And why should they do so at all? For one thing, late Roman elites were not about to give up classical literature just because they were now Christian. Among other functions, classical literature reinforced exclusive class identities, and the gods could be seen as harmless fictions and delusions rather than as Satanic demons.
What certain Christian readers effected in Late Antiquity was a paradigm shift in the reading of ancient texts as literature and the viewing of religious artifacts as art. This created a new context for its continuing preservation. Rather than being destroyed as the abode of demons, religious statuary could now be displayed in the streets and galleries of Constantinople Bassett In their secular guise, even statues of the gods were treasured for artistic value rather than their religious significance, as an imperial law explained outright Theodosian Code Something analogous happened to texts.
The shift from polemical theological hermeneutics toward literary and aesthetic ones was grounded in ancient philosophical precedents, which now became dominant, although this development overall remains relatively underexplored. Canonical texts continued to be studied in the classroom as rhetorical exemplars.
They could even be invoked for the moral lessons that they imparted, though this worked better for the heroes rather than the gods, whose immorality was always condemned in Byzantium and remained the target of scorn. It is no accident that this happened when the late Roman world ceased to identify with the religious culture that produced those texts, and ceased to identity as ethnically Greek.
It remained Greek, however, in language, and Christian elites valued classical literature precisely for its rhetorical and aesthetic qualities. In this development, Christian rhetors, or teachers of rhetoric, played a decisive role. It was also no accident that Christians who formulated a response to his challenge were students and teachers in the schools of rhetoric. Two of them merit separate mention. Gregory the Theologian opposed Christian hardliners who wanted the Church to repudiate all secular literature—he himself claimed to be in love with it De vita sua —but at the same time, in his orations against Julian especially Or.
To drive the point home, in his polemic against Julian he demonstrated his mastery of the rhetorical tradition and deep knowledge of Hellenic myth, all the while disparaging its specifically religious content in multiple scornful references. This was one function of Christian classical scholarship. The other figure was Basil the Great, a leader in the emerging monastic movement and a model bishop for Byzantine posterity.
Basil was aware of the temptations and repugnant features of pagan literature, but he occluded them in his analysis, which sought to soften them by inculcating a deceptively simplistic hermeneutic: Christian readers were to pick out the best and leave the rest Fortin Even pagan myths such as Odysseus and the Sirens and the Choice of Herakles from Xenophon could be reframed as valuable moral lessons for Christians.
Prior Christian readings of the myths were apologetic and stressed their immorality and absurdity, or brought them down to earth through Euhemerism Graf But as the latter was driven out of existence, mythology was paradoxically liberated for Christian use in literature as symbolism, ornament, and linguistic play.
The gods, after all, had always been embedded in the Greek language. This was a purely literary practice, by this point unconnected to religious expression Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky By the end of antiquity, classical literature had been sufficiently tamed, at least in practice, that it could be used, consumed, and reproduced by a Christian society.
But the underlying tensions were more covered over and ameliorated than resolved. Julian was denounced and refuted again and again down to the end of Byzantium. We will keep this tension in mind as we explore the creative reception of the classical corpus. The emperor Alexios I — is said to have wanted to keep his daughter Anna illiterate out of fear that she would be corrupted by the immoral stories about the gods Georgios Tornikes, Funeral Oration for the Lady Kaisarissa Anna, Born in Purple, pp.
Homer and tragedy were parts of elite literary education, whose basic methods in Byzantium had not changed much since antiquity. Anna happened to live in an age that loved mythological comparisons and name-dropping Basilikopoulou-Ioannidou Her contemporary, the bishop Niketas of Herakleia, who wrote commentaries on the Bible and Gregory the Theologian, also produced mnemonic-didactic poems on grammar for use by students mastering Attic prose.
To a certain extent, ancient texts were preserved for formal reasons i. The Life of Thucydides by Markellinos fifth century? It was those aspects of his work that were most debated among Byzantine scholars. Sententious Remarks Psellos wrote an essay comparing Euripides to Georgios Pisides seventh c. The greatest breakthrough in the Byzantine reading of tragedy was the rediscovery of ancient meter in the early fourteenth century in general, see Wilson In short, the needs of the Byzantine classroom exerted a strong influence on the survival of the corpus, for besides the texts themselves there was an extensive apparatus of scholarly aids Dickey The origin of these scholarly traditions lies in antiquity but in most cases we can access it only through the repackaged lexika, etymologika, epimerismi, scholia, the Souda, and commentaries that were designed for use by the Byzantine scholar.
He had to understand the meaning and usage of archaic and rare words, a host of obscure mythological persons and events, and the arcana of pagan ritual. It is from this material that early modern dictionaries descend, and scholars of ancient religion often have only these scraps to use. Modern classicists have accordingly tried to extricate the nuggets of ancient material and by-pass the Byzantine middle-man, but this approach is bound to appear increasingly problematic as the purposive mechanisms of reception are recognized.
