by Scott McGill
34.5 Literary Criticism
Most recorded Byzantine readings, interpretations, and studies of ancient literature consist of scriptural exegesis or commentaries and scholia on classical (not late antique) literature. Notable exceptions are Photios’s reviews in the Bibliotheca, some essays by Psellos on various Church Fathers and on Georgios of Pisidia, and a brief essay on Synesios by Theodoros Metochites, the fourteenth‐century philosopher and statesman.
I will highlight here only one aspect of Photios’s engagement with late antique literature, his distrust of mythography and allusions to myth, which evidently made him feel uncomfortable. We know that Christian attitudes had undergone a fundamental transformation in this regard during late antiquity. Greek mythology began as a target of apologetic ridicule and confrontation and ended up as just another cultural adornment or narrative template, to be deployed rhetorically by Christian authors in ways similar to their pagan counterparts. In Photios’s time, however, Byzantine intellectual culture had reverted to its more fundamentalist mode and was not yet ready for experiments in mythological or erotic fiction (Lauxtermann 1999). In his review of the orations of Chorikios, for example, Photios felt it necessary to juxtapose the author’s sincere orthodoxy with the fact that he inexcusably and inexplicably introduces Greek myths and stories, even when writing about sacred topics (cod. 160). But compare how he treats the same topic in reviewing the pagan Himerios, whose style he admired: “His writings are full of all kinds of examples from history and mythology, either for proof, or to draw parallels, or for pleasure, or to ornament what he is saying…but it is clear that he is impious when it comes to religion, and imitates those dogs that bark against us in secret” (cod. 165). Pagans are more likely to get away with using mythology in Photios’s reviews than are Christian writers, perhaps because he found it less discordant in their case. Photios dislikes the “disgraceful obscenity” of mythological transformation stories and prefers Lucian, a pagan who mocks the belief in such things, over those who present them at face value, leaving Photios uncertain as to whether they believed them (cod. 129). He finds it easy to attribute a book On Incredible Tales to the Platonist Damaskios precisely because “such monstrosities invented in bad faith” suited an atheist who clung to idols even as the light of faith was spreading throughout the world (cod. 130).
In sum, there was no recognition in Photios’s flat reading that Christian literature of late antiquity had evolved classicizing mythographical modalities. The irony was that Byzantine literature of the middle period would effectively recreate the trajectory of its late antique counterpart, moving beyond Photios’s suspicious attitude to exhibit a mythographical mania of sorts, where not only emperors but bishops, too, were compared to Homeric heroes, along with erotic, pseudo‐pagan, imaginative fiction (Kaldellis 2007: chapter 5). Moreover, Photios, who presented himself as a champion of images after the Iconoclast controversy, was also obsessed with finding evidence in the literature of late antiquity about the use of images in worship, thereby imposing his own cultural preoccupations on his readings of late antique texts (e.g. cod. 160 on Chorikios).
Psellos also wrote some brief treatises on the literary style of the Church Fathers, especially Gregory of Nazianzos and John Chrysostom, which attempt to uphold them as worthy equivalents on “our” side of Demosthenes, Plato, and Lysias, even if they habitually deviate from classical norms (Hörandner 1996). The parameters of his analysis are, again, provided by the rhetorical‐theoretical tradition, though unfortunately Psellos does not offer close readings of specific passages to document his verdicts. At the opposite hermeneutical extreme, many of Psellos’s exegetical notes (published under the title Theologica), possibly stemming from his lectures, do contain close readings of clauses or passages in Scripture and of the Fathers, especially Gregorios of Nazianzos, but these focus on technical philosophical questions, not literary style. Still, questions of grammar occasionally come up in the resolution of textual ambiguities. Psellos’s guiding authorities in these notes are, more often than not, the non‐Christian Neoplatonists (one cannot imagine that this would have gone over well with Gregorios). Psellos’s best‐known literary essay on a late antique author is his comparison of Euripides to the seventh‐century theological poet Georgios of Pisidia (known today mostly for his panegyrical poems on the wars of the emperor Herakleios, but known to the Byzantines for his work the Hexaemeron, or Six Days of Creation). The essay, couched in the technical terms of rhetorical theory and metrical analysis, is unfortunately damaged in transmission, and only a page is devoted to Georgios anyway (Dyck 1986). Psellos is not interested in reading the two poets against their distinctive historical backgrounds; instead, he applies the same standards to their evaluation, as if they were contemporaries competing for the same prize. It is not clear, however, to whom he awards it. The fact that he treats them as roughly equal can disturb modern scholars, who would not think twice. But the point of the exercise is as much to showcase Psellos’s own rhetorical skills, and elsewhere he advertises the fact that making a weak case seem strong was among them. Having Georgios predictably lose to Euripides would not have made for interesting reading, and, moreover, the exercise enabled Psellos to praise the literary qualities that he most prized in his own writing (Dyck 1986, p. 37).
