Introduction

This literary exchange demonstrates the continuing importance of the dialogic genre, and indeed a considerable awareness of generic subtleties, at the very end of the ‘Byzantine millennium’. Literary and philosophical dialogues were in fact one of the most enduring and most often practised forms of writing both in antiquity and throughout the Byzantine period. Yet the hundreds of examples known from the early Christian period and continuing in Byzantium until as late as 1453 and beyond have rarely received the attention they deserve. If Byzantine literature was the ‘Cinderella’ of Byzantine studies,2 dialogues remain the Cinderella of Byzantine literary history.