f The Undead in Byzantium. Some Notes on the Reception of Ancient Literature in Twelfth-Century Byzantium

This article proposes to look at the twelfth-century ‘poetics of appropriation’ of classical literature and more specifically on portrayal of literary production as a kind of dialogue with the dead. Although it was not uncommon to reuse ancient models and integrate them into new texts before the twelfth century, this paper argues that what was different in this period was the awareness with which the process of using earlier texts was carried out involving a conscious interaction with a previous model. This article suggests that this process should be referred to as ‘the poetics of appropriation’. What is more, it is argued that in Byzantium appropriation of previous literary models very often meant not only establishing a specific relationship with a text but also entering in ‘a dialogue’ with the work and/or its dead author. In the twelfth century the dead ancient authors were not only fully rehabilitated but, in fact, became almost unquestionably useful.