The Chronographia is an original, experimental, and uneven work, an imaginative exercise in interpreting the past through a rhetorical performance that expands into scenes to intensify and frame events. The skills of the rhetor are summarized. The text’s interplay of voices and roles, especially the imperial role, will be examined, together with the range of emotions felt and modelled, the spaces highlighted, the structuring of scenes, and their audiences inside and outside the action. Each reign dictates its own directions, each is assessed by its embodiment in the emperor: the Body Politic being the tacit underlying metaphor in a text unusually rich in metaphor. The aim is to discover how Psellos experiments with the material and finds out its possibilities; how the work develops to accommodate the increasing pressures of his own presence and self-presentation; how the empathetic, volatile, sensibility described by Papaioannou in Psellos’ rhetoric functions in the genre of history, and, from Book Six, how the Platonic idea of indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) fares, given the interfusion of the tragic and the comic in its course.