Byzantine Literature and the Western Canon

Arnaldo Momigliano once said that the trouble with Byzantinists is that they all read different texts, i.e. there is no canon of Byzantine Greek literature. By looking at the circumstances of the development of national canons of literature, the arrival of the so-called 'Western canon' and perhaps also the renunciation of the canon (stale, male and pale) in recent years, we may be able to understand why this is so, and what this tells us about the place of literature in the empire and in the centuries after its fall.