ancient legends and throw light on the allusions to them in classical literature.
By the end of the ninth century, it is probably true to say that the Irish stimulus had worked itself out. Had a steady supply of Greek texts been available, one cannot doubt that men would have been found to make use of them, but, it must be repeated, no new material was coming in. Byzantium despised the West and did not care to enlighten it. The Greek monasteries of Southern Italy seem never to have attracted any attention in the north. The chief scholar at Rome, Anastasius Bibliothecarius, died in 897 and left no successor. Something more needs to be said of what he had accomplished. Nearly all his translations, which are not few, were made at the request of friends or of the Pope. He revised John's Dionysius and provided it with scholia rendered from Greek. He put into Latin the Acts of two Councils, that of 787 and that in which Photius was deposed and Ignatius restored to the patriarchate. For John the Deacon, who was designing a large Church history, he translated the Chronography of Nicephorus and copied extracts from the chronicles of George the Syncellus and of Theophanes, the three together forming what was known as the Chronographia tripartita, not to be confused with the Historia tripartita that was made for Cassiodorus. It is an imposing list, and there is more than this to his credit.
The excursions made into Greek literature in the tenth century are almost negligible. In the middle of it Leo of Naples produced a version of an Alexander-romance for Duke John of Naples from a manuscript he had brought from Constantinople. It marks a stage in the spread of that most influential romance. Later on we encounter another type of Greek scholar, the man thoroughly familiar with the spoken language, in Liudprand of Cremona, diplomat and historian.
It is not pretended that what has been said here of the study and influence of Greek in these centuries is a complete survey. The gaps will be obvious to experts. The province of liturgy, for instance, has not been touched, and there is much in early tropers and other service books which goes to shew that forms were borrowed from the Byzantines. That the litanies of the Saints first appeared in Greek, transmitted from Rome late in the seventh century to England by a Greek-speaking Pope, is a proposition recently maintained by that great scholar Edmund Bishop. Hagiography, again, would easily fill a chapter of its own. We do not yet know all that was done by eastern monks, driven westward by the Iconoclastic troubles, in the way of translation of Acts of Saints, or more generally in the diffusion of their language. Further – a small matter, this, perhaps – it would be worth while to collect the instances in which western scribes have employed the Greek alphabet for their titles and colophons; it is mainly a piece of harmless parade, but is not wholly insignificant. Irishmen, Bretons, and Spaniards were
