1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 107 on Psellos' life, education, and career, on his relation to the Byzantine Academy founded by Constantine Monomachos, and on his non-philo- sophical writings. The last three chapters are devoted to his work as a philosopher. The author has consulted not only the published work of Psellos, but also unpublished philosophical writings preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale. His general conclusion is that Psellos carried on the traditions of the Neoplatonists, and especially of Plotinus, rejecting however their tendencies towards demonology and magic. The author gives us his idea of Psellos' mental attitude on p. 197 : Cette evolution de l'ecole de Plotin qui a' est operee dans le sens d'un affaiblissement du caractere propre a l'esprit grec, repugne a Psellos. Les idees inspirees par la peur, les sentiments qui depriment et degradent la pensee humaine lui font horreur. II aime que la vie soit libre, douce et pleine de joies. Rationaliste avant tout, il veut des idees qui puissent repondre au raisonnement. Much, however, of the evidence for Psellos' repugnance to magic is derived from the speech against Kerularios, and seeing that only four years later he was writing an encomium on this same patriarch, neither speech can be taken very seriously. It is easy, too, to exaggerate the humanism of Psellos : his remarks on the classics show that his esprit grec was always esprit grec byzantin. His taste for rhetoric led him to prefer Euripides to Aeschylus, who rpa.)(yv€i rrjv aKorjv ovk cut^oi? 6Vo/Aao-iv : nor did he find Sophocles much better. His verdict on Aristophanes — fiavavo-os rk TroXka kcu O-qXvfxavrj^ — shows rather the prig than the hellenist. It is also not easy to share the author's estimate of contemporary letters. In particular his praises of the poetry of John Kyriotis, surnamed the Geometer, are out of all proportion. It is almost absurd to compare his hymns to the Virgin, frigid and pedantic lists of epithets in metre, in the last hymn even arranged as an alphabetical acrostic, to the Salve Regina of the western church. Even higher praise is given to his Confession and to his Verses to a Musician. Of these the first is a rhetorical exercise in bad elegiacs, and in the second the poet expresses the fear that ships will be wrecked by heedlessly dancing to his music. It is this poem which Mr. Zervos mentions (p. 87) as an example of Psellos' ' impressions pro- fondes et charinantes en face de la nature et des oeuvres d'art '. The last chapter, ' Influence de Psellos sur les philosophes byzantins et les savants de la Kenaissance ', touches on very difficult ground. The neoplatonic doctrines of Psellos are traced in the later Byzantine age, and so to Gemistos Plethon, and from him to the platonists of the Italian renaissance, especially Ficino. This raises a question into which national feeling cannot but enter, and a western is likely to feel that the role played by Byzantium is here exaggerated. The stimulus of Greek learning is of course not in question, and Mr. Zervos has shown that it was not only ancient texts that the Italians received, but a learned tradition, upon which such scholars as Psellos had left their mark. So much is agreed : Italy received the contents of the storehouse of the ancient world. But it is hard to go much further than this. The contrast between the creative power of Italy and that of all the Byzantine age is too great for it to be possible to seek the source of energy outside Italy. Mr. Zervos' view is given in a passage on p. 249 :
