GREEK LITERATURE

body of writings in the Greek language by the peoples of mainland Greece, the Greek Islands, ancient Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy), and Asia Minor. Its history embraces the ancient (before the 4th century AD), Byzantine (4th century AD-1453), and modern (after 1453) periods. body of writings in the Greek language, with a continuous history extending from the 1st millennium BC to the present day. From the beginning its writers were Greeks living not only in Greece proper but also in Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, and Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy). Later, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean lands and then of the Byzantine Empire. Literature in Greek was produced not only over a much wider area but also by those whose mother tongue was not Greek. Even before the Turkish conquest (1453) the area had begun to shrink again, and now it is chiefly confined to the territory of the republic of Greece. Additional reading Ancient Greek literature Among many surveys of Greek literature, the best are P.e. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox, The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1, Greek Literature (1985); Jacqueline De Romilly, A Short History of Greek Literature (1985; originally published in French, 1980), with an excellent bibliography; K.J. Dover (ed.), Ancient Greek Literature (1980); and Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (1966; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1963). Still valuable are Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897, reprinted 1966); and Moses Hadas, A History of Greek Literature (1950, reissued 1962). N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1970, reprinted 1977); and Paul Harvey (comp.), The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1937, reprinted with corrections 1980), are excellent reference resources. Topical studies include Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vol. (1955, reprinted with amendments, 2 vol. in 1, 1957); J.W.H. Atkins, Literary Criticism in Antiquity: A Sketch of Its Development, 2 vol. (1934, reissued 1961); C.M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry from Alcman to Simonides (1961, reprinted 1967): Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2nd rev. ed. (1961); Brian Vickers, Comparative Tragedy, vol. 1, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (1973, reprinted 1979); R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (1954, reprinted 1977); Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949, reissued 1985); and M.J. Anderson (ed.), Classical Drama and Its Influences (1965). Trends in scholarship are discussed in Maurice Platnauer, Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship, 2nd ed. (1968). Donald William Lucas The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica Byzantine literature The standard reference works are Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich, 2nd ed. (1977), and Geschichte der byzantinischen Volksliteratur (1971); and Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vol. (1978). The standard work on Byzantine liturgical poetry is Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged (1961, reprinted 1971). George A. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors (1983), is concerned with social aspects, particularly with the rhetorical method in education. A collection of studies on the vernacular poetry of the period is E.M. Jeffreys and M.J. Jeffreys, Popular Literature in Late Byzantium (1983). Alexander Kazhdan, Studies on Byzantine Literature of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1984), brings methods of Western medievalists to the study of Byzantine literature. Influences are traced in Kenneth M. Setton, The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance (1956), a reliable survey. Also useful is Ihor evcenko, Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World (1982). Robert Browning Modern Greek literature C.Th. Dimaras (K.Th. Deemaras), A History of Modern Greek Literature (1972; originally published in Greek, 2 vol., 1948-49), is a comprehensive study that is especially useful on the history of ideas. Linos Politis, A History of Modern Greek Literature (1973), is the best general survey. Other useful works include Constantine A. Trypanis, Greek Poetry: From Homer to Seferis (1981), covering the entire Greek poetic tradition; Roderick Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (1980); Philip Sherrard, The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry (1956, reprinted 1981); Edmund Keeley and Peter Bien (eds.), Modern Greek Writers: Solomos, Calvos, Matesis, Palamas, Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Seferis, Elytis (1972); Edmund Keeley, Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (1983); and Peter Bien, Three Generations of Greek Writers: Introductions to Cavafy, Kazantzakis, Ritsos (1983). See also Mary P. Gianos (comp.), Introduction to Modern Greek Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Drama, and Poetry (1969). Peter A. Mackridge Byzantine literature General characteristics Byzantine literature may be broadly defined as the Greek literature of the Middle Ages, whether written in the territory of the Byzantine Empire or outside its borders. By