Knowledge of classical rhetoric survived through the Middle Ages, precariously at times, both in the East in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire and in western Europe, where Latin remained the language of religion and scholarship. Until the Renaissance, Greek scholars very rarely had any knowledge of Latin and western scholars were equally ignorant of Greek. The two traditions are somewhat different: in the East it is largely the sophistic strand that was strongest, with some philosophical influence from Neoplatonism. Public address was an important factor in the cohesion of the state, and orators were held in honor. Many speeches were published for the reading public. Writing about rhetoric largely took the form of commentaries on earlier treatments. In the West, the handbook tradition of Latin rhetoric was continued in new works and handbooks of letter writing, poetry, and preaching were eventually produced, a development less evident in the East. Western writers composed prose panegyrics and encomiastic poetry, but no leading role in society was granted the orator as it was in the East.
Some reasons for the difference between East and West are clear. Sophistry and philosophy were much more strongly established in the Greek portion of the Roman Empire than in the West. The serious application of epideictic to Christianity began in the East, as seen in orations of Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, and continued throughout Byzantine history. In contrast, epideictic was somewhat less practiced in the West, where interest in rhetoric was traditionally connected with the study and practice of law and civil procedure. In the East, Roman government was a continuity, with the result of greater cultural continuity than in the West: educational and cultural functions performed by Greek sophists of later antiquity continued to be performed throughout Byzantine history once they had been adapted to Christianity. Although there were serious threats to the survival of the eastern empire (for example, from the Arabs in the eighth century and from the Crusaders in the thirteenth), survive it did until the Turkish conquest in 1453. The western Roman Empire did not survive as such after the fifth century. In the East, Greek was continuously spoken, although the popular dialect significantly deviated from the formal, official language. In the West, the new rulers brought new languages with them, even though Latin continued to be important throughout the region.1
Because of the threats to the survival of Greek culture and the Greek Church, Byzantine civilization was often nervous, defensive, and in awe of its classical past. In the case of rhetoric, Byzantine conservatism is seen in the continued imitation of classical models and in adherence to late classical textbooks, especially those of Hermogenes, and in preservation of sophistic forms of oratory. The greatest importance of Byzantium in the history of rhetoric, and in the history of literature, is as the preserver and transmitter of classical Greek texts. The period of greatest danger for the survival of texts was the eighth century, when the Iconoclasm movement in the Church destroyed works of art and turned against classical culture generally. Greek works that scribes did not copy and preserve in this period were permanently lost except for some fragmentary discoveries in papyri buried in the sands of Egypt or under the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Byzantium (modern Istanbul) had been made the eastern capital of the Roman Empire by Constantine in A.D. 324 and was refounded as Constantinople in 330. After the death of Theodosius in 395, the Roman Empire was permanently split into eastern and western halves, and as the western parts slipped into the control of Germanic rulers in the course of the next century, the eastern empire emerged as the sole remnant of Roman power. Subsequent Byzantine history is usually divided into three periods. The first had no sharp break with antiquity. It includes the vigorous age of Justinian (527–65) and ends with the siege of Constantinople by the Arabs in 717. The second period gradually emerges into a renaissance of learning in the ninth century, contemporary with the Carolingian renaissance in the West. This development continued in the tenth century during the reign of the scholar-emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus and reached a climax in the eleventh century, the time of the greatest Byzantine writer, Michael Psellus. Some decline is noticeable in the twelfth century, which nevertheless produced the classicizing historian Anna Comnena and Eustathius, author of an enormous commentary on the Homeric epics. This second period may be said to have ended with the fall of Constantinople to the Latin Crusaders in 1204. The final period includes the Greek recovery of Constantinople in 1261 and the succeeding cultural renaissance under the dynasty of the Palaeologi, which facilitated the transmission of Greek learning to the West. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 marked the end of Byzantine, and thus of Roman, history. Throughout its history the Byzantine state, like the later Roman Empire, was an autocracy, with parallel and overlapping hierarchies in civil, military, and ecclesiastical government. Administration was carried on by a highly developed scribal bureaucracy—hence the use of “byzantine” in English to describe bureaucratic methods. An important function of formal education was training future bureaucrats and leaders of Church and State.
