General thesis is that the empire degenerated or decayed from the belle epoque of Basil II.
Suetonian/procopian memoir, touching on the late Macedonian dynasty, the whole of the Doukai, and the beginning of the Komnenoi.
Given that he was apparently a notable scholar of his time, as well as times, it's bemusing to imagine how it would have seemed to him, could he have been told about it. The fact that I could for a pittance pull this man's direct voice, as it were, out of the air (and onto my Kindle) across barriers of time and space and language a millennium after he lived is a source of wonder to me.
As it stood, it was that goldmine for the researching writer, a first-hand account, studded with the kind of telling details that general histories leave out. This is a text that, for the non-scholar, could really have used about double its own weight in explanatory footnotes, but I'll have to look at other books for that. ) as it was I was lost in a smaller swamp. I would have been quite at sea if I hadn't watched a rather good Great Course on the Byzantine Empire a month or so ago (. Reading between the lines, as well as what's on them, is recommended. Emperor, relative of emperor, or high government official were all high-risk professions in that era, with penalties for failure besides death or exile including blinding, castration, or forced conversion into a monk or nun (although a few managed to wriggle out of the latter disempowerment, sometimes.) A lively, colorful, and occasionally bizarre narrative, at once very approachable and sometimes very alien. A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine emperors.
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