“And the Earth has once again become invisible and unformed”: Glosses to the Image of War in the Oration ‘On the Treaty with the Bulgarians’

Authors:

Pages: 201-213

Abstract:

The text discuss the question of human attitudes facing the miseries of war on the basis of an excellent piece of Byzantine rhetoric art from the third decade of 10th c. Throughout the first three chapters of the oration, concerning the peace treaty of 927 between Byzantium and Bulgaria, the author built up the image of war itself as well as of a suffering human who had become a witness to the violence inflicted to the soil, temples and villages, as well as and first of all to humans during war operations. And although that image was in many aspects a clichй of the Byzantine literature through multiplying the images of suffering, present in other similar works, it referred to the deeply rooted pattern of such feelings, based on the experience of many generations of Byzantines themselves and of the humankind in general. So, despite being, in some ways, a customary topos it reflected the possible or perhaps actual human experience of meeting with violence. The text present and characterize the attitudes and emotions which accompanied the Byzantine author he had experienced (or at least said he had), being a witness and hearing the relations of atrocities of a fratricidal war.

Keywords:

violence, war studies, the image of war, emotions, Byzantine literary topoi, Byzantine rhetoric, Byzantine- Bulgarian relations.

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