My second text is the Precepts and Anecdotes written by Kekaumenos to his son in the 1070s. This text plays an important part in Kazhdan’s construction of homo byzantinus and for all its peculiarities it takes the reader into the more private world of the Byzantine ‘man in the street’. The somewhat fearful views of the world expressed by Kekaumenos appear to support Kazhdan’s reading of Byzantium as a society marked by ‘individualism without freedom’, such that ‘the final aim of homo byzantinus was, in principle, a solitary, eremitical life, free from any form of social relationship’ [A. Kazhdan and G. Constable, People and Power in Byzantium (Washington, DC, 1982), 33 and 60]. This somewhat misanthropic reading of Byzantine society and of its construction of the individual can be found in Kekaumenos’s text.
– Homo Byzantius?, in Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (1997), pp. 191-2