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536 GREEK LITERATURE.

CHAPTER Llf.

SEVENTH OR BYZANTINE PERIOD. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.1

I. the translation of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople was the beginning of a new order of things. Christianity, viewed at first with indifference by a people who professed the greatest toleration, but who confounded it with the Jewish worshipr the object of their contempt; persecuted and tolerated in turn by successive emperors; and finally raised to the throne in the person of Constantine, had now become the dominant religion of the state. Its influence on all the branches of liter­ature and science gave a new form to most of themy while it produced others entirely new, particularly those connected with theological specu­lation, into which the nature of our subject, however, does not permit us to enter.

II. Apart from the zealous labors of the Christian writers in their new field of inquiry, literature was now rapidly on the decline, although sev­eral of the cities in which it had hitherto flourished still retained, for a time, a portion of their former celebrity. Athens, for instance, still pos­sessed philosophers, who explained in their public lectures the writings of Plato and Aristotle, until the edict of Justinian closed their schools, and drove them into the East. This same city had also its schools of gram­marians and rhetoricians. Constantinople had similar establishments for the culture of the liberal arts, and also for jurisprudence ; Alexandrea had again become the abode of'the sciences ; and Berytus flourished with its school of law; but the true spirit of literature had departed, and the fall of the Eastern empire buried the whole fabric in its ruins.2

III. At what time the ancient Greek may be said to have ceased as a living language, and the modern or Romaic tongue to have taken its place, is difficult to determine. It may be dated, perhaps, from the sev­enth and eighth centuries of our era, as far as Greece itself was concern­ed, when the country was permanently occupied by Sclavonic settlers. The extent of the transformation which ensued is most clearly proved by the number of new names which succeeded to those of the ancient geography. But it is also described by historians in terms which have suggested to many the belief that the native population was utterly swept away, and that the modern Greeks are the descendants of barbarous tribes, which subsequently became subject to the empire, and received the language and religion which they have since retained from Byzantine missionaries and Anatolian colonists. The expression of Constantine Porphyrogenitus3 is worthy of notice, when he says €(rd\ap(60r] irao-a rj

1 Scholl, Hist. Lit. Gr., vol. vi., p. 1, seqq, 2 Id. ib. 3 De Them., iL, 6. Compare Thirlwall, Hist. Grn vol. viii., p. 471, note.