The rhetoric of Kekaumenos 1

Since their first appearance the Consilia et Narrationes ascribed to Kekaumenos have been warmly received, not least because of the simple directness of their style. As one scholar has observed, &s;it is dangerous to underestimate the rhetoricity of Kekaumenos&s;. Kekaumenos provides no encomia, since his gnomai are normally unattributed. As has been said, Robert Browning used the example of Kekaumenos when discussing Byzantine literacy. The Byzantine educational curriculum was that developed in the Graeco-Roman period. In the Byzantine period, the basic order of study remained the same; a propaideia in reading and writing, then the study of the language, based on the analysis of texts and then the study of rhetoric. In both the Roman and the Byzantine periods, therefore, money and geography have meant that many more young men have studied &s;grammar&s; than those who entered the next stage of rhetorical learning.