Republished from talesoftimesforgotten.com
Written by Spencer Alexander McDaniel on 21/1/2020
There is a widespread belief among members of the general public that ancient Greek texts were mostly only preserved by the Arabs through Arabic translations. The Byzantine Empire is rarely mentioned in the context of the preservation of classical texts. When the Byzantines are mentioned in this context, it is usually by writers who see them as ignorant fundamentalist Christian obscurantists.
Contrary to what popular culture would lead you to believe, however, the Byzantine Empire did retain Greco-Roman knowledge. In fact, the vast majority of ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present day are primarily known from Greek manuscripts that were either copied in the Byzantine Empire or copied from texts that were copied in the Byzantine Empire.
The idea that the majority of ancient Greek texts have only been preserved because they were translated by Arabic scholars is largely a misconception. There are a few lesser-known classical Greek texts that have been preserved only through Arabic translations, but the vast majority of the really famous texts that people still study today have actually been preserved in the original Greek.
The widespread ignorance of the Byzantines’ role in the preservation of classical Greek and Roman texts is just one small part of a centuries-old, systematic effort by westerners to marginalize the Byzantine Empire and minimize its importance in European history.
The “Spaceship Earth” version
First, before I debunk anything, let’s review the misconception that I will be debunking. I think that the version of history that is probably most familiar to the most people in the United States is some version similar to the one that is told by the narrator on the ride “Spaceship Earth” at EPCOT in Walt Disney World. The narrator for the ride talks all about how the ancient Greeks and Romans invented wonderful things and built spectacular engineering marvels. Then the narrator says this:
“But then we hit a roadblock. Rome falls and the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt is burned. Much of our learning is destroyed forever—or so we think. It turns out there are copies of some of these books in the libraries of the Middle East being watched over by Arab and Jewish scholars. Call it the first backup system. The books are saved and, with them, our dreams of the future.”
This is a fabulous distortion of the real history. Indeed, it is really more of an alternative history than a real history. Nonetheless, this same basic narrative of classical texts being preserved almost exclusively by Arabic scholars through Arabic translations occurs throughout modern popular culture.
For instance, the 2007 History Channel documentary The Dark Ages is not quite as wildly inaccurate as Spaceship Earth. Nonetheless, it still leaves the viewer with a similar impression that Greek and Roman knowledge was completely (or at least almost completely) lost in Europe and that this knowledge was preserved solely by the Arabs. The documentary describes the western European Crusaders as bringing back all the lost knowledge of the Greeks and Romans from the Arabs after the Crusades.
The basic notion that most ancient Greek texts have only been preserved through Arabic translations is not just found in popular culture; it has even managed to worm its way into college textbooks written by specialist scholars. One of the most widely used textbooks for introductory undergraduate courses on ancient Greece in the United States is the book Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History by Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan, Roberts, Tandy, and Tsouvala, published by Oxford University Press. For the most part, it is an excellent textbook, but, on page 533 of the fourth edition, it declares:
“Aristotle’s Poetics and Hippocrates’ medical texts, for example, were translated directly from Greek to Arabic, while Greek philosophy and science put its mark on Arab thinkers and astronomers during the Middle Ages in the schools and libraries of Baghdad. Although the monasteries of Byzantium and Western Europe were instrumental in the preservation of Greco-Roman thought, many Greek texts survived only in Arabic translations and through those were passed on to the Latin West.”
Most of what the passage says here explicitly is correct. Nonetheless, the way the passage is worded makes it sound as though the majority of ancient Greek texts are only known from Arabic translations and the Byzantines only played a role in preserving a handful of certain texts. The part where the textbook says “many Greek texts survived only in Arabic translations” should really say something more like “a few Greek texts survived only in Arabic translations.”
For even more examples of how the idea of Greek texts being preserved exclusively by the Arabs permeates modern culture, you can see this excellent article written by New Zealand classical scholar Peter Gainsford on his blog Kiwi Hellenist.
Now that we’ve reviewed the misconception, let’s move on to debunk it.
ABOVE: Front cover of the book Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. It is mostly a good textbook, but, due to poor choice of wording, it inadvertently perpetuates the widespread misconception that most classical Greek texts have only survived through Arabic translations.
Misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria related to this misconception
The Spaceship Earth ride talks about the Library of Alexandria in connection to the preservation of Greek texts. Therefore, it is worth addressing here a few of the major misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria that are relevant. I wrote a whole article debunking popular misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria back in July 2019. I highly recommend reading that article if you want to learn the details. Nonetheless, I will summarize the main points of that article here.