As heir to the language, the literature, and the religion of classical Greece, Byzantine scholars sought to transmit them to future generations as unchanged as possible. The truth had been revealed and methods of study had been canonized, but standards were difficult to maintain. Grammar schools taught the rudiments of the Greek language, reading of Greek texts, and progymnasmatic exercises in composition. Secondary education, where it existed, continued to be based on schools of rhetoric. A few students might then continue to study dialectic as an introduction to philosophy, thus completing a program analogous to the trivium in the West.2 A counterpart of the quadrivium is also attested at times.3 The most significant addition to the subject matter of classical education was study of the Bible and Fathers of the Church. The Old Testament book of Psalms, in Greek translation, became a basic school reader, but Homer and other poets, Plato, and the orators continued to be studied by more advanced students.
Greek grammar was usually taught from the textbook of Dionysius Thrax, written about 100 B.C. It remained authoritative for knowledge of the classical language for fifteen hundred years and received many commentaries. Progymnasmata, the exercises in composition discussed in Chapter 5, were most often studied in the textbook of Aphthonius,4 which also received commentaries. Early examples of these are one by John of Sardis dating from the ninth century and one by John Geometres dating from the tenth. The former work contains no reference to Christianity, but the latter draws on examples from Gregory of Nazianzus. The incorporation of Christian writers into the literary canon was a process that continued throughout the Byzantine period. The best late classical examples of progymnasmata were those by the fourth-century sophist Libanius. Though he was a pagan, his writings were studied for their style in the Byzantine period. Many examples of Byzantine progymnasmata survive and are often interesting. Those by Nicephorus Basilaces, for example, written in the mid-twelfth century, combine compositions about Zeus and Ajax with those about Samson and the Virgin, and an ethopoeia on what the Greek god of the Underworld, Hades, said when Lazarus was raised from the dead. (Christian theologians did not, in general, deny the existence of the pagan gods, which they regarded as devils.) The various forms of progymnasmata—narratives, chrias, encomia, comparisons, etc.—exercised direct influence on literary composition and were incorporated into homilies or histories or saints’ lives as a form of amplification. A good example of a syncrisis, or comparison, in literary form is the essay by Theodorus Metochites (ca. 1260–1332), On Demosthenes and Aristides.5 The ethopoeia, or personification, influenced the writing of epistles, often revised and published as literary creations.6 Another favorite was the ecphrasis, or description, which was given a Christian treatment as a description of a church or work of art. Probably the most famous example, and certainly one of the most ambitious, was the work On Buildings by Procopius of Caesarea (d. 565), with a celebrated description of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.7 Procopius seems to have intended the work as an encomium of the church’s builder, Justinian, whom he did not admire but thought it prudent to praise.
In the fourth century of the Christian era teachers of rhetoric could be found in every city of the Roman Empire and students traveled many miles for more advanced study with the great sophists of Athens, Antioch, Constantinople, and elsewhere. In the fifth and sixth centuries Gaza in Palestine was a leading center of rhetorical studies under Zosimus, Procopius, and Choricius, some of whose works have survived.8 Their compositions included panegyrics, ecphrases, prose monodies, and commentaries on the Attic orators. The rhetors of Gaza were Christians and contributed to the integration of Christian and pagan models of style and drew illustrative examples from both Christian and pagan classics.
The philosophical schools of Athens were closed by Justinian in 529, but the effect of that action has probably been exaggerated by modern historians who like to couple it with the establishment of the monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy in the same year to designate the end of the classical and beginning of medieval institutions of learning. More significant at the time was Justinian’s termination of the requirement that municipalities throughout the empire pay the salaries of teachers (see Procopius Secret History 26.5); many cities probably could not afford the cost in this period of general economic decline. Thereafter, private teachers of grammar and rhetoric could be found in some major cities, but formal education languished for the next three centuries.
