A Letter Collection is an Archive: The Case of the Letters of Nikephoros Ouranos

I am currently completing a translation of the collection of 50 letters by Nikephoros Ouranos, who was an important associate of emperor Basil II. I agree with Darrouzès that the letters are not the place to go for full-dress biography, but ‘ils suffisent pour nous dévoiler le cœur noble et l’espirit cultivé de Nicéphore Ouranos’ (1960, 48). But this collection, even though it was surely assembled by other hands, is long enough to allow observations more searching than mere evidence of fine character and education. Bringing known/suspected details of Nikephoros’ career and political importance into dialogue with his letters can generate insights such as the following: how the powerful speak to each other and to the less powerful; the negotiation of status asymmetry; ambiguity of tone in high-stakes communications; how to speak about the emperor—in this case, Basil II, about whom we always want to know more; still other things. Furthermore, a letter collection such as this one is every bit an archive as other sources are. It may seem that one is reading much into the letters, but this is the case with all archives as they don’t tell a story without the researcher: ‘“[an a]rchive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentation that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there...nothing happens to this stuff, in the [a]rchive... as stuff, it just sits there until it is read, and used, and narrativized’” (Steedman 2002, 68 in Doan 2013, 48 [emphasis in original]). An archive must be designated as such and will not interpret itself. Indeed, every account of the past is a narrative forged via selection and interpretation by the historian.