Literary Subversion and the Aristocracy in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: A Stylistic Analysis of the <i>Timarion</i> (ch. 6–10)

‘Narrative always says less than it knows, but it often makes known more than it says’ (Gérard Genette) In this paper I wish to argue the relevance of detailed literary and stylistic analysis for a fuller understanding of learned twelfth-century texts, using as my model the elaborate eulogy in the Timarion of a prominent but hitherto unidentified member of the Doukas-Palaiologos family. The passage in question, so far taken at face value, may be interpreted as a highly-wrought and carefully contrived piece of irony, or, in other words, as a subversive ‘send-up’ of one of the most fashionable branches of the twelfth-century aristocracy.