ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 of Between Byzantine Men concerns itself with ritual brotherhood or adelphopoiesis. It starts with Basil I’s brotherhoods in the historiographies, teasing out subtexts in the narrations and speculating about how Byzantine audiences would have understood them. These readings of the historiographers are then contextualized by visualization of the adelphopoiesis rite and close reading of an elaborate brotherhood prayer, a prayer that shares vocabulary and depictions of warm man-to-man relations with epistolography and historiography. Ultimately, it must be concluded that brothers are what brothers do. And it appears that carnality was something eminently possible, as both historiography and ritual speak not only of spiritual union but also of bodily closeness in various ways.
