The Transmission of Classical Learning

Nearly every work of ancient Greek literature that survives does so because a Byzantine scribe copied it. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galen — for each of them, the oldest complete manuscripts are Byzantine, most of them from the ninth century or later, and the text we read descends from those copies.

This is the Byzantine contribution to European civilisation that even the empire’s least sympathetic critics have conceded, and it is usually described in passive terms, as though the texts survived by inertia. They did not. They survived because particular people, at particular moments, decided that pagan Greek literature was worth the enormous expense of copying, and taught it, corrected it and argued about it for a thousand years.

The Bottleneck

Ancient books were papyrus rolls, which last a century or two in normal conditions. Survival required continuous recopying, and every transition — roll to codex, papyrus to parchment, majuscule to minuscule script — was a filter. A text not copied at the moment of transition was lost.

The critical bottleneck came in the seventh and eighth centuries, when the empire was fighting for survival and book production nearly stopped. What emerged on the other side was a much reduced corpus, and the losses are enormous: most of Greek tragedy, most of lyric poetry, most Hellenistic literature and most ancient historical writing are gone.

The Minuscule Revolution

The recovery began around 800 with a change of handwriting.

Ancient Greek books were written in majuscule — separated capital letters, no word division, no accents, no punctuation — which is slow to write and consumes parchment. In the late eighth or early ninth century, probably in a monastic scriptorium in Constantinople, a cursive minuscule script was developed for book production: connected lower-case letters, word separation, accents and breathings.

Minuscule is faster to write and takes far less space, and its adoption made a systematic recopying programme economically possible. Over the ninth and tenth centuries, the classical corpus was transcribed from majuscule into minuscule — and what was not transcribed then was, with few exceptions, lost.

Almost the entire surviving Greek classical canon passes through this single editorial moment. It is the narrowest point in the history of European letters.

The Scholars

Leo the Mathematician (9th c.) taught at the Magnaura school in Constantinople and collected scientific manuscripts; copies associated with his circle underlie our texts of Euclid, Ptolemy and Archimedes.

Photios (c. 810–893) read and reviewed 280 books in the Bibliotheca, about half of which are now lost. His summaries are our only knowledge of a substantial part of ancient Greek prose.

Arethas of Caesarea (c. 860–939) commissioned and annotated manuscripts of Plato, Euclid, Lucian and Aristides. Several of his actual books survive, including the oldest manuscript of a large part of Plato — the Clarke Plato in the Bodleian Library, copied in 895, with Arethas’s own marginal notes.

Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (913–959) sponsored a programme of encyclopaedic compilation, excerpting ancient historians by subject. The originals are mostly lost; the excerpts survive.

Michael Psellos (11th c.) revived the study of Plato at a time when Aristotle dominated the curriculum.

Eustathios of Thessalonica (12th c.) wrote commentaries on Homer that fill several volumes and preserve quotations from lost works.

Maximos Planoudes and Demetrios Triklinios (13th–14th c.) were textual critics in a recognisably modern sense, comparing manuscripts, restoring metre and emending corrupt passages. Planoudes also translated Latin authors — Ovid, Cicero, Boethius, Augustine — into Greek, reversing the usual direction of traffic.

Why They Bothered

The question is fair. Why did a Christian empire spend a thousand years copying pagan literature?

The answer is education. The Byzantine curriculum was built on classical rhetoric and grammar, and it was the training for the civil service. To write the Greek expected of an official, one read Demosthenes; to write history, one read Thucydides; to argue, one learned Aristotle’s logic. The classical texts were professional necessities, not antiquarian luxuries.

There was also a defence of the practice, and its author was Basil the Great, whose short address To Young Men, On How They Might Derive Benefit from Greek Literature argues that Christian students should take what is useful from pagan authors as bees take nectar from flowers, leaving the rest. It was the standard citation for a millennium, and it did real work.

Tension persisted. Byzantine intellectuals were periodically accused of Hellenising — the trial of John Italos in 1082 for teaching Platonic doctrines is the notable case — and the boundary between studying Plato and believing him was policed. But the texts were never suppressed, and the manuscripts went on being copied.

The Route West

Classical Greek learning reached western Europe twice.

Through Arabic. The ninth-century Baghdad translation movement rendered the Greek scientific and philosophical corpus into Arabic; twelfth-century translators in Toledo and Sicily rendered it into Latin. This is how the Latin west got Aristotle, and it is described in Byzantium and the Islamic world.

