Advising the Byzantines: The Pervasiveness of Parainesis

What do we mean by advice ( parainesis) in Byzantium? By looking at distinctions made in handbooks of letter-writing we can distinguish parainetic writing from didactic, and from protreptic. We can see that advice has several affinities: to rhetoric, to ‘how-to’ works of practical utility, and to ophelitic chapter literature in centuries. We can also discern patterns of who gives advice to whom: individual to individual or group, father to son, individual to emperor, and imperial father to imperial son. There appears to be no single genre of parainesis but a mode of parainetic writing. But these conclusions are shaken by the assumption in a recent work that the closest affinity of advice texts is with fiction, in particular fable collections and frame-stories. The rest of the essay examines the parainetic credentials of both and decides to enlarge the definition of parainesis to include them. Parainesis is pervasive in Byzantine literature and functions as a mode of communication, employing fiction as a means of conveying usefulness ( opheleia).