Metochites’s Essays have been little studied (Hult 2002), in part because his writing style is difficult and obscure. In one essay on literary criticism (17), he distinguishes between the writing styles of authors from Syria and Phoenicia, on the one hand, and Egypt, on the other. As most of his reading, too, was probably in late antique authors, the examples that he cites include Libanios and Porphyry for the first group, whose style is marked by smoothness, and then Synesios and the Egyptian Church Fathers for the second, whose style was harsh or rough. Both groups are distinct from the “Attic” writers, that is, the ancient classics. The categories of style that Metochites deploys to make these comparisons are taken from the rhetorical manuals. It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, for modern readers to reconstruct the experience of a “rough” or “smooth” style in reading Libanios or Synesios. It is likely that we have entirely lost this sense of stylistic nuance – assuming that Metochites himself could define these qualities and then actually find them in a text. Unfortunately, he does not give examples that would allow us to understand what he means.
The only late antique author to whom Metochites devotes an essay is Synesios (18), and it makes some intriguing statements. After praising him for perfectly mixing philosophy and rhetoric, Metochites says that Synesios’s style did not conform to the ancient Hellenic way of writing (presumably an “Attic” standard) but was instead more “modern.” Specifically, it was neither “smooth” and “simple” like the ancients nor “forceful,” as so much writing was in his own time. Is it possible that Metochites was trying to articulate a late antique literary aesthetic, different from that of classical prose, but also not a standard to which Synesios himself fully adhered? Unfortunately, his frame of reference remains the conventional tradition of rhetorical theory, which is not yet amenable to modern use or appreciation. Metochites also makes a perspicacious observation about Synesios, showing that he was a superior reader to Photios. Synesios, he says, cannot be classified neatly as belonging to this or that doctrine, as he belonged to all groups, mediated among them, and chose their best elements. It is interesting that modern scholarship on Synesios has struggled with the same question, with some viewing him as a Christian and others as essentially a Platonist with only a Christian patina. Curiously, Metochites never calls Synesios a Christian at all: The question for him is which ancient philosophical school he belonged to, and his conclusion is that he was a Platonist who took in other fields and approaches as necessary.
To conclude, in terms of the history of Greek literature it is not clear that “late antiquity” ever really ended and “Byzantium” began after it at some point, such that we might postulate a clear state of reception between the two, at le
ast not in the sense in which the term is usually understood. Byzantium was rather a living extension of late antiquity, and the Byzantines did not perceive a rupture between the two, except on the level of imperial greatness. Genres came and went, or were periodically reconstituted, but the basic modalities of Byzantine literary culture were those of late antiquity. The two were successive phases of the same culture, a continuous evolution within the same literary tradition.
REFERENCES
Barber, Charles and Jenkins, David. ed. (2009). Medieval Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics. Leiden: Brill.
Dyck, Andrew R. (1986). Michael Psellus: The Essays on Euripides and George of Pisidia and on Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Høgel, Christian. (2002). Symeon Metaphrastes: Rewriting and Canonization. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.
Hörandner, Wolfram. (1996). Literary criticism in 11th‐century Byzantium: Views of Michael Psellos on John Chrysostom’s style. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2: 336–344.
Hörandner, Wolfram. (2012). Pseudo‐Gregorios Korinthios: Über die vier Teile der perfekten Rede. Medioevo Greco 12: 87–131.
Hult, Karin. (2002). Theodore Metochites on Ancient Authors and Philosophy: Semeioseis gnomikai 1–26 and 71. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. (2014). Introduction: The social presence of Greek in Eastern Christianity, 200–1200 CE. In: Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek (ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson), 1–92. Surrey: Ashgate.
Kaldellis, Anthony. (2005). The works and days of Hesychios the Illoustrios of Miletos. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45: 381–403.
Kaldellis, Anthony. (2007). Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaldellis, Anthony. (2012). The Byzantine role in the making of the corpus of classical Greek historiography: A preliminary investigation. Journal of Hellenic Studies 132: 71–85.
Kaldellis, Anthony. (2015a). The Byzantine conquest of Crete (961 AD), Prokopios’ Vandal War, and the continuator of the chronicle of Symeon. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 39: 302–311.
Kaldellis, Anthony. (2015b). Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians. London: Routledge.
Koder, Johannes. (2013). Zur Unterscheidung von alter und neuer Zeit aus byzantinischer Sicht. In: Polidoro: Studi offerti ad Antonio Carile (ed. G. Vespignani), 507–521. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull'alto Medioevo.
Lauxtermann, Marc. (1999). Ninth‐century classicism and the erotic muse. In: Desire and Denial in Byzantium (ed. Liz James), 161–170. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate.
Magdalino, Paul. (1999). The distance of the past in early medieval Byzantium (7th–10th centuries. Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 46: 115–146.
Papaioannou, Stratis. (2013). Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.
Photios. (1959–1977). Bibliothèque (ed. and trans. René Henry). 8 vols. Paris: Belles Lettres.
Photius. (1993). The Bibliotheca (ed. and partial trans. N. G. Wilson). London: Duckworth.
Psellos, Michael. (1989). Theologica, vol. 1. (ed. Paul Gautier. Leipzig: Teubner)
Saradi, Helen. (2011). The monuments in the late Byzantine Ekphraseis of cities: Searching for identities. Byzantinoslavica 59: 179–192.
