Reflections on Nikephoros Gregoras’ Historia Rhōmaikē: Innovation, variety, emotion

The Historia Rhōmaikē was written and circulated in Constantinople in several installments since the 1340s. It recounts events in Byzantine history from the period from 1204 until ca. 1359. Today the work is preserved in more than forty manuscripts, two of which-Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, codd. Vat. gr. 165 and 164-were partially copied, annotated, and revised by Gregoras himself. The pinakes, marginal, and chapter titles in both codices indicate that the latter were designed as an edition of the first seventeen books of the History. The present paper studies Gregoras’ historiographical project and a selection of his letters and hagiographical works in order to explore Gregoras’ self-referential remarks on ‘novelty’ and ‘innovation’, as well as his reflections on the aesthetic value of variety and the pleasure the latter can incite. It also adduces as evidence some of the ‘editorial’ decisions the two Vatican manuscripts preserving the Roman History display, such as the chapter division and its relationship to the pinax of each volume, and the role of marginal titles in guiding the readers’ emotional response or alternatively, in directing how the text should be performed. Gregoras’ remarks on novelty and its relation to diversity and perception indicate his concern with the reception of his literary production, which in turn, reaffirms the importance of rhetoric in Palaiologan Byzantium.