Cyril and Homer

I mentioned earlier that Constantine (Cyril) is said to have studied Homer during his years as a student in Constantinople (the 840s).  I want to take some time to talk about what reading the Iliad in Byzantium might have been like.

In the 9th century Pagan slavs were settled throughout much of the Greek countryside, as far as the Peloponnesus.  Greek speakers were largely confined to cities and church property.  The real core of the Byzantine state was not Greece itself, but Thrace and Western Anatolia - the regions that had sided with Troy in the Trojan war.  The Emperor Michael III (reigned 842-867) was of Phrygian ancestry on his father's side, and Paphlagonian and Armenian on his mother's.  Even if the peoples of the empire largely spoke Greek as common language, it is doubtful that they identified with Homer's Achaean protagonists.

We know from quotations attributed to him during his mission to the Khazars that Constantine the Philosopher did not consider the Byzantine state's legitimacy to be based on its Hellenic or Roman heritage, but on Christianity.  In his time and place, the Trojan War would have been seen as an unjust war between different heathens, certainly not worth fighting over an unfaithful wife.  Someone as educated as Constantine would see the destruction of Troy as a great loss to civilization.  While hard evidence is scanty, I think it is important to consider what the Troy mythos meant to Constantine the Philospher, and whether it helped shape his attitude toward "barbarian" peoples.  

The Christian scholars of Constantine's time rejected the pagan greeks' morality, but embraced their great ancient thinkers.  The Illiad would have given a glimpse of the lost splendor of the ancient "Trojan world" - Western Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Black Sea coast - places he and his brother became well acquainted with in their travels.  The Trojan culture must have had great thinkers like their rivals the Greeks (in fact, even centuries later, Western Anatolian influence on the emergence of classical Athenian thought is well documented).  Constantine would likely have taken an interest in tracing contemporary peoples back to Troy and its allies.  If this was his take on the Illiad, it would explain the great intellectual effort he put into to the study of "barbarian" cultures while he was working to convert them.  But really all the hagiography tells us is that he read Homer.

All this brings me to the topic of my problem with calling the Byzantines a "Greek" Empire.  It is like calling America an "Anglo-Saxon Nation" because English is the common language.  Even those ethnic greeks from the Hellenic Theme in the middle ages would decline to call themselves Hellenes, associating the term with paganism.  The Byzantines were a diverse group including representatives of ancient Balkan and Near Eastern nations (Thracian, Phrygians, Armenians, Lydians, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian and Judeo-Christians), the remnants of Latin speaking populations (Vlachs), as well as newcomers (the Turkic peoples, Slavs, even some Kurdish and Persian refugees from the Muslim conquest).  They called their state Roman and their language Greek, but their culture is hardly what we think of as "Greco-Roman" in the west.  Hellenism as a cultural attitude still existed in some parts of Byzantine society, but it was not the dominant idiom.  Theophylakt Ohridski, a Bulgarian writer of the generation of Cyril and Methodius' students, writes in the early 10th century; 

"Many think that our age is in some respects a step back from antiquity's miracles and the lives of men who, though dwelling in the flesh, lived almost entirely in the spirit."

This is a medieval conception of the dark age/golden age distinction.  But for him (and likely many contemporaries), the golden age of years past was not the age of Athens, Alexander, and the Roman Republic, but the Apostolic and Patristic age, which saw the spread of Christianity and reform of the decadent pagan world of the mediterranean, culminating with the establishment of Christianity as a state religion in the 4th century.  This was the period in which the great theological writings which would shape the debate over orthodoxy were produced.  Cyril and Methodius are both named after saints of this period, as was their contemporary patriarch Ignatios.  The Cappadocian Fathers, of whom Gregory of Nazianzus was a favorite of Cyril, make up a particularly influential group based in Asia Minor.  Other important church fathers were from Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt.  Plato and Aristotle were read and well regarded,  but the Christians did not want a return to the society and values of that age.  The pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture did not have the same romantic associations for them that it has had for Westerners since the Rennaissance.  

Byzantine Christians were familiar with writers who had articulately opposed the emperor worship, mysticism, and sexual perversion which pervaded religious practices in late Pagan times.  Even the Fall of Rome was not really seen as the beginning of a dark age for the Byzantines - the Goths were defeated under the Emperor Justinian and their Heretical sect, the Arian Christians, was crushed.  Even the long and costly war with Persia in the early 7th century ended with a victory for the Byzantines.  The advance of Christianity continued even as the western Roman empire gave way to feudalism.  Only a major disaster for Christianity could bring about the dark age that Theophylact Ohridski alludes to.  And this is just what happened in the 7th and 8th centuries.  Islam and Iconoclasm, not Visigoths and Vandals, made the Byzantine dark ages dark.

Also, as a librarian, Cyril knew what the sacking of a city could do to the cause of learning.  It had happened 2 centuries before his own time, at Alexandria, where the Muslims destroyed or captured the best written works of antiquity.  He might have imagined the Greeks looting the libraries and temples of Troy in the same way, cutting short the study of sciences that would not be known again for centuries.  Astronomy was one science which was well developed in the east before it reached Greece.  The Trojans would have been a perfect link between pre-Zoroastrian Persia, and classical Greece.  Astronomy was the most advanced theoretical knowledge the barbarians of Cyril's time possessed.  As he studied their symbols along with their traditions and religion, the memory of reading the Iliad must have been with him.  Could it be that their beliefs were not just local superstition, but relics of a great civilization's science?

 This is getting a little off subject, so I'm going to read the Illiad (for the first time since 9th grade) and see what I can find.