ABSTRACT
If we are going to talk about the relationship of rhetoric and history in the work of Niketas Choniates, we should raise the question of where the authorial presence is traceable in the Chronike Diegesis. There are many ways of ascertaining this presence that could show that the rhetoric in Choniates the historian is not the work of a mere declaimer, however skilful, but that of a discriminating master involved in the narrative task of shaping the material to his historiographical purpose. The two most obvious approaches forcing themselves to our aĴention are to focus upon, and bring to the forefront, the author’s manner of presenting the historical material available to him and, secondly, to study his vocabulary, both word choice and acoustical aspects. To investigate the lexical aspect properly, the words of Choniates would have to be studied beyond their literal surface meaning and measured, so to speak, by their ability to evoke an atmosphere through their qualities of sound, their classical associations or the capacious range of their meanings.1 Here I would like to take into consideration the approach to authorial presence that has more to do with structural aspects, understood as both the sequence of themes and the construction of episodes, although the lexical and structural aspects may in due course have to be brought together.