late antiquity many of the classical Greek genres, such as drama and choral lyric poetry, had long been obsolete, and all Greek literature affected to some degree an archaizing language and style, perpetuated by a long-established system of education in which rhetoric was a leading subject. The Greek Church Fathers were the products of this education and shared the literary values of their pagan contemporaries. Consequently the vast and imposing Christian literature of the 3rd to 6th centuries, which established a synthesis of Hellenic and Christian thought, was largely written in a language already far removed from that spoken by all classes in everyday life, and indeed from that of the New Testament. This diglossy-the use of two very different forms of the same language for different purposes-marked Byzantine culture for 1,000 years; but the relations between the high and low forms changed with the centuries. The prestige of the classicizing literary language remained undiminished until the end of the 6th century; only some popular saints' lives and world chronicles escaped its influence. In the ensuing two and a half centuries, when the very existence of the Byzantine Empire was threatened, city life and education declined, and with them the use of classicizing language and style. With the political recovery of the 9th and 10th centuries began a literary revival, in which a conscious attempt was made to recreate the Hellenic-Christian culture of late antiquity. Simple or popular language was despised; many of the early saints' lives were rewritten in inflated and archaizing language and style. By the 12th century the cultural self-assurance of the Byzantines enabled them to develop new literary genres, including romantic fiction, in which adventure and love are the main motifs, and satire, which occasionally made use of imitations of spoken Greek. The period from the Fourth Crusade (1204) to the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks (1453) saw both a vigorous revival of narrowly imitative, classicizing literature, as the Byzantines sought to assert their cultural superiority over the militarily and economically more powerful West, and at the same time the beginning of a flourishing literature in an approximation to vernacular Greek. But this vernacular literature was limited to poetic romances, popular devotional writing, and the like. All serious writing continued to make use of the prestigious archaizing language of learned tradition. Byzantine literature's two sources, classical and Christian, each provided a series of models and references for the Byzantine writer and reader. Often both were referred to side by side: for example, the emperor Alexius Comnenus defended his seizure of church property to pay his soldiers by referring to the precedents of Pericles and the biblical king David. Much of Byzantine literature was didactic in tone, and often in content too. And much of it was written for a limited group of educated readers, who could be counted upon to understand every classical or biblical allusion and to appreciate every figure of rhetoric. Some Byzantine genres would not be considered of literary interest today, but instead seem to belong to the domain of technical writing. This is true in particular of the voluminous writings of the Church Fathers, such as Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor. Principal forms of writing Nonliturgical poetry Poetry continued to be written in classical metres and style. But the sense of appropriateness of form to content was lost. An example is the transitional work of Nonnus, a 5th-century Egyptian-born Greek who eventually converted to Christianity. His long poem Dionysiaca was composed in Homeric language and metre, but it reads as an extended panegyric on Dionysus rather than as an epic. Nonnus is plausibly credited with a paraphrase, in similar metre and style, of the Gospel According to St. John, thereby fusing classical and Christian traditions. Several short narrative poems in Homeric verse, of mythological content, were composed by contemporaries of Nonnus. Paul the Silentiary in the mid-6th century used the same Homeric form for a long descriptive poem on the Church of the Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople. Many brief occasional poems were written in hexameters or elegiac couplets until the late 6th century. But changes in the phonology of Greek, and perhaps declining educational standards, made these metres difficult to handle. A cleric, George the Pisidian, wrote long narrative poems on the wars of the emperor Heraclius (610-641), as well as a poem on the six days of the creation, in iambic trimeters (12-syllable lines, consisting in principle of three pairs of iambic feet, each of a short syllable followed by a long). His example was followed by Theodosius the Deacon in his epic on the recapture of Crete from the Arabs in the 10th century. This 12-syllable line became the all-purpose metre in the middle and later Byzantine periods and was the vehicle for narrative, epigram, romance, satire, and moral and religious edification. From the 11th century it found a rival in a 15-syllable stressed line, which was used by the monk Symeon the New Theologian in many of his mystical hymns and which became a vehicle for court poetry in the 12th century. It was also used by the metropolitan Constantine