What Dionysius Thrax and Aphthonius were to the grammar schools, Hermogenes was to the study of rhetoric throughout the Byzantine period. The popularity of his works resulted from several qualities. First, his major (and genuine) treatises On Stases and On Ideas had potential utility in teaching argument and style, useful in any form of writing or speaking. Second, Hermogenes was strongly classicizing. His great rhetorical model was Demosthenes, who more than any other seemed to combine all “ideas” of style. This classicism constituted an initial appeal to early Byzantine scholars, but the acceptance of Hermogenes’ authority, especially in the middle Byzantine period, helped to perpetuate classicism, including admiration of Demosthenes at a time when political and social conditions were radically different from what Demosthenes had known. Third, Hermogenes was systematic, specific, and generally clear. He defined his terms, gave examples, and above all was given to categorization and subdivisions of concepts in a form that students could be expected to memorize. This rather pedantic approach appealed to the Byzantine mind, which proceeded along similar hierarchical channels in theology, philosophy, law, bureaucratic government, court ceremonies, and other aspects of life. Hermogenes had combined complex details into a unified system that paralleled Byzantine concepts of human life as a microcosm of eternal life, and his twenty forms of style could be mingled, combined, and varied to produce a kaleidoscope of aesthetic effects congenial to the Byzantine taste for color, symbol, and mystical expression, as seen, for example, in mosaics. A good example of the application of the Hermogenic ideas of style can be found in the homilies of Photius, even though Photius never mentions Hermogenes by name.9 Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 856 to 867 and 878 to 886, was the most important Byzantine scholar of the ninth century, and largely responsible for the renewed study of the classics in this period of cultural renaissance. In particular, his Lexicon provided readers with a dictionary of Attic Greek that facilitated the anachronistic use of the high style in all serious communication.
Hermogenes’ treatises were the subject of numerous commentaries through Byzantine times. For the work on stasis, for example, commentaries include one from the fifth century by the Neoplatonist philosopher Syrianus10 and from about the same time commentaries by Sopater and Marcellinus. From the eleventh century come the commentaries of John Doxapatres, and from the thirteenth the commentary of Maximus Planudes, a scholar and poet who also commented on Hermogenes’ work on ideas of style and on two other works then attributed to Hermogenes, On Invention and On Method, drawing chiefly on earlier discussions. For the work on ideas of style there is a commentary by Syrianus again, and an anonymous commentary probably dating from the tenth century that draws on older material but adds references to Christian writers, chiefly Gregory of Nazianzus, as well as a more Christianizing commentary by John Siceliotes from the eleventh century11 and again the commentary by Planudes.
Most commentaries begin with a prolegomenon, or introduction, to the study of rhetoric, similar to the introductions to philosophy composed by Neoplatonists.12 These discuss the definition and parts of rhetoric and its early history in Greece. There are also a number of Byzantine works on figures of speech that show Hermogenes’ influence, as well as synopses of Hermogenes’ theories by Michael Psellus, George Pletho, and others.
Although the Hermogenic works were the major authority on rhetoric for the Byzantines, writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Menander Rhetor and other handbooks and treatises were available to scholars in some libraries and were sometimes combined into single large manuscripts. Parisinus Graecus 1741, copied in the tenth century and now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, is a vast compendium of rhetorical texts; it includes Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Demetrius’s On Style, the rhetorical works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Pseudo-Aristides, Alexander’s handbook of figures of speech, Apsines’ rhetorical handbook, and other works.
