The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

by M. R. James

Greek MSS.: Production and Dispersion

The area in which Greek MSS. were produced in the medieval period was (with negligible exceptions) confined to Greece proper, "Turkey in Europe," the Levant, and South Italy. In the monastic centres, particularly Mount Athos, there were and are large stores of Greek books, the vast majority of which are theological or liturgical; and the theological authors most in vogue are those of the fourth and later centuries. Copies of primitive Christian authors or classical ones are comparative rarities. True, one or two of surpassing interest have been found in such libraries; a famous Plato was brought by Dr. E. D. Clarke from Patmos, and is at Oxford now; the treatise of Hippolytus against heresies came in the forties from a monastery to the Paris library. But these are exceptions. We have to look at Constantinople as by far the most important centre of learning and of book-production. The city was full of libraries, public and private, and of readers. The culture of the place was, no doubt, self-contained; it did not aim at enriching the outer world, which it despised; its literary productions were imitative, the work of dilettanti and decadents. Nevertheless, it preserved for us wellnigh all that we now have of the best literature of Greece, and, but for a few catastrophes, it would have handed on much more. Of thirty-two historical writings read and excerpted by Photius in his Bibliotheca, late in the ninth century, nineteen are lost; of several of the Attic orators, Lysias, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus, he possessed many more speeches than we have seen. Michael Psellus, who died about 1084, is credited (I must allow that the evidence is not of the best) with writing notes on twenty-four comedies of Menander, of which, as is well known, we have not one complete. In the twelfth century John Tzetzes and Eustathius apparently had access still to very many lost authors. In short, before the Latin occupation of Constantinople in 1204, the remains of ancient Greek literature very notably exceeded their present bulk. Much of it, no doubt, was preserved in single copies, and only a narrow selection of authors was in constant use for educational purposes. Only three plays out of seven of Æschylus, for example, were read in the schools. The rest, with Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius, practically depended for their survival on the famous copy now at Florence. Instances might be multiplied. The threads of transmission to which we owe most of the Euripidean plays, the Anthology, the History of Polybius, the works of Clement of Alexandria, the Christian Apologists, the commentary of Origen upon St. John, are equally slender. We cannot doubt that the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders was, in its obliteration of works of art and of literature, far more disastrous than the capture of the city by the Turks in 1453. For the best part of a century before the latter date, the export of precious MSS. to Italy had been going on, and many of our greatest treasures were already safe in the hands of scholars when the crash came. Nor is it possible, I believe, to show that between 1204 and 1453 many authors whose works no longer exist were read in Byzantine circles. That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of them, and the sale and export went on at a great rate.