Manasses for his world chronicle and by the anonymous redactor of the epic romance of Digenis Akritas. It was in this metre, which followed no classical models, that the early vernacular poems were written, such as the romances of Callimachus and Chrysorrhoe, Belthandros and Chrysantza, the Byzantine Achilleid (the hero of which has nothing in common with Homer's Achilles but his name), and the Romance of Belisarius. These are the most significant works of genuine fiction in Byzantine literature. Many of these poems were adaptations or imitations of medieval Western models: examples are Phlorios and Platziaphlora (the Old French Floire et Blancheflor), Imberios and Margarona, and Apollonius of Tyre, each a romantic narrative. The epic genre is represented by a long unpublished poem on the Trojan War, adapted from the Roman de Troie of the 12th-century French poet Benot de Sainte-Maure. This openness to the Latin West was new. But even when they were based on Western models, Byzantine poems differed in tone and expression from their exemplars. Most of this vernacular poetry cannot be dated more precisely than to the 13th or 14th century. Much Byzantine poetry is rather unimaginative, long-winded, and tedious. But some poets show a genuine vein of inspiration, for instance, John Geometres (10th century) or John Mauropous (11th century), or remarkable technical brilliance, such as Theodore Prodromus (12th century), or Manuel Philes (14th century). The ability to write passable verse was widespread in literate Byzantine society, and poetry-or versification-was greatly appreciated. Modern Greek literature (after 1453) Post-Byzantine period After the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453, Greek literary activity continued almost exclusively in those areas of the Greek world under Venetian rule. Thus Cyprus, until its capture by the Turks in 1571, produced a body of literature in the local dialect, including the 15th-century prose chronicle Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus by Lentios Machairs and a collection of translations and imitations in elaborate verse forms of Italian poems by Petrarch and others. Crete, which remained in Venetian hands until 1669, became the centre of the greatest flowering of Greek literature between the fall of Constantinople and the foundation of the modern Greek state. There a number of authors developed the Cretan dialect into a rich and subtle medium of expression. In it were written a number of tragedies and comedies, a single pastoral tragicomedy, and a single, anonymous religious drama, The Sacrifice of Abraham, mostly based on Italian models. The leading playwright was Gergios Chorttsis. In the first half of the 17th century Vitsntsos Kornros composed his romance, Erotkritos. These Cretan authors composed their works almost entirely in the 15-syllable iambic verse of the Greek folk song, whose modes of expression influenced them deeply. In the Ottoman-ruled areas of Greece the folk song, which concisely and unsentimentally conveyed the aspirations of the Greek people of the time, became practically the sole form of literary expression. Toward the end of the 18th century, however, a number of intellectuals emerged who, under the influence of European ideas, set about raising the level of Greek education and culture and laying the foundations of an independence movement. The participants in this "Greek Enlightenment" also brought to the fore the language problem, each promoting a different form of the Greek language for use in education. The leading Greek intellectual of the early 19th century was the classical scholar Adamntios Koras, who in voluminous writings on Greek language and education, argued for a form of Modern Greek "corrected" according to the ancient rules. Independence and after Old Athenian School The Greek state established as a result of the Greek War of Independence (1821-29) consisted only of a small section of the present-day Greek mainland and a few islands. Athens, which became the capital of Greece in 1834, soon came to be the chief cultural centre, gathering together writers from various areas, particularly Constantinople. The Sotsos brothers, Alxandros and Panaytis, introduced the novel into Greece, but they are best known for their Romantic poetry, which as time went by moved gradually away from the Demotic ("popular"), or commonly spoken, language toward the Katharevusa ("purist") form institutionalized by Koras. The work of these writers, which relied greatly on French models, looks back to the War of Independence and the glorious ancient past. Their melancholy sentimentality was not shared by Alxandros Rzos Rangavs, a verbose but versatile and not inconsiderable craftsman of Katharevusa in lyric and narrative poetry, drama, and the novel. By the 1860s and '70s, however, Athenian poetry was generally of poor quality and was dominated by a sense of despair and longing for death. Prose throughout the period was monopolized by the historical novel. Emmanuel Rodis' novel called I Ppissa Ionna (1866; Pope Joan) is a hilarious satire on medieval and modern religious practices as well as a pastiche of the historical novel. Pvlos Kalligs, in Thnos Vlkas (1855), treated contemporary problems such as brigandage. In Louks Lras (1879; Eng. trans., Loukis Laras) Dimtrios Viklas presented a less heroic view of the War of Independence.