It is important to establish that, first of all, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is probably the one event in the history of the human race that occupies the single most absurdly disproportionately large position in popular culture relative to its actual importance. It is telling that even the narrator of the EPCOT ride realizes that this event was not nearly as catastrophic as it is often made out to be.
In historical reality, there really was no single event that “destroyed” the Library of Alexandria all at once. It actually suffered a long, gradual decline with many and various setbacks along the way. Ultimately, what really led to the Library of Alexandria coming to an end was mostly a lack of funding and patronage.
The event that most people are probably thinking of when they think of the “destruction of the Library of Alexandria” is the burning of a portion of the Library’s collection in 48 BC when the city of Alexandria was under siege by Julius Caesar. During the siege, Julius Caesar’s men accidentally set fire to the docks of Alexandria and the fire spread throughout the city, destroying a portion of the Library’s collection. What actually happened, though, probably differs quite a bit from the narrative most people are told.
ABOVE: Imaginative modern illustration showing how the artist imagined the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC might have looked
First of all, the Library itself probably was not completely destroyed. What was actually destroyed, according to some ancient writers such as the Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD), was a warehouse the Library was using to keep scrolls. We know for certain that the Library either survived the fire in some form or at least quickly managed to reopen, since the Greek geographer Strabon of Amaseia (lived c. 64 BC – c. 24 AD) gives a description of a visit he made to the Mouseion, the larger institution of which the Library of Alexandria was a part, in around 20 BC—only around twenty-eight years after the famous fire.
The Library of Alexandria actually continued to exist for several centuries after Caesar’s fire. It never received the kind of funding and support that it had received under the rule of the early Ptolemies, though, and, over time, its collection and its importance gradually dwindled. We do not know exactly when the Library of Alexandria came to an end, but we can be sure that, if it still existed in 272 AD, it would have been destroyed in that year when the forces of the emperor Aurelian utterly leveled the entire Brouchion quarter of Alexandria in which the Library was located. By that time, though, the Library would have been barely even a shadow of its former glory.
Second of all, the Library of Alexandria was only one of dozens of libraries that existed throughout the Mediterranean. Almost every major city in the Mediterranean world had a library of some kind. Some of these libraries, such as the Library of Pergamon, actually rivalled the Library of Alexandria’s collection. The vast majority of all the texts that were held in the Library of Alexandria were held in dozens of other libraries as well and any texts that were only held in the Library of Alexandria were probably doomed to destruction anyways because they were not being copied.
The real reason why so many texts from ancient Greece have been lost is not because one library burned down, but rather because many texts simply were not copied. In the ancient world, you did not have to burn texts to destroy them forever; all you had to do was not copy them and, eventually, all the manuscripts of those texts would break down and they would be lost forever.
Third of all, there was probably no major scientific knowledge that was lost with the Library of Alexandria because the Library of Alexandria contained primarily Greek literary texts. The writings it contained were things like Greek comedies and tragedies, epic poems, lyric poems, scholarly commentaries on various works of literature, and so forth. Most scientific information at the time was not held in libraries, but rather by tradesmen, who normally did not write such information down.
It is also very strange that, in popular culture, including in Spaceship Earth, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is often associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, since the fire of Alexandria started by Julius Caesar’s men during the Siege of Alexandria in 48 BC actually took place in the time of the Roman Republic—before the Roman Empire was even established.
There is very little good reason why the fire of Alexandria in 48 BC that destroyed a portion of the Library of Alexandria’s collection and the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD should even be mentioned in the same sentence, since these events happened literally centuries apart.
ABOVE: Nineteenth-century fictional illustration by the German artist O. Van Corven depicting how he imagined the Library of Alexandria might have looked in its heyday
The continued copying of classical texts in Europe
It is often represented that Arab and Jewish scholars in the Middle East were primarily responsible for the preservation of ancient Greek texts after the collapse of the western Roman Empire. This is not accurate, however. For one thing, the Golden Age of Islamic scholarship actually began in around the eighth century AD.
That means the Islamic Golden Age actually came around eight centuries after the famous fire of Alexandria in 48 BC and around three centuries after the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. Clearly, then, someone else was copying Greek and Roman texts during the time that passed between the collapse of the western Roman Empire and the rise of the Islamic Golden Age; otherwise we would no doubt have very few Greek and Roman texts.
The real reason why so many texts have survived despite the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is because those texts were preserved in other libraries throughout the entire Mediterranean world. Certainly, some of those libraries were in parts of the Mediterranean world that we today would consider part of the “Middle East,” but not all of them. (It is worth noting that, today, Egypt is more often than not considered part of the “Middle East.”)
