The Medieval Greek Romance

Roderick Beaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134810284
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First published by CUP in 1989, The Medieval Greek Romance provides basic information for the non-specialist about Greek fiction during the period 1071-1453, as well as proposing new solutions to problems that have vexed previous generations of scholars. Roderick Beaton applies sophisticated methods of literary analysis to the material, and the bridges of the artificial gap which has separated `Byzantine'literature, in a form of ancient Greek as both homogenous and of a high level of literary sophistication.
Throughout, consideration is given to relations and interconnections with similar literature in western Europe. As most of the texts discussed are not available in English translation, the argument is illustrated by lucid plot summaries and extensive quotation (accompanied by literal English renderings).
For this edition, The Medieval Greek Romance has been revised throughout and expanded with the addition of an `Afterword' which assesses and responds to recent work on the subject.

Part I

1071–1204

1

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

In 1071 the Byzantine army under the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated at Manzikert, in eastern Anatolia, by the forces of the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan. The emperor was taken prisoner, and the terms of the treaty under which he negotiated his freedom repudiated by his successor, Michael VII, who had usurped the throne during his absence. As a consequence of this defeat, during the next ten years the whole of central Anatolia, which had been the geographical and economic heartland of the Eastern empire since Roman times, came to be occupied by the Seljuk Turks, leaving only parts of the coastline in Byzantine hands. The same year also saw the Norman conquest of Sicily, and the loss to Byzantium of its last provinces in Western Europe. Thereafter the Byzantine claim to universal empire, despite the strident line proclaimed by the imperial court up until the fifteenth century, became progressively divorced from reality. The educated Byzantine of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries found himself having to think again about himself and his place in society, and the place of that society in the cosmos. The inheritance of the battle of Manzikert was to create ‘a largely Greek state out of what had been a multilingual Empire’.¹

The importance of 1071 as a watershed is agreed by modern historians of Byzantium, for many of whom it inaugurates the ‘late’ period of a tripartite division;² but its significance is evaluated more often in terms of the ‘decline and fall’ of an ancient civilization than of the emergence of a modern one. The map of the Byzantine empire between 1081 and 1204, as Anthony Bryer points out, reveals a geographically dispersed and strategically vulnerable spread of territory which happened to coincide to a very large extent with the areas of Greek colonization in the ancient world, and also with those areas where speakers of the modern language were to be found up until the population exchanges of the early twentieth century. In other words, the identity of spoken language and state that was to become a fundamental tenet of nineteenth-century nationalism throughout Europe became – by accident – a reality during a formative period of medieval Greek history.

The significance of this fact is easily obscured because Greek had been, under the Roman empire, the unofficial lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, before becoming the official language of Byzantium in the sixth century. However, ‘Greek’ for most of this period meant a written language much of whose morphology, syntax and vocabulary, by the tenth and eleventh centuries, had to be learnt in school and perfected through arduous written exercises, whether the vernacular one spoke at home was the spoken Greek of the day or some other language. Although Greek in its written form was accorded special prestige, it did not in fact enjoy a monopoly even as a written language, let alone of speech, within the boundaries of the early and middle empire. The modern equation of ‘Byzantine literature’ with texts written exclusively in Greek gives a false picture of linguistic homogeneity, since literature was also produced within the Byzantine empire in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Church Slavonic, Armenian and Georgian.³ There is less documented evidence for linguistic diversity in the period between the eighth and eleventh centuries than there is for the earlier period, but it is clear that, although Greek was now the all but universal language of writing and education, many different spoken-language communities continued to flourish within the empire. The existence of Slavic speakers in large numbers in the Greek peninsula from the sixth century to at least the ninth has long been known, although the extreme view that Greek disappeared altogether as a spoken language, to be re-introduced later by learned circles in the capital, is no longer tenable. Slavic may not still have been much in use in the Greek peninsula by 1025, but the map of the Byzantine empire at the death of Basil II in that year shows many areas within its borders where it is scarcely possible that Greek could have been spoken as a first language by many of the inhabitants. Before 1071 there were many Byzantines whose mother-tongue was not Greek; after the sack of Constantinople by the fourth crusade in 1204 there were many mother-tongue speakers of Greek who lived outside the shrinking confines of the Byzantine state.

In other words the Byzantines of the twelfth century had something very like a national identity, in the modern sense, foisted on them; an identity, moreover, which Greek-speakers in later centuries never quite lost sight of, and which in the long run proved more enduring than the older Byzantine model of universal empire that was maintained at an official level until 1453. In the twelfth century this older way of looking at Byzantium and its role in the world was upheld by the emperors of the Komnenian dynasty and lent some credibility by their military and diplomatic successes. But this older worldview is, from that time on, an imperial overlay on an emergent political and cultural reality which is fundamentally incompatible with it. The latter worldview is perhaps historically manifested for the first time in the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople in 1182, and plays an increasingly evident role in the secular literature of the Palaiologan period, both within and outside the empire. But it is the interaction, perhaps even mutual irritance, set up between these two worldviews and their increasing lack of it, that motivates many of the striking cultural innovations of the twelfth century.

