Michael Psellos

Michael Psellos served nine or ten Byzantine emperors as courtier and adviser, revived the study of Plato in the empire, and wrote the Chronographia, which is the most personal and least trustworthy of the Byzantine histories. He came from a modest Constantinopolitan family, made his way through the imperial secretariat, and became consul of the philosophers, effectively head of the revived higher school. His Platonism was genuinely unusual in a culture that had settled on Aristotle for logic and distrusted Plato for everything else, and it got him into trouble: he was obliged to make a public profession of orthodoxy, and his pupil John Italos was condemned for heresy after him. He took monastic vows in 1054 when his position at court became dangerous, and left the monastery again as soon as it was safe, which is characteristic. The Chronographia covers the century from Basil II to Michael VII and is written as a series of character studies rather than a chronicle; Psellos is in most of the scenes and always advising well, which is the reason to read it carefully. It is nonetheless the main narrative source for a period in which the empire lost Bari, lost Manzikert and lost most of Anatolia, and its account of the court politics behind those defeats is not available anywhere else. He also wrote on medicine, law, demonology, rhetoric, mineralogy and music, and left a large correspondence. He tutored the future Michael VII, whose reign was a disaster, and he is generally held to have handled his own survival better than the empire's. The date and manner of his death are unknown, and even his baptismal name - Constantine - is recovered only by inference. His funeral orations for his mother and daughter are among the few pieces of intimate writing to survive from Byzantium.

• Lived: 1018 CE – 1078 CE
• Nationality: Byzantine
• Roles: writer, official