Byzantine Culture

History · Guide

Byzantine Literature

Byzantine literature ranges from chronicles and saints' lives to epic, satire, romance and the finest medieval history. Its genres, its language problem, and the works worth reading.

Byzantine literature has a reputation problem that is largely the fault of nineteenth-century classicists, who read it looking for Sophocles and found chronicles, saints’ lives and theological polemic instead. Gibbon’s verdict — that in a thousand years the Byzantines had not produced a single work of genius — set a tone that took a century to shake.

The judgement is wrong, but the reasons behind it are worth understanding, because they explain what Byzantine literature actually is and why it looks the way it does.

The Language Problem

Educated Byzantines wrote in a form of Greek modelled on Attic prose of the fifth and fourth centuries BC — a language nobody had spoken for eight hundred years when Byzantium began and fifteen hundred when it ended.

This is diglossia: a learned written register and a spoken vernacular coexisting, with the gap widening over time. A historian like Anna Komnene wrote in an idiom deliberately archaic, using Homeric vocabulary and Thucydidean constructions. The vernacular appears in writing only occasionally before the twelfth century, and its appearance is always a deliberate choice, generally for satire, popular verse or works aimed beyond the educated elite.

The consequence for modern readers is that Byzantine literature can seem mannered and imitative. Byzantine authors would have regarded that as a compliment: mimesis, the emulation of classical models, was the point. Originality in the Romantic sense was not a value.

History and Chronicle

The best Byzantine writing is historical, and the tradition is continuous from the fourth century to the fifteenth.

Procopius (6th c.) wrote the wars of Justinian in conscious imitation of Thucydides, a panegyric on the emperor’s buildings, and the Secret History — a savage private attack on Justinian, Theodora and Belisarius that was not published in his lifetime and that reads like a different man wrote it. Whether it is a genuine private view or a rhetorical exercise has been argued for four centuries.

Michael Psellos (11th c.) wrote the Chronographia, covering fourteen reigns he mostly witnessed, with a psychological acuity and a self-regarding wit that has no medieval parallel. His portraits of Constantine IX, Zoe and Romanos III are the closest thing Byzantium produced to modern biography.

Anna Komnene (12th c.) wrote the Alexiad, a history of her father’s reign — the only large-scale history by a woman in the medieval world, and a superb account of the First Crusade from the receiving end.

Niketas Choniates (13th c.) covered the century to 1204 and wrote the lament for the sacked city that is the most powerful passage of Byzantine prose.

Alongside these ran the chronicle tradition — Malalas, Theophanes, Skylitzes, Zonaras — written in simpler Greek, organised year by year from the creation, and aimed at a wider readership. Chronicles were the most widely copied Byzantine historical texts and the ones that were translated into Slavonic, Georgian and Arabic.

Hagiography

Saints’ lives are the largest single category of Byzantine literature and the most useful to social historians, because they describe things no other genre bothers with: village disputes, prices, illnesses, marriage negotiations, the behaviour of tax collectors.

The genre changed over time. Early lives are circumstantial and often close to their subjects; from the tenth century, Symeon the Metaphrast rewrote about 150 of them in elevated Greek, standardising the style and removing much of the incidental detail that made the originals valuable. The rewritten versions became the standard liturgical texts, and the earlier ones survive patchily.

Poetry

Religious poetry is the strongest branch, and Byzantine hymnography — Romanos, Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, Kassia — is the finest verse written in Greek after the classical period.

Secular verse includes epigrams (a continuous tradition from antiquity, collected in the Greek Anthology, itself a Byzantine compilation), court panegyric, didactic poems, and satire. George of Pisidia’s verse accounts of Heraclius’s campaigns are genuinely good military poetry.

The one Byzantine epic is Digenis Akritas, the tale of a frontier warrior of mixed Byzantine and Arab parentage, surviving in several versions of varying date and language. It is the closest thing Byzantium has to a national poem, and it is written in the fifteen-syllable “political verse” that dominates vernacular Greek poetry to this day.

Satire and the Vernacular

The twelfth century produced a burst of writing that breaks the register conventions.

The Timarion and Mazaris are Lucianic dialogues in which the narrator visits the underworld and interviews the dead — an excellent vehicle for mocking contemporaries. The Ptochoprodromic poems, attributed to a “poor Prodromos,” complain in vernacular verse about poverty, bad marriages, greedy abbots and the uselessness of a literary education, and they are very funny.

