Greek Literature in Late Antiquity

Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317124740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Late Antiquity has attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. As a historical period it has thus far been defined by the transformation of Roman institutions, the emergence of distinct religious cultures (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), and the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval and early modern Europe. Despite all this, the study of late antique literary culture is still in its infancy, especially for the Greek and other eastern texts examined in this volume. The contributions here presented make new inroads into a rich literature notable above all for its flexibility and unparalleled creativity in combining multiple languages and literary traditions. The authors and texts discussed include Philostratus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Nonnos of Panopolis, the important St Polyeuktos epigram, and numerous others. The volume makes use of a variety of interdisciplinary approaches in an attempt to provoke discussion on change (Dynamism), literary education (Didacticism), and reception studies (Classicism). The result is a study which highlights the erudition and literary sophistication characteristic of the period and brings questions of contextualization, linguistic association, and artistic imagination to bear on little-known or undervalued texts, without neglecting important evidence from material culture and social practices. With contributions by both established scholars and young innovators in the field of late antique studies, there is no work of comparable authority or scope currently available. This volume will stimulate further interest in a range of untapped texts from Late Antiquity.

PART 1
Dynamism

Chapter 1
New Themes and Styles in Greek Literature, A Title Revisited

Averil Cameron
Keble College, Oxford

Some years ago I published a paper with the title ‘New Themes and Styles in Greek Literature, 7th and 8th Centuries’.¹ Readers commented in response that some of the characteristic literary types I pointed to were not in fact new; for example, dialogues, questions and answers and florilegia all seem to be already established in the fifth century. Dialogues and debates, moreover, were not only religious: they might also for example be philosophical.² But the broader dating raises the question of whether one should instead posit a more continuous series of developments in Greek literary texts, from the fourth or fifth centuries onwards.³ Historians and archaeologists have spent much of their time in recent years discussing the structural and social changes of the late antique period, and it would indeed be strange if literature did not in some way also reflect them.

It is surely a fair question to ask where literature fits in the context of the ‘long late antiquity’—the model of the period which Wolfgang Liebeschuetz has called the multi-culturalist, which rejects decline in favour of transformation, which sees late antiquity as extending as late even as the eighth century, and as encompassing the first phase of Islam, and which prevails in current scholarship.⁴ It is true that in all the mass of methodological essays on the interpretation of late antiquity, literary criticism and literature per se get very little if any attention. A new French textbook on the period 312–641 covers the ‘written culture’ of the Greek East in the period in a few pages, and without linking it in any systematic way to general historical issues.⁵ In contrast, Liebeschuetz in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman City is brave enough to include chapters on literature in West and East and to ask big questions about quality and/or ‘decline’,⁶ while H. Inglebert reads the history of late antique culture as a history of Christianization.⁷

I will argue here that we do need to put back consideration of late antique Greek literary culture into the general historical context. After all, late antiquity, defined as the fourth to seventh centuries, was a period which saw not only the rise to prominence of bishops,⁸ and the development of the cult of saints and Christian pilgrimage centres, but also the opening of a gap between East and West, and the dramatic shrinkage of educational possibilities with the collapse of eastern cities. In the East the state came under extreme pressure and had to reinvent itself. Disappointingly for us, then, the recent collection by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, Approaching Late Antiquity, with a chapter by Alan Cameron on ‘Poetry and Literary Culture in Late Antiquity’, does not go much later than 400—though admittedly its subtitle is The Transformation from Early to Late Empire.⁹

Periodization, and even simple nomenclature, at the moment offer many traps for the historian or literary critic concerned with late antiquity. For instance, Anthony Kaldellis, in his book on Procopius, is scathing about ‘Byzantinists’, especially British ones,¹⁰ but is Procopius and is the sixth century Byzantine or late antique? Indeed Kaldellis’s own book title refers not to Byzantium but to the ‘end of antiquity’. Conversely, Alexander Kazhdan’s history of Byzantine literature begins only with the later seventh century.¹¹ On the other hand the hymns of Romanos in the sixth century are equally commonly taken as marking a new departure, even the beginnings of modern Greek literature.¹² Likewise, Inglebert imposes a strongly chronological schema on his presentation of late antique culture. The French editors of Le monde byzantin do not worry about this question of nomenclature and periodization, but I think we must be conscious of it, even if only in judging the existing modern approaches, for while it may seem unimportant in itself, the terms ‘late antiquity’ and ‘Byzantium’ both carry a heavy charge of association and connotation, and this affects modern reactions to the texts in question. To be termed ‘Byzantine’ is all too likely indeed to be the kiss of death for an author, as Ruth Webb implies when commenting on the absence of Byzantine literature from the western canon.¹³

