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poet of contemptible powers, who attempted to A.D. write a continuation of the Iliad; and of Priscian, whose birth and productions scarcely entitle him to rank among the Greek literati,* are alone worthy of mention in this age of vitiated taste and fanatical corruption.†

The death of Justinian produced a pause in the theological warfare that had so long disturbed the tranquillity of the nation; and during the reign of his successors from Justin to Phocas, the church enjoyed an interval of comparative repose. It was, however, but the enervating and sultry calm which precedes the fresh out-bursting of the storm, as the accession of A.D. Heraclius in the tenth year of the seventh century, was the signal for the re-commencement of hostilities. It is at this epoch that

of his works in the monastery of St. Nicolas at Otranto. Schoell, 1. vi. c. Ixxiii. Harles, sec. v. p. 520.

* Priscian was born at Cæsarea, and his treatise De arte Grammatica was adapted to the Latin, not to the Greek tongue. Berington, app. i. p. 580.

The Anthology of Stobæus, an author whose life and era are unknown, has been generally attributed to the sixth century. See Gibbon, c. liii. Schoell, 1. vi. c. xciv. Berington, app. i. p. 570.

During this interval, the Emperor Maurice, a Roman by birth, (Gib. c. xlv.) was distinguished, amongst other estimable qualities, by a love for letters. But his exertions could neither recall the faded genius of the age, nor retard the advance of still darker ruin. Menander, surnamed the Pro

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the period usually denominated "the Middle Ages" is supposed to commence; a melancholy era in the annals of the world, when genius was extinguished,, taste polluted, and learning, numbed into a wintry torpor, had retired into cells and seclusion, to await the reviving beams of a more genial sun.*

Scarcely had Heraclius escaped from a menacing struggle with the Persians, when he awoke in his own dominions the smouldering fires of religious controversy, by espousing, through a mistaken policy, the monothelite faction of the Church. A new impetus was thus communicated to the fury of contending parties, whose discussions continued almost to the commencement of the following century to rend the empire, and engross the attention of all classes of the people. The unwonted ardour with which this controversy was espoused by all ranks, may in some degree be accounted for, by the late suppression of the schools of philosophy by Justinian; and the favourite passion of the Greeks, thus checked in its accustomed course,

tector, a soldier of the guard, who has left some poetry, and a continuation of the History of Agathias, was one of the objects of his bounty.

* This period is likewise considered to be from the fall of the Western to the fall of the Eastern Empire.

+ For an account of this controversy, see Gib. c. xlvii.

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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.

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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 during 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 ;† and it was then, likewise, that the remnants of the Alexandrian library disappeared. The loss sus

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*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

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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

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