Meanwhile, the reason why so many texts survived after the collapse of the western Roman Empire is because those texts continued to be copied in the lands where the languages they were written in were still spoken (or at least read). Thus, classical texts written in Latin were mainly preserved in western Europe and western North Africa, while classical texts written in Greek were mainly preserved in the realms of the predominately Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire.
Indeed, it is actually the Byzantine Empire that is most directly responsible for the vast bulk of surviving ancient Greek texts. Unfortunately, the Byzantine Empire is rarely even mentioned in discussion of the preservation of ancient Greek texts—most likely because the Byzantines have been wrongly stereotyped for centuries as backwards easterners who sat around making obscurantist theological arguments and had no interest in studying classical Greek texts.
This stereotype could not be any further from the truth. Yes, the Byzantines produced a lot of theological arguments that we today would probably consider rather silly, but there is no world in which you could accurately claim that they had no interest in preserving and studying classical Greek texts.
Likewise, it is important to emphasize that, although knowledge of the Greek language mostly disappeared in western Europe after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, knowledge of Latin remained. Latin texts continued to be copied and studied in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and it is mainly thanks to medieval western European scribes that we still have ancient Roman texts written in Latin.
ABOVE: Mid-tenth century Byzantine manuscript illustration of Matthew the Apostle with Byzantine-era scribal equipment
Texts that really have only survived through Arabic translations
It is certainly true that a large number of ancient Greek texts were indeed translated into Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages during the Islamic Golden Age. It is also true that there are a few ancient Greek texts that have only survived through Arabic translations. These texts are mostly works that were less popular and less influential. Very few of them are considered to be especially important.
For instance, the last four books of Hypatia of Alexandria’s commentary on Diophantos’s Arithmetika have only survived through an Arabic translation and the rest of her commentary has been lost. This is not especially surprising, considering that, as I discuss in this article about Hypatia I wrote in August 2018, she is mostly famous today because the story of her death was heavily embellished and mythologized by later writers and not so much on account of the long-term impact of her scholarship.
Hypatia had a lot of influence during her lifetime over some very powerful and important people, including the Roman prefect of Egypt, and the sources contemporary to her life unanimously agree that she was extremely brilliant. As far as we can tell from the surviving texts, though, she does not really seem to have produced any especially groundbreaking original mathematical ideas. Her commentary on the Arithmetika was written to aid her students in learning about mathematics. Consequently, the mathematical teachings presented in it are extremely basic.
The vast majority of the texts we have today that are still widely studied have been primarily preserved in the original Greek through manuscripts that were either copied by the Byzantines themselves or copied from manuscripts that were copied by the Byzantines. All the major surviving works of classical Greek drama, classical Greek epic, and classical Greek philosophy have survived to the present day primarily through Greek manuscripts, especially manuscripts derived from the Byzantine scribal tradition.
ABOVE: Manuscript illustration from 1237 depicting scholars at an Abbasid library
Just “being watched over”?
It is also rather disturbing how the Arab scholars are usually portrayed as simply acting as custodians of classical Greek and Roman texts rather than actively studying them and writing about them. For instance, in Spaceship Earth, the narrator describes the Greek and Roman texts as “being watched over by Arab and Jewish scholars.”
This wording makes it sound almost as though the Arab and Jewish scholars were keeping these texts locked away in secret storehouses where no one was allowed to read them. It makes it sound as though they were merely preserving the books with express purpose so that superior Europeans would eventually be able to come along and read them.
In reality, they were not just temporarily “watching over” these texts as Spaceship Earth would have you believe; instead, they were actively studying them, analyzing them, engaging with them, making arguments based on them, and expanding on the ideas found in them. The portrayal of medieval Middle Eastern scholars as merely watchful custodians of classical texts is deeply rooted in Eurocentrism and old colonialist ideas.
In other words, the popular narrative that Greek texts have mostly only come down to us through Arabic translations is demeaning towards both the Byzantines and the Arabs; the Byzantines have been completely edited out of the narrative even though they arguably played the biggest role of all in the preservation of ancient Greek texts and the Arabs’ role has, ironically, been minimized in a different way—by portraying them as merely temporary custodians of the classical tradition rather than participants actively engaging with it.
ABOVE: Photograph of the “Arab and Jewish scholars” from Spaceship Earth
How the Byzantines have shaped the ancient Greek texts that have survived
The Byzantines have traditionally been portrayed by western historians as indifferent or even hostile to the classical tradition, but, as any scholar of the Byzantine Empire will tell you, this was far from the case. Byzantine intellectuals were, in fact, deeply engaged with classical Greek writings. The vast majority of ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present day have survived because they were preserved and studied by the Byzantines.
