Review of: "Adam J. Goldwyn and Ingela Nilsson, eds., Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019" (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies, 2018
The present paper is an overview and discussion of Byzantine literary criticism concerning the ancient Greek novel from the ninth to the fifteenth century CE. More specifically, I focus here on the opinions and judgments of some of the most prominent Byzantine scholars as regards two fully extant Greek novels: Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Tale. I review in some detail various aspects of the ‘evaluation practice’ of Patriarch Photios I (ninth century CE) and Michael Psellos (eleventh century CE), and I also – though more briefly – go over the corresponding theories and ideas of (Philip-)Philagathus of Cerami (twelfth century CE) and Ioannis Eugenikos (fifteenth century CE). The main question I attempt to address in this study is how similarly or differently (even idiosyncratically) the Byzantines read and discussed the Greek novels over the centuries.
2010
Abstract: This paper deals with the presence of Bakhtin’s adventure chronotope in the ancient Greek novel (first centuries AD) and its re-appearance in the Byzantine novel (12th century) and modern Greek romantic novel (1830–1850). Unlike previous scholarship on Bakhtin, which has adopted chronotopical analysis almost exclusively for the purpose of chronological literary history, our semiotic approach to narrative genres addresses diachronic similarities between three generic variants by taking into account cultural-historical circumstances. We argue that these similarities consist of a highly specific combination of (1) a certain degree of (proto-) ethnical awareness primarily based on the classical heritage of the 5th and 4th centuries BC (‘Hellenism’), and (2) a fundamental unease among the literati with the prevailing political climate. In our view, both circumstances found an adequate mode of expression in the narrative syntax of the adventure novel.
The Cambridge Guide to Homer, ed. C. Pache in association with Casey Dué, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton , 2020
The article traces the literary genres through which knowledge of Homer (formal elements such as vocabulary and meter, or broader acquaintance with his plots and cast of characters) were communicated throughout the Byzantine period. Centos (a genre of poetry resulting from adapting and stitching together verses from the Homeric epics in order to tell Christian stories, mostly cultivated around the fifth century) were a vehicle through which the taste for Homerizing diction and versification were diffused among Greek-reading schoolchildren and other educated audiences during later centuries (certainly from the tenth century into the Ottoman period). Although neither Homer’s verses nor centos are known to have been translated in other languages during the Middle Ages, texts in languages that closely engaged with the grammar and rhetorical structure of Greek (Syriac, Georgian) indicate acquaintance with those verses of Homer that were frequently used in Greek as grammatical and rhetorical examples. In addition, knowledge of Homeric and other Greek mythology was diffused in oriental Christian literatures through a few widely translated orations by the fourth-century Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus. A number of medieval literatures also show acquaintance with Homer’s status in Byzantine literary culture as a source of proverbial wisdom, although many of the wise sayings circulating under his name in languages other than Greek are misattributed to him. Varying degrees of acquaintance with Homeric plots and heroes are evident in several medieval literatures (Latin and various Western European vernaculars, but also Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavic), where they entered through other venues. The most diffused are known translations of world chronicles, in which Homer’s royal figures regularly appear as part of a universal history of kingship. Chronicles and belletristic writing (e.g. romances of chivalry from the later Middle Ages) outlined genealogies of nations or aristocratic houses going back to Homeric figures (most famously, the Trojan Aeneas who fled the sack of Troy by the Greeks counts as the progenitor of the Romans and a number of medieval peoples and royal clans claiming the imperial heritage of ancient Rome). As is well known, genealogies going back to an ancient past serve as narratives of identity that articulate or help negotiate political and social realities in the present. Accordingly, it is possible to interpret the retelling of Homeric plots in Byzantine and other medieval literatures as part of an international dialogue through which Byzantium and its neighbors debated their individual political and cultural claims. In addition, allegorical readings of Homeric plots (equating Homeric figures with cosmic elements or qualities of the human soul) were widely diffused in philosophy and the natural sciences. The naturalization of such texts in Arabic through Greek-to-Arabic translation in the ninth and tenth centuries clearly created a venue for the importation of Homeric elements in the literatures of the Islamic world. The significance of allegory within Byzantine literary culture (it was an omnipresent mode of interpreting Homeric literature throughout the Byzantine millenium) appears to have played a role in the development of allegory in the Islamic context. Allegory continued to be important in early modern European philosophy and the natural sciences until the seventeenth century because of the extent to which ancient Greek technical literature was embraced for these purposes. Early modern Europe read this literature not simply in Byzantine manuscripts, but with the help of Byzantine educational tools and therefore through the lens of a Byzantine interpretative framework.
Within the multiform field of ancient narrative fiction, a group of anonymous works may be distinguished, all of which were composed during the first centuries of the Roman Empire and share a series of common generic traits. These texts are (according to the titles used in present-day literary-historical research): the Life of Aesop, the Alexander Romance, the later Lives of Homer (including the Contest of Homer and Hesiod), the Story of Apollonius King of Tyre, and the brief Life of Secundus, the Silent Philosopher. All these works are characterised by a linear biographical narration and an open textual tradition, comprising many different redactions and versions in parallel circulation. The central hero and biographee is a kaleidoscopic personality, combining metis and linguistic proficiency with various other roles from the traditional narrative repertoire. All the texts under discussion also operate as multi-collective repositories of all kinds of narrative and gnomic genres (animal fables, novellas, anecdotes, travel legends, fictional epistles, riddles and conundrums, occasional epigrams, wise sayings and commandments, proverbs), which are intercalated into the narrative on various occasions. Above all, the main feature of these texts is their quasi-popular (λαϊκότροπη, “in the folk/popular manner”) aesthetic: the plot and characters are formed on the basis of traditional legends and folktale patterns, while the manner of narration is founded on the techniques of folk storytelling. In the academic year 2022-2023, I am teaching a postgraduate seminar on these works. I upload here a select bibliography of editions, commentaries, and important studies for each one of them, which I have prepared for the needs of the seminar and its participants. I have also added to the aforementioned works the so-called "Book of Syntipas", that great epigone of "Ahiqar" in the medieval period, which shares a number of common features with the "open" biographical romances of late antiquity. In the course of the seminar, we aspire to comparatively investigate the common traits of these works. We will also endeavour to highlight leading motifs and themes which occupy a significant place in poetic texture of the texts under discussion, from the manipulation of time, space, and narrative suspense to eroticism, intellectual contests, travel adventures, and the sagacious attitude towards death. The participants will perhaps come to realise that the sagacity of popularised storytelling is a reflection of the tragic experience in the mirror of the collective imaginary.