The most important texts of our collection are the funeral orations for the patriarchs Michael Keroullarios, Konstantinos Leichoudes and John Xiphilinos, a personal friend of Michael Psellos. All the texts offer valuable details concerning Psellos’s early life; at the same time they constitute an important testimony to the survival of the Late Antique Rhetoric in XI c. Byzantium. They constitute a necessary supplement to Psellos’s more famous work, his Chronography, verifying and shedding a new light on the events narrated there.
I. Polemis, University of Athens.