A note on alexander Kazhdan, Theodore Metochites, our freedom and the Naples byzantine studies school

Many Byzantinists in Russia and abroad, including Antonio Garzya (1927-2012), the years-long head of the Naples Byzantine studies school, have taken enthusiastically Alexander P. Kazhdan’s idea of an “individualism without freedom” as the essence of Homo Byzantinus’ mentality. But the idea iself is far from being peremptory, the same being true for Kazhdan’s speculations about a putative cultural decline of the Byzantine fourteenth century. In our article we consider the dialogue between the two scholars, starting from Garzya’s seminal 1985 article on the faces of Hellenism in the middle Byzantine period.