36 Part One: Texts and Contexts
the military from the late 950s to 985: his military rank is unknown, but at a
certain point in his career he was awarded the honorary title of protospatharios
(by Nikephoros Phokas?). As Geometres owned a luxurious mansion in the
centre of the city and never refers to any financial problems (in his poems he
complains about almost everything, but not about poverty), he must have
been rather well-off. He may have inherited some of his possessions from his
father, a “loyal servant of the emperor”, but the rest of his opulence will have
accrued throughout his years of active service in the military^48. Thus I would
suggest that Geometres did not directly depend upon financial gifts from the
emperor, but that he was remunerated for his priceless literary services with a
comfortable position in the Byzantine army.
To return to the initial question: why do Byzantine poets of the seventh
through the tenth centuries hardly ever ask for any rewards, whereas later
poets (especially from the twelfth century onwards) repeatedly beg to be paid
for their services? Like Kazhdan^49 , I believe that one should approach this
problem from two separate angles: different forms of social stratification, and
varying degrees of self-assertiveness. The Comnenian age is characterized by a
political system in which a few families, related to each other by bonds of
marriage and blood, effectively control the administration and the channels of
promotion and demotion within the bureaucracy. As is only to be expected, in
such a political system patronage plays a central role as the medium through
which money, positions and favours are distributed. And this in its turn
explains the sudden emergence of a social stratum of (supposedly destitute and
mendicant) intellectuals who desire to enter the service of some patron in order
to earn their bread. Before the year 1000, however, power is not yet as monop-
olized as in later centuries. The emperor was officially, and often also in
practice, the main source from which power emanated; but even the emperor
depended on the support of different factions at court. These factions changed
all the time. They were not stable political pressure groups, but temporary
coalitions of various individuals seeking (with the backing of their relatives) to
protect their own interests. Allies would suddenly turn into bitter enemies;
former enemies could become one’s best friends. In this continuous power
struggle, no one was to be trusted and no one was to be utterly rejected. This
was a political system that did not favour patronage – at least not the kind of
permanent patronage whereby the patron and his favourites depend upon each
other in a sort of stable symbiotic relation. John Geometres is a splendid
(^48) See LAUXTERMANN 1998d: 364–365.
(^49) Kazhdan has put forward his theories in various publications: see, for instance, A.P.
KAZHDAN & A. WHARTON EPSTEIN, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and
Twelfth Centuries. Berkeley–Los Angeles 1985, 130–133 and 220–230.