Learning and literature flourished during the Byzantine period, though not so as greatly to enrich the libraries of bibliophiles in later ages. Like the Benedictine monasteries in the West, the Basilian monasteries of the Greek Church guarded and transmitted the writings of the great Church teachers, the monks diligently copying manuscripts and laboriously constructing catenæ of the opinions of the Fathers. But while their reading was wide, it was not deep; they were scholarly, but uncritical. They lacked imagination, invention, constructiveness. It is a striking fact that the stream of ecclesiastical history which flowed so copiously through the previous centuries now began to run dry, or rather perhaps we should say, was now diverted into the main river of political and secular history. This is the age of the voluminous Byzantine historians. Anybody who attempts to wade through their pages must soon be wearied with their unhappy attempts at cumulative rhetoric. The style reminds us of popular Victorian prose at its worst. There is a constantly recurring effort at producing effects by piling up clauses one upon another till a sentence is sometimes expanded to the extent of a page of print. Theophanes is about the last of the writers who retain some traces of the literary spirit of Thucydides. He gives weight to his narrative by his own contributions of poetical wisdom. But, for the most part, these narratives are choked with colourless details—details which neither characterise nor vitalise the narrative. They are barren of serious reflection, in place of which we have pages of flat narrative varied by bursts of adulation or vituperation.
After allowing for undeniable defects, we must perceive that these were not dark ages, nor were they inert or infructuous according to their kind. After John of Damascus, the last of the Fathers, the next great writer and the last of his own calibre is Photius,[1] who died in the year 891. His chief work is the Bibliotheca,[2] an encyclopædia of literature, containing accounts of nearly three
- ↑ See pages 235, ff.
- ↑ Μυριοβίβλιον.
