
Byzantine Laments - diodorus
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n05/barbara-newman/byzantine-laments
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mcguire
" _Neville observes that in the 18th century, when the tale of attempted
fratricide took shape, historians were less sensitive to the rhetorical
strategies of their sources. In Anna’s case, however, the problem was not that
Gibbon, Diehl and the rest failed to note Choniates’s bias, but rather that
they shared it. A woman so intrepid as to write history, that most masculine
of genres, must have been power-hungry enough to wish, as Choniates claims,
that she had ‘the long member and the balls’. Paraphrasing the words he put in
her mouth, modern historians took them not only as fact but as the key to her
character._ "

" _But for modern historians, Anna’s histrionic grief for a father who had
died thirty years earlier seemed so excessive that they sought a different
explanation for her ‘bitterness’ – and hit on disappointed ambition._ "

