BYZANTINE
118
BYZANTINE
The three theologians first named are best judged
by their letters and minor occasional writings.
Eustathius seems to be the most important among
them, not only because of his learned commentary
on Homer and Pindar, but particularly because of
his own original writings. Therein he reveals a
candid character, courageously holding up every evil
to the light and intent upon its correction, not shrink-
ing from sharp controversy. In one of his works
he attacks the corruption of the monastic life of that
day and its intellectual stagnation; in another, one
of the best of the Byzantine polemical writings, he
assails the hypocrisy and sham holiness of his time;
in a third he denounces the conceit and arrogance of
the Byzantine priests, who were ashamed of their
popular designation, "pope". For a rhetorician
like Michael Italicus, later a bishop, it is extremely
significant that he should attack the chief weakness
of Byzantine literature, external imitation; this he
did on receiving a work by a patriarch, which was
simply a disorderly collection of fragments from
other writers, so poorly put together that the sources
were immediately recognizable.
Noteworthy also is the noble figure of the pupil and friend of Eustathius, Michael Acominatus (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) Archbishop of Athens and brother of the historian Nicetas Aco- minatus. His inaugural address, delivered on the Acropolis, compared by Gregorovius with Gregory the Great's sermon to the Romans in St. Peter's, exhibits both profound classical scholarship and high enthusiasm; the latter, however, is somewhat out of place in view of the material and spiritual wretched- ness of his time's. These pitiful conditions moved him to compose an elegy, famous because unique, on the decay of Athens, a sort of poetical and anti- quarian apostrophe to fallen greatness. Gregorovius compares this also with a Latin counterpart, the lament of Bishop Hildebert of Tours on the demoli- tion of Rome by the Normans (1106). More wordy and rhetorical are the funeral orations over his teacher, Eustathius (1195), and over his brother Nicetas, both of them, nevertheless, fine evidences of a noble disposition and deep feeling. In spite of his humanism, Michael, like his brother, remained a fanatical opponent of the Latins, whom he called "barbarians". They had driven him into exile at Ceos, whence he addressed many letters to his friends, which are of great value for the understanding of his character. In his style he is strongly influenced by Eustathius; hence the ecclesiastical note in his otherwise classical diction.
With Theodoras Metochites and Maximus Planudes we come to the universal scholars (polyhistores) of the time of the Palseologi. The former gives evi- dence of his humanistic zeal in his frequent use of the hexameter, the latter in his knowledge of the Latin, both being otherwise unknown in Byzantium, and acquaintance with them foreboding a new and broader grasp of antiquity. Both men show an un- usually fine grasp of poetry, especially of the poetry of nature. Metochites composed meditations on the beauty of the sea; Planudes was the author of a long poetic idyll, a kind of literature otherwise little cul- tivated by Byzantine scholars. On the whole, Me- tochites was a thinker and poet, Planudes chiefly an imitator and compiler. Metochites was of the more speculative disposition, as his collection of philo- sophical and historical miscellanies show. Planudes was more precise, as his preference for mathematics proves. It is worth noting, as an evidence of contem- porary progress in philosophy, that Metochites openly attacks Aristotle, lie also deals more frankly with political questions, as is shown, for instance, in his
comparison of dem y, aristocracy, and mon- archy. In spite of tliis breadth of interest his cul- ture rests wholly on a Greek basis, while Planudes,
by his translations from the Latin (Cato, Ovid,
Cicero, Caesar, and Boethius), vastly enlarged the
Eastern intellectual horizon.
This inclination toward the West is most notice- able in Nicephorus Gregoras, the great pupil of Me- tochites. His project for a reform of the calendar alone suffices to rank him among the modern and superior intellects of his time, as he will surely be admitted to have been if ever his numerous and varied works in every domain of Byzantine intel- lectual activity are brought to light. His letters, especially, promise a rich harvest. His method of exposition is based on that of Plato, whom he also imitated in his ecclesiastico-political discussions, e. g. in his dialogue "Florentius, or Concerning Wis- dom". These disputations with his opponent, Bar- laam, dealt with the question of church union, in which Gregoras stood on the side of the Unionists. This attitude, which places him outside the sphere of strictly Byzantine culture, brought upon him bitter hostility and the loss of the privilege of teach- ing; he had been occupied chiefly with the exact sciences, whereby he had already earned the hatred of orthodox Byzantines.
While, therefore, the Byzantine essayists and en- cyclopedists stood, externally, wholly under the in- fluence of ancient rhetoric and its rules, and while they did not, like Bacon, create an entirely new form of the essay, yet they embodied in the traditional form their own characteristic knowledge, and thereby lent it a new charm.
III. Secular Poetry. — As the prose literature, both historical and philosophical, followed one or more ancient models — the former Thucydides in par- ticular, the latter Plato — so poetry likewise had its prototypes; each of its principal classes had, so to speak, an ancient progenitor to whom it traced back its origins. Unlike the prose literature, however, these new kinds of poetical Byzantine literature and their models are not to be traced back to the classical Attic period. The Byzantines write neither lyrics nor dramas and imitate neither Pindar nor Sophocles. They imitate the literature of the post-classic or Alexandrian period, and write romances, panegyrics epigrams, satires, and didactic and hortatory poetry. The chief Alexandrian representatives of these species of literature are the models for the Byzantines, in particular Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, Asclep- iades and Posidippus, Lucian and Longus. For didactic poetry it is necessary to go back to an earlier prototype, a work ascribed to Isocrates, by whom, however, it was not actually written. The poetic temperament of the Byzantines is thus akin to that of the Alexandrian, not of the Attic, writers. This statement is of great importance for the understand- ing of the poetry of Byzantium. Only one new poetic type was evolved independently by the By- zantines — the begging-poem. The five ancient types and the new one just mentioned are not contem- poraneous in the Byzantine period; the epigram and the panegyric developed first (in the sixth and seventh centuries), and then only, at long intervals, the others, i. e. satire, didactic and begging poetry, fi- nally the romance. All of these appear side by side only after the twelfth century, that is to say in the period of decay, they themselves marking a decadence in literature.
The epigram was the artistic form of later antiq- uity which best suited the Byzantine taste for the ornamental and for intellectual ingenuity. It cor- responded exactly to the concept of the minor arts,
which in the Byzantine period attained such high
development. It made no lofty demands on the imag- ination of the author; the chief difficulty lay rather in the technique and the attainment of the utmost possible pregnancy of phrase. Two groups may be distinguished among the Byzantine epigrammatists:
