Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Learning, literature, science, and art

Page 12

In rhetoric, which is often connected with philosophy, several writers may be specially remembered. Gregorius (George) of Cyprus, a patriarch under Andronicus the Elder, composed an interesting and beautifully written autobiography. Nicephorus Chumnos, a contemporary and disciple of Gregorius of Cyprus, wrote a number of theological, philosophical, and rhetorical essays and left a collection of 172 letters. In his philosophical essays he is one of the most ardent and skillful defenders of Aristotle. Chumnos was in correspondence with almost all the personalities of his epoch who were known in politics, religion, or literature. Though inferior in intelligence, originality, and knowledge to his master, Gregorius of Cyprus, Chumnos is not without distinct significance for the Byzantine and Italian Renaissance of his epoch. By his love of antiquity, passionate, though a little servile, and by the variety of his knowledge Chumnos heralds Italian humanism and the western Renaissance.

Finally, the works of Mazaris the imitation of Lucian, The Sojourn of Mazaris in Hades, and A Dream After the Return to Life, as well as his letters on Peloponnesian affairs of the early fifteenth century afford, in spite of the small literary talent of their author, important material on the problem of the imitation of Lucian in Byzantine literature, and give interesting details on the Byzantine culture of the time.

In philology the Palaeologian epoch produced not a few interesting writers who, in their tendencies and ideas, are forerunners of a new intellectual era and are, as Krumbacher said, less closely connected with their Byzantine predecessors, for example Photius or Eustathius of Thessalonica, than they are with the first representatives of the classic renaissance in the west. But here is one side of the work of the philologists of the Palaeologian epoch for which they are reproached, and not without reason, by classical scholars. This is their treatment of classical texts. While the commentators and copyists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries preserved the manuscript tradition of the Alexandrian and Roman time almost intact, the philologists of the Palaeologian epoch began to remodel the text of ancient authors according to their preconceived ideas of the purity of Hellenic language or sometimes in the style of new meters. This tendency has caused classical scholars to refer, when it was possible, to manuscripts of the pre-Palaeologian epoch. However vexatious this practice may have been, it must be judged by the conditions of the time. The philologists were beginning to be dissatisfied with the purely mechanical methods of their predecessors and were seeking, though rudely and awkwardly, to express their own creative tendencies.

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