The official and spoken language of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, especially its capital, Constantinople; a transitional stage between the ancient Greek language of antiquity and the modern modern Greek language of Greece and Cyprus.

Chronology

Chronologically, the Middle Greek stage covers almost the entire Middle Ages from the final division of the Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The following periods are distinguished in the history of the Byzantine language:

Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages

First (Early Byzantine) period

In conditions of almost universal illiteracy, incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of education in an archaic literary language, dilution ethnic composition empire due to the migration of Slavs to the Balkans and constant foreign intervention after 1204, many Greek peasants are better at foreign languages than their own literary language. In the late Byzantine period, the roles of the lingua franca of the coast are played by French and Italian. Albanian, many South Slavic languages ​​and dialects, the Aromanian language, and even the Romani language are also used in the mountainous regions. As a result of constant international communication in Greek in the Byzantine period, a number of features were developed in common with other Balkan languages ​​(see Balkan linguistic union). After the capture of Adrianople (Edirne) by the Turks in 1365, the Byzantine dialects are increasingly influenced by the Turkish language; many Greeks (Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia) finally switch to the non-Indo-European Turkish language and convert to Islam.

In the late Byzantine period, the folk language, expelled from literary circulation, was left to natural development in popular use and was preserved in a few monuments of folk literature. How great was the difference between the artificially maintained pure literary language and the one used by the people can be judged by the numerous versions or transcriptions into a commonly understood language by the most famous historical writers.

Patterns of development of the Middle Greek language

The chronological and genetic development of the Byzantine language from Ancient Greek and its gradual transition into the modern Modern Greek language are different, for example, from the history of the Latin language. The latter, after the formation of the Romance languages ​​(Old French and others), ceased to be a living and developing organism. Greek, on the other hand, basically retains its unity and gradual development until modern times, although a detailed analysis of the series shows that this unity is largely imaginary.

The Byzantine language tends to divergent development. A characteristic feature of the Byzantine period is the gap between the written and spoken language, developed diglossia: knowledge of both the literary language (among the upper strata) and spoken dialects. This process was put to an end only in the modern Greek period (in the 20th century) after the Greek-Turkish population exchange and the gradual Turkishization of native speakers outside of independent Greece.

The organizing principle in the development of neologisms (neologisms) of the Greek language was folk dialects and provincialisms, as well as the individual traits of writers. The influence of folk dialects (vernacular), expressed in differences in the pronunciation of sounds, in the structure of sentences (syntax), in the decomposition of grammatical forms and in the formation of new words according to the law of analogy, is found even in the pre-Christian era.

The Greeks themselves, aware of the difference between the literary and the language used in ordinary conversation and in popular circulation, called this latter γλώσσα δημώδης, άπλή καθωμιλημένη (glossa dimodis), finally, ρωμαϊκή (romaika) in contrast to the first - καθαρεύουσα, κοινή διαλεκτος (kafarevusa literally "purified" koine). Earlier traces of grammatical and lexical features are observed on Egyptian papyri and inscriptions. In the Christian era, the literary and folk language are separated even further and deeper, since the features of the folk language have found application in Holy Scripture and in church practice, that is, in hymns and teachings. One might expect that the vernacular language, which has already departed considerably from the literary one, will gradually find application in various kinds of literature and enrich it with new forms and word formations. But in reality, because of the extreme purism of Dimotica, the vernacular continued to oppose Kafarevusa (written language) until the 1976 reform, when the two were brought closer together, with Dimotica predominating.

One of the oldest languages ​​in the world. Even today, Greek is spoken by 10 million inhabitants of Greece, most of the population of Cyprus and, of course, the Greek diaspora scattered around the world. Of course, we can say that this is not so much. But it would be extremely strange to evaluate the Greek language based only on how many people speak it today.

What is most interesting about this language is its amazing history: after all, the Greek language stands at the origins of everything that shaped Western thought - philosophy, literature, the Christian Church ... And therefore, in almost any European language you can find great amount words with Greek roots: space, telephone, grammar, lamp, astronomy and many others. So it's safe to say that we all speak a little Greek!

