The Pen and the Sword: Who Wrote the Alexiad?

RUT MACRIDES

Ana Komnene's Alexiad, an account of her father's reign which has been available in Penguin
paperback since 1969, is no doubt read by more people today than it was in the Middle Ages.:
Although the Alexiad has provided generations of historians with material for the writing of the
history of the Komnina, it has scarcely been the object of analysis since the pioneer work of
Georgina Buckler in 1929. Fundamental questions are only now being addressed, questions such as
how Anna's work relates to that of other Byzantine writers of history in style and in content, how
reliable it is in reconstructing the events of Alexios's reign, how It compares with the other narrative
account of Alexios's reign written in the twelfth century by John Zonaras and, last but not least,
whether Ana's being a woman affects her presentation in any way. In the last few years. however,
the text and its author have attracted more attention. The Byzantine Studies conference in New York
in 1995 devoted a session to Anna Komnene which included papers on her portrayal of women and
her philosophical interests. In 1996 Diether Reinsch published a translation of the Alexiad into
German based on a new edition of the text which he has prepared. Also in 1996 a volume devoted to
studies on Alexios I Komnenos appeared in which James Howard-Johnston raised the issue of the
authorship of the Alexiad. It is this study which is my starting point. The hypothesis put forward by
Howard-Johnston will be discussed in the context of eleventh- and twelfth-century historical writing,
namely the works of Michael Psellos and John Zonaras. Further, the question of gender-specific traits
in medieval historical writing will be addressed with regard to the Alexiad.

In his work on the Alexiad, Howard-Johnston takes as his point of departure the amount of space
devoted to warfare in the work, something which he finds surprising. "Enemy after enemy emerges
from the sur-rounding world to launch attacks on the empire" is his description of Anna's
presentation of events. Military narrative, he estimates, takes up roughly half of Anna's text. "War
supplied the Alexiad with most of its material and provided its basic structure." He further
comments, "This concentration on military history and the intense concern for the opera-tional
peculiarities of campaigns seems rather odd, in the light of Anna's known interests which were
literary and intellectual and her lack of ex-perience of battles and war." Howard-Johnston suggests,
therefore, that "if we knew nothing of the author, we would suppose that the Alexiad was penned by
a retired officer whose active life had been spent in the field and whose later years were dominated
by the memories and remi-niscences of himself and his old companions-in-arms."6 He finds just such
an officer in the person of the caesar Nikephoros Bryennios, Anna's husband, whose hand, he argues,
can be detected in the Alexiad. He was the "original progenitor" of much of the material in the
Alexiad. It was from him that she took the bulk of her material on military history—"un-familiar and
uncongenial subject matter."7 His was the extensive archival research which Howard-Johnston posits
went into the Alexiad and to which we owe the chrysobull for Anna Dalassene, the letter to Henry IV,
and the treaty of Devol. His, too, are the "well-told, entertaining anec-dotes which lard the text."
Howard-Johnston evaluates this material: "Next to the high-grade campaign narrative which forms
the solid core of the text, it is these stories which raise the Alexiad, for all its muddles and gaps, to
the level of the very best historical works produced in Christen-dom or indeed in the Islamic lands in
the middle ages. Thus, much, if not most, of the Alexiad is attributed to Nikephoros by Howard-
Johnston, while

Anna's contribution and task was to fill out the material in Nikephoros' dossier, to plug the gaps in the main
military and diplomatic narrative, adding matter of her own choosing and comments of her own, and to subject
all the material to a thorough stylistic upgrading.

"Hers was to be a long and sweated labour of love." In this way, Howard-Johnston presents the
husband and wife team, expressing sur-prise that the relative importance of each partner's
contribution to the Alexiad was not recognized long ago, given that Anna does not conceal her debt
to Nikephoros. The relationship of the Alexiad to Bryennios's work is clearly laid out by Anna in her
prooimion. There she states that she undertook her ac-count of her father's deeds because her
husband, the caesar, had not been *able to complete the work which he had begun at the command
of the empress Irene, his mother-in-law. Bryennios had written about Alexios's exploits only in the
period before his accession to the throne, from the reign of Romanos Diogenes to that of Nikephoros
Botaneiates:

Having taken the composition to that point he stopped—for there was no time to continue the work further—
causing damage to the things being written about and depriving readers of pleasure. That is why I have
undertaken to write all that was done by my father, so that such deeds do not escape those who live later
unnoticed. What harmony and how much grace the caesar's words had, is known by all who have read his
writings. But, as I said, having reached that point, he brought the work back to us from abroad, sketched out
and half-finished, bringing also with him. alas, a deadly illness . . .

