ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes the term 'travel genres' in two senses: one is the technical rhetorical sense meaning the genres declaimed before or after travel; the other is the more commonly accepted sense of literary genres with examples which include, or comprise, narratives of travel. There are five rhetorical travel genres: the propemptikon, which 'speeds its subject on his journey with commendation', the syntaktikon, which is the farewell of the departing traveller, the prosphonetikon, which is an address to someone arriving, and there is the epibaterion, the speech a traveller makes on arrival. The fifth rhetorical travel genre is hodoiporikon, a traveller's account of a whole journey. By the twelfth century other personal accounts of travels are making their way through like other kinds of autobiographical writing: a communication at the symposium focused on a fourteenth-century account by Libadenos. The chapter also resolves fundamental trial of separation engineered by peril at sea.
