28 Facts About Byzantine literature

Byzantine literature is the Greek literature of the Middle Ages, whether written in the territory of the Byzantine Empire or outside its borders.

The prestige of the Attic literature remained undiminished until the 7th century AD, but in the following two centuries when the existence of the Byzantine Empire was threatened, city life and education declined, and along with them the use of the classicizing language and style.

However the vernacular Byzantine literature was limited to poetic romances and popular devotional writing.

All serious Byzantine literature continued to make use of the archaizing language of learned Greek tradition.

Byzantine literature has two sources: Classical Greek and Orthodox Christian tradition.

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The first three include representatives of those kinds of Byzantine literature which continued the ancient traditions: historians and chroniclers, encyclopedists and essayists, and writers of secular poetry.

Sometimes a Byzantine literature chooses a classic writer to imitate in method and style.

At its zenith under the Macedonian dynasty the Byzantine literature world produced great heroes, but no great historians, excepting the solitary figure of the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

Unlike the historical works, Byzantine literature chronicles were intended for the general public; hence the difference in their origin, development, and diffusion, as well as in their character, method, and style.

The chronicle Byzantine literature is originally foreign to Greek civilization, the first of which was composed by uneducated Syrians.

Representative Byzantine literature chronicles are the three of Joannes Malalas, Theophanes Confessor, and Joannes Zonaras, respectively.

Byzantine literature was the first of his intellectual circle to raise the philosophy of Plato above that of Aristotle and to teach philosophy as a professor.

Byzantine literature was equally adroit and many-sided in his literary work; in harmony with the polished, pliant nature of the courtier is his elegant Platonic style of his letters and speeches.

In form this Byzantine literature is characterized by its extensive use of the popular forms of speech and verse, the latter being the "political" verse, an iambic verse of fifteen syllables, still the standard verse of modern Greek popular poetry.

Chief phases in the development of the Byzantine literature epigram are most evident in the works of these three.

Byzantine literature wrote in an affected and turgid style, in the classical form of the hexameter; he abounds in brilliant ideas, and in his skillful imitation of the ancients, particularly in his erotic pieces, he surpasses most of the epigrammatists of the imperial period.

Typical of this kind of Byzantine literature are the commemorative poem of Paulus Silentiarius on the dedication of the church of St Sophia, and that of Georgius Pisides on the glory of the prince.

Only three kinds of ecclesiastical Byzantine literature, which were as yet undeveloped in the 4th century, exhibit later an independent growth.

Byzantine literature wrote hymns on the Passion of the Lord, on the betrayal by Judas, Peter's denial, Mary before the Cross, the Ascension, the Ten Virgins, and the Last Judgment, while his Old Testament themes mention the history of Joseph and the three young men in the fiery furnace.

Byzantine literature is said to have composed about a thousand hymns, of which only eighty have survived, evidently because in the 9th century the so-called canones, linguistically and metrically more artistic in form, replaced much of his work in the Greek Liturgy.

Byzantine literature is fond of symbolic pictures and figures of speech, antitheses, assonances, especially witty jeux d'esprit, which contrast with his characteristic simplicity of diction and construction.

The true founder of a distinctively Byzantine literature mysticism was Maximus the Confessor, who deepened the tradition of Christian Neoplatonism, as found in the Pseudo-Dionysius, with the resources of Orthodox Christology.

Byzantine literature's principal work is a collection of prose pieces and hymns on communion with God.

Byzantine literature is akin to the chief German mystics in his tendency towards pantheism.

That celebration of the achievements of Greek heroes in popular Byzantine literature was the result of the conflicts which the Greeks sustained during the Middle Ages with the border nations to the east of the empire.

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In fact Italian Byzantine literature impressed its popular character on the Greek popular poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries, as French Byzantine literature had done in the 13th and 14th.

Byzantine literature culture had a direct influence upon southern and central Europe in church music and church poetry, though this was only in the very early period .

Byzantine literature culture had a definite impact upon the Near East, especially upon the Persians, and the Arabs.