Byzantine literature is the Greek literature of the Middle Ages, whether written in the territory of the Byzantine Empire or outside its borders. It forms the second period in the history of Greek literature after Ancient Greek literature .
Byzantine literature’s two sources, classical and Christian, each provided a series of models and references for the Byzantine writer and reader. Often both were referred to side by side: for example, the emperor Alexius Comnenus defended his seizure of church property to pay his soldiers by referring to the precedents of Pericles and the ...
Byzantine literature may be broadly defined as the Greek literature of the Middle Ages, whether written in the territory of the Byzantine Empire or outside its borders. By late antiquity many of the classical Greek genres, such as drama and choral… Greek scholarship In classical scholarship: Christian versus classical scholarship
Research Interests: Byzantine literature, especially rhetoric and epistolography; sociology of literature; textual criticism and editorial theory Website Office Hours Sign-up Boylston 226 ariehle@fas.harvard.edu p: 617.496.0970 John Duffy Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Philology and Literature, Emeritus
- Introduction
- General Character of Byzantine Literature
- Theology
- History
- Poetry
- Romance
- Satire
- Epistolography
- Byzantine Scholarship and Philosophy
It should be noted at once that, except for a large number of fragments on papyrus and the Persiansof Timotheus (which has been preserved almost intact on a papyrus nearly contemporary with its author), virtually all of our texts of the ancient Greek classics were literally saved from destruction by the diligence of the Byzantine scholars who studi...
Though it is rarely prudent to generalize concerning an entire people, there are a few traits of Byzantine literature as a whole that may be regarded as characteristic. Above all, the medieval Greeks, like their ancient ancestors, whose literature they cherished, had a fierce sense of cultural pride that left its mark in every phase of their activi...
Byzantine civilization turned around two foci: the Church and the emperor. There is hardly a phase of Byzantine activity that can be considered apart from these two vital factors. Though the emperor dominated all phases of Byzantine life and even exerted control over the Byzantine Church, the Byzantines felt no special urge to write about political...
In the field of history, the Byzantines continued the ancient Greek tradition with notable success, and produced a great historical literature. The extant texts are regularly divided into two types: histories and chronicles, though the distinction between the two is often blurred. Historians and Chroniclers.Chronicles and histories differed from ea...
The meters of classical poetry had been based upon quantity, i.e., upon the length of vowels and of syllables. Some Byzantine poets followed the ancient prosody, mostly in iambic trimeters, less commonly in hexameters, elegiac distichs, or anacreontic verse. But even the writers who accommodated themselves to these norms took many liberties in the ...
A phenomenon that is intriguingly parallel to that of the West, though initially independent, is the writing of romances. There were two phases, in the mid-12th century and in the late 13th to 14th centuries. Amongst the first to appear was the epic-romance of Digenis Akritas, of which several recensions survive, all in political verse. The kernel ...
The Byzantines were far less interested in satire, which was undoubtedly inhibited by the absolutistic character of the imperial power. But this genre was not altogether neglected. For example, in the Philopatris, a satire cast in the form of a dialogue, there is an exchange of views between a Christian and a pagan. The unknown author wrote c. 969,...
The art of letter writing was much cultivated throughout the Byzantine period and many often voluminous collections survive. Theoretical analyses in handbooks of rhetoric recommend that letters should be modeled on an elegant conversation with a friend. However, the fact that in most cases the real message was conveyed by the messenger has ensured ...
An unbroken thread of serious scholarly interest in texts from the ancient world was maintained throughout the Byzantine period. If they themselves did not produce creative works that, aesthetically considered, rival Homer and the other great monuments of ancient literature, they at least were uniquely responsible for all that have survived. They n...
The Byzantine Empire was the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and it survived over a thousand years after the western half dissolved. A series of regional traumas—including pestilence, warfare, social upheaval, and the Arab Muslim assault of the 630s—marked its cultural and institutional transformation from the Eastern Roman Empire to the ...
Aug 24, 2010 · The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a “New Rome” on the site of the ancient Greek...
Yahoo Web Search
About 6,250,000 search results
- Byzantine literature
Literature of the Byzantine Empire
Byzantine literature is the Greek literature of the Middle Ages, whether written in the territory of the Byzantine Empire or outside its borders. It forms the second period in the history of Greek literature after Ancient Greek literature. Wikipedia
