The “aerial tollhouses” are a uniquely Byzantine formulation of how souls experience judgment and its consequences after death.  The fullest formulation of this narrative is found in the tenth-century Life of Basil the Younger, but makes appearances earlier in the Life of John the Almsgiver, Ps-Anastasios’ Narrations, a cento homily falsely attributed to Cyril of Alexandria, and, most importantly, in the ninth-century Chronicon of George the Monk.  This essay reads George’s presentation of the tollhouses as well as the lengthy patristic florilegia he appends to it in conversation with theories of anthology and Bruce Lincoln’s theory of myth as ideology.  In this way it is shown that George shapes the tollhouse myth around emerging practices of confession and repentance, and reads those practices into earlier patristic traditions.  The ideology of confession emerges even more clearly in the Life of Basil the Younger, in which the tollhouses are made into a memory map for preparing for confession.  The logic of the tollhouses is thus determined in large part by social pressures, economies of clerical and lay power, and literary aesthetics.  The conclusion draws consequences for how “tradition” operates in the creation of Byzantine anthologies more broadly, as opposed to how it appears in the end-products.