From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Medieval Texts and Their Modern Reception (review)

Variorum compilations are long familiar to medievalists. This volume is notable among them for the effectiveness with which its nineteen articles create a coherent whole, responsive to their assembly between two covers in a given order. The articles illuminate both the issues that have run as leitmotifs through Roderick Beaton's career, and the shifts in his judgments about them. A brief preface lays out with skeletal clarity his reasons for the articles' selection and sequence, and his current opinions on the questions that they raise. His theme is the role of Byzantine literature in the formation of both Byzantine and modern Greek cultural identity; his focus is the secular literature of the twelfth to the sixteenth century, in which modern Greek first became a literary language. He treats the texts both in time, as they ignite response in specific contexts, and through time as they embed themselves in an ongoing cultural heritage.

'The concepts I propose to deal with,' Beaton says in one of the articles, 'are the nexus of nationhood and language, and the establishment of a cultural identity by appeal to the past, or the concept of "tradition"' (XVII, p. 94). The same might be said of this volume. The opening two articles, which span his career, function by their juxtaposition to frame the theme of Greek identity in his work. The first analyzes two vernacular poems by the mid-twelfth-century Ptochoprodromos. They mark the emergence of a Byzantine literature that shares three key features with the contemporary vernaculars of western Europe: the named author who is present in the text; vernacular language; and fictionality. At much this same twelfth-century date, Byzantines first began to refer to themselves as 'Hellenes.' This convergence of a Greek vernacular with a Greek identifier has been seen to signal the shift of the 'empire of the Romans' to a nascent, Greek-speaking national state, incubated under the pressure of western European and Seljuk expansion. The second article, composed a full twenty years later, stands back to evaluate this equation. It compares the developments that led Greek-speakers in the twelfth century on the one hand, and in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other, to replace the identifier 'Romaios' with 'Hellene.' No direct line connects the two, Beaton concludes, and the word 'Hellene' evoked very different terms of identity in the two, referring to language and ethnicity on the one hand, citizenship of a nation-state on the other. But both had of necessity to operate within the secular realm, and both drew upon the same cultural process, reinterpreting and reconstructing the past to address the present anew.

The task of identifying the constituent components of such an available past, and of exposing the processes by which they were remade, is taken up in the ensuing three sections of the book. These treat first epic, then satire, and finally romance—what Beaton prefers to call the verse novel.

The five articles on Byzantium's great epic, Digenes Akrites, focus on orality. Two extract evidence from surviving—and so necessarily learned—literature of the existence of an oral Byzantine balladry, and oral balladry on epic themes then serves as a basis for the arguments of the ensuing three. Two of these probe the evolution of Digenes Akrites before its inscription as a written text. Crucial here is the differentiation of Akrites, hero of oral ballads about the Byzantine frontier, from Digenes, the hero of two races, the deliberately crafted invention of a learned poet, who fused the two heroes in a narrative that was more truly romance than epic, and that continued to evolve long after its initial inscription in what must have been the early twelfth century. The final article in this section turns to the modern Greek context, to probe the relation of the vibrant modern Greek tradition of akritic songs to the postulated oral ballads of Byzantium. The...