AN INITIAL PAIR of propositions: senses work in language, but are not original to, dependent on, or servile to it; and on account of that nonlinguistic basis of senses, many entities, maybe all, but at least far beyond language’s reach, sense their worlds. Such propositions are simply that: possibly or even just intuitions or inferences; that is to say, they engage philosophical and ethical questions, at best, and become intellectual passatempo, at worst. Naturally, I want to argue for the former, because on the one hand, our own resources for understanding relations among entities in late antiquity and Byzantium are so incomplete and inarticulated that engagement with how we relate to and judge our own worlds is crucial. Patchwork, piecemeal, puzzling is our approach to the consistency of sense lives across living things, both in beings we easily assume have feelings (ourselves, animals) and those we assume do not (inert materials such as metals, for example). And so on the other hand, confronting our assumptions about life and our responsibilities can arise from historical investigations and determine both our attitudes toward the past and toward our common present. For these reasons, a highly provisional exercise that stretches the historical imagination and accords sense lives to others can be mutually beneficial.

My specific attention in this chapter is directed at the viscous in Byzantium. By that I mean (mostly, but not only) the molten: the state that wax, metal, glass, stone, and similar, can achieve when heat is applied to it, a state that can bridge the liquid and heated and that can also be the process in which fusion of otherwise separate materials can take place. The state between solid and liquid is always in process; almost no substance stays viscous. Something is always on the way to something else when in a state of viscosity. In that mobile passage between states, essences are declared, as in alchemy’s belief in the process of purification toward gold when some materials are melted and fused with others.