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Introduction
Whilst old age in classical Greek and Roman society has been the subject of sustained academic interest (Richardson 1969 ; Finley 1984 ; Falkner 1995 ; Cokayne 2003 ; Parkin 2003 ), little has been written about the position of old people and the expectations of old age in the state that succeeded them, the Byzantine Empire.1 At first glance, this is surprising since the Byzantine Empire survived much longer than either the earlier Hellenistic or Roman empires.2 Not only was it long lived, but it sustained a highly literate elite of civil servants and religious leaders that produced a relatively large body of literature compared with the relative illiteracy of Western Europe. Yet Byzantine social history remains a marginalised subject area and detailed information about the cultural and social aspects of everyday life in the Empire is limited. Though much has been written about the lives of the emperors, the everyday lives of the men and women who formed the Empire's citizenry have been only lightly sketched (cf . Charanis 1973 : especially 53-70; Jenkins 1967 ; Kazhdan and Constable 1982 ). Particularly scant attention has been paid to the social organisation of the lifecourse and the transitions into and through adulthood. The present paper is an attempt to redress this dearth by considering the change in the status of old age that came about in Byzantine society.
Before turning directly to the topic of old age, it is worth considering why there has been a neglect of Byzantine social history and what implications this has for constructing a more general history of old age in western society. A number of factors have played a part. The demise of the Eastern Roman Empire and its cultural marginalisation after incorporation by the Ottoman Empire led to the perception that Byzantium could never be more than 'the immutable residue of Rome's decline' (Kazhdan and Epstein 1990 : xix). The Christian nations that eventually emerged in the West after the final collapse of the Roman Empire developed their own traditions and institutions with seemingly little reference to developments in the East. The ability of the western Church to survive and maintain a residual administrative structure throughout the 'dark ages' helped ensure the Christianisation...