Defining the Discipline: Rhetorical Prolegomena from Late Antiquity to the End of Byzantium

This paper addresses the question of how Byzantine rhetoricians perceived their own projects of commenting on Hermogenes and teaching rhetoric by concentrating on the rich tradition of prolegomena, both on rhetoric in general and on the individual Hermogenean treatises more particularly. Various teachers and scholars from Late Antiquity to the end of the Byzantine Empire and beyond prepared introductory essays outlining the preliminary knowledge they considered essential for their students to acquire before studying the Hermogenean treatises. At the same time, these prolegomena allowed rhetoricians to articulate their ideas on the definition of rhetoric, its history, and its place in the hierarchy of learned disciplines, thereby providing insight into their ideas on the social, political, and intellectual importance of rhetoric—and hence of their own pedagogical and scholarly activities. Byzantine rhetorical commentaries are characterised by intricate genealogical entanglements, as scholars reused and reworked the work of their predecessors. Moving beyond discourses of derivativeness and originality, this paper instead uses the entangled nature of the material to explore how successive rhetoricians positioned themselves within the preceding rhetorical tradition and employed earlier texts not merely as sources but as a synchronic library of rhetorical thought that facilitated their scholarly and didactic practice. Their selections and omissions from previous works, as well as their additions to and reframing of the existing material, reveal their understanding of (Hermogenean) rhetoric and of their own scholarly endeavours. While aware of their intellectual predecessors and the history of the available knowledge corpus, Byzantine scholars reactivated this received material to meet the intellectual and educational needs of new historical and cultural contexts. By combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives, this paper thus intends to shed light on the processes underpinning Byzantine rhetorical scholarship, as well as on continuity and change in Byzantine rhetorical thinking.