[240]. “John of Sicily” (Walz, vi. 225), who in the thirteenth century cites the lost φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι almost as if he was citing the Περὶ Ὕψους, is certainly no exception. The undated Byzantine (Cramer, Anecd. Oxon., iii. 159, quoted by Professor Roberts after Usener), who couples Λογγίνου κρίσεις with those of Dionysius, may come nearer, as may the anonymous scholiast on Hermogenes (Walz, vii. 963), who cites the ὁμιλίαι on τὸ στομφῶδες, “mouthing.”
[241]. Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Characters and Censures of the most Considerable Poets. London, 1694. P. 58. “Rapin tells us that Dantes Aligerus wants fire, and that he has not heat enough.”
CHAPTER VI.
BYZANTINE CRITICISM.
PHOTIUS—DETAILED EXAMINATION OF THE ‘BIBLIOTHECA’—IMPORTANCE OF ITS POSITION AS A BODY OF CRITICAL JUDGMENTS—TZETZES—JOHN THE SICELIOTE.
If the word Byzantine is not quite such a byword as it once was, it still has for the most part an uncomplimentary connotation. How far that connotation is justified in reference to our special subject can hardly be better set forth than by exposition of three books of the middle and later Byzantine period.[[242]] The first shall be the remarkable and in a way famous Bibliotheca[[243]] of Photius in the ninth century; the second, the Homeric Allegories of Tzetzes in the twelfth; the third, that commentary on the περὶ ἰδέων of Hermogenes by John the Siceliote in the thirteenth, which preserves to us our earliest reference to what is almost certainly the Περὶ Ὕψους, and assigns it to Longinus.
The first is in its way unique. The author, it may be barely necessary to say, was Patriarch of Constantinople for a period |Photius.| of nearly thirty years, though with an interval of ten, during which he was deposed or deprived (858-867, 877-886), in the latter half of the ninth century. He was originally a lay statesman, and, from causes no doubt political as well as religious, was much engaged in the disputes which led to the final separation between the Eastern and Western Churches. His birth- and death-dates are not known; but he was, in the year last mentioned—886—banished by Leo VI. to a monastery in Armenia. The Bibliotheca purports to be an account or review of books read during an embassy to Assyria, written for the benefit, and at the request, of the author’s brother Tarasius. There is no reason for questioning the excellent Patriarch’s veracity; but if he actually took with him the two hundred and eighty authors (some of them very voluminous) whom he summarises, he must have had one of the largest travelling libraries on record. The form is encyclopædic, each author having a separate article beginning Ἀνεγνώθη, “there was read:” and to a great extent these articles consist of summaries of the matter of the books. This, as it happens, is fortunate. Photius seems to have had a special fancy for giving précis of narrative, whether ostensibly historical or avowedly fictitious; and he has thus preserved for us all or almost all that we know of things so interesting as the Persica of Ctesias, and the Babylonica or Sinonis and Rhodanes of the romancer Iamblichus. Naturally enough, a good deal of his matter is theological, and his abstracts here are seasoned with a sometimes piquant, but seldom strictly critical, animus. But he by no means confines himself to mere summary, and we have in his book what we have nowhere else—a sort of critical review of a very large portion of Greek literature. Pretty full abstract after his own manner, and some extract of this, will be the best basis possible for considering the state of literary study and taste at what was perhaps the only cultivated capital of Europe, if not (putting the dimmer East out of the question) of the world, at the time when the classical languages were almost half a millennium past their real flourishing time, and when as yet only Anglo-Saxon to certainty, and some other Teutonic dialects probably, had arisen to represent the new vernaculars in any kind of literary performance.
Photius observes no order in his notices, which would appear to be genuine notes of reading; and most of his earliest entries are short, and devoted to writers possessing at best interest of matter. The first that has struck me as possessing the interest of literature is Art. 26, on Synesius. The characterisation of the good Bishop of Ptolemaïs runs thus: “As for phrase, he |Detailed examination of the Bibliotheca.| is lofty and has ὄγκος” (the word we encounter so often and find so hard to translate), “but swerves off to the over-poetical.” “His miscellaneous epistles” (the judgment just quoted is on his philosophical treatises on Providence, on Monarchy, &c.) “drip with grace and pleasure,[[244]] not without strength and substance[[245]] of thought.” The rest is personal and religious, but extremely interesting.