Thus, Anna does "not conceal her debt to Nikephoros." She states that she wrote the work her
husband had not managed to write. The work Nikephoros did write and bring back to Constantinople
he himself de-scribes in his prooimion in a self-effacing manner:

I chose neither to write a history nor to weave an encomium . . . but set out in this work with the
wish to provide a starting point for those who want to write about his deeds. Let the name of the
composition be "Material for a history."

Bryennios himself decries his work. Yet Howard-Johnston argues that Bryennios's work is too
polished to be described as "sketched out and half-finished." It follow, therefore, according to him,
that Anna is referring to other material she inherited from Nikephoros, material at various stages of
organization and drafting, Nikephoros's Alexiad, the basis of the text known to us as Anna Komnene's
Alexiad. Now, the issue Howard-Johnston has raised in opening up the question of the source of
Anna's material—military, archival, and anecdotal—is an emotive one for some because it involves a
woman and a man and,more specifically, the only Byzantine woman writer of a historical narra-tive
that we know of and her husband. And although Howard-Johnston does not literally argue that
authorship should be reassigned—he stops just short of this—he implies that all that is good and all
that makes the Alexiad a world-class history derives from Nikephoros Bryennios. This debate or
problem has come relatively late to Byzantine literary studies in contrast to western medieval studies
where male authorship has been claimed for women writers off and on in the past, most notori-ously
in the case of Heloise's letters to Abelard. 17 It has been said of this debate that "whole forests have
been felled in the quarrel," yet "no con-sensus has been reached, for it is more than the solution of a
textual crux that is at stake, more than entrenched academic pride—it is the very bat-tle of the
sexes."' 8 It is doubtful that Byzantine studies are on the brink of a similar battle but Howard-
Johnston's analysis of the Alexiad provides a welcome opportunity to reconsider aspects of historical
writing such as the nature of our sources' sources, the reasons for our historians' choice of material.
Let us examine the assumptions that underlie Howard-Johnston's thesis. The Alexiad is
predominantly military because Anna did not fol-low her own inclinations and interests but set out to
bring to light her late husband's unpublished work. Left to her own devices, Anna would have written
a very different kind of history, one from the perspective of palace and capital. Howard-Johnston
cites Michael Psellos as someone who set a recent precedent in history writing from this
perspective.19 Anna Komnene lived in Constantinople and this she had in common with all male
writers of Byzantine history. Her male colleagues wrote history precisely because they were at the
center, as holders of positions in the civil bureaucracy, or the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as secretaries
or judges. They had no military interests or expertise themselves, yet they all included descriptions of
military campaigns in their histories. Rarely present themselves on expeditions or at battles, they
depended on the re-ports of others for their accounts.' That is, all male writers of history except for
Psellos. He is precisely not the precedent for Anna or for anyone. His history or Chronographia is
unique in portraying what was happening at court to the exclusion of all else. History, in his hands, is
stripped of "events." Reading his Chronographia one is hardly aware of war. On two occasions he
gives :brief descriptions of battles: the attack of the Russian fleet on Constan-tinople in the reign of
Constantine Monomachos and the battle of Manzikert in the reign of Romanos Diogenes. The point
about these descriptions is not that they are bad accounts of battles, but that, like everything else,
they were included in the Chronographia not to inform readers about Byzantine history but to tell
them about Michael Psellos and his relationship to the emperors in question.' Psellos had an
enormous influence on Anna. She speaks admiringly of him in the Alexiad: "Michael Psellos, who
reached the peak of all learning" and "became famous at that time for his wisdom." His influ-ence on
her can be detected in the great number of borrowings from his Chronographia. It is estimated that
Anna cites him verbatim eighty-one times. more frequently than any other author, pagan or
Christian. She was also influenced by another aspect of his writing—,his intrusion of himself into the
narrative of his history. In this respect alone Anna was more like Psellos than any other writer of
history.26 But Psellos's approach to histoly writing was otherwise a hapax. It had none of the usual
elements of elassicizing historical writing: no dates, no account ofa causes and results. No one wrote
history like Psellos, not even Anna, for all her admiration of him. That Anna has not followed in his
