610. flowed with a natural impetuosity into fresh A.D. channels of disputation and enquiry.* The principal writers of the age were of course those addicted to theology, the subject of popular interest; but even here their works evince a sad decline from the standard of the early champions of the Church, and "a turgid eloquence, and an affected pomp and splendour of style, which cast a perplexing obscurity over subjects in themselves clear and perspicuous," was the highest point of perfection to which both prose writers and poets aspired.† History was almost totally neglected, and the feeble name of Symocatta § alone, who lived about A. D. 629, attracts attention from its solitary position on the barren page of the period. Independently of some productions of lighter literature, and an absurd treatise on natural history, he composed an account of the empire from the death of Tiberius II. (A. D. 582) to the murder of Maurice and his children by the tyrant Phocas. It is divided into five books, and though in general weak and pedantic, it occasionally contains passages of eloquence and power. * Berington, p. 540. + Mosheim, Cent. VII. p. i. c. ii. Gibbon, c. xlviii. Berington, app. i. p. 541. Schoell, 1. vi. c. lxxvii. c. lxxxvi. c. xcvi. Berington, app. i. p. 540. Boeclerus, sec. P. C. vii. p. 85. Harles, sec. v. p. 536. Fabricius, 1. v. c. v. 5. A.D. 610. The monothelite controversy began almost at the same moment when hosts of the Arabs were hovering on the borders of the empire, and commencing that series of expeditions, by which, ere twenty years of the Hegira had elapsed, they possessed themselves, amongst other conquests, of two of the fairest provinces A.D. of the empire, Syria and Egypt. It was du 640. ring these excursions, that the schools of Edesa and Antioch, of Bairout* and Alexandria, were destroyed, and Grecian literature fled before the steps of the victorious Saracens ;t and it was then, likewise, that the remnants of the Alexandrian library disappeared. The loss sus The school of Berytus, or Bairout, was celebrated for its proficiency in jurisprudence, and during the reign of Justinian furnished the most able lawyers of Byzantium. "Les Musulmans, bien loin de détruire les établissemens qu'ils y trouvèrent, en fondèrent de nouveaux; mais ces institutions furent dès-lors perdues pour la littérature Grecque."-Schoell, 1. vi. c. lxxi. It is almost needless to repeat the well-known reply of Omar, when questioned by Amrou, at the solicitation of John the Grammarian, as to how he was to dispose of the literary treasures of Alexandria, after its conquest in 640,-" that they should be destroyed, since, if consonant with the Koran, they were useless, and if opposed to it, pernicious;" or the fable of their having supplied fuel for six months to the four thousand Baths of the city. The tale owes its popularity to Gregory Bar Hebræus, or Abulfaragius, who inserted it in his Arabic translation of his Syriac Chronicle; but its author 640. tained by the literary world in the destruction A.D. of the latter, has been, no doubt, infinitely exaggerated; but a matter of more serious consequence to the interests of learning, arising from the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs, was the suspension of the manufacture of paper from papyrus, which ensued: parchment, a more expensive material, was now adopted generally by the copyists of books, whose value was increased in proportion to their consequent rarity. In this emergency, the erasure of ancient and valuable manuscripts was introduced by the impoverished and ignorant monks, and some of the brightest productions of former ages disappeared in their palimpsests, in order to make room for the ravings of theologians, or the annals of ecclesiastical warfare.† was Abdollatif, an Arabian writer of the thirteenth century, but anterior to Abulfaragius. Being mentioned by no Christian authorities, as well as involving a manifest falsehood in. its details, since the number of books after so many conflagrations, and their dispersion scarcely a century before by Theophilus, (Gib. c. xxviii.) could not possibly equal the report of Abdollatif, the veracity of the story may be justly questioned; but there is no doubt as to the fact of the dispersion of the library, small and valuable as it must have been, about the period mentioned. * Gibbon, c. li. The Arabs, however, made ample restitution for this. A.D. 640. A.D. 717. The quick succession of these revolutions, and the commotions at Constantinople at the close of the seventh century, amply account for the blank which appears during this era in the annals of literature; nor were the events of the succeeding age more favourable to intellectual advancement. The eighth century is, in fact, the blackest in the history of the Eastern empire. During a brief portion of its commencement, the exhausted virulence of polemical disputation seemed verging towards extinction, when all at once a fresh crater burst into vigorous action in the celebrated ikonoclastic commotions, which rendered the literary history of nearly two centuries almost an absolute blank, "whilst a savage ignorance and contempt for letters disgraced the princes of the Heraclean and Isaurian dynasties." The early injury, by introducing into Spain the manufacture of 717. remnant of talent surviving to the nation was A.D. devoted exclusively to the furtherance of the all-absorbing contest; and "frigid homilies, insipid narrations of the exploits of pretended saints, vain and subtle disputes about unessential and trivial subjects, vehement and bombastic declamations for or against the worship and erection of images," composed the circle of literature in this degenerate and miserable age. The fury of the disputants, equally levelled against art and learning, annihilated with an unsparing hand the monuments of both; and Leo the Isaurian has been accused of destroying, in his pious frenzy, the Royal College, or Octagon, of Constantinople, where the cultivators of letters had found a refuge on their expulsion from Syria and Egypt by the Saracens. The library attached to this institution had formerly suffered by conflagration in the short reign of Basiliscus,† when the celebrated manuscript of the Iliad and Odyssey, transcribed on the entrails of a serpent one hundred and twenty feet in length, was destroyed. At the period when it was assailed by the Ikonoclasts, it was still said to contain upwards of 20,000 volumes, which were under the guardianship of * Hallam, Hist. Mid. Ages, vol. ii. c. ix. p. 618. Gibbon, c. liii. Mosheim, Cent. VIII. p. i. c. 2. ↑ A. D. 679. |