A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  PART THREE

  RECEPTION

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Late Antique Literature in Byzantium

  Anthony Kaldellis

  The Byzantines had no concept of “late antiquity” or “the later Roman Empire” (as they were still living in the Roman Empire), and therefore they also had no notion of late antique literature. But Constantine’s conversion and foundation of Constantinople did represent a turning point in their perception of imperial history, and the Christian Roman Empire from Constantine to Herakleios was later perceived as superior to both the pagan empire that had come before and the diminished empire that came after (Magdalino 1999). So there was a sense of a Christian‐Roman Golden Age, which coincided with what we call late antiquity. Byzantine emperors aspired to emulate their late antique predecessors in various ways, especially Constantine and Justinian. Their city, palace, and cathedral (Hagia Sophia) were all late antique constructions, and the Byzantine Church, its administration, and its canons were late antique institutions. That period was also distinguished by the production of foundational Christian texts in the spheres of theology, exegesis, hagiography, and liturgy. In all those fields, including that of secular law, later Byzantines wrote exclusively within the parameters set by late antiquity, just as in the area of rhetoric they followed the rules encoded in the commentaries and the instructional manuals (for example, Menander Rhetor and Aphthonios). In sum, Byzantium as a civilization took its bearings mostly from late and not from classical antiquity. Its foundational moments, in both political and religious life, had taken place in late antiquity and were commemorated in ceremonies, liturgies, texts, and art. How did this affect the Byzantine reception of late antique literature?

  What enables us to talk of late antique literature in Byzantium as if the two were separate is the precipitous decline in literary production that occurred in the mid‐seventh century during and after the Arab conquests. Though some genres never fully lapsed, most had to be revived or reconstituted, a process that began in the later eighth century and was not in full swing until the twelfth. The Byzantine experience in this regard was different from that of eastern Christian communities under Arab rule. There Greek hagiography, hymnography, other types of poetry, and philosophical theology extended late antique traditions and produced works, such as those by John of Damascus, that eventually became canonical (Johnson 2014, pp. 67–78). In Byzantium there was a greater rupture. This allows us to distinguish between “early” and “middle” Byzantium, but it is not clear that the Byzantines themselves perceived a rupture. They refer to “ancient” and “modern” literature or historical eras, but in fluid and ad hoc ways that do not correspond to modern categories (Koder 2013). Photios’s reviews of hundreds of books in his Bibliotheca reflect no awareness of late antiquity as a distinct period or that a rupture had occurred after it. As far as the Byzantines knew, there was a continuous tradition of writing Greek, some of it older and some of it newer. The perceived unity of this tradition is exemplified in a list proposed in the thirteenth century of the four best orations: One was ancient (Demosthenes), one imperial (Aristeides), one patristic (Gregory of Nazianzos), and one recent Byzantine (Psellos) (Hörandner 2012, p. 105). The selection may have been designed to include the different periods as well as a balance between pagan and Christian authors.

  The distinction between pagan and Christian was far more important for structuring Byzantine views of the past than mere chronological periods. “Ours” vs. “theirs” and “inside” vs. “outside” were fundamental polarities of thought that governed how the tradition was approached, even when it was mixed and matched in the actual manuscripts. Each side had its own greats, though little work has yet been done on how Byzantines created literary canons. Suffice it to say here that the literary canon for them consisted of the works that they copied most frequently, commented upon, invoked as authorities, and cited. In terms of the reception of late antique literature, “our authors” – that is, authors of the Christian classics – were almost all from that period, whereas the classics of “outer wisdom” came from every period between Homer and Proklos. Therefore, period, canonicity, and (perceived) religious affiliation did not entirely overlap. Nevertheless, beyond the “classics,” late antiquity is overrepresented within the corpus of all surviving ancient literature. A work and word count in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae yields, for the thousand years between Homer and 200 CE, some 4200 works for a total of 30 million words; then, for the 500 years between 200 and 700 CE, it yields 3500 texts for 47 million words, that is, almost as many works and far more words for a period half as long. While these are rough counts, they reveal a bias in favor of the survival of late antique literature over ancient literature and a tendency toward larger works in that period. Just Galen and John Chrysostom together likely account for more than all extant classical Athenian literature. This bias is confirmed by Photios’s Bibliotheca: Five‐sixths of the works reviewed there are late antique, as are most of the works that Photios seems to have preferred on grounds of style and approach (Treadgold 1984, p. 90). Photios’s sample is, however, skewed, because he generally does not include ancient authors whom he could reasonably expect his readers to know already (e.g. Homer, Thucydides). At any rate, we realize again that both the ancient canon and our literary late antiquity – at least on the Greek side – are largely the product of Byzantine choices and preferences (Kaldellis 2012).

