Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Learning, literature, science, and art

Page 13

Among the philologists was the monk Maximus Planudes (his secular name was Manuel), a contemporary of the two first Palaeologi, who devoted his leisure to science and teaching. He visited Venice as a Byzantine envoy, and was closely related to the cultural movement then rising in the West, especially owing to his knowledge of the Latin language and literature. An assiduous teacher, Planudes was the author of some grammatical essays, and the collection of more than 100 of his letters portrays his intellectual personality as well as his scholarly interests and occupations. Besides historical and geographical extracts compiled from the works of ancient writers, Planudes left translations of Latin authors such as Cato the Elder, Ovid, Cicero, and Caesar. He is perhaps best known in western Europe for his edition of selections from Greek authors. The vast number of existing manuscripts of his translations shows that, in the earlier days of humanism, they often served as texts for the teaching of Greek in the West. At the same time, his numerous translations from Latin into Greek greatly contributed to the cultural rapprochement between East and West in the Renaissance epoch.

Planudes' disciple and friend, Manuel Moschopulus (Moschopulos), a contemporary of Andronicus II, is, like his teacher, of great significance in determining the characteristics of Byzantine learning at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries as well as for the transmission of classical studies in the West. His Grammatical Questions and Greek Dictionary were, along with Planudes' translations, favorite textbooks for the study of Greek in the West; in addition, his commentaries on a number of classical writers and his collected letters afford interesting material, which has not yet been adequately studied or estimated.

A contemporary of Andronicus II, Theodore Metochites, is sometimes remembered in the history of Byzantine literature in connection with philology. But his wide and many-sided activities go far beyond the modest confines of philology. In the section on the Empire of Nicaea he has been mentioned as the author of a panegyric on Nicaea. Well-educated, an authority on the classical authors, an admirer of Plutarch and Aristotle and especially of Plato, whom he called Olympus of wisdom, a living library, and Helicon of the Muses, a talented statesman, and first minister under Andronicus II, Theodore Metochites is an exceedingly interesting type of Byzantine humanist of the first half of the fourteenth century. This man of learning and distinguished statesman had exceptional influence in state affairs, and he enjoyed the complete confidence of the Emperor. His contemporary Nicephorus Gregoras wrote: From morning to evening he was wholly and most eagerly devoted to public affairs, as if scholarship were absolutely irrelevant to him; but late in the evening, after having left the palace, he became absorbed in science to as high a degree as if he were a scholar with absolutely no connection with any other affairs.

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