The Macedonian dynasty, wonderfully rooted in murder, having been renewed by violence as a peaceful, orderly, administration, a soldier-emperor is installed: Constantine IX, the main subject of the Chronographia, and its potential stumbling block. To deal with his own self-division towards Constantine, Psellos creates an elaborate structure of genres and disciplines – panegyric and history, rhetoric and philosophy – and conflicting roles for himself, to dramatize an odi et amo in which the comic and the tragic infuse each other in continuously changing ways. The effect is exhilating, shocking, and ingeniously balanced, as Psellos sets the failure of an indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) and his own moral degeneration against the expansive power of panegyric vested in this emperor. For good artistic reasons, Psellos omits the patriarch Keroularios and his attack on Psellos’ orthodoxy, projecting his own displacement onto a highly fictional portrayal of another character. The reign of Theodora, however, is vitiated by his repressed anger with Keroularios, ranting against his proxies in her government. The two reigns exemplify the work’s uneven quality.