Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Macedonian epoch (867-1081)

Education, learning, literature, and art 

Page 4

Another eminent figure of the period of the Macedonian dynasty was Arethas, archbishop of Caesarea, in the early part of the tenth century. His broad education and profound interest in literary works, both ecclesiastic and secular, were reflected in his own writings. His Greek commentary on the Apocalypse, the first as far as is known, his notes on Plato, Lucian, and Eusebius, and finally his valuable collection of letters, preserved in one of the Moscow manuscripts and still unpublished, indicate that Arethas of Caesarea was an outstanding figure in the cultural movement of the tenth century.

Patriarch Nicholas Mysticus, well known for his active part in the ecclesiastical life of this period, left a valuable collection of over 150 letters. It contains messages written to the Arabian Emir of Crete, to Simeon of Bulgaria, to the popes, to Emperor Romanus Lecapenus, to bishops, monks, and various officials of civil administration. From them come materials on the internal and political history of the tenth century.

Leo the Deacon, a contemporary of Basil II and an eyewitness of the events of the Bulgarian war, left a history in ten books which covers the time from 959-975 and contains accounts of the Arabian, Bulgarian, and Russian campaigns of the Empire. This history is all the more valuable because it is the only contemporary Greek source dealing with the brilliant period of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces. The work of Leo the Deacon is also invaluable for the first pages of Russian history because of the extensive data on Sviatoslav and his war with the Greeks.

The monograph of John Cameniates, a priest of Thessalonica, on the Arabian conquest of Thessalonica in 904, of which Cameniates was an eyewitness, has already been mentioned.

Among the chroniclers of this period was the anonymous continuator of Theophanes (Theophanes Continuarus), who described events from 813 to 961 on the basis of the works of Genesius, of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and of the continuator of George Hamartolus. The question of the identity of the author of this compilation is still unsolved. The group of chroniclers of the tenth century are usually represented by four men: Leo the Grammarian, Theodosius of Melitene, the anonymous Continuator of George Hamartolus, and Symeon Magister and Logothete, the so-called Pseudo-Symeon Magister. But these are not original writers; all of them were copyists, abbreviators, or revisers of the Chronicle of Symeon Logothete, whose complete Greek text has not yet been published. There is, however, a published Old Slavonic version of it so that a fairly good idea can be formed of the unpublished Greek text.

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