Directly from Greek. From the late fourteenth century, Byzantine scholars went to Italy to teach. Manuel Chrysoloras came to Florence in 1397 to teach Greek and is the founder of Greek studies in the west. Bessarion assembled the finest Greek library in Europe and left it to Venice. Refugees after 1453 brought manuscripts and taught in the Italian universities, and the first printed Greek texts, from Aldus Manutius’s press in Venice from 1495, were set from Byzantine manuscripts by Greek editors.

The consequences for the Renaissance are treated in Byzantine influence on the Renaissance.

What Was Lost

It is worth being clear about the scale of loss, because the survival can look more impressive than it should.

Of the roughly ninety plays Sophocles wrote, seven survive. Of Aeschylus’s eighty or so, seven. Of Euripides, nineteen out of about ninety — and ten of those survive only because a single manuscript of an alphabetical collection happened to make it through. Sappho survives in fragments and papyrus scraps. Most of Polybius, most of Livy’s Greek contemporaries, the bulk of Hellenistic science and nearly all of ancient music are gone.

The Byzantine corpus is a selection, shaped by what was taught in schools and what fitted a scholar’s interests in the ninth century. It is what we have, and we have it because of them.

The Manuscripts That Carry the Canon

Naming a few actual books makes the abstraction concrete, and shows how narrow the survival often was.

The Clarke Plato (Bodleian, MS E.D. Clarke 39). Copied at Constantinople in 895 for Arethas of Caesarea, who paid for it and annotated it. It contains the first six tetralogies of Plato’s dialogues and is the oldest substantial manuscript of Plato in existence. Everything we read of those dialogues descends from this book or its relatives.

The Venetus A (Marciana, Gr. Z. 454). A tenth-century Iliad with the ancient scholia — the accumulated commentary of Alexandrian scholarship — in the margins. It is the single most important manuscript for the text of Homer and for the history of ancient literary criticism. It reached Venice with Bessarion.

The Laurentian Sophocles and Aeschylus (Laur. 32.9), tenth or eleventh century, containing the seven surviving plays of each, plus Apollonius Rhodius. Of roughly 180 plays those two poets wrote, this book and its relatives preserve fourteen.

The Vienna Dioscorides, made about 512 for the princess Juliana Anicia — the oldest illustrated herbal, and the ancestor of European botanical illustration.

The Archimedes Palimpsest, a tenth-century copy of Archimedes scraped and overwritten with a prayer book in the thirteenth. Imaging since 1998 has recovered the Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion, neither of which survives anywhere else.

Each of these is a single physical object on which a substantial portion of European intellectual history depends.

The Alphabetic Accident

The survival of Euripides illustrates how arbitrary the process was, and the case is worth knowing.

Ten of Euripides’ plays survive in multiple manuscripts and with ancient commentary: these are the “select” plays, chosen at some point in late antiquity for school use, copied repeatedly, and safe.

Nine more — Helen, Electra, Heracles, Cyclops, Ion, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Suppliants, Trojan Women — survive in essentially one manuscript and its copy. They occupy a run of the alphabet from epsilon to kappa, and they are generally thought to be the surviving volume of a complete alphabetical edition of Euripides that existed in Byzantium.

One codex from that set survived. Had it not, nine plays including the Bacchae material and some of Euripides’ most admired work would be titles in a list.

That is the shape of the whole transmission. What survives is not what was best, or what was most read in antiquity, but what happened to be in the right book at the right time when someone decided to copy it into minuscule.

What the Byzantines Thought They Were Doing

A closing observation, because the modern gratitude can obscure the motive.

Byzantine scholars were not preserving classical literature for posterity, and they would have been surprised by the suggestion. They were educating civil servants, training rhetoricians, equipping themselves for theological argument, and enjoying books.

Arethas bought a Plato because he wanted to read Plato and annotate it. Photios summarised novels because he had read them. Eustathios wrote on Homer because he taught Homer. Planoudes translated Ovid because he found Ovid interesting.

The preservation is a by-product of a living educational culture that happened to use ancient texts as its curriculum for eleven hundred years. When that culture ended, the copying stopped — and by then, as Bessarion and the Greek scholars of Italy describes, the printing press had made it unnecessary.

• Byzantine Manuscripts — how the books were made
• Bessarion and the Greek Scholars of Italy — the transmission west
• Patriarch Photios — the Bibliotheca
• Byzantine Influence on the Renaissance — what Italy did with it
• Byzantine Literature — the Byzantines’ own writing
• Education in Byzantium — why the classics were taught
• Byzantium and the Islamic World — the other route west