An unusual feature of Byzantine teaching and one of the few innovations in the theory of style inherited from Hermogenes was the belief that obscurity can at times be a virtue. Arethas of Caesarea in the tenth century was the author of a tract entitled To Those Who Have Accused Us of Obscurity, in which he claims his detractors do not understand when obscurity should be used. John Geometres in the eleventh century took the further step of saying that not every instance of obscurity is a vice and it may even be a virtue, and this claim is echoed by later writers.13 The obscurities of the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church, and of Greek philosophers as well, given allegorical interpretation as discussed in Chapter 7, provided justification for this view. Religious truth was regarded as hidden by a veil of obscure language to protect it from the profane and to give it value from the labor required to understand it, and Byzantine writers imitated the style. In addition, some secular truths might be dangerous to express too clearly but could be said in ways that those in sympathy with the writer could understand.
Rhetorical schools were not so common as grammar schools at any time, and declamation does not seem to have been widely practiced after the sixth century. Some Byzantine writers, however, wrote declamations as a literary exercise, and a few survive, such as those by George Pachymeris, who lived in the thirteenth century and also composed progymnasmata. In his fifth declamation, faithful to the tradition of the sophists, he imagines himself as Demosthenes advising the Athenians what to do about Philip’s capture of Elatea.
Plato’s works, including Gorgias and Phaedrus, were much studied in the early Byzantine period, when Christian and pagan Neoplatonists dominated the schools of philosophy. Neoplatonist critical and aesthetic theory was an important influence on Byzantine art and writing.14 Hermias of Alexandria wrote a commentary on Phaedrus in the mid-fifth century, and Olympiodorus one on Gorgias in the late sixth century.15 In later Byzantine periods Aristotle was more read than Plato, largely because of the place of his logical works in the curriculum, but there were enthusiastic Platonists, of whom Michael Psellus was one. Aristotle’s Rhetoric was regarded as part of the Organon, or collection of his logical treatises, and occasionally read in that connection.16 Two Byzantine commentaries on the Rhetoric have survived, probably dating from the middle Byzantine period, but there is little sign of direct influence of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle about rhetoric.
In Constantinople a school of advanced studies, called “the University” by modern scholars, had been organized in A.D. 425 by an edict of Theodosius II (Codex Theodosius 14.9.2). The faculty consisted of ten teachers of Greek grammar, five of Greek rhetoric, ten of Latin grammar, three of Latin rhetoric, two of law, and one of philosophy. The curriculum was remarkably secular, intended to train young men for positions at all levels in government. How long this institution survived is not known. It is unlikely to have survived the eighth century and may have collapse, or faded away, much earlier. The view to be found in some older books on Byzantium, that “the University” survived with a series of refoundings and reforms until 1453, is without substance. There was no continuous tradition of higher education in Constantinople and no consistent government support.17 There were private teachers of philosophy and rhetoric and some other subjects, and occasionally one of these achieved official support, as did Leo the Philosopher in the ninth century and Michael Psellus in the eleventh. Psellus and Xiphilinus, an eminent legal scholar, were the heads of competing schools, and Constantine IX Monomachus intervened in the dispute between them and briefly provided some subsidy for a school of law under Xiphilinus and a school of rhetoric and philosophy under Psellus, but the system soon collapsed.18 Our best source of information is Psellus’s Funeral Eulogy for Xiphilinus.
Michael Psellus (1018–ca. 1078) was an official at court, an orator, a Platonist whose philosophical views were condemned by the Church, and the author of many works, of which the best known is the Chronographia, a rather personal history of his own times. He also wrote on scientific and philosophical subjects and composed a versified summary of Hermogenes’ rhetorical theory. Versification of technical writing was common in both East and West as an aid to memorization of the contents. The importance of sophistic rhetoric in Psellus’s thinking emerges in a speech he composed on the rhetorical character of Gregory of Nazianzus. The speech employs the theory of ideas of Hermogenes and is modeled on Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s essays on the ancient orators. Gregory is found to be the exemplar of all “ideas” of style; each quality is taken up in turn. Psellus’s major speeches are three funeral orations on distinguished contemporaries, Kerullarius, Leichudes, and Xiphilinus. In Chronographia (6.41) he speaks of learning as divided into two parts, rhetoric and philosophy. He describes as his personal goal to mold his tongue to eloquence by rhetorical discourse and to purify his mind by philosophy (6.107). Statements in his letters are consistent with this goal. Writing to a correspondent about Hermogenes, he says, “Perhaps you know philosophy and rhetoric, but you do not know how to put them together; there is a philosophizing rhetoric as well as a rhetoricizing philosophy”; and elsewhere, “Just as Plato in the Timaeus combines theology with physical science, so I write philosophy by means of rhetoric and fit myself to both through the use of both.”19 This reflects the tradition of philosophical rhetoric but is a nobler vision than that held by most in Byzantium.