The defeat at Manzikert, and the chaotic decade of the 1070s, were followed by the accession to the throne of the tough military Emperor Alexios I Komnenos in 1081. For the next hundred years the Byzantine empire was ruled by Alexios (1081–1118) and his successors John II (1118–43) and Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80), until the collapse of the dynasty and of civil order in the final decades of the twelfth century. The crucial period of cultural transition that was the twelfth century in Byzantium is marked almost throughout by the firm and relatively stable rule of the Komnenian dynasty. This is not the place to examine the tangled question of the attitude of these emperors to the arts: suffice it to say that they may not have been either as philistine or as repressive of cultural innovation as they often appear from contemporary writings and in modern assessments. Authoritative, however, they certainly were, and a precedent with important implications in the field of literature was established as early as 1082, the year after Alexios’ successful coup d’état. In that year the philosopher and rhetorician Ioannes Italos was publicly tried and condemned for heresy.

Italos had been the last and the least cautious of a distinguished line of eleventh-century teachers of rhetoric such as Ioannes Mavropous and Michael Psellos, who had revived interest in the speculations, and not just in the language and style, of the pagan philosophers. A modern study, broadly sympathetic to Italos, puts his case like this:

[Italos,] while not deviating significantly from Christian dogma per se, argued a line of thought which often crossed over into the realm of dogma without the full context of a theological frame of reference. Rather, he bases himself extensively upon classical Greek philosophy, argues the pro and con of Greek philosophical propositions, and then adapts the points he discusses to a conclusion basically compatible with Christian teaching. In the course of his argumentation he proceeds syllogistically, which, repeatedly, involves him in assuming a philosophical hypothesis at variance with Christian teaching for the sake of argument, so that he can modify or disprove it.

The emperor himself intervened to make a show-trial of the proceedings, and to ensure that not just Italos himself but all who had been closely associated with his teachings should be anathematized.⁴

In this way the intellectual ‘renaissance’ of the eleventh century seems to have been checked. Rhetoric, which continued to flourish on a much increased scale throughout the century of the Komnenian emperors, was diverted into other avenues than philosophical enquiry. In consequence the twelfth-century interest in classical Hellenism may lack the intellectual refinement of Psellos and his contemporaries but none the less builds on the achievements of the eleventh century to spread its activities much more widely (including the exploitation of the vernacular, which would hardly have had much interest for Psellos) but in less depth. It was against this intellectual background that literary fiction in the form of the romance, but also of Lucianic satire and a new genre of comic begging poetry, emerged in the mid-twelfth century.

The period of Byzantine history which is ushered in by the defeat of Manzikert and the trial of Italos has met with varying assessments at the hands of historians, both medieval and modern. It has been called a time either of renaissance or of reaction; the firm political and military grip of the three Komnenian emperors whose reigns span almost the entire period has been praised as genius and denounced as repression, and the crisis of identity which is here proposed as underlying the achievements, as well as the shortcomings, of the period has been robustly dismissed by one eminent scholar as a ‘catastrophic failure to adapt to a changing world’.⁵ The accession of Alexios I Komnenos in 1081 marked the beginning of a hundred years of stable government (by Byzantine standards at any rate) during which an abiding aim of imperial policy was to restate the traditional claims of universal empire (by military and diplomatic means) and of religious orthodoxy (by preventing the teaching of heretical doctrines). On the face of it Alexios and his successors, John and Manuel, succeeded: the frontiers were pushed back and the purity of religious dogma upheld. During this period the first real encounters between Byzantium and the West took place, as Western crusaders passed through Byzantine lands in 1096–7 and again in 1147, and as trading privileges within the empire were granted to merchants from Pisa, Genoa and Venice in the course of the century: contacts which, to begin with at least, were mutually beneficial.

In literature the romance suddenly appears in the mid-twelfth century, and alongside it satire, another fictional genre which had not been practised since late antiquity. It is surely a symptom of the times that both of these innovations have the outward appearance of revivals from the past, an appearance which, now as then, easily obscures the revolutionary act of reviving forms and conventions that had been so long out of use. Hellenistic satire and the conventions of the Hellenistic romance are re-appropriated by twelfth-century writers, after an interval of some eight hundred years. Like the outward image of Byzantium itself under the Komnenian emperors, these externals conceal a profound response to a changed world. It was during the same century that vernacular Greek (by this time, in effect, the modern language) was introduced into literature, although for the time being in a much more cautious and experimental way than in the West at the same period.

