There was no other Byzantine intellectual as many-sided and productive as this renaissance man of the eleventh century. His philomatheia and boundless curiosity led him to explore in writing the highways and byways of ancient and medieval thought, culture and literature, from the grand sweep of historical narrative in his Chronographia to the nitty gritty of philology in short treatises, from the high-flying theories of Plato and Proclus to the lowly properties of stones, from the revered theology of Gregory of Nazianzos to the suspect lore of the Chaldaean Oracles, and the list could go on at length. In the standard history of secular Byzantine literature, by Herbert Hunger, the largest index entry by far is claimed by Psellos and the reason is simple: he figures—either as author, presumed author, or expert witness—, in almost every single genre and subcategory of writing covered in that exhaustive two-volume account. The sheer quantity of the output, not to mention its transmission through the centuries in manuscript form, has always posed a serious bibliographical challenge. The earliest attempt to pull the disparate strands together and to systematically describe the vast oeuvre of Psellos was made by the indefatigable and learned Leo Allatius in the seventeenth century. First published as a short monograph in

1634 his De Psellis et eorum scriptis diatriba, after some preliminary discussion of two other figures said to have the name Michael Psellos, introduces our man in inevitably extravagant terms as “the teacher of< emperor> Michael Ducas, who, having achieved the highest distinction in the Republic of Letters, won such an honorable name for himself among men of later times that he obliterated the memory