Probably more continuous than “the University” was the Patriarchal School of Constantinople, which is first heard of in the seventh century and best known from the twelfth, when its three teachers of Scripture were joined by a fourth, the master of the rhetors.20 The faculty of the Patriarchal School at that time had important public oratorical functions: the delivery of panegyrics, funeral orations, and other official speeches, which were published and preserved. Among the masters of the rhetors were Nicepherus Basilaces and Eustathius, the latter best known for his commentary on the Homeric poems in which he makes use of Hermogenic concepts of style.21 Constantinople dominated Byzantine culture, but there were some other centers of education, including Antioch, Nicea, and Thessalonica. There were also important monasteries in Asia Minor and Greece and on the islands that copied manuscripts and preserved classical texts throughout the later centuries.
Although a popular literature, seen, for example, in simple, often anonymous lives of the saints and in folk poetry, was composed during the Byzantine period using the contemporary Greek of the time, the official language of the Byzantine Empire was the literary Greek of late antiquity, artificially preserved by educated persons for over a thousand years.22 Although generally referred to as “Attic,” in contrast to the demotic, or language of daily life or the speech of the uneducated, this formal language had its origins in the Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, found in the New Testament. It was refined by the Atticizing speakers and writers of the Christian era, continually reinforced by the attention paid to true Attic prose models, including Demosthenes and Plato, as well as to Atticizing prose written by Aristides, Libanius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and others in late antiquity, and expanded somewhat by the inclusion of words and phrases from poetry. Pronunciation was allowed to follow a natural development, but Byzantine writers, Psellus, for example, repeatedly tried to reassert the lexical and grammatical standards of classical Greek in writing in the high style. And Anna Comnena “dislikes to record even the names of barbarians, for fear they may defile the pages of her history.”23 Serious writers were also expected to follow the conventions of classical literary genres and to sprinkle their works with allusions to the Greek classics and the Bible. One result of the lack of change in the formal language is that it is often impossible to date a Byzantine literary work unless one has external sources of reference to it or its writer.
The anachronistic use of Atticizing Greek for all serious communication, including the writing of personal letters, like the use of formal languages in other cultures, sharpened the division between the educated and the uneducated. It was made possible by the continuation of traditional grammatical and rhetorical education, encouraged by the Church, which drew its authority from the Greek Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers and was anxious to preserve knowledge of their language. The extraordinary value put on classical language and style, exceeding the role of Latin in the West, was part of a search for cultural stability and permanence in the face of the destruction of the classical world and the dangers from alien societies, including Slavs to the north, Arabs to the south, Turks to the east, and varied hordes of semibarbaric “Latins” to the west. In addition, the requirement of its use helped to ensure the political and social power of those with access to education.
One reason that rhetorical studies did not significantly change throughout the Byzantine period is that there was little significant change in the need for rhetoric, its functions, or its forms, as perceived by the leaders of society. Rhetoric in most cultures has more often been a tool of preservation of the status quo than of change. Knowledge of the right language and right forms was the prerequisite for a career in Church and State in Byzantium, and the attitudes inculcated with that knowledge were extremely conservative.