The voluminous productions of Hellenistic and Roman mythography lapsed in part because the Byzantines were not interested in the myths themselves, whose endless variants were often of purely local importance. They were, however, interested in myth and ritual to the degree necessary for understanding references in canonical texts. This bias explains why it is so hard for historians of ancient religion to see past ancient literature. The gods, however, remained a perennial problem, to which Byzantine writers responded in ways derived from ancient thought.
The most extensive rewriting of ancient mythology as history occurs in the chronicle of Ioannes Malalas sixth c. This is a strange work. The stories are fleshed out with invented material and fictitious sources, like in a Hollywood film, and behaviors are exaggerated and all-too-human. Malalas may yet turn out to be the Byzantine equivalent of the Historia Augusta a series of half-historical and half-fictitious biographies of the Roman emperors in Latin, which pokes fun at the methods of historiography.
Nevertheless, he was among the first Christian authors to attempt a global rationalization of myth—and hence a mythography—that drew upon that vast lost edifice of Hellenistic and Roman scholarship Cameron The sixth century witnessed intense engagement with classical literature in Constantinople, including the production of magisterial works of political and military history, antiquarian research, political thought, Latin epic, and the epigram including the erotic epigram , as well as massive compilations of ancient learning, including geography and Roman law.
This era made great strides toward normalizing and sanitizing the place of mythology in secular Christian literature. The seventh century, by contrast, witnessed a precipitous decline in the production of literature, especially secular texts. This was a consequence of the Arab conquests, and one of the few times when the political and literary fortunes of Byzantium aligned. The Chronicle of Georgios the Monk c. Likewise, about one out of ten homilies of the ninth and tenth centuries feature mythological comparisons which are also polemical Antonopoulou The ancient hero is found wanting compared to the saint, and the deeds of the gods are castigated as immoral.
The most striking example is an Easter Day homily by the emperor Leo VI himself — , which targets various lurid examples of their sexual immorality.
These homilists were following the example set by Gregory the Theologian see above , but they were operating in a different context of reception. Rather than see this as zombie rhetorical trope—still walking past its expiration point—we may see in these denunciations a reflex to what these men were increasingly reading in their own studies: the gods may have been dead, but the classics were coming back alive, and their heterodoxy and sheer moral otherness had to be contained.
At the same time, these men were flaunting their learning before an audience possibly ignorant of the stories being mentioned. In the eleventh century, more sophisticated hermeneutical tools were developed for coping with the gods in literature, at just the time when interest in ancient texts was growing along with a desire to recover and replicate its modes, tropes, and genres.
Allegory was one option broached by Psellos among others , typically through Neoplatonic sources. Psellos tried, where possible, to postulate equivalences between mythical entities and Platonic and Christian metaphysical concepts.
This approach yielded strikingly different results from the polemical juxtapositions in homilies Cesaretti A commentator on Hesiod named Ioannes Galenos late eleventh c. The twelfth century, an era of intense exploration of pagan antiquity and its literature in Byzantium as in the west Ziolkowski , witnessed more systematic efforts to tackle this problem. Tzetzes, a teacher of the classics who idolized Homer, deployed the full range of ancient allegoresis to extricate the poems from their surface pagan entanglements.
He was asked to produce a summary of the Iliad for the benefit of the German wife of Manuel I — who needed to understand the literary traditions of her new home, and possibly to grasp the mythological allusions that were being directed at her at the court, as the culture of the time turned increasingly to mythological modes of expression.
Tzetzes wrote an extensive, book-by-book verse summary of the plot of the Iliad and subsequently of the Odyssey , which allegorizes the gods as natural or psychological forces, as rhetorical ways of expressing natural or human phenomena, or euhemeristically. His contemporary was Eustathios, a teacher of rhetoric who became bishop of Thessalonike and the greatest Homeric scholar before the eighteenth century.
He wrote two large line-by-line commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey which draw on the commentary tradition since antiquity, focusing on grammatical and rhetorical topics, narrative interpretation, and the allegorization of the gods.
Summing up, the suppression of ancient paganism as a religious force in Late Antiquity enabled Christian writers to safely reconstitute a literary classicism and even mythography of their own, a process that culminated in the literature of the sixth century.
Critics applied modern standards without hesitation and found it wanting. Moreover, Byzantine mimesis was not a straitjacket. It allowed room for variation, invention, and deviation from tradition, all within a familiar framework that actually served to direct readers to what was different or distinctive. But this does not go far enough.
We need a different framework, though that is a long-term project for the field. There is nothing inherently problematic about mimesis cf. Such mimesis does not predetermine the quality of the works in question, their intelligence, or their originality.
Finding those qualities is largely a function of whether we actually enjoy reading them and find them stimulating. Contents Go to page:. Horton Christ Ivor J. Treier Liturgy Sue A. Rozeboom Reformed Ethics Philip G. All rights reserved.
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