When Constantine refounded the city of Byzantion as Constantinople, he continued to conduct the empire’s official business in Latin. That Constantine’s Greek was poor even Eusebius cannot hide, and so the language of the court became Latin. Still, most early Byzantine literature, in the first few centuries after the founding of Constantinople, was written in Greek enriched and transformed by contact with Slavic, Semitic and Caucasian languages and cultures and others within the sphere of influence of the East Roman empire. From the sixth century Greek was also the language of literature and government, secular and ecclesiastical. The laws of the empire were translated into Greek and but a few calcified Latin terms and phrases were preserved, by the tenth century, as designations or acclamations. Despite the dominance of Greek, other tongues were heard throughout the empire. If Latin was no longer widely known, there were those in Constantinople sufficiently skilled to conduct official business, and others who learnt to communicate with traders and travellers from the West. Constantine, a famous Byzantine linguist of the ninth century better known as St Cyril, certainly knew Latin, and taught himself to read “Russian” – that is, Scandinavian runes – in Cherson on a legation to the Khazars, where he debated in Hebrew. For a later mission he invented an alphabet to represent the sounds of the Slavic tongue, in order that Scripture might be translated. The complex Glagolithic was later adapted by a second Constantine, of Preslav, using a modified Greek alphabet. The new letters were renamed in honour of Cyril, and forms of Cyrillic are still in daily use by hundreds of millions from Siberia to the Adriatic, testament to the willingness of the Byzantines to recognize the Slavic languages as suitable for Christian worship. The Slavonic liturgy was roundly condemned in Old Rome, but acknowledged by the patriarchate of Constantinople. This should come as no surprise, for Scripture and liturgy had long been written and celebrated in the Caucasian languages, and although not without controversy the Christian churches of Armenia and Georgia, of equal antiquity to that of Constantinople, were generally accorded autocephalous status.
If St Cyril was exceptional in his linguistic abilities, he was not alone in moving between the equally literate worlds of the court and the Church. As Catherine Holmes demonstrates in her careful study of political literacy, the Byzantine world was one of “multimedia” exchanges, where visual, oral and textual messages were communicated together, and together reinforced social networks and hierarchies. Byzantine citizens lived in a rich graphical landscape, surrounded by antique and contemporary inscriptions. Building on work by Margaret Mullett and others, Holmes shows “that Byzantine literacy from the ninth century onwards existed in a dynamic relationship with other modes of communication and social behaviour.” Writing also manifested authority, however poor the spelling, and rich and poor alike were confronted with documents produced by the imperial bureaucracy, including legal codes and compilations, new edicts (novels) and golden-sealed documents of validation (chrysobulls) and the sealings that secured them, tax registers and demands (praktika). The rich wrote their own letters, to cement friendships or foment rebellions, and issued their own documents, including monastic foundation documents (typika), to protect themselves and their families against encroachments, largely by the state. And as the middle empire expanded from the later ninth to the later eleventh centuries – demographically, economically and territorially – one can detect a “demand-led” growth in literacy which provoked reactions from emperors, resistant to the encroachments of bureaucrats. Holmes’ intriguing formulation draws cleverly on Chris Kelly’s exploration of the late Roman state, but concludes in her own realm, the empire of Basil II.
Holmes devotes attention to Kekaumenos, who offered his curmudgeonly provincial advice to eleventh-century generals. Dennis Sullivan, in Chapter 12, provides the richest of contexts for this text in his masterful survey of a greatly neglected genre of literature, military manuals. Addressing those composed by both armchair strategists and real generals, by or for emperors, addressed to anonymous or known commanders, Sullivan reveals the ever-changing calibration of traditional and contemporary considerations. Most striking are the prescriptions of the ninth- and tenth-century taktika, which transport the reader to the zone of frontier engagement between eastern Christendom and Islam, as the Abbasid caliphate fragmented.
In Chapter 13, Michael Featherstone addresses a single practical handbook, devoted to court ceremonial, and divines from it the changing structure and functions of the Great Palace in Constantinople. The De cerimoniis, which was compiled in the reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos and revised two decades later under Nikephoros Phokas, contains descriptions of court ceremonies from the sixth century to the later tenth. In the Porphyrogenitos’ day the key space was the throne room or Chrysotriklinos, an octagonal hall built or reconstructed by Justin II (565–78), which now served as “the interface between the private apartments of the emperor … and the public parts of the palace.” Its vaults and domes were decorated with religious images so that the hall resembled a church, but it was used not for the liturgy but to receive officials, for promotions and for the “everyday procession.” Featherstone takes on the role of papias, the door-keeper, who at the first hour unlocks the gates for us and draws aside the many heavy curtains, so that we may see the emperor seated on his sellion, to the right of the throne, and dressed appropriately for the given day. Far more might be expected on feast-days, when the full assembly of officials would appear suitably robed and the crowned emperor would occupy the central throne to receive the proskynesis, the low bow of adoration, from his subjects, before a grand procession would head for Hagia Sophia. On great feasts one might also expect grand banquets in the Nineteen Couches and to hear a good deal of oratory.
As Emmanuel Bourbouhakis reminds us, in Chapter 14, towards the beginning of his provocative study of rhetoric and performance, “there were always a great many more listeners in Byzantium than readers,” and “the better part of the texts which have come down to us … were composed for some form of recital.” Is “literature” even an appropriate term, we are asked, in those cases when the written word existed to serve the demands of elocution, of performance, when it was “a script rather … than a text”? There are clues, as Reinsch has argued, in punctuation. The same oratorical talents were demanded of those who would deliver homilies as imperial panegyrics, or indeed eulogies for the dead, the most frequent demand on an orator’s time and skills. One might have difficulty trusting Michael Choniates when he complains of the need to place style over substance to impress his audience, like a performing monkey, particularly given his own CV and that of his mentor, Eustathios of Thessalonika. Both men were rewarded with bishoprics in large part for their talents as court orators.
