Nautical and Marine Imagery in the Panegyrics of Eustathios of Thessaloniki

The panegyrics of twelfth-century Byzantium, with their conventional images such as those of the sea, have tended to be disregarded due to a feeling that these images are both derivative and predictable. This is not to appreciate the dynamic interplay between the models from an idealised literary past and their twelfth-century reworkings. Eustathios of Thessaloniki could manipulate audience expectations in this way and was a master of techniques more usually found in poetry.