  The bias favoring late antiquity makes sense. Older works had a greater chance to be lost over time, to lapse because of changing tastes, or to be absorbed by later works that subsumed or condensed their contents into comprehensive or handy compilations. Thus, we have many large collections that “digest” earlier literature in various fields, including Plutarch’s Moralia, Diogenes Laertios, and John Stobaios (in ethics and philosophy); Dio Cassius (Roman history); Galen (medicine); Eusebios’s Chronicle; and the corpus of Roman law (of which Greek translations were being made already in the sixth century), as well as straight‐up reference works such as that of Stephanos of Byzantium (for geographical lexicography, itself quickly abridged). These “digests” had not only the competitive advantage of being later but also of reflecting the outlook of the Greek Roman Empire of late antiquity, whose natural extension Byzantium was. Moreover, the preferential survival of patristic Greek literature comes as no surprise. Finally, all works had to survive the bottleneck (and filter) of the transliteration of ancient books (i.e. being rewritten in the minuscule script), which began around 800. In sum, the Byzantines preferred late antique literature in bulk, as it spoke more directly to the concerns of their world, and so we have more of it than its antecedents. But they also kept a selection of classics, valorized in part by the prestige they had accumulated over the centuries, their entrenchment in the classroom, and their centrality to the subsequent tradition.

  The question has been insufficiently asked why the Byzantines kept pagan literature from late antiquity. Their choices are understandable when it comes to rhetoric and epistolography. Libanios, Themistios, Himerios, and Julian offered templates and models to later authors, especially for writing orations in praise of emperors and others, and they were important witnesses to the key events of the fourth century and biographically connected to Church Fathers: Libanios as the alleged teacher of John Chrysostom and correspondent of Basil the Great; Themistios as the founder of the senate of New Rome and spokesman for Christian emperors; Himerios as the teacher at Athens of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzos; and Julian as a fellow student and later target of Gregory of Nazianzos. But why keep anti‐Christian late antique literature, such as some of the works of Julian, the philosophical treatises of Proklos, and the history of Zosimos? Not all such works were kept, of course. Porphyry’s anti‐Christian treatise was burned by imperial order and survives, like that of Julian, only in fragments quoted by Christian refutations. But Byzantinists still have not addressed the question why any was kept at all, and why more was kept, in fact, than
Christian heretical literature, which was entirely wiped out in the Greek tradition (anti‐Chalcedonian literature survived in Syriac, translated almost as it was being produced in late antiquity). Certainly, there may have been Neoplatonist sympathizers in later times, but we also need to consider the function that this literature performed in supporting Orthodox projects. Here literary reception meets the ideology of intellectual life. Julian was the negative Evil Other necessary for understanding Gregory of Nazianzos, the most important Christian author of late antiquity, and he was also fundamental for policing the boundaries and so the very constitution of Orthodoxy. He was refuted over and over again, all the way down to Palaiologan times. Intellectual Hellenism (or paganism) never ceased to haunt the Byzantines, and its name was Julian. Proklos, by contrast, offered the philosophical expertise and conceptual sophistication that many deemed necessary for grappling with theological issues, and his thought was redeemed by Pseudo‐Dionysios, who Christianized it (and who has been suspected of being a pagan Trojan horse). Finally, Zosimos seems to have been kept (in few copies, if more than one) because he made a manifestly weak case against Constantine and Christianity that could easily be refuted – and was refuted, over and over again in the margins of the single manuscript that we have (Kaldellis 2015b, pp. 46–64).

