The Patria of Hesychios of Miletos :|a literary performance

Abstract

This thesis examines Hesychios of Miletos’s late antique Patria of Constantinople within a framework of tools and concepts developed within literary studies, literary criticism, and memory studies. Modern scholarship has often approached the corpus of patriographic literature on Constantinople as an unreliable treasure of evidence about the city’s topography. Likewise, Hesychios’s Patria has been primarily used as evidence about the state of the contemporary social milieu and has not been thoroughly analyzed as a literary artifact. Hence, it has been the case that what we know about Hesychios’s literary personality and interpretations of his Patria are reconstructions of modern scholars based on their view of Late Antiquity. This thesis conceives Hesychios’s work as a literary performance. It starts by discussing the concept of genre and the genre of patria in Byzantine literature in chapter two. Looking at both primary sources about Hesychios and modern reconstructions of who he was, it examines what we can know about Hesychios’s literary personality in chapter three. Chapter four introduces structural literary analysis tools and examines Hesychios’s source Anaplous Bosporou. Chapter five is a thorough analysis of Hesychios’s work through structural and literary analysis using tools and concepts developed in memory studies. All throughout, this thesis asks the perennial historiographical question, “How much can we really know?” and rather than reaching definitive conclusions, it aims to enrich and complicate what we think about Hesychios and his Patria.