ABSTRACT
Byzantine histories and chronicles constitute one of the richest and most informative types of written source material for the period, partly because of the relative sparseness of evidence such as archival documents (until the later tenth and eleventh centuries), and (in great contrast to the Roman period before the sixth century) epigraphy. For the same reason, history writing is also one of the most problematic types of source at the historian's disposal, since corroborative material is difficult to find, while the ideological programme inherent in the choice of material, mode of reportage, and narrative structure, whether unconscious or deliberate, creates difficulties of interpretation which are especially problematic. Authorial intention, assumptions and agendas, as well as the formal framework within which the historian or chronicler worked - consciously or not - played an equally crucial role in determining how the material employed by the writer interplayed with the broader cultural context as well as the psychological frame of reference in which the writing took place. l
To begin with, the distinction between 'history' and 'chronicle', or more exactly between 'annals' and 'chronicles', which remains an important aspect of the late Roman heritage in the medieval West, is of little value except in the crudest terms. Byzantine annalists followed the Thucydidean model for the most part, with a 'weak' year-by-year framework tempered by thematic narratives in which particular issues are pursued, sometimes at the expense of any regular form in the yearly structure; chroniclers and 'chronographers', who organized their material on a model more obviously based around short yearly entries, were by the same token drawn to thematic narrative. There remains a distinction between those writers who adhere to a strict year-by-year account, and those who construct a more biographical narrative, taking the reigns of individual emperors as their basic structure, although invariably pursuing also a chronological framework within each reign.2 Yet while it
See R. Macrides, 'The historian in the history', in C.N. Constantinides, N.M. Panagiotakis, E.E. Jeffreys and A.D. Angelou, cfJIAEAAHN. Studies in honour of Robert Browning (Venice 1996) 206-24; Ya.N. Lyubarskii, 'Quellenforschung and/or literary criticism: narrative structures in Byzantine historical writings', Symbolae Osloenses 73 (1998) 5-22. The issue is further problematised in A. Kaldellis, The argument of the Chronographia of Psellos (Lei den 1999).