footsteps is hardly, then, a strong indication that Bryennios's hand can be seen in the Alexiad. The
predominance of military material in the Alexiad is indeed striking.' There is more of it there than in
any Byzantine history since Procopius's Wars. The little on internal affairs Anna does supply is less
than John Zonaras's account of the reign offers. The most substantial of this internal material
recounted by Anna, the accounts of the trial of Basil the Bogomil and of Alexios's foundation of the
Orphanotropheion, are bunched together out of chronological sequence and injected into the
narrative of Alexios's Turkish campaign of 1116. If it is true, as has been argued, that these were last
minute additions made in reaction to contemporary events, then the Alexiad would have been even
more a story of war in its original conception." That this should be the case when a woman is the
author creates, for some, a stronger need for expla-nation. An explanation can be sought which
includes Nikephoros Bryennios but gives him a different role from the one Howard-Johnston has
assigned to him. It is the, form. of the work, I would argue, which is responsible for the emphasis on
war. With the Alexiad Anna was writing a new kind of history, history as epic. Her title is the first clue
to this. It was pointed out long ago that Anna cites the Iliad and the Odyssey, that her descriptions of
battles are colored by the siege of Troy, that the world of the Homeric poems is a standard against
which Anna's present is measured. She compares her mother, her father, and her husband, but also
foreigners, to Homeric heroes and she uses Homeric allusion as a vehicle for some of her most
personal statements about herself and her work. But the extent of the Homeric influence on the
content of the Alexiad has perhaps not been appreciated. What is epic if not the story of arms and a
man? In writing a history of her father's reign in the form of a heroic biog-raphy or a historical epic
Anna shows herself to be in step with twelfth-century literary developments.32 Michael Psellos had
shown that historical writing could depart from the conventions laid down by an-cient historians.
Epic was in vogue in the reign of Anna's nephew Manuel when Anna was writing the Alexiad. A
written version of the epic romance Digenes Akrites had been in circulation since Alexios's reign and
Manuel was himself being hailed as "a second akrites."33 But the revival had occurred earlier, in the
reign of Anna's brother, John II, whose exploits had been celebrated in Homeric style by Theodore
Pro-dromos.34 In this context it is not surprising that a "Constanfinopolitan with literary interests"
should have had so much to say about war. But Anna's choice of epic was not only a matter of
literary influence: family rivalry could also have influenced her to celebrate her father in this way. Her
brother and her nephew were recipients of panegyrical works which hailed their heroic feats, while
John had himself already commemorated his father's victories over Normans, Petchenegs, and Turks
by commissioning a pictorial cycle depicting these on the walls of the palace.35 For family reasons
too, then, it is not surprising that the firstborn daughter of Alexios Komnenos who was born in the
purple but nevertheless failed to come to the throne should have wished to record her father's reign
in similar fashion. Yet it is not the Iliad alone which resounds in Anna's title and story. The Odyssey
also is central to her work.36 For Anna alludes to qualities of Alexios which are Odysseus-like: he is
ever quick-witted, able to find a solution for every problem which comes his way.37 If we take this
allu-sion seriously, it can explain why, as Howard-Johnston puts it, Alexios is presented as a ruler who
cannot anticipate or forestall danger.38 Succes-sive threats from abroad take him by surprise. It can
explain too why Anna likens Alexios to a skillful helmsman steering Byzantium through high seas and
buffeting storms, responding to a series of challenges from without, each of which is as unpredictable
as a natural event. This ex-plains why the image of wave upon wave of disaster, of floods of danger is
so frequent.' Further, Anna's likening of Alexios and his reign to Odysseus and his odyssey does away
with the need to posit missing material from the Alexiad. For Howard-Johnston, Anna's description of
an Alexios taken by surprise by external threats is attributable to her attempt to make up for the lack
of "long digressions on the geography, customs, monuments, curiosities, and history of foreign
peoples which convention required of high-style, classicizing histories."40

Anna, who lacked the necessary knowledge and understanding, could not possibly add the required
background information herself. A task which had daunted Nikephoros was quite beyond her. So she
had to improvise some overall theme for a history which concentrated on the actions of Alexios'
government, rather than the circumstances and mo-tivations which might explain them.'"