Letter-writing, espistolography, was a highly rhetorical art. Bourbouhakis describes John Italikos’ reaction upon hearing, not reading, the letter of a Caesar (in fact the emperor’s son-in-law), “which dripped like honey onto” his ears. Likewise, the chapter by Stratis Papaioannou on letter-writing begins with a rhetorical flourish: the writer, John Mauropous, will “speak with brevity, but, for you, I speak in a penetrating, sweet voice,” through his pen. He speaks to his friend, or better yet his friends, gathered together in a theatron – a pre-modern “social-networking site” – to listen together and to respond to the language and news. Letters were exchanged by those who had arrived, and by those who aspired to join them, in the empire’s highest echelon. The letter was the principal means to maintain and build friendships at a distance, and most letters would be accompanied by gifts. Friendship as expressed in the letters that we may now still read, Papaioannou reminds us, must be understood as something shared by groups of erudite and political men – the first and only surviving examples of a woman’s letters date to the fourteenth century – and the letter “should be placed somewhere at the intersection of politics and literature.” The rhetorical and public nature of the letter from its inception explains the tendency to preserve and publish the finest examples, which then reached a wider audience, although the scarcity of surviving manuscripts suggests that this was never so wide as many other forms of literature. The models to be emulated were set by the fourth century AD, and intertextuality – “an author’s use of the texts of others in order to convey meaning” – was de rigueur. The phrase with which Chapter 15 begins, Mauropous’ own “penetrating, sweet voice,” is revealed to be that of Menelaus, in the words of Homer, praising concision, but now excusing the writer for the (rhetorical) inadequacy of the accompanying gift.
Letter-writing was an urban pursuit, which rose and fell as a practice – or at least the preservation of letters fell and rose – with the fate of cities. Epistolography flourished in the sixth century, but not again until the tenth when it was sustained through the twelfth century. It suffered after 1204 until the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, “the last minor bloom.” Where Papioannou claims that letter-writing came closest to what we regard as literature, for it stressed a “unique appreciation of imagination,” of fiction rather than the pursuit of truth or the desire to instruct, Livanos (Chapter 16) would have us assign that role to poetry. In a compelling overview of Byzantine poetry, we are urged neither to suspend aesthetic judgement nor to judge unfairly the works of such masters as Christopher of Mytilene and (the same) John Mauropous, who “are subtle in their allusions, often ironic, and complex in their symbolism and imagery.” Bringing to bear his expertise in Latin poetry of the western lands of Christendom, Beowulf and Petrarch are invoked for contrast, although this is no fruitless hunt for “a Byzantine Chaucer or Dante.”
Anthony Kaldellis, in Chapter 17, whose concern is Byzantine historiography in the middle and later periods, offers an equally expansive and erudite interpretation. In his essay, the writing of history is presented as one narrative in many voices, a continuation of Roman history following Greek principles. It was the history of an elite by an elite, certainly, almost exclusively male, and composed by authors trained in rhetoric for whom writing history was an opportunity to demonstrate erudition, but also a pleasure. Their methods, like their interests, were rather different to ours, and Byzantinists in search of truths must look a little deeper to find them, following the paths cleared by classicists.
A different type of truth may be found in the lives of saints, vitae, and two chapters are devoted to hagiography. In the first, Youval Rotman suggests that Greek hagiography in southern Italy and Sicily served a variety of political and cultural purposes in the region. Rather than treat it as peripheral to the vision of sanctity produced in the centre of the empire, one must consider it on its own terms, and in two phases. First, one notes a Christian fascination with Jews and fictional Montanists in the eighth and ninth centuries, whereby local issues might be played out far from the Constantinopolitan concern with Iconoclasm. Later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, hagiographers addressed the quotidian concerns associated with the Arab expansion across the Mediterranean, and saints were advanced as local leaders for the protection of communities from harm and forced conversion. A compelling counterpoint is provided, in the perspective of a Jewish source.
In the second chapter devoted to hagiography, Alice-Mary Talbot offers a fascinating commentary on a particular fourteenth-century saint’s life, of which she will publish an independent English translation. A meticulous survey of the miracles performed by Palamas, once patriarch and later saint, both in life and once dead, demonstrates his efficacy in curing all manner of ailments, but particularly constipation and other embarrassing and distressing conditions of the bowel and gastrointestinal tract. Palamas reappears towards the end of Joseph Munitiz’s edifying survey of Byzantine spiritual literature (Chapter 20), from the sixth-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers to the eighteenth-century Philokalia, where the writings of the Palamists and other hesychastic champions were collected. In between we are introduced to major collections of “beneficial tales” such as those attributed to Anastasios of Sinai and Paul of Monemvasia. Here too we meet Symeon Metaphrastes, who in the later tenth century abridged and transformed the lives of 150 saints for inclusion in a ten-volume Menologion, a collection of vitae arranged by the date on which the saint was celebrated in the church calendar; and Paul of Evergetis, whose Synagoge of c. 1050 collected into four books spiritual texts, largely of the fourth to seventh centuries, and has survived in more than eighty manuscripts. The Synagoge makes plain the “Christ-centred aspect of much Byzantine spiritual writing and its stress on the Passion as a remedy for human sinfulness,” and Munitiz explores both its sources and its challenges, but also its omissions, notably most of the “great” patristic Fathers, including Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom, but also Symeon the New Theologian. The greatest departure from the Synagoge came in the fourteenth century, with the advent of Palamism, which practice centred on the “prayer of the heart,” also called the “Jesus Prayer”: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”