Larisa Orlov Vilimonović, Structure and Features of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad: Emergence of a Personal History (Lucas McMahon)

Larisa Orlov Vilimonović

Structure and Features of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad: Emergence of a Personal History

(Amsterdam, 2018), 358 pp. $136.00

Those wishing to understand to enigmatic history written by the unhappy daughter of the medieval Roman emperor Alexios (r. 1081-1118) live in good times. This is the third monograph published in English on the Alexiad since 2014. All approach the author and her text in different ways, and the result is that we now have a range of longer, more nuanced readings that expand upon the previous gold standard of Anglophone Anna Komnene scholarship, an edited volume from 2000, Anna Komnene and Her Times. Penelope Buckley’s 2014 The Alexiad of Anna Komnene: Artistic Strategy in the Making of a Myth is a literary study that argues Anna was attempting to rehabilitate the figure of her father and show him as the restorer of the empire and the “last Constantine,” a role with theological connotations. Leonora Neville’s 2016 Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian has a gendered interpretation, arguing that the thirteenth-century historian Niketas Choniates invented the story of Anna’s failed coup against her brother out of spite because a woman had written a history. While the coup remains central to Vilimonović’s reading of the Alexiad, she takes a decidedly rhetorical and historical approach. Key to Vilimonović’s approach is how Anna employed ancient Greek rhetorical models, as well as the literary circles that were active in Constantinople during the reign of John II Komnenos (r. 1118-43). Rather than the bitter aunt long separated from power writing under Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143-1180) Vilimonović posits that we need to read the Alexiad in light of the decades Anna lived alongside John when he was heir apparent, emperor, and then attempted to secure the succession for this son Alexios. This approach leads to exciting new conclusions in a range of areas, especially in medieval Greek history writing and Komnenian family politics during the first half of the twelfth century.

A central tenet of the book is that culture and literature are inseparable. Vilimonović looks to literary circles to find evidence of political tensions during the establishment of the Komnenoi. She sets the context of the writing of the history at the time when John had decided that the throne should pass through his male descendants. A key argument that begins here but will (convincingly) play out through the rest of the book is that the Alexiad is written from the perspective of the Doukas house and that in it we can see much greater levels of political tension within the ruling Komnenos-Doukas alliance. The Doukas family had previously had two emperors on the throne (Constantine X, r. 1059-67; Michael VII, r. 1071-78) and proved instrumental in the 1081 coup of Alexios Komnenos. Alexios was married to Eirene Doukaina, a granddaughter of the dynasty’s most senior member, the kaisar John Doukas. This merging of the dynasties is traditionally where the history of the Doukas family ends, and the history of twelfth-century Byzantium has always been the story of the Komnenoi. However, Vilimonović reveals that a Doukas political narrative and alternative power centre decades after the empire was supposedly solidly under one-family rule.

Before turning to those arguments in detail Vilimonović studies Anna’s rhetorical style. The main argument here is that meaning needs to be understood in the rhetorical system of Greek learning that Anna was steeped in. Rather than looking at the genre of history and ancient Greek writers of history, Vilimonović posits that Anna’s model was Aristotle, who codified in Byzantium how argumentation should work and the relationship between history and truth. Anna’s second model was more recent: Michael Psellos. Anna invokes Psellos’s encomium of his mother. The encomium was effectively self-praise of Psellos, and Anna uses something similar to emphasize her closeness to her parents and thus the reliability of her narrative. This makes the Alexiad a mirror of Anna and this is intentional: Psellos wanted to remind his audience that he was a great imperial counsellor, while Anna reminds hers of her eligibility for the throne.

The next chapter aims to look at the ideal ruler but turns to the Homeric aspect of the Alexiad. The chapter is less focused than previous ones but makes a number of enlightening arguments: like the Iliad, the Alexiad is a tale of woe, but Anna’s. The first war against the Normans is presented in Homeric terms by assigning the main characters a guise from the Iliad: Alexios forging letters is similar to what Odysseus did against Palamedes; the wounding of George Palaiologos is like Hektor being wounded by Ajax. Vilimonović notes that Anna often prefers to link Alexios to Herakles rather than Odysseus, the latter being a divisive figure in the twelfth century. The chapter also makes arguments about Anna’s effort to refute the criticisms made by John the Oxite of Alexios in 1091 and the place of rhetoric invoking Constantine I at John’s court but these arguments do not entirely come together.

The following chapter deals with Anna’s claims about her right to rule, and Vilimonović shows how she emphasizes her descent from Alexios and resemblance to her parents, at the expense of John. Anna’s betrothal to Constantine Doukas also connects her to that house and its legitimacy. The next chapter (‘The pain of Niobe and the cry of Elektra’) is about lament. Vilimonović argues that lament has been viewed in scholarship as gendered, but Aristotelian ideas about the genre are not. Vilimonović raises the important point that if Anna was attempting to reinforce her authority through female virtue, then why does she never mention being a mother? Instead, she has an “Elektra complex”, and emphasizes her connection to her father.

Two long chapters (pp. 163-337) make up the remainder of the book. The first of these is on the Doukai and their political activities and opinions. Vilimonović argues that the Alexiad needs to be seen in light of Komnenian propaganda at John’s court. The arguments contained therein are wide-ranging and convincing, but the main point is that Anna writes herself into the story as the most legitimate member of the Doukas house. The circle of Eirene Doukaina is the origin of both the Alexiad and the Komnenodoukikon, a term invented by the poet and rhetor John Prodromos to resist the Doukai from being fully assimilated into the Komnenoi. Vilimonović rehabilitates Eirene’s reputation as patron: she did not merely fund literati and monasteries, but had a coherent, Doukas-centric political platform, and those political views involved working against her own son.

The final chapter continues these themes but turns to the Komnenoi. Vilimonović opens with a discussion of Anna Dalassene and argues that Anna misrepresented her grandmother, who chose to refer to herself on her seals as a nun. Yet Anna never mentions this, and Anna sets Dalassene’s death near her own birth in order to make herself the empress reborn. Moreover, she overstated Dalassene’s authority and approximates her to an empress, whereas historically her powers seem to have been more circumscribed. Vilimonović presents a new solution for the disappearance in the Alexiad of Adrianos Komnenos, brother of Alexios I. She proposes that because he was married to a daughter of Constantine X he had a stronger connection to the imperial Doukai than Eirene did and so Anna excluded him to make herself the heir. Some of the argumentation here is not always clear and this plays down the Diogenes conspiracy which is intriguingly but not entirely convincingly made out to be a statement about Anna’s own story. The chapter concludes with John imprinting his mark upon Constantinople with the triumph of 1133 and the construction of the Pantokrator monastery in 1136. The coup against John was, as Vilimonović argues, less a case of an active attempt to remove him from the throne but rather an effort by the Doukas faction headed by Eirene Doukaina to keep the Komnenoi from subsuming their family.

This rich book is unfortunately hampered by an apparent lack of editorial intervention. Nearly every page contains infelicities in the English, but fortunately this rarely impedes understanding. Certain parts of the book have a slightly scattershot approach and do not always come together into a single argument, notably the chapter on the ideal ruler. It may not always be possible to structure all of these arguments into individual chapters, and so this book would have benefitted from an index locorum.

Nonetheless, this is a highly valuable treatment of the Alexiad, Anna Komnene, and dynastic politics in eleventh and twelfth-century Byzantium. Vilimonović should be commended for writing the book in English as it is an immense work of scholarship that presents a wide range of new and intriguing ideas, and has major implications for understanding medieval Greek history writing, intellectual culture, and dynastic politics.

Lucas McMahon
Princeton University

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