My suggestion is that there was no missing material. Anna chose to pre-sent Alexios reacting to the
unpredictable because this made him an Odysseus. My suggestion for the content of the Alexiad puts
the pen firmly into Anna's hand. My reading of the Alexiad gives choice back to Anna. She did not
have to make her history of her father's reign about war because that was the material her husband
provided. She wanted to make her history about war because this subject was true to her father's
reign, true to the ethos of the Komnenoi,42 and true to the hero her father was. Hers was a true his-
tory.' An Anna in control of her material means too that what has been in-terpreted as a slip of the
pen that she found editing Bryennios's files an uncongenial task,44 can be read as a literary device, as
an authorial intru-sion. In the course of describing operations against Bohemond at Dyrra-chion in
1108, Anna interjects,

Having reached this point as I wield my pen at lamp-lighting time, I feel my words to be slipping away
as I doze a bit over my writing. Where the use of barbarian names is required of necessity, as is the
nar-ration of changing material, the body of the history and the continuity of the work seem likely to
be disjointed; but it is no cause of anger for those who read my writing well-disposed.45

This passage serves not so much to tell readers what Anna felt and thought, as it does to strike a
pose as a writer and to call attention to her-self in the act of writing.'

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Anna had to get her military ma-terial from somewhere.
Although she accompanied her father on some expeditions, as she tells us herself,47 she could not
have been present at all the engagements she describes in her work. Bryennios could have been her
source. But he does not have to be. Unlike many Byzantine writers of history, Anna is very explicit
about her sources, their nature and their range. Toward the end of the Alexiad she tells her readers.

. there are those alive today who knew my father and relate his deeds. From these accounts not a
small part of this history has been collected here: each one narrated something else of what he
remem-bered and all were in aereement. But most of the time we too were with father and mother,
accompanying them . Some information, as I said. I have from my own observation. other material is
from those who accompanied the emperor on campaign; I learned about these in various ways. and
also they conveyed to us the events in the wars through certain carriers but I also heard the emperor
and George Palaiologos talking about these things in person. I collected most of this especially when
the third person after my father held the sceptre of the imperial office . . . Whatever I collected for
this history. let God and his heavenly Mother. my Lady. know. I collected from some alto-gether
worthless and unambitious writings of old men who were sol-diers at the time when my father held
the Roman sceptre ..

Anna used oral and written military sources. It is not necessary to imagine that she left out a
reference to her most important source when she mentioned so many others. We need not
postulate that she received files from Bryennios "at various stages of organization and drafting" to
explain the "abrupt transitions" in her narrative.49 For Bryennios, I would reserve an even more
important role than that of main contributor to the Alexiad. His Material for a History, an ac-count
which includes the deeds of his grandfather, Nikephoros Bryen-nios, a general who had revolted in
the reign of Botaneiates, is the first attempt to write history as epic. Bryennios indicates this when, in
the middle of a description of his ancestor he breaks off to assert, "If my ac-count had no other aim
than to narrate his deeds in full, it would be nec-essary to write another Iliad.'50 Anna Komnene
perhaps took her cue from Bryennios by writing another Iliad for her father. But who can say whose
idea the epic history was originally? Like other aspects of the Komnenian regime, history writing too
was a family affair.

Anna Komnene does present her account of her father's deeds as a completion of a task her husband
was not able to fulfill. She will have us believe that she undertook the task "out of filial and uxorial
devotion."51 But is this not a role she adopts for her readers, to make herself and her work more
acceptable to them? She writes about the women in her fam-ily in a similar way, presenting them as
good and supportive mothers and wives rather than as women exercising independent power. She
herself draws attention to the controversial aspects of the power they wielded52 but defends them
by giving them acceptable motives. Her grandmother, far from seeking the power and the position
for herself, acted as a self-sacrificing mother: ,

She looked towards the last stage and thought of monasteries in which she would draw out the
remaining years of her life in prudent contem-plation. This is what she had in mind and intended for
herself above all. But even though she considered this in her mind and was wholly fixed on the higher
life. she also loved her son if any woman did, and wished to bear together with her son the storm of
the imperial office . The passion of a mother possessed her, and she governed together with her son,
the emperor. and sometimes took alone the reins and drove the carriage of power blamelessly and
without error.`'

Anna's mother, on the other hand,

. • . the picture of reserve and the resting-place of holiness, did not like to show in public her arm or
a glance or even to transmit to unknown ears her voice. Such was her modesty. Since. not even the
gods, they say. fight necessity, it was necessary for her to accompany the emperor on his frequent
campaigns. Her innate modesty kept her within the palace but her affection for the emperor and
burning love for him brought her out of the palace—although she did not want it—for these reasons.
First, because he needed more care on account of the affliction to the legs which befell him . . .
Secondly, and the more important rea-son why the empress accompanied the emperor: he needed
much ob-servation of a many-eyed power because of the many plots which grew up on all sides."

