Byzantine Literature - Characteristics

Characteristics

Many of the classical Greek genres, such as drama and choral lyric poetry, had been obsolete by late antiquity, and all medieval literature in the Greek language was written in an archaizing style, which imitated the writers of ancient Greece. This practice was perpetuated by a long-established system of Greek education where rhetoric was a leading subject. A typical product of this Byzantine education was the Greek Church Fathers, who shared the literary values of their pagan contemporaries. Consequently the vast Christian literature of the 3rd to 6th centuries established a synthesis of Hellenic and Christian thought. As a result, Byzantine literature was largely written in a style of Atticistic Greek, far removed from the popular Medieval Greek that was spoken by all classes of Byzantine society in their everyday lives. In addition, this literary style was also removed from the Koine Greek language of the New Testament, reaching back to Homer and the writers of ancient Athens.

In this manner, the culture of the Byzantine Empire was marked for over 1000 years by a diglossy between two different forms of the same language, which were used for different purposes. However, the relations between the "high" and "low" forms of Greek changed over the centuries. 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. The political recovery of the 9th century instigated a literary revival, in which a conscious attempt was made to recreate the Hellenic-Christian literary culture of late antiquity. Simple or popular Greek was avoided in literary use and many of the early saints' lives were rewritten in an archaizing style. By the 12th century the cultural confidence of the Byzantine Greeks led them to develop new literary genres, such as romantic fiction, in which adventure and love are the main elements. Satire made occasional use of elements from spoken Greek. The period from the Fourth Crusade to the Fall of Constantinople saw a vigorous revival of imitative classicizing literature, as the Greeks sought to assert their cultural superiority over the militarily more powerful West. At the same time there was the beginning of a flourishing literature in an approximation to the vernacular Modern Greek. However the vernacular literature was limited to poetic romances and popular devotional writing. All serious literature continued to make use of the archaizing language of learned Greek tradition.

Byzantine literature has two sources: Classical Greek and Orthodox Christian tradition. Each of those sources provided a series of models and references for the Byzantine writer and his readers. In occasion, both sources were referred to side by side, for example when emperor Alexius Comnenus justified his actions of seizing church property to pay his soldiers by referring to the earlier examples of Pericles and the biblical king David.