In such a situation, and considering the Church’s greater interest in the language than in the content of the classics, it is easy to see that style would be the most important aspect of rhetoric. Study of stasis theory kept alive the logical side of the subject to some extent, and the Byzantines studied Aristotelian logic but without developing that subject into the scholastic discipline so congenial to western scholars in the Middle Ages. Their willingness to acknowledge deliberate obscurity as a virtue of style, in contrast to Aristotle’s insistence on clarity, is one of their unusual themes, parallel to the use of rhetoric to retard rather than to facilitate social and political change. But even this concept developed out of Hermogenes’ treatise on ideas and the aesthetics and biblical exegesis of late antiquity rather than being entirely new, and it has some counterpart in views of Augustine and other western writers.
The Byzantine Empire had a senate and a system of lawcourts, descended in both cases from institutions of the Roman Empire, but neither deliberative nor judicial oratory were major forms of discourse in the East. The function of public address in Byzantium was to present decisions to the public and to strengthen loyalty to Church and State through the use of epideictic forms. The church year presented a series of opportunities for panegyrical sermons, especially in Constantinople, and many of these are preserved, as are many funeral orations of famous persons. Both types were consistently modeled on the great works of Gregory of Nazianzus, which were studied as classics. Literally thousands of homilies also survive, often indebted to John Chrysostom, another classic to the Byzantines; some are highly rhetorical and some are in the simpler form of the ancient homily. Collections of homilies were also made. Leo the Wise, emperor from 886 to 912, seems to have been especially influential in the creation of these collections.24
Outside the specific functions of the Church, though not outside church influence, are numerous epideictic orations that were given on public occasions. The most important group are the encomia of emperors and members of the imperial family by officially approved orators.25 Examples of these survive from all periods, including the encomium of Anastasius I by Procopius of Gaza, encomia by Psellus of the empress Theodora, of Constantine IX Monomachus, and of Michael VII Ducas, and encomia by Nicetas Choniates of Isaac II and Alexis III. There are also encomia of patriarchs, including that by Eustathius on Michael III (1170–78). Other epideictic takes the form of funeral orations for the great and monodies, or prose laments, such as Psellus’s for Andronicus Ducas, son of Constantine X. The monody was a classical form for which models could be found among the works of Aristides (for Smyrna after an earthquake) and Libanius (on the death of Julian the Apostate). In addition, there are prosphonetics, or speeches of official welcome, propemptics, or speeches of farewell, and genethliacs, or birthday speeches, and many others forms, most of which had been described in the handbooks of Menander Rhetor. In addition to real speeches, there were also written addresses to influential persons in the tradition of Isocrates’ To Nicocles, and rhetorical autobiographies, for which the first oration of Libanius was a model.26
The static quality of formal Byzantine rhetoric does not mean that the period is not important in the history of rhetoric. The schools of grammar and rhetoric of Byzantium and the compositions of Byzantine orators preserved classical rhetoric as a living tradition for a thousand years. It is because of Byzantine scholars and scribes that Greek writings and ideas survived to be carried to Italy for study and imitation and to become a factor in cultural tradition when increased wealth and motivation made high levels of culture possible in the Renaissance and when Byzantine civilization itself was terminated by the Turkish conquest. Byzantium is a time capsule in which the teachers of rhetoric sealed the best of the past as they saw it, including works by Plato and Aristotle. The Church connived at this preservation because of interest in the status quo, but a distaste for worldly knowledge lingered, especially among the monks. The Greek Church did not love the classics but did love the language of the New Testament and the Fathers. Study of rhetoric had become one of the roads to knowledge of the Scriptures and patristic literature.
The last important figure in Byzantine rhetoric was George Trebizond. Born in Crete in 1395 and educated in Greek rhetoric, he arrived in Italy in 1416 and brought with him a knowledge of the Hermogenic tradition, unknown in the West. Combining this knowledge with the Ciceronian tradition of the West, in 1424 he published, in Latin, the first complete rhetorical treatise of the Renaissance, Rhetoricorum Libri V, or Rhetoric in Five Books. It became widely known later in the century after the new technology of printing was introduced. From this point, the histories of eastern and western European rhetoric begin to converge.