Both the nature and the significance of the innovative adaptation of long-discarded literary conventions in the Komnenian period become apparent if we define the phenomenon as a ‘renaissance’ in the terms of Hans Robert Jauss:

One can line up the examples of how a new literary form can reopen access to forgotten literature. These include the so-called ‘renaissances’ – so-called, because the word’s meaning gives rise to appearance of an automatic return, and often prevents one from recognizing that literary tradition can not transmit itself alone. That is, a literary past can return only when a new reception draws it back into the present, whether an altered aesthetic wilfully reaches back to reappropriate the past, or an unexpected light falls back on forgotten literature from the new moment of literary evolution, allowing something to be found that one previously could not have sought in it.⁶

The literary experimentation of the twelfth century seems largely to have ceased in the 1180s, a period of rapid disintegration following the death in 1180 of Manuel Komnenos.⁷ There is no surviving fictional literature that can be dated with certainty to the hundred years following the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, although traditionally established genres of Byzantine writing continue unabated in the thirteenth century. Neither the romance nor the vernacular reappears for certain until the early fourteenth century, and it is only from that time that a form of the vernacular becomes the accepted medium for fiction (whether in the romances that are the subject of this book or in the satirical fables such as the Tale of the Four-Footed Beasts, the Poulologos and the Tale of the Donkey).⁸ None the less, throughout those centuries when a vernacular literary idiom was being fashioned and was rapidly increasing in popularity, the romances of the twelfth century, written in the learned language, continued to be copied and read and, it will be argued, to influence writers.

LEVELS OF LANGUAGE AND LEVELS OF LITERATURE

We have seen that from 1071 onwards the spoken language of almost all Byzantines was for the first time Greek. To the resulting intellectual climate must be attributed two apparently contradictory trends in the literature of the twelfth century that have long been noticed: the simultaneous cultivation of a hyper-correct ‘Attic’ language in which the divorce between spoken and written Greek is pushed to an unprecedented extreme, and of the vernacular not just as a means of expression (as in the Poems of Poor Prodromos and Glykas’ Verses Written While Held Imprisoned) but also as a source for literary material, as in the ‘proto-romance’, Digenes Akrites. In each case, what is sought, whether fully consciously or not, is an identity for the writer and his public as ‘Greek’, which may replace or co-exist uneasily with his received identity as citizen of God’s earthly kingdom. In the case of the high Atticist, such as Anna Komnene, the search is for the authentication of that identity in a past as remote, and therefore as authoritative, as that of the Bible; in the case of the writers who experimented with the vernacular, of which the ones mentioned are only the most thoroughgoing examples, similar authentication is sought (usually playfully) in something shared as a lowest common denominator: the language of the street, and the names of trades and utensils in the poems attributed to Prodromos, the common heritage of proverbial wisdom in Glykas.

Between these extremes is a wide middle ground, a linguistic register modelled not on ancient Attic but on the by this time equally ancient Koine. The tradition on which this register drew was that of the Gospels, early Church Fathers and saints’ lives, as well as of functional literature of an earlier period. No less a language of learning than the ‘high style’ of the Atticists, this register was prolifically exploited in the twelfth century for didactic and popularizing literature, especially that addressed for a reward to high personages when their comprehension was more important than their admiration.⁹

Twelfth-century writers show versatility, in some cases virtuosity, in their exploitation of different language registers. Theodore Prodromos, the most prolific writer of the age, uses all of them; so does the historian Michael Glykas; Konstantinos Manasses and Ioannes Tzetzes in different works use either the ‘high’ or the ‘middle’ register, apparently depending on whom they are addressing. A peculiarly Byzantine obsession (not unknown in modern Greece either) for transposing the same text from one register to another begins in the second half of the tenth century with the work of Symeon the Metaphrast, who supervised the rewriting of many of the older saints’ lives in a more literary and less widely comprehensible linguistic idiom.¹⁰ And after the twelfth century we find paraphrases in the other direction, from ‘high’ to ‘middle’ style, of the Alexiad of Anna Komnene and the History of Niketas Choniates. Digenes Akrites and the frequently copied ‘Spaneas’ poem, containing moral advice for a young man, are preserved in both ‘middle-style’ and ‘low-style’ versions, but in these cases we cannot be certain which is the paraphrase or when it was made.

This linguistic background is not as different from that found in the West at a similar period as at first appears. Histories of the modern literatures of Europe are by and large the histories of literature in the European vernaculars, and begin, as do the histories of modern Greek literature, with the earliest use of these vernaculars for literary purposes. But the ancient/modern division according to whether Latin or the vernacu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• Part I 1071–1204
• 1 The Twelfth-Century Background
• 2 The Literary Tradition
• 3 The ‘Proto-Romance’, Digenes Akrites
• 4 The Renaissance of a Genre
• 5 The Twelfth-Century Texts
• Part II 1204-1453
• 6 The First ‘Modern Greek’ Literature
• 7 The Original Romances: The Texts and Their Stories
• 8 The Original Romances: Narrative Structure
• 9 Translations and Adaptations of Western Romances
• 10 Genealogy
• 11 Orality
• 12 Reception
• Afterword: The Medieval Greek Romance Since 1987
• Notes
• References
• Index