Art. 44 deals with Philostratus and his famous life of Apollonius of Tyana. The bulk of the notice, as we should expect, both from the Patriarch’s fancy for analysis of narrative and from his religious bent, is busied with the matter; but we have some actual criticism. He is as to his phrase “clear, graceful, and aphoristic, and teeming with sweetness;[[246]] bent on obtaining honour by archaism and the fashionableness [or new-fangledness] of his constructions.”[[247]] Josephus has Art. 47. He is “clean in phrasing, and clever at setting forth the intention of his speech distinctly and pleasantly; persuasive and agreeable in his speeches even if occasion compels him to speak in different senses; fertile in enthymemes on either side, and with gnomæ at command if ever any man had them; also most competent to infuse passions into his discourse, and a proved hand at awaking compassion and softening the reader.” All which (observe the strict rhetorical form of it) is very handsome towards that Ebrew Jew. The note (49) on Cyril of Alexandria, that he “keeps the character and idiom of the appropriate speech,” that “his style is fashioned and, as it were, forced to express idiosyncratic idea,”[[248]] and “is like loose poetry that disdains metre,” is itself thoroughly idiosyncratic, and speaks Cyril very well. Two others, 55 and 75, of a somewhat acrid character, on Johannes Philoponus (“Matæoponus rather,” quoth our Patriarch), are, though acrid, by no means uncritical. All these are late and mainly ecclesiastical writers, though of a certain general literary interest. The first author, at once of considerable age and of purely literary value, to be very fully handled is the above-mentioned Ctesias, and we have only fragments whereby to control Photius’s criticism of him. But the paragraph which comes at the end of the abstract of the Persica, and applies both to that and to the Indica, is itself worth abstracting. “This historian is very clear and simple in language, so that his style is mixed with much pleasure. He uses the Ionic dialect, not throughout, like Herodotus, but partially. Nor does he, like that writer, divert his story to unseasonable digressions. But from the mythical matters with which Herodotus is reproached neither does Ctesias abstain, especially in the book called Indica. Still, the pleasure of his history consists chiefly in the arrangement of his narrative, which is strong in the pathetic and unexpected, and in the variation of it by dint of the mythical. His style is slipshod more than is fitting, often falling into mere vulgarity. But the style of Herodotus, both in this and other respects of the power and art of the Word, is the canon of the Ionic dialect.”
Appian’s Roman History and Arrian’s Parthica come in for successive notice, but there is nothing about the latter’s literary character till the much later and fuller notice of his Alexander-book at 91, where Photius, as is specially his wont with historians, gives a full appreciation. The pupil of Epictetus, he thinks, "is second to none among those who have best drawn up histories, for he is both first-rate at succinct narration, and he never hurts the continuousness of his history by unseasonable divagations and parentheses.[[249]] He is original [“new-fangled,” the usual translation of καινοπρεπὴς, has a too unfavourable twist in it], rather by the arrangement of his words than by his vocabulary; and he manages this in such a fashion that hardly otherwise could the tale be told more clearly and luminously. He uses a vivid, euphonious, well-turned style, and has smoothness well mixed with grandeur.[[250]] His neologisms are not directed to mere innovation à perte de vue,[[251]] but close and emphatic, so as to be real figures of speech and not merely change for ordinary words.[[252]] Wherefore clearness is his companion, not merely in this respect, but most of all in the arrangement and order and constitution of his style, which is the very craft-secret of clearness. For the use of merely straightforward periods is within the power of mere uncultivated persons,[[253]] and, if it be maintained without admixture, brings the style down to flatness and meanness, whereto Arrian, clear as he is, has not approached. And he makes use of elliptic figures not in respect of his period but of his diction, so as never to become obscure: if any one should attempt to supply what is wanting, it would seem to tend towards the superfluous, and not really to complete the ellipse. The variety of his figures is also one of his strongest points—not changing at once from simple usage, but forming themselves gently and from the beginning, so as neither to annoy with satiety nor to worry by overcrowding. In short, if any be set against him in the matter of historical composition, many even of the old classics[[254]] would be found his inferiors in taxis."
Appian has earlier had less elaborate praise, as being terse and plain in phrase, as truth-loving as possible, an expounder of strategic methods, and very good indeed at raising the depressed spirit of an army, or soothing its excitement, and exhibiting passion by means of speeches. It is odd enough, after the exaltation of Arrian—a good writer but no marvel—to the skies, to come across the following brief and grudging estimate, inserted in the shortest of summaries, of a man of the highest genius like Herodotus. Photius here, as elsewhere, does justice to the Halicarnassian as a canon of Ionic. “But he employs all manner of old wives' fables and divagations, whereby an intellectual sweetness runs through him,[[255]] though these things sometimes obscure the comprehension of the history and efface its proper and corresponding type, since truth will not have her clearness clouded by myths, nor admit divagations (parecbaseis) further than is fitting.” This is rather dispiriting for the first really great writer whom we meet; and the long judgment upon Æschines, which follows shortly, makes little amends, because the orators had been criticised and characterised ad nauseam for a thousand years. Later we have no ill criticism of Dion Cassius—indeed Photius seems more at ease with post-Christian writers, even if they be non-Christians, than with the classics proper, or ἀρχαῖοι as he calls them. The careful and somewhat artificial style of this historian, his imitation of Thucydides, and some other things, are well but briefly noted.