Romans in their conquest of Greece (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit) repeated itself in the conquest of the East by Greece, though to a minor extent and in a different way. The whole literature of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor cannot, despite its international and cosmopolitan character, disavow the influence of the Oriental soil on which it was nourished. Yet the growth of too strong a local colouring in its literature was repressed, partly by the checks imposed by ancient Greek tradition, partly by the spirit of Christianity which reconciled all national distinctions. Even more clearly and unmistakably is Oriental influence shown in the province of Byzantine art, as Joseph Strzygowski has conclusively proved.
The greater portion of Greek literature from the close of ancient times down to the threshold of modern history was written in a language identical in its principal features with the common literary language, the so-called Koinē, which had its origin in the Alexandrian age. This is the Language.literary form of Greek as a universal language, though a form that scintillates with many facets, from an almost Attic diction down to one that approaches the language of everyday life such as we have, for instance, in the New Testament. From what has been already said, it follows that this stable literary language cannot always have remained a language of ordinary life. For, like every living tongue, the vernacular Greek continually changed in pronunciation and form, as well as in vocabulary and grammar, and thus the living language surely and gradually separated itself from the rigid written language. This gulf was, moreover, considerably widened owing to the fact that there took place in the written language a retrograde movement, the so-called “Atticism.” Introduced by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century before Christ, this linguistic-literary fashion attained its greatest height in the 2nd century A.D., but still continued to flourish in succeeding centuries, and, indirectly, throughout the whole Byzantine period. It is true that it often seemed as though the living language would be gradually introduced into literature; for several writers, such as the chronicler Malalas in the 6th century, Leontius of Neapolis (the author of Lives of Saints) in the 7th century, the chronicler Theophanes at the beginning of the 9th century, and the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century, made in their writings numerous concessions to the living language. This progressive tendency might well have led, in the 11th and 12th centuries, to the founding in the Greek vernacular of a new literary language similar to the promising national languages and literature which, at that period, in the Romance countries, developed out of the despised popular idiom. In the case of the Byzantines, unfortunately, such a radical change never took place. All attempts in the direction of a popular reform of the literary language, which were occasionally made in the period from the 6th to the 10th centuries, were in turn extinguished by the resuscitation of classical studies, a movement which, begun in the 9th century by Photius and continued in the 11th by Psellus, attained its full development under the Comneni and the Palaeologi. This classical renaissance turned back the literary language into the old ossified forms, as had previously happened in the case of the Atticism of the early centuries of the empire. In the West, humanism (so closely connected with the Byzantine renaissance under the Comneni and the Palaeologi) also artificially reintroduced the “Ciceronian” Latin, but was unable seriously to endanger the development of the national languages, which had already attained to full vitality. In Byzantium, the humanistic movement came prematurely, and crushed the new language before it had fairly established itself. Thus the language of the Byzantine writers of the 11th–15th centuries is almost Old Greek in colour; artificially learnt by grammar, lexicon and assiduous reading, it followed Attic models more and more slavishly; to such an extent that, in determining the date of works, the paradoxical principle holds good that the more ancient the language, the more recent the author.
Owing to this artificial return to ancient Greek, the contrast that had long existed with the vernacular was now for the first time fully revealed. The gulf between the two forms of language could no longer be bridged; and this fact found its expression in literature also. While the vulgarizing authors of the 6th–10th centuries, like the Latin-writing Franks (such as Gregory of Tours), still attempted a compromise between the language of the schools and that of conversation, we meet after the 12th century with authors who freely and naturally employed the vernacular in their literary works. They accordingly form the Greek counterpart of the oldest writers in Italian, French and other Romance languages. That they could not succeed like their Roman colleagues, and always remained the pariahs of Greek literature, is due to the all-powerful philological-antiquarian tendency which existed under the Comneni and the Palaeologi. Yet once more did the vernacular attempt to assert its literary rights, i.e. in Crete and some other islands in the 16th and 17th centuries. But this attempt also was foiled by the classical reaction of the 19th century. Hence it comes about that Greek literature even in the 20th century employs grammatical forms which were obsolete long before the 10th century. Thus the Greeks, as regards their literary language, came into a cul de sac similar to that in which certain rigidly conservative Oriental nations find themselves, e.g. the Arabs and Chinese, who, not possessing a literary language suited to modern requirements, have to content themselves with the dead Old-Arabic or the ossified Mandarin language. The divorce of the written and spoken languages is the most prominent and also the most fatal heritage that the modern Greeks have received from their Byzantine forefathers.
The whole Byzantine intellectual life, like that of the Western medieval period, is dominated by theological interests. Theology accordingly, in literature too, occupies the chief place, in regard to both quantity and quality. Next to it comes the writing of history, which the Byzantines General character of Byzantine literature.cultivated with great conscientiousness until after the fall of the empire. All other kinds of prose writing, e.g. in geography, philosophy, rhetoric and the technical sciences, were comparatively neglected, and such works are of value for the most part only in so far as they preserve and interpret old material. In poetry, again, theology takes the lead. The poetry of the Church produced works of high aesthetic merit and enduring value. In secular poetry, the writing of epigrams especially was cultivated with assiduity and often with ability. In popular literature poetry predominates, and many productions worthy of notice, new both in matter and in form, are here met with.
The great classical period of Greek theological literature is that of the 4th century. Various factors contributed to this result—some of them positive, particularly the establishment of Christianity as the official religion and the protection accorded to it by the state, others negative, Theology.i.e. the heretical movements, especially Arianism, which at this period arose in the east of the empire and threatened the unity of the doctrine and organization of the church. It was chiefly against these that the subtle Athanasius of Alexandria directed his attacks. The learned Eusebius founded a new department of literature, church history. In Egypt, Antonius (St Anthony) founded the Greek monastic system; Synesius of Cyrene, like his greater contemporary Augustine in the West, represents both in his life and in his writings the difficult transition from Plato to Christ. At the centre, in the forefront of the great intellectual movement of this century, stand the three great Cappadocians, Basil the Great, the subtle dogmatist, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, the philosophically trained defender of the Christian faith, and Gregory of Nazianzus, the distinguished orator and poet. Closely allied to them was St Chrysostom, the courageous champion of ecclesiastical liberty and of moral purity. To modern readers the greater part of this literature appears strange and foreign; but, in order to be appreciated rightly, it must be regarded as the outcome of the period in which it was produced, a period stirred to its depths by religious emotions. For the times in which they lived and for their readers, the Greek fathers reached the highest attainable; though, of course, they produced nothing of such general human