Because the Byzantines played such an utterly pivotal role in preserving ancient Greek writings, they have irreversibly helped shape the modern canon of classical Greek literature. In chapter three of his book Byzantium Unbound, published by ARC Humanities Press in 2019, the Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis offers an impassioned defense of why classicists should study the Byzantines. One of the main points he presents is that nearly all the ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present have survived specifically because they appealed to Byzantine tastes and interests.
For instance, the reason why so many texts written in the Attic dialect by authors who lived in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC have been preserved for us and so many texts written by authors from other parts of the ancient Greek world have not is because the Byzantines were deeply interested in classical Athens and they regarded the Attic dialect as the best and the most readable of all ancient Greek dialects.
Thus, the Byzantines chose to copy reams worth of Athenian tragedies, Athenian comedies, works by Athenian historians, speeches by Athenian orators, and so forth. Meanwhile, because works written in non-Attic dialects were generally seen as less readable or even less interesting, far fewer of them have survived. This is the reason why, for instance, we have the complete texts of Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War and Xenophon’s Hellenika, but only fragments of Hekataios of Miletos’s Genealogies.
ABOVE: Roman marble bust of the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes, whose speeches have been preserved in the original Ancient Greek mainly because the Byzantines were especially interested in Attic oratory
I have written about this phenomenon before, most notably in my article about Sappho from December 2019. Many authors have claimed that Sappho’s poems were deliberately destroyed in the Middle Ages by fundamentalist Christians who were disgusted by her frank treatment of sexuality, but this story is actually a canard that was made up by western European scholars during the Renaissance. For reasons I discuss in the article, it is highly unlikely that Sappho’s poems were deliberately destroyed out of prudishness.
In reality, the main reason why most of Sappho’s poems have been lost is probably because Sappho wrote in the Aeolic dialect, which Roman and Byzantine readers regarded as obscure, archaic, and hard to read. Many of the poems of Sappho that have survived have been preserved through quotation in works of philosophy and rhetoric that the Byzantines did choose to copy. For instance, Sappho’s only complete poem, the “Ode to Aphrodite” is preserved through quotation in the treatise On Composition, written by the Greek historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – after c. 7 BC).
Works written in the Attic dialect weren’t the only works Byzantine scholars were interested in, though; they were also deeply fascinated with the Homeric poems, which are not written in the Attic dialect. Thus, largely because of the Byzantine’s intense interest in them, not only have the Iliad and the Odyssey been preserved for us in their entirety in the original Ancient Greek, but so have extensive commentaries on them, including commentaries written both by ancient Greek scholars and by Byzantine scholars.
The level of interest that Byzantine scholars had in the Homeric epic is demonstrated by the example of Eustathios of Thessaloniki (lived c. 1115 – c. 1195 AD), who was an archbishop of the city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. Eustathios wrote exhaustive commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, which draw extensively on the works of earlier commentators. His commentaries on the Homeric poems have survived to the present day in their entirety.
ABOVE: Detail of an icon of Eustathios of Thessaloniki dating to c. 1312 from the Vatopedi Monastery at Mount Athos. Eustathios wrote exhaustive commentaries on the Homeric poems, which have survived to the present day.
Byzantine scholars were also deeply interested in Platonic philosophy, which is the main reason why all the dialogues of Plato, a number of pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Plato, many of the writings of Aristotle (who was Plato’s student), and the writings of many later Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophers have been all preserved in the original Ancient Greek. These are writings that Byzantine scholars studied and often interpreted through a Christian lens.
Meanwhile, in western Europe, the only work by Plato that was preserved during the Middle Ages prior to the reintroduction of Plato from the Greek-speaking east was a portion of Calcidus’s Latin translation of Plato’s Timaios. In other words, we are almost totally indebted to the Byzantines for the fact that any of Plato’s dialogues have survived at all.
It may come as a surprise to some people that the Byzantines were also interested in medical, mathematical, and scientific writings. This is the reason why the sixty some treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, most of the medical writings of the Greek doctors Galenos of Pergamon, Pedanios Dioskorides, and Soranos of Ephesos, and most of the mathematical writings of the Greek mathematicians Eukleides of Alexandria, Archimedes of Syracuse, Apollonios of Perga, and Klaudios Ptolemaios have been preserved to the present day in the original Ancient Greek.
Many New Atheist writers like to complain about how, in 1229 AD, the pages from a codex containing many writings of Archimedes—including two treatises that are otherwise only preserved in Arabic translations and one treatise that is only preserved through that particular codex—were unbound, incompletely erased, and used to make a Christian prayer book known as the “Archimedes Palimpsest.”
