Neo-Latin Languages

This section surveys translations from contemporary European vernaculars, with a focus on literature in Frankish Greece, and texts such as the War of Troy, the Chronicle of Morea, and adaptations of western romances. The survey is introduced by a general discussion of translation in the Middle Ages—which allowed for many forms of adaptation, including expansion, abridgment, and the complete rewriting of a given model—and the socio-political contexts and contact zones in which such translation activity took place in Byzantium, the dominant culture being always the giver and the dominated the receiver.

Rhetorical Practice

This chapter surveys key aspects of rhetorical practice in Byzantium, with a focus on the middle and late periods. The first section maps out the generic landscape of Byzantine rhetoric, which, in addition to oratory in the narrow sense, can be argued to comprise virtually all of (highbrow) literature, including poetry. While it is true that Byzantine rhetoric is particularly rich in texts of the demonstrative type such as encomia, the essay asserts against claims to the contrary, that forms of deliberative and judicial rhetoric continued to exist in Byzantium and appear in fact ubiquitously once one broadens the scope beyond secular oratory. After a brief sketch of the place of rhetoric in higher education, the chapter proceeds to discuss the various steps involved in composing and performing a rhetorical text. In this, it follows ancient and medieval precepts for the so-called tasks of the rhetorician—invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery—and shows their relevance for the practice of writing and reciting texts belonging to various rhetorical genres. Throughout, this chapter argues that scholarship on Byzantine rhetoric has focused too narrowly on panegyric and on matters of style, and that attention should turn to long-neglected aspects of argumentative technique that were at the heart of Byzantine rhetorical theory and education and that can be found in a wide array of textual genres, particularly in religious literature.

Rhetorical Figures

The Byzantine tradition of tropes and figures, as it survives in various “handbooks,” is chiefly pedagogical in nature, aiming at practical proficiency. It derives from treatises composed between the first and fifth–sixth centuries ce, which were reworked and supplemented numerous times, but generally retained the late antique division into tropes (τρόποι), figures of diction (σχήματα λέξεως), and figures of thought (σχήματα διανοίας). This chapter describes the types of surviving treatises, their principles of classification, the lists of tropes and figures they contain, and their place in the rhetorical “curriculum.” It sketches out some prominent literary and rhetorical functions of figurative language in Byzantine literature, such as creating emphasis, blending concepts, setting a pace, expanding or contracting certain meanings, epitomizing arguments, and engaging the audience. The chapter is accompanied by a glossary of commonly used tropes and figures of diction and thought.

Narrative

This chapter aims to offer the reader a basis for how to approach narrative both as an object of historical investigation and as a modern methodological tool. It addresses the meaning and function of narrative form and technique in Byzantine literature, examining them through specific examples of the Byzantines’ own constant and explicit interest in narrative. The chapter contains an opening section on narrative theory and “proto-narratology,” followed by three analytical sections on characterization and focalization; time and space; narrator and narrative, author and audience. Byzantine texts under discussion include progymnasmata, the Patria, and Timarion. The chapter is concluded with some ideas for future research in the field.

Orality and Textuality (With an Appendix on the Byzantine Conceptions)

The chapter proposes that one cannot approach Byzantine literature—preserved in either medieval and early modern manuscript books or in the form of inscriptions—without an appreciation of its textual modes of production and circulation, its possible origins in oral creation, and its likely orientation toward oral performance and auditory reception. It thus introduces and surveys three types of texts: (i) texts that reflect conditions of primary orality (songs, sayings, and short or long “stories”); (ii) texts that entail secondary orality (primarily rhetorical and liturgical texts); and (iii) a middle type of texts (texts of fictive orality and rhetoricized liturgical literature). The chapter is rounded off by an examination of Byzantine conceptions of oral vs. written discourse.

Syriac

During late antiquity, Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, belonging to the northwest group of Semitic languages, and originally the language of the Kingdom of Edessa and the Oshroene in Upper Mesopotamia, became the literary language of Aramaic-speaking Christians and developed under the mutual influences of both Greek and Iranian. This section surveys Syriac translations of Byzantine Greek texts, from the Bible and homiletics, to theological and ascetic literature, as well as historiographical, hagiographical, and other narrative texts. It thus highlights Greek authors with important corpora in Syriac (e.g. Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, and the Areopagitic corpus), as well as authors and texts no longer extant in Greek (often because of their deviation from Constantinopolitan orthodoxy).

Poetry?

This chapter gives an overview of how Byzantines conceptualized “poetry.” It argues that from the Byzantine point of view, poetry only differs from prose in a very formal way, namely that it is written in verse. Both prose and poetry belonged to the category of logoi, the only label that was very frequently used, in contrast to the term “poetry,” which was reserved for the ancient poetry studied at schools. Many authors considered (and exploited) the difference between their own prose texts and poems as a primarily formal one. Nevertheless, poetry did have some functions that set it apart from prose, even if these features are for us less expected. The quality of “bound speech” gained a spiritual dimension, since verse was seen as a restrained form of discourse, also from a moral point of view. Finally, the chapter gives a brief overview of the social contexts for which (learned) poetry was the medium of choice: as an inscription, as paratext in a wide sense, as a piece of personal introspection, as invective, as summaries (often of a didactic nature), and as highly public ceremonial pieces.

Sacred Song

The chapter surveys the primary forms that Christian sacred song took in Byzantium, in relation to the relevant manuscript evidence, liturgical practice, and music. It first draws attention to major challenges in relevant research (e.g., the immensity of the evidence, the living tradition of Byzantine liturgy, the disparate nature of the available evidence). Then, the main hymnic forms are presented: the monostrophic troparion, the polystrophic kontakion (for whose later history the chapter proposes an innovative reinterpretation of its supposed “decline” during the middle Byzantine period), the polystrophic kanôn, and the polystrophic stichêra. The chapter concludes with a presentation of various fields of desiderata in the study of Byzantine hymnography.

Language

Byzantine Greek was a highly developed and artful language with close ties both to the living language of the time and to a centuries-old literary heritage. Like all humans, the Byzantines grew up with their mother tongue; for those of Greek-speaking background and in Greek-speaking contexts, this was the spoken medieval Greek. Those who had the privilege to obtain education adopted—to various degrees—linguistic elements of older stages of the Greek language in order to compose their texts. Many of these older linguistic elements were used in a seemingly “arbitrary” way when compared to the linguistic rules of ancient Greek. Viewed in their contemporary context, however, these elements were creatively incorporated into a linguistic system which was essentially based on the contemporary language and was consistent in itself. The creative blend of traditional and modern features—though not readily accessible to the modern reader—and the tension between them left ample space for personal choices. This is precisely what makes the language of Byzantine literature a particularly exciting topic.

A Rhetorical Genre(?)

The chapter is a case study of Byzantine learned rhetoric in action, and some of the complications that one faces when one applies the concept of “genre” to Byzantine rhetoric. The test case is the invective, in Greek ψόγος, from the perspective of Byzantine rhetorical education and practice. After a series of general observations on rhetorical definitions of the “invective,” as well as on the fact that the invective resembles more a rhetorical “mode,” which is present in a variety of “genres,” than a “genre” per se, the chapter reviews a few representative related texts from the middle and late Byzantine period.