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BYZANTINE
bined genuine piety and a strong family feeling, the earliest collection of neo-Greek love songs, known
In an artistic sense the work can certainly not be as the "Rhodian Love-Songs". Besides songs of
compared with either the Greek or the Germanic various sorts and origins, they contain a complete
epics. It lacks their dramatic quality and the romance, told in the form of a play on numbers, a
variety of their characters. It must be compared youth being obliged to compose in honour of the
with the Slavic and Oriental heroic songs, among maiden whom he worships a hundred verses, cor-
which it properly belongs. responding to the numbers one to one hundred, be-
The love-romance of the Greek Middle Ages is fore she returns his love, the result of the fusion of the sophistical Alexandra- Between the days of the French influence in the
Byzantine romance and the medieval French pop- thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and those of
ular romance, on the basis of an Hellenistic view of Italian in the sixteenth and seventeenth, there was
life and nature. This is proved by its three chief a short romantic and popular revival of the ancient
creations, composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth legendary material. It is true that for this revival
centuries: " Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe", "Bel- there was neither much need nor much appreciation,
thandros and Chrysantza ". "Lybistros and Rho- and as a consequence but few of the ancient heroes
damne". While the first and the last of these are and their heroic deeds are adequately treated. The
yet markedly under the influence of the Byzantine best of these works is a romance based on the story
romance, both in
thought and in man-
ner of treatment, the
second begins to
show the aesthetic
and ethical influence
of the Old-French
romance: indeed, its
story often recalls
the Tristan legend.
The style is clearer
and more transpar-
ent, the action more
dramatic, than in
the extant versions
of the Digenis leg-
end. The ethical
idea is the roman-
tic idea of knights
hood — the winning
of the loved one by
valour and daring,
not by blind chance
as in the Byzantine
literary romances.
Along with these
independent adap-
tations of French
material, are direct
translations from
"Flore et Blanche-
fleur, "Pierre et
Maguelonne", and
Others, which have
passeil into the do-
main of universal lit-
erature.
To the period of Frankish cot belongs also the metrical Chronicle of Morea (fourteenth
o f Alexander the
Great, a revised ver-
sion of the Pseudo-
Callisthenes of the
Ptolemaic period,
which is also the
source of the west-
ern versions of the
Alexander romance.
The "Achilleis", on
the other hand,
though written in
the popular verse
a n d not without
taste, is wholly de-
void of antique local
colour, and is rather
a romance of French
chivalry than a his-
tory of Achilles.
Lastly, of two com-
positions on the
Trojan War, one is
wholly crude and
barbarous, the other,
though better, is a
literal translation of
tin old French poem
of Benott de Ste.-
More
To these products of the fourteenth century may be added two of the sixteenth, both de- scribing a descent into the lower world,
evidently popular offshoots of the Timarion and Ma-
zaris already men- tioned. To the
century). It was composed by a Frank brought up in former corresponds the "Apokopos", a satire of
though a foe of the Greeks, and its literary the dead on the living: to the latter, the "Picca-
value is but slight, though its value for the history of tores", a metrical piece decidedly lengthy but rather
civilization is all the greater. Its object was. amid the Unpoetic, while the former has' many poetical pas-
cnnstantly progressing hellenization of the Western sages (e. g. the procession of tin- dead) and be-
conquerors, to remind them of the spirit of their an- trays the influence of Italian literature. In fact
Ci tors. It is Greek, therefore, only in language; in Italian literature impressed its popular character
literary form and spirit it is wholly Frankish. The on the Creek popular poetry of the sixteenth and
author "describes minutely the feudal customs which seventeenth centuries, as French literature had done
had been transplanted to the soil of Greece, ami this in the thirteenth and fourteenth. As a rich popular
perhaps is his chief merit: the deliberations of the poetry sprang up during the last-mentioned period
High ( ourt are given with tin' greatesl accuracy, ami on the islands off the coast of Asia Minor, so now a
he is quite familiar with the practice of feudal law" similar literature developed on the Island of Crete.
(J. Schmitt). As early as the fourteenth century the Its most important creations are the romantic epic
Chronicle was translated into Spanish and in the fif- "Erotokritos" and tin- dramas "Erophile" and
tecnth into French anil Italian. "The Sacrifice of Abraham", with a few minor pic
About the same time and in the same locality, in tures of customs and manners. These works tall
the Mnall islands off the coast of Asia Minor, appeared chronologically outside the limits of Byzantine
