ABSTRACT
In May 2000 there was a conference in Nicosia in Cyprus entitled 'Towards a 'new' history of Byzantine literature'. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Byzantine departments of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of Cyprus or, in effect, by Paolo Odorico, an Italian based in Paris, and Panagiotis Agapitos, a Greek based in Cyprus. The task which the Cyprus conferences have set themselves is how to go about replacing Krumbacher and the von Muller series, because in effect there has never been a History of Byzantine Literature. In one of the papers for the first Cyprus conference on the general problem of a history of Byzantine literature, Paul Magdalino gave a paper entitled 'A History of Byzantine Literature for Historians'. The large numbers of Byzantine histories and chronicles that were written and rewritten, and so obviously catered for readers, reveal a Byzantine interest in narrative.
