e functions,
church festivals, imposing audiences and the like with much more
familiarity and enthusiasm than she displays in her treatment of the
underlying causes and inner connections of events. But with all their
faults, these memoirs are an authoritative account of a brilliant and
important epoch, and of a ruler who for his military sagacity and
political shrewdness ranks among the great personages of the Middle
Ages.

The human traits of the author reveal themselves in every chapter of her
work. Anna possessed a womanly weakness for gossip and slander, and
mingles her praise of the other prominent women of her time with a
tincture of disparagement that must often be attributed to feminine
jealousy. She possessed considerable wit and irony, but was intensely
vain of her rank, her Greek origin and especially of her literary
attainments. Nor must we fail to note the vaulting ambition of this
otherwise attractive woman, an ambition which made her untrue to her
brother and a conspirator against his throne and his life.

Anna Comnena realized that the chief censure of her work at the hands of
contemporaries and of posterity would be the charge of partiality, and
against this she seeks to defend herself in a striking passage:

"I must still once more repel the reproach which some may bring against
me, as if my history were composed merely according to the dictates of
the natural love for parents which is engraved on the hearts of
children. In truth, it is not the effect of that affection which I bear
to mine, but it is the evidence of matters of fact, which obliges me to
speak as I have done. Is it not possible that one can have at the same
time an affection for the memory of a father and for truth? For myself,
I have never directed my attempt to write history otherwise than for the
ascertainment of the matter of fact. With this purpose I have taken for
my subject the history of a worthy man. Is it just, then, by the single
accident of his being the author of my birth, his quality of my father
ought to form a prejudice against me, which would ruin my credit with my
readers? I have given, upon other occasions, proofs sufficiently strong
of the ardor which I had for the defence of my father's interests, which
those that know me can never doubt; but, on the present, I have been
limited by the inviolable fidelity with which I respect the truth, which
I should have felt conscious to have veiled, under pretence of serving
t