  What use did the Byzantines make of other late antique texts? For the most part they read them without leaving any trace of their reaction. The rest of this chapter will survey various modalities of engagement. Some of the following categories overlap or shade into each other, yet together they offer a diverse picture of diachronic reception. What made this possible was the glacial pace of change in written Greek, especially at the higher registers of the literary spectrum. Byzantine scholars were trained to use more or less the same form of Greek as was used in late antique literature, and so they never lost touch with the tradition or had to “rediscover” it. Their intuitive sense of the continuity of the tradition was thus reinforced by linguistic stability.

  34.1 Continuation

  Some late antique projects called out for extension (if they were chronologically limited), supplement, or completion, and some Byzantine authors obliged. The patriarch Nikephoros (806–815) wrote a Short History that picks up more or less where that of Theophylaktos Simokattes, the last classical historian of late antiquity, left off. Whether or not he intended it as a continuation, the two works were transmitted together, in sequence. But other than being written in Attic Greek, the two works are different in style and format, as Nikephoros briefly covers a century and half of history as opposed to Theophylaktos’s longer account of 20 years. It was, nevertheless, an attempt to pick up where a prestigious late antique tradition had left off. A more deliberate team effort to do the same in the twelfth century produced philosophical commentaries on books of Aristotle where there were gaps in the late antique commentary tradition (Barber and Jenkins 2009). This was a curious case of a multi‐author corpus “completed” after a six‐century hiatus. Late antique texts could be both extended and supplemented. Thus, the Onomatologos of Hesychios (sixth century) was an encyclopedia of pagan authors ordered alphabetically that was later extended to the ninth century and supplemented with Christian authors, while keeping Hesychios’s “brand” name in the title, before it was used by Photios and in the Souda (Kaldellis 2005).

  34.2 Absorption

  Later works in a tradition could absorb earlier ones, either partially or wholly, and drive them out of circulation. An example from the other main strand of historiography is Eusebios’s Chronicle, which survives in forms closer to the original in the Armenian and Latin translation but in Greek was absorbed into later chronicles and received indirectly – for example, through Georgios Synkellos (ca. 800). Likewise, in the sixth century Justinian’s magister officiorum Peter the Patrician wrote up instructions for the performance of court ceremonies and protocols, but we know this “manual” only through the chapters of it that were absorbed, and possibly reworked to suit the new context, in the tenth‐century Book of Ceremonies. This reuse, explicitly signaled in the chapter headings, was itself political, in that it linked the court of Konstantinos VII to the more powerful, authoritative, and normative empire of Justinian. The enhanced and extended Onomatologos of Hesychios was likewise absorbed into the tenth‐century Souda and then lost (though smaller versions of it continued to circulate separately). Absorption did not always lead to the loss of the original, especially if it took place later in the game and the original was an already established text. In the fourteenth century, for example, Nikephoros Xanthopoulos revived the genre of ecclesiastical history, but for the period of late antiquity he relies on the same authors whom we have, fusing them into a single narrative, which is why we do not use him for that period. In fact, only now is a proper critical edition being prepared.

  34.3 Rewriting

  Late antique texts sometimes found Byzantine editors and were rewritten to be improved stylistically or to serve new purposes in new contexts. The classic example is the Menologion, a collection of 148 saints’ lives arranged by calendar feast day, compiled in the late tenth century by Symeon Metaphrastes and his team. One of the goals of this collection was to provide vitae that met a high stylistic standard: If the original text did not, it was rewritten in a loftier and more acceptable style. Some of the lives, such as Athanasios’s Life of Antony, were already established classics, and so Symeon included them without alteration. In some cases, for example St. Symeon the Stylite, he combined a number of sources to produce a new text (Høgel 2002). Other Byzantine practices of rewriting are harder to classify, as they defy modern conventions and even make readers uncomfortable. The military manual of the emperor Leon VI, the Taktika (ca. 900), lifts passages almost verbatim from the Strategikon of Maurikios (ca. 600), albeit without acknowledgment and acting as if nothing had changed in the practice of war and the structure of the Roman army. More troublingly, it repurposes some of the original material: For example, it transfers the chapters on the Avars to the contemporary Hungarians and Bulgarians and turns the Strategikon’s description of Sasanian warfare and military culture into prescriptions for contemporary Byzantine warfare. This veers closer to literary repurposing – if we must give it analytical respectability – than to lazy plagiarism.