In his book Women Writers of the Middle Ages, Peter Dronke ad-dresses the question whether there
is anything in the work of women writers that distinguishes their work from that of men. He claims
that women's motivation for writing seems rarely to be predominantly liter-ary. "The opportunity
and the power to write tended to be too hard-won to make an extrinsic relationship to writing
possible. It is often more ur-gently serious . . . a response springing from inner needs, more than
from an artistic, or didactic. inclination."55 Although Dronke does not in-clude Anna Komnene in his
study, what he says of western medieval women writers seems apt for her. What we know of the
circumstances of her life leads us to believe that for her, also, the writing of the Alexiad was
"urgently serious." The "three emperors"56 in her life, her father, her mother, and her husband,
were dead. No full written account of Alexios's deeds had been written. Thirty years after his death,
in the reign of her nephew Manuel, Anna was impelled to tell the story. There was no one else who
could do this for him or for her. The Alexiad, as the one work of historical writing which is attrib-uted
to a woman writer in Byzantium, is a vital piece of evidence for questions of female authorship. Yet,
it is precisely because it is a unique work that it is impossible to draw general conclusions from it.
Howard-Johnston postulated that a Constantinopolitan woman would not choose to write so much
on warfare. But what did women choose to write about? Janet Nelson has tentatively isolated three
traits in early medieval women writers in the west: "a marked interest in the political roles of royal
women," "a sharp-eyed preoccupation with the play of power within royal families," and a relatively
free style, incorporating oral tra-dition as well as, or instead of. written sources. She suggests that the
co-incidence of these traits in one writer might be a pointer to female authorship. She finds that the
Alexiad contains all three.57 Certainly the Alexiad exhibits a "marked interest in the political roles of
royal women": Maria of the Alans, Anna Dalassene, and Irene Doukaina. And who more than Anna
Komnene was preoccupied with the play of power within royal families? But in the case of Anna it is
difficult to describe these traits as gender specific. Rather they appear to be spe-cific to the times, to
Komnenian government. And if we wish to test this suggestion, a comparison of the Alexiad with
John Zonaras's Epitome is the best and, indeed, only way.

Zonaras's name and fate have been linked to Anna's since Ziegler wrote,58 yet little is known for
certain about his life. Zonaras does ex-press admiration for Anna's learning in his chronicle59 but he
did not necessarily know her. He expresses criticism for John II's abandonment of his father on his
deathbed6° but he was not therefore necessarily part

The Pen and the Sword: Who Wrote the Alexiad? 73

of Anna's and Bryennios's failed coup against him. He may have read the Alexiad6I but he did not
model his account of Alexios's reign on it and he certainly had at least one other source for it.
Zonaras was a judge in Constantinople before he went to live on the Princes' Island of Saint Glykeria
in a monastery where he wrote his world chronicle which ends with the death of Alexios in 1118. He
gives some vague indications of his time, of writing in the section on Alexios's reign. When he records
Alexios's settling of the defeated Petchenegs in the theme of Moglena, he claims, "To this day they
have remained there over succeeding generations . . ."64 Likewise, in his description of the or-
phanage Alexios refounded, he comments, "And these arrangements were made in this way and are
preserved to the present day."65 However, these references to the passing of time are not specific
enough to help date Zonaras's time of writing. The only datable reference to his life is to be found in
his commentary to the canons, his other surviving written work, also composed on Saint Glykeria. In
his scholion to canon 7 of the council of Neokaisareia, Zonaras makes mention of the emperor's sec-
ond marriage.66 This implies that Zonaras was writing his commentary sometime after 1 161 when
Manuel I was remarried.67 Although this ref-erence does not give a date for the writing of the
chronicle, it suggests that Zonaras was writing in the reign of Manuel and perhaps later in that reign
than Anna.68 Zonaras, as a senator and a judge, gives a critical assessment of Alexios's reign which
makes his account a valuable complement to Anna's Alexiad.69 He did not, however, necessarily
write with the Alex-iad in mind. There are a few instances where similarities can be detected in the
descriptions of events. Zonaras's description of the First Crusade as a "commotion" which moved
from west to east and was announced by a plague of locusts is in harmony with Anna's reference to
the "whole of the west marching across Europe" preceded by locusts. Zonaras presents the image of
Alexios as a hunter who trapped Basil the Bogomil while Anna refers to her father catching the
heretic with bait. Zonaras explains that in the second, successful battle against the Petchenegs the
emperor and his army relied entirely on divine intervention. Anna explains that in the second
operation against this enemy Alexios put his confidence in God, not on horses or equipment, and
won. These similarities. however, are of a general nature and are not sufficiently strong to show any
definite dependence of Zonaras on Anna's account. The language used is required by the experience
or was to be found in oral and written sources common to both authors.