In this article from November 2019, however, I point out a fact that these writers often overlook, which is that the original codex that was used to make the Archimedes Palimpsest was copied by Byzantine Christian scribes in Constantinople in the middle of the tenth century AD, during the so-called “Makedonian Renaissance,” a period of Byzantine history during which the study of science and mathematics especially flourished. If it weren’t for the Byzantines, that codex would never have existed at all.
ABOVE: Photograph of a page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, showing Archimedes’s text written underneath the text of the prayer book
The Byzantines have also irreversibly shaped which sources we have available to us for the study of ancient Roman history as well as Greek history. The reason why we have so many ancient accounts of the history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Principate written in Greek is because the Byzantines saw themselves as Romans and Byzantine intellectuals were interested in studying accounts of the early history of their nation in their own language.
Thus, Byzantine scribes copied the writings of Greek authors such as Polybios of Megalopolis, Dionysios of Halikarnassos, Appianos of Alexandria, Ploutarchos of Chaironeia, Herodianos of Antioch, and Kassios Dion, who all wrote about the history of the Roman Empire in Greek. Many of the writings of these authors that were copied by the Byzantines are among our most important sources for ancient Roman history.
By now, I think I’ve made my point. The Byzantine selection of which classical Greek texts to copy has greatly impacted which texts we have available to us to study in the twenty-first century. For more information, you can read the chapter in Kaldellis’s book, which covers many of the same points I cover here, but also delves into some other issues.
ABOVE: The Greek historian Polybios of Megalopolis, shown here in a carving from the Stele of Kleitor, is one of our major sources for early Roman history. His writings were preserved mainly because the Byzantines wanted to read about their own early history in their own language.
The return of Greek texts to western Europe from the Byzantines
While a lot of emphasis in popular culture tends to be placed on the role of the study of Greeks texts returning to western Europe from the Arabic-speaking world, less emphasis seems to be placed on the more important role of Greek texts returning to western Europe from the Byzantine Empire.
Especially after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, there was an massive outpouring of Greek scholars who fled to western Europe, especially Italy, bringing Greek texts and knowledge of the Greek language with them. These scholars included people like Vasilios Vessarion (lived 1403 – 1472), Ioannis Argyropoulos (lived c. 1415 – 1487), and Dimitrios Chalkokondylis (lived 1423 – 1511).
It was partly as a result of the influx of Greek scholars from the east that the study of the Greek language returned to western Europe in the late fifteenth century. The Greek scholars introduced the Greek texts of works that had not been studied in the west in the original Greek in centuries. Greek scholars, then, actually played an incredibly vital role in the reintroduction of the study of classical Greek texts and the Greek language to western Europe.
Dimitrios Chalkokondylis published the first printed edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1488 and the first printed edition of the speeches of the ancient Athenian orator Isokrates (lived 436 – 338 BC) in Greek in 1493. These publications of Greek texts paved the way for non-Greeks to start publishing printed editions of texts in Greek. The first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, the Textus Receptus, was published by the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (lived 1466 – 1536) in 1516.
ABOVE: Portrait of the Greek scholar Dimitrios Chalkokondylis, who published the first printed editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the speeches of Isokrates in Greek and helped re-introduce the study of the Greek language to western Europe in the late fifteenth century
Conclusion
Ultimately, lots of different people were involved in the preservation of classical Greek texts, but the people who are mostly responsible for the survival of so many Greek texts in the original Greek are the Byzantines. Although there are a few ancient Greek texts that have survived only through Arabic translations, the vast majority have survived in Greek.
The reason why popular culture so vehemently maintains that Greek texts were preserved exclusively by the Arabs and not by the Byzantines is because, for centuries, westerners have tried to remove the Byzantines from European history. This effort began in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III declared the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor of the Holy Roman Empire with the excuse that the throne was vacant because the Byzantine Empire at that time was ruled by Empress Eirene Sarantapechaina and, according to Pope Leo III, no woman could ever be a legitimate ruler of the Roman Empire.
Ever since then, westerners have tried to portray themselves as the true inheritors of the Greco-Roman tradition and the Byzantines as backwards eastern pretenders. The last thing many westerners want to admit is that the Byzantines played a massive role in the preservation of ancient Greek texts, so, instead, they claim that these texts were solely preserved by the Arabs.
Once again, to be very clear, I am not saying that the Arabs did not play an important role in preserving some ancient Greek texts. Nonetheless, I am saying that the Byzantines are the ones who should be getting most of the credit here.