Abstract
Abstract Michael Psellos' encomium of his mother, regarded by the twelfth-century scholar Gregory of Corinth as one of the four best speeches ever composed, exemplifies what the Byzantine rhetorical tradition thought “good rhetoric” was made of. The stylistic and aesthetic values usually attributed to Byzantine rhetoric seem insufficient to account for Gregory's opinion. This essay argues that, by offering a “figured” defense of his career as a “Byzantine Sophist,” Psellos' encomium functions as a culturally significant instance of antilogy, and thus reprises not only the forms of late-antique sophistic rhetoric, but also and more importantly its intellectual ideal, within the terms of Byzantine high culture.