remained in use up to the end of the empire in the mid-15th century. The flourishing of literary descriptions is not paralleled by a similar effort in visualizing urban landscapes in late Byzantine art. .
