ABSTRACT
Despite Alexander Kazhdan’s use of homo byzantinus as his generic label for ‘Byzantinekind’, the lack of ‘men’ in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and the role of homo byzantinus say the same thing: men are the norm; women and eunuchs the differential. For Byzantinists, we accept that it was normative in Byzantium that masculinity was the subject and femininity the other, that what a man should be was how a person – homo byzantinus – should be. People’s places on the ‘homo byzantinus scale’ could be adjusted by their performance, a performance which could be equated to being. Against homo byzantinus, the othering of everything and everyone else could take place effortlessly: slaves, children, eunuchs, ‘foreigners’, non-Orthodox, anything ‘not male’. Women and men in both texts and images are set up to play roles up and down the ‘homo byzantinus to the beasts’ scale.
