The very title, Alexiad suggests rather an epos--a poem in prose--than a serious historical work, and emphasizes its epideictic tendency.

Again, many of the so-called epideictic epigrams are little more than stories told shortly in elegiac verse, much like the stories in Ovid's Fasti.

The Epideictic section, as one would expect from the more miscellaneous nature of its contents, has a larger proportion of non-elegiac pieces.