Anna Of Byzantium

“‘We humans? But surely you are human, too, Simon?’ ‘Not really. Not anymore,’ he said. ‘A slave is not a human being, Princess; or were you not aware of that?’”

Simon’s conviction that, as an enslaved person, he is no longer a human being, as well as the calmness with which he delivers this line, signals how different modern and Byzantine understandings of the world are. Anna’s hesitancy to accept the notion that Simon is not human makes her sympathetic, as she echoes the modern stance that enslaved people still have complete humanity.

“It was unfair. I was always the one visitors paid attention to. No one had ever wondered over my right to the throne, as these barbarians had. Could they have planted a seed of doubt in my father’s mind? He was always telling us that we had to be kind to our enemies—would that include making them like him more if he followed their ways?”

Anna’s use of rhetorical questions reveals the insecurity that she feels as a young girl living with high political stakes. Her youthful inexperience in politics leads her to take the emissaries’ attention for John personally, even though being ignored for the first time is not necessarily as “unfair” as she believes. Entitlement thus mixes within Anna’s mind to form a persistent jealousy over the treatment that John receives as a prince.

“Simon was wrong. There were no gods anymore to punish injustice. I would have to do it myself.”

By giving herself the job of a god—enacting divine retribution—Anna early on reveals her tendency toward hubris. Her dismissal of Simon’s advice and wisdom is also an indication that she does not understand his paternal treatment of her, and she has not realized that there are Competing Definitions of Family outside of a biological connection.