A fundamental question, of course, is what do we mean by ‘literature’?, or better, what counts as ‘literature’? Is it justifiable to consider ‘high’ literature only, in the traditional way,¹⁴ or should we include the whole range of writing in late antiquity, of which high literature is a part? Kazhdan debates this issue in some detail. He distinguishes ‘literature’ from Schrifttum, mere writing, and distinguishes between literary and non-literary texts. He is aware of the mass of modern theoretical discussion as to what constitutes literature. Literature, he says, is not ‘the accumulated mass of written texts’, but ‘the system of ways and means employed by the authors to express themselves’.¹⁵ He goes further: ‘without images and figures, there is no literature’; his own work will be a history of the development of litterarité, ‘the modes and ways of poetical expression’. He is not afraid to include religious writing such as apocalyptic, miracle stories, hagiography or hymnography, in a history of literature. He may still be on the look out for ‘real life’, but he has allowed himself to range widely. Among late antique writers in Greek the historians, both secular and ecclesiastical, have traditionally been well studied.¹⁶ But let us not approach late antique literature with an already existing agenda which says that certain sorts of literature—more ‘historical’, or realistic—are by definition more worth studying, or more worthy of the label ‘literary’. Let us abandon both these views, and take a broad approach, including in our thoughts about late antique literature all kinds of written texts, from the high-level histories to the unpretentious saint’s Life, and, moreover, admit into the realm of literature homilies, theological treatises and even conciliar acts.¹⁷ Such histories of late antique literature as have been written take a narrower focus, or separate ‘Christian’ literature as part of patristics from literature written in secular and classicising mode. Elizabeth Clark is a notable scholar who has pioneered a different approach, with her argument that literary theory also belongs in the fields previously fenced off as ‘patristics’ or ‘church history’.¹⁸

I believe we need to look beyond the binary oppositions which have seemed to be inherent in the writing of the period, especially those between Greek and Latin and pagan (or secular) and Christian, and give more attention to the striking growth of Syriac, Coptic, Georgian and Arabic as literary languages, to the complex relation between elite, high-style and highly cultured writing with less formal and often more practical types of expression,¹⁹ and (something which I think is vital) to the integration of theological and other religious writing into our understanding of later Greek literature in general.²⁰ Greek literature in late antiquity has not only to be related to the availability and type of education,²¹ to the powerful influence of rhetoric,²² and to social and political change in general, but also to the demands of, for instance, Christian liturgy, Christian cult centres, Christian edification, homiletic and catechism. It is striking, for example, how much late antique Christian literature was actually written by monks and bishops—why was it written and for whom was it intended?²³ The same bishops composed homilies and exegetical works and operated within social networks maintained not least by means of letter-writing—but if we think of Libanius, for example, or Augustine and Paulinus of Nola, we can soon see that this was not confined to Christians, nor to Greek.

These competing influences were not always easy to resolve. The sixth-century epigrammatists of Agathias’ Cycle evidently had an excellent training in verse composition, and in the early seventh century, Sophronius was using quite decent anacreontics to write about Jerusalem and about the Persian invasion of Palestine. But a whole monastic literature also grew up in Greek (and other languages), from the lives and sayings of the fathers to ‘centuries’, florilegia, ascetic writings and more. Andrew Louth has recently presented the writings of John of Damascus in this light.²⁴ The circulation of books, including classical manuscripts, is a vital subject for the period,²⁵ but so too are the translation, rewriting and retelling of stories at all literary levels from the simplest to the quite elevated,²⁶ and the ways in which the vast quantity of ecclesiastical and theological material was kept, maintained and controlled. Both censorship and the fabrication of texts were techniques used by ecclesiastics in our period: texts were themselves, as I have suggested, used as weapons.²⁷ Not surprisingly, then, books were also burned by imperial order.

Religion still poses problems for some critics of late antique literature. Kazhdan, a scholar who spent his formative years in the communist system, was also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, a great achievement in terms of the dissemination of knowledge of Byzantium, but a work low on spirituality, icons, orthodoxy and the like and strong on material culture, d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration, Spelling, and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART 1 DYNAMISM
• PART 2 DIDACTICISM
• PART 3 CLASSICISM
• Index