A bit of history

Of course, modern Greek differs in many ways from the language spoken by the greatest thinkers of antiquity, such as Plato or Aristotle. Over the many centuries of its existence, the language has changed a lot, so the phrase "Greek" often requires clarification. The following names are used for the different stages of its development:

• Ancient Greek- the language of ancient Greece, including as part of the Roman Empire (until the 5th century AD).
• Byzantine language (or Middle Greek) - the language of the Greek and Hellenized population Byzantine Empire(VI-XV centuries). However, many neo-Hellenistic scholars oppose this term and propose to talk about the coexistence of early modern Greek and ancient Greek: this is due to the fact that the Greek language of that period was extremely heterogeneous.
• Modern Greek It has existed since about the 15th century as the language of the Greek and Hellenized population of the late Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. Today it is the official language of Greece and Cyprus.

XIX and XX centuries in Greece are marked by the presence of a special language situation - diglossia(this is how the simultaneous existence of two language variants is called). However, in 1976, the official language became dimotica(δημοτική), but from kafarevuses(καθαρεύουσα) - a language variant oriented towards the Greek literary tradition and following ancient Greek writing standards, but with modern pronunciation - only a few elements have survived.

About Greek dialects

Most Greek regions have their own local dialects. So, for example, there are Cypriot, Cretan, Tsakonian, South Italian and Northern Greek. Dialects are exclusively oral circulation and are not used in writing (the exception is literary works, where characters can speak one or another dialect). In each of the regions, there are also pronunciation features that are noticeable to a foreigner to varying degrees.

Most of the differences are between the Cypriot dialect of Greek and what is called Classical Greek. It must be said that the Cypriot dialect as a whole is characterized by the presence of the sounds “sh” and “h”, which are not present in modern Greek, as well as long vowels and duplication of consonants or their “swallowing”, which is also not typical for the modern Greek language. These phonetic differences are also fixed in writing:

Μούττη - μύτη - nose

(mutti - miti)

Όι - όχι - no

Μυάλος - μεγάλος - large

(myalos - megalos)

As you can see, the difference is quite significant, not to mention the fact that there are words that are completely different from their Greek "brothers":

Καρκόλα - κρεβάτι - bed

(karkola - krevAti)

Ιντυχάνω - μιλώ - to talk

(IndiAno - cute)

Φκάλλω - βγάζω - to take out, pull out

(fkAllo - vgAzo)

But there is no need to be afraid of these differences: no matter where in Greece or Cyprus you are, if you speak the classical Modern Greek language (which is spoken in the continental part of Greece - Athens and Thessaloniki), you will be understood everywhere without any problems!

How and where to start learning Greek

Start with the alphabet and work out the pronunciation of the sounds clearly, as in Greek, along with correct accent, it is the pronunciation that plays a decisive role: in Greek there are many at first glance similar sounds, the substitution of which can lead to curious and sometimes sad consequences. This is especially true for those sounds that are not in the Russian language.

The next step - and in this case it does not matter whether you study Greek on your own or under the guidance of a teacher - will be the development grammatical basis Greek. Many note the similarity of the grammar of the Greek language with the grammar of the Russian language. This is partly true: both in Greek and in Russian, nouns change by gender (there are three of them, as in Russian - masculine, feminine and neuter), numbers, cases (here it is even easier for Russian speakers, since in Greek there are only cases four - nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative), and verbs have categories of conjugation, mood ...

Since Modern Greek is a simplified version of Ancient Greek, there are not so many rules compared to Russian, but quite a few exceptions. But this is what makes it even more related to the Russian language, and until you start learning Greek, you can’t even guess how much these languages ​​have in common!

That is why it will not work to start learning Greek, like English, by memorizing a certain number of words: without getting acquainted with the grammatical structure of the Greek language, you will not be able to compose even the most simple sentences. Therefore, please be patient and take the time to study Greek grammar.