Treadgold, Warren. (1984). The Macedonian renaissance. In; Renaissances before the Renaissance (ed. Warren Treadgold), 75–98. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Westerink, L. G., and J. M. Duffy. (2002). Michael Psellus: Theologica. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Teubner.
FURTHER READING
A different and complementary approach to the same topic:
Papaioannou, Stratis. (2009). The Byzantine late antiquity. In: A Companion to Late Antiquity (ed. Philip Rousseau), 17–28. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Arabic Reception of Late Antique Literature
Kevin T. van Bladel
Around 940, in northern Iran, Abū Ḥātim al‐Rāzī wrote in Arabic that the “best” languages were those in which God had communicated to his prophets: Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, and Arabic. He conceded importance to Greek and Sanskrit for the sciences composed in them. But Arabic, he insisted, was the best of them all, not only because of its inherent perfection, but because, he believed, more people strove to learn Arabic than any other language at any time in history,
to the point that they translated the scriptures, like the Torah, the Gospel, the Psalms, and the rest of the books of the prophets from Aramaic and Hebrew into Arabic; they translated the statements of the Persian sages into Arabic, and all of the books of philosophy, medicine, astral sciences, engineering, and mathematics from Greek and Sanskrit into Arabic; and every nation aspired to learn Arabic in order to translate what they had into it. Those who know the Qur’an and Arabic books have not wished to translate it into any other language, nor were any of the nations even able to render any of it into any other language.
(Abū Ḥātim al‐Rāzī 1994, p. 73)
By the tenth century, when Abū Ḥātim wrote, Arabic may have, indeed, seemed to be on its way to universal use. Although he grew up at the site of modern Tehran speaking an Iranian language at home, he chose Arabic as the medium for all his books, composed on subjects ranging from Arabic lexicography to the Ismaili Shiite doctrine he professed and propagated. Because they were written in Arabic, his works could, in theory, find readers from Spain to Afghanistan, the space across which Arabic had become the preeminent language of learning and public communication, especially in cities and towns. He could feel confident that any ancient learning worth reading – be it Scripture, philosophy, science, or medicine – was, or would be, translated into Arabic and was in principle available to him. In his original writings, Abū Ḥātim shows his familiarity with a wide range of ancient sources, including not only the Qurʾān, copious early Islamic traditions, and many exemplary Arabic poems (some from before Islam) but also Arabic works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus, and Galen; a doxography based at some removes on the Refutatio omnium haeresium attributed to Hippolytus of Rome (d. 230); and other late ancient material in Arabic translation. In his use of ancient sources, Abū Ḥātim is not unusual but rather typical of tenth‐century Arabic authors. He was one of many who knew ancient sources in Arabic translation. Of course, he uses them only for his own purposes, but the point remains that he felt it useful to cite them.
The Arabic reception of late ancient literature followed the remarkable elevation of the status of the Arabic language after the seventh‐century conquest and the stabilization of a literary standard of Arabic. In late antiquity, until the beginning of the seventh century, Arabic literature had been the product of relatively removed pastoralist and village peoples in the vast Arabian peninsula and of small client kingdoms and tribes on the arid fringes of the powerful Roman and Persian Empires. Peoples of the Persian kingdom and the Roman Empire had known speakers of Arabic primarily as brigands, mercenaries, and immigrant outsiders. Theirs was a language that very few non‐Arabs ever needed, and a limited amount of its literature survives. By the year 800, however, after the far‐reaching conquests of the seventh century, a standardized form of Arabic was becoming the main language of intercommunal and interregional written communication wherever Arabs had settled in Iraq, Egypt, Iran, northern Africa, and Spain. Although the conquerors had initially settled in new colonies (ams&c.dotbl;ār), such as Kūfa and Bas&c.dotbl;ra in southern Iraq and Fusṭāṭ in Egypt, that were intended to keep them apart and to minimize mutual acculturation while serving as bases for further conquests, the social boundaries between Arabic‐ and non‐Arabic‐speakers and between Muslim, client‐convert, and non‐Muslim subject were gradually eroding. Arabic became the primary language of increasingly many people, including offspring of union
s of Arabic‐speaking fathers and mothers who spoke other languages and even of some who had no Arabic‐speakers in their ancestry. In the course of the tenth century, Arabic became the preferred medium of all learned public and intercommunal urban communication in cities almost everywhere across the Middle East and North Africa, from the Atlantic to Central Asia. By the year 1000, many members of religious communities subordinate to the Muslim, Arabic‐speaking rulers – including Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, especially in the Muslim cities where political and military power was now based – had in many cases already shifted to the use of Arabic within their own communities and homes. Arabic would only spread further in subsequent centuries until, gradually, their traditional languages – Coptic, Greek, Aramaic, most Iranian languages, and others – would evolve into the scattered, scarcely written vernaculars of ghettos, small villages, and remote pastoralists, their old book traditions now the specialized domain of religious scholars and priests belonging to the diminishing non‐Muslim religious groups.
