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Literacy in the Byzantine World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Robert Browning
Robert Browning*
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Extract

The historian Nicephorus Gregoras, writing of the Patriarch Athanasios I, dismisses him scathingly as . Yet we know that Athanasius, who came from the countryside near Adrianople, was reading the Lives of Saints before the age of twelve. And his surviving writings—homilies, encyclicals, canonical decisions, letters, etc.—fill the 204 folios of codex Vaticanus graecus 2219. Most of these writings still await publication. But the recent edition by Mrs. Alice-Mary Talbot of 115 of Athanasios’ letters shows that he wrote fluent literary Koine Greek, without the archaizing affectations of Byzantine Atticism and with occasional voluntary or involuntary lapses into the spoken language of his time. He was no stylist: for him it was the matter, not the manner, that counted. He had little acquaintance with classical Greek literature. But in addition to the Scriptures, which he constantly quotes, he was familiar with the more widely read works of the fourth-century fathers, knew the basic texts of civil and canon law, and could quote the Epanagoge. Clearly he was no illiterate, but a professional user of the written word.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 4: Essays Presented to Sir Steven Runciman , 1978 , pp. 39 - 54
Copyright
Copyright ©The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1978

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