More striking than the similarities are the instances of divergence in the accounts of each author;
these indicate another source for Zonaras which is independent of the Alexiad. Notably, Zonaras's
chronology has been shown to be more reliable and useful in clarifying Anna's often (purposely)
skewed order of events. But Zonaras differs also on details. He names the Kanikleiou as the
monastery in which Botaneiates con-fined the Komnenian women at the time of the coup of 1081,
whereas Anna says it was the Petrion. He has Robert Guiscard in charge of operations at the battle of
Larissa, while Anna's account features Bohemond. He tells us that the orphanage was a refoundation
whereas Anna gives the impression that it was a new institution Alexios created. Zonaras states that
Anna Dalassene was already a nun when her son came to the throne, a point which is corroborated
by surviving seals. while Anna gives us all the evidence of her grandmother's monastic ten-dencies
—"the palace assumed the appearance of a monastery under the influence of this remarkable
woman"—but no more.77 Perhaps the most surprising difference in the two accounts is, how-ever,
the description of the First Crusade. The prominence Anna gives the Crusade as opposed to Zonaras's
terse paragraph is only partly ex-plicable in terms of the scope of each author's work, the one a
classiciz-ing history concentrating on one emperor's reign, the other a world chronicle in which
Alexios's reign is but a fraction of the whole. For Zonaras the Crusade is a mass movement of Franks
from west to east which captured cities, one of which—Nicaea—was given over to the em-peror for
money. He gives no sense of the individuals involved or their motives. Zonaras's detached account of
a passing phenomenon is a sobering reminder that Anna's version, written to defend Alexios's han-
dling of it. completely colors our perceptions of the significance of the movement for Byzantium.78
Like Anna Komnene. John Zonaras gives considerable space to the political role of women and to the
power struggles within the Komnenian family. Zonaras, however, adds information not included by
Anna and strips the Komnenian women of their acceptable mother-wife-daughter roles so
emphasized by Anna herself. Zonaras's women are interested in power for themselves.79 While
Anna impresses on her readers that Anna Dalassene only reluctantly took on the administration of
the empire, Zonaras shows her to have so much control and to have been in this posi-tion for so long
that "the emperor was aggrieved and he enjoyed imperial rule almost in name alone."8° From Anna
we hear nothing more about her after her appointment. Zonaras, however, states that she
"withdrew from

the Palace, in fear lest she should be compelled and should appear to make the transition against her
will."8I Again, it is only Zonargs who claims that Irene Doukaina had "great power" even when
Alexios was "physically strong." This power increased when he became ill:

But when he had pains in his feet and his walking had been im-peded . . . and he was in consequence
bedridden, the empress governed and the emperor was largely shaped to her will; it was planned
that all the power and the government of the empire be transferred to her after the passing of her
husband, so that even her son the emperor should be subject to her.

From Anna we learn that Irene commissioned Bryennios to write a history of Alexios's reign. Zonaras
tells us much more of their relationship:

Because the empress had great power, her son-in-law Bryennios the caesar was also very strong and
through him was promulgated everything that was administered in the palace. Hence all approached
him, and it was entrusted to him to pass judgment and he pronounced justice like the emperor.. In
this way. as I have said, things went well for the caesar, and the man was celebrated on every
tongue. This inspired great despondency in the emperor's son, who was emperor, and threw him into
anxiety.

Zonaras. therefore, although an outsider to the Komnenian family and also to the regime, provides
corroborative evidence for the political role of Komnenian women. Furthermore, it is he, and not
Anna, who tells us of the power struggles within the family. Zonaras's Epitome helps us to read
between the lines of the Alexiad. More than this, it shows Anna, in her writing of the history of her
father's reign, to be bound more to her family, her times, and her genre than to her sex.