INFLUENCE OF GEEEK LITEEATUEE 401 Mount Athos and elsewhere, the originals of which were painted many centuries ago, Pericles and Leonidas and other great men of their race are introduced among the occupants of heaven. The wealthier classes, the scholars, the nobles and their wives, down to the last period of the existence of the em- pire aimed at speaking and writing Greek with elegance and purity. They recognised that they were the heirs of literary treasures which were greater than those possessed by any other European people. They realised that in the long series of Greek authors from classical times down through nearly two thousand years to the period in which they were living they had an historical literature longer and more complete than any race known to them. There had been indeed dark periods in the literary history of the empire as in that of other countries. In Constantinople during the four centuries which preceded the Turkish conquest, though to a less extent than in Western Europe, learning and literature had been largely neglected. After the time of the great scholar Photius (patriarch of Constantinople between 877 and 885) few works of importance had been produced. The students of Constantinople had come to take but small interest in any study which did not concern theology, law, or history. Possibly they ceased even to guard the treasures they possessed with the like care which their predecessors had shown. Many valuable manuscripts disappeared. The Latin Disappear- conquerors are admittedly responsible for the destruction of booL° after a large number of books. In the Myriobiblion of Photius, an 1204, abridgment of two hundred and eighty authors which is rich in extracts from historians, he gives us all we possess of certain writers. But two thirds of the works he enumerates have been lost since the time of the Fourth Crusade and will probably never be recovered. 1 No writer quotes any of the lost authors after 1204. 2 1 See Aristarchi's (the Grand Logothete) papers on Photius in the Trans- actions of the Greek Syllogos of Constantinople, and two volumes edited by him of that patriarch's sermons and homilies, published 1901. 2 Heeren, in his Essai sur les Croisades, p. 413, quoted in Hallam's Middle D D