Twelfth-century writers also revived the ancient Greek novel: four verse and prose romances survive, full of shipwrecks, pirates and reunions, and they in turn fed into the later vernacular romances of the Palaiologan period.

Theology, Rhetoric and Everything Else

The bulk of what was actually written and copied was theological: commentaries, homilies, polemics, florilegia, canon law, monastic rules. The major figures are treated in the Church Fathers of Byzantium.

Rhetoric was the core of education and shaped everything else; every genre is written by people trained to compose formal speeches.

There were also letters in enormous quantity — the collected correspondence of figures like Psellos, Theodore the Studite and Demetrios Kydones runs to hundreds of items, and Byzantine letters are literary compositions, circulated and admired, rather than private communications.

And there was scholarship: the Bibliotheca of Photios, the encyclopaedic compilations of Constantine VII, the tenth-century Suda lexicon, the commentaries of Eustathios of Thessalonica on Homer, and the editorial work described in the transmission of classical learning.

Where to Start

For a reader approaching Byzantine literature for the first time, four works do more than any survey:

  1. Procopius, The Secret History — short, vicious, unforgettable
  2. Michael Psellos, Chronographia — the best-written Byzantine book
  3. Anna Komnene, The Alexiad — history, biography and the crusade
  4. Niketas Choniates, particularly the account of 1204

All four are available in good English translations, and all four demolish the idea that Byzantine writing is uniformly stiff, pious and derivative.

The Twelfth-Century Moment

One period deserves separate treatment because it breaks most of the generalisations made about Byzantine writing.

The decades around 1100–1180, under the Komnenian emperors, produced an unusual concentration of literary experiment:

The revival of the novel. Four romances survive — by Theodore Prodromos, Niketas Eugenianos, Eustathios Makrembolites and Constantine Manasses — consciously imitating the ancient Greek novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, with shipwrecks, pirates, separated lovers and reunions.

Satire in the vernacular. The Ptochoprodromic poems, attributed to a “poor Prodromos,” complain in colloquial Greek about a shrewish wife, poverty, greedy abbots and the worthlessness of a literary education. They are genuinely funny and are the earliest substantial literature in something close to spoken Greek.

Lucianic dialogue. The Timarion sends its narrator to the underworld to interview the dead, including recently deceased contemporaries, and mocks them.

Begging poetry. A whole genre of verse petitions to patrons, frequently self-deprecating and frequently very skilful.

Scholarship. Eustathios of Thessalonica’s commentaries on Homer, which run to thousands of pages and preserve quantities of lost material.

History. Anna Komnene and, at the century’s end, Niketas Choniates.

What makes the period distinctive is the loosening of register. Writers moved between high Attic and the vernacular deliberately, for effect, and wrote about themselves with an irony that is rare in the tradition.

The Vernacular Question

The relationship between written and spoken Greek is the structural fact about Byzantine literature, and it has a long afterlife.

Educated writing aimed at Attic Greek of the fifth and fourth centuries BC — a language separated from Byzantine speech by well over a millennium, with a different pronunciation, a different vocabulary and grammatical forms (the dative, the optative, the infinitive) that had disappeared from speech.

Learning to write it took years of schooling, which is described in education in Byzantium, and the ability to do it was the mark of the educated class.

Vernacular writing appears from the twelfth century and expands in the Palaiologan period: the romances, the Chronicle of the Morea, the Digenis Akritas versions, animal fables, and satirical verse. It was a choice, made for particular genres and audiences, not an inability to write otherwise.

The division outlived the empire by six centuries. Modern Greece inherited it as the katharevousa question — a purified official language against demotic speech — which was a live political dispute into the twentieth century, produced riots in 1901 over a demotic translation of the gospels, and was settled in favour of demotic only in 1976.

The Translations Available Now

The practical barrier to reading Byzantine literature has largely fallen in the last thirty years, and it is worth saying what exists.

The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library publishes Byzantine texts with facing Greek and English, and has issued Psellos’s Chronographia, Digenis Akritas, the Alexiad material, saints’ lives, letters and satirical works.

The Translated Texts for Historians series covers the historians and chroniclers with full apparatus.

Penguin and Oxford have the Alexiad, Procopius’s Secret History, Psellos and Choniates in accessible editions.

For hagiography, several collections of saints’ lives in translation have appeared, including a volume of lives of Byzantine holy women that transformed access to that material.

A reader who wanted to work through the major Byzantine writers in English could now do so, which was not true in 1990. That change, more than any revision of scholarly opinion, is what has opened the field to general readers.

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