Chronographia
The two predominating passions of Psellus’s life were to get on in the world and to promote scholarship and learning. This first characteristic is probably what emerges most plainly from his Chronographia. With repeated apologies he is always describing the importance of his own position, the extent to which imperial personages depend on him, and he likes to add digressions designed to reveal his own private feelings and to underline the significance of his efforts towards achieving more effective higher education. It may be doubted how reliable an adviser he made on matters of state, but the fact that he served a long series of eleventh-century rulers until 1077 is a tribute to his Personality as well as to his adaptability.
Psellus has to admit to at least one unfortunate episode in his political career which he glosses over in the Chronographia as best he can. Threatened with a reversal at court towards the end of Constantine IX’s reign, he thought it judicious to absent himself for a time. The natural thing for a Byzantine in such circumstances was monastic retirement which might or might not prove permanent. Psellus soon realized his total lack of vocation and returned to the secular world as soon as it was safe to do so.
Far otherwise with his friend and companion Xiphilinus, who had indeed found his way of life. Their experiences are described in more detail elsewhere in Psellus’s writings. Psellus had evidently thought of the monastery simply in terms of a comfortable background for a series of Socratic dialogues in the cloisters between himself and his fellow scholar, and is half teased, half reproached by Xiphilinus for his mistake.
Psellus’s two most attractive traits are his loyalty to his friends and his devotion to scholarship. All his life Psellus stuck to his early friends, men of character and achievement very different from his own. John, his old teacher, was almost dragged to imperial notice and then for a time held a lectureship in the University at Psellus’s nomination.
Xiphilinus and Psellus remained in close touch, though after the monastic episode their paths forked and their differences of outlook became more apparent, but it evidently cut Psellus to the quick to be accused by Xiphilinus of unwise concentration on Platonic studies, and he was swift to prove his orthodoxy and reinstate himself in his old friend’s good opinion.
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