  Rewriting as appropriation could take troubling forms. The tenth‐century chronicler Symeon Logothetes (likely identical to Symeon Metaphrastes) narrated the conquest of Crete (960–961) by Nikephoros Phokas under Romanos II by lifting language verbatim from Prokopios’s account of Belisarios’s conquest of Vandal North Africa, right down to the description of the triumph that followed (Kaldellis 2015a). The two expeditions were structurally similar, so the choice was inspired, but the result is that Symeon’s account is compromised as a factual record. It can be redeemed, perhaps, as a symbolic statement: The new age of Byzantine conquests inaugurated by the Phokas family restored the empire to the dominant position it had held under Justinian. As we saw above, the reuse and reabsorption of Justinianic literature buttressed the pretensions of the Macedonian dynasty. A similar interpretation may be offered of late Byzantine encomia of cities, specifically of Constantinople by Theodoros Metochites and Trebizond by Bessarion, which extensively recycled the language, ideas, and themes of the encomia of Athens by Aristeides and of Antioch by Libanios, albeit rearranging the “raw” material to make new narratives and arguments (Saradi 2011). This textual relation both situated the Byzantine cities in the tradition of prestigious ancient cities – the very ones recommended in the rhetorical manuals as benchmarks for civic greatness – and provided ways of showcasing the Byzantine cities’ superiority over them. It was this “imitation” that allowed the comparison to take place in the first place, by forming tight textual relations.

  34.4 Replicating Authorial Personae

  Some Byzantine authors constructed their literary personae around that of a canonical late antique writer or figure. In antiquity, Arrian had done this with Xenophon, his
literary model. In Byzantium, Leon VI cast himself (among other guises) as a new Justinian, coissuing the Basilika (a Greek version of the Corpus) and then following that up with 113 Novellae of his own, the first of which cites Justinian as the model for the entire project. Leon was presenting himself as a new (and improved) Justinian. A more ambitious and complex refashioning of this kind was performed by the eleventh‐century intellectual Psellos. In some of his political philosophical texts he presents himself as a new Themistios, offering advice in speeches to Christian emperors, while in others he channels a persona modeled on the bishop‐philosopher Synesios, especially in his negotiation of rhetoric and philosophy and the public face appropriate to each. Yet more than either of them, Psellos took Gregory of Nazianzos as his main literary prototype (Papaioannou 2013). Famously, Gregory had used his speeches to engage with a range of genres, from theology and hagiography to invective and panegyric, and had also written poetry and letters. Many of these were infused with a powerful first‐person presence. The diversity and ambition of Gregory’s vast oeuvre was, moreover, meant to provide a canonical Christian counterpart to the prestige genres of late antiquity, claimed controversially as Hellenic (pagan) property by Julian. Psellos’s own wide‐ranging literary experiments replicated this project, as he covered most genres and infused most of his works with a striking albeit also deliberately vulnerable autobiographical persona. He, too, wrote funeral orations for his friends and associates, including prominent churchmen, and for his mother and other relatives, and he also produced accounts of his own life and career, including apologiae for controversies and invectives against his enemies. Gregory was the chief rhetorical inspiration for this project. Psellos also set about restructuring Byzantine theology through exegesis, infusing Neoplatonism into its methods to a degree that Gregory would have found appalling. He also wanted to overturn the traditional Byzantine monastic system of values. In fact, there are indications that Psellos sought to change the course of Byzantine thinking from the track on which Gregory and the other Church Fathers had set it, and his appropriation of Gregory’s persona was an effective way to achieve this revolution from the inside (Kaldellis 2007: 158–163 and chapter 4).