And the study of words may well turn into a game. Take, for example, the word άνθρωπος (Anfropos) - man. And what kind of science is engaged in the study of man? Anthropology! Or τραπέζι (trapEzi) - table. What are we doing at the table? We eat, that is, we eat. And you can endlessly give such examples.

Learning Greek may seem difficult at first glance. However, everything is in your hands, and success depends on the regularity and intensity of classes - better, of course, under the guidance of an experienced teacher - and subsequent language practice.

The word itself is of Greek origin. It goes back to the noun ή κατήχησις - announcement, (oral) teaching, edification, formed from the verb κατηχέω - to announce, (orally) teach, teach. This verb is a prefix from the verb ὴχέω - make a sound, sound(cf.: ό ήχος - sound, rumor; ήὴχη- sound, noise; ή ὴχώ - echo, echo; sound, noise, scream; rumor, rumor) and contains the prefix κατα - with the meaning of the completeness of the action. About the words announce(κατηχέω) and catechumen(κατηχούμενος) materials for the dictionary of Church Slavonic paronyms are of interest: to κατηχέω - “1. educate, educate, educate... 2. tune (of a musical instrument)»; to κατηχούμενος - " preparing for baptism, one to whom the foundations of the faith have been communicated" with reference to the relevant Church Slavonic texts.

Etymological dictionaries of the Russian language indicate the mediation of the Latin language in borrowing this word: “from lat. catechesis from Greek. teaching, instruction» ; "Late Late. catechesis - catechism, an elementary course in theology< греч. katēchēsis - поучение, назидание; оглашение, от katēcheō - устно поучать, от ēcheō - звучать, от ēchō - эхо; слух, молва» . В словаре-справочнике, в котором собраны наиболее распространенные в русском языке слова латинского происхождения, включая и те, которые вошли в латынь из греческого языка, объяснение несколько иное: «Catechesis, is f (греч.: наставление, познание) - катехизис, элементарный курс богословия. С сер. XVII в., первонач. в формах catechism, catechism. Through staroslav. from Greek." .

To understand how this word penetrated into the Russian language, it is necessary to turn to its phonetic appearance. And he did not even settle in modern Russian (catechism and catechism). To understand this issue, let us turn to the traditions of the transmission of Greek words in Russian.

In modern times, two systems of phonetic transmission of ancient Greek words were identified, named after the names of the Renaissance scientists Erasmus of Rotterdam and Johann Reuchlin who proposed them. The Erasmus system correlates the pronunciation of a word with its graphics and reflects the sound of Greek words in Latin. It is accepted in most European countries and is used in Russia in gymnasium and university practice when reading secular texts. Reuchlin's system was focused on living Byzantine speech. This system is adhered to by Greek scholars, in Russia it was assimilated earlier than Erasmova, directly from the Greeks and strengthened in spiritual institutions. In the Reuchlin system, it is customary to read liturgical texts.

In the Greek noun κατήχησις we will be interested in the pronunciation of the letters η and σ, which are rendered differently in these systems. In the Erasmus tradition, η is pronounced as "e", and σ, according to the rules of the Latin language, is voiced. In the Reuchlin tradition, η is pronounced "and", while σ retains the voicelessness ("s"). Thus, in the Erasmus tradition, our word should sound like a "catechesis", and in the Rekhlinov tradition, like a "catechesis". What happened?

It turns out that in a living language, both traditions could interact: either the transformation took place according to the Latin stereotype, but was not retained ( rhetorician and retor, philosopher and philosopher), or the transformation took place according to the Greek-Byzantine stereotype ( cathedra and department, orthography and spelling), but also not always kept ( library and vivliofika, leg and cafeteria). If borrowings were included in the Russian language in a dual form, the Greek-Byzantine variants were not retained more often ( theory and feoria, physics and physic). However, mixed forms could also appear in the presence of two or more phonetic differences in one word: dithyramb(in the XVIII century - praises and dithyramb), apotheosis (apotheos and apotheosis) . The word belongs to this type catechism. Of course, from the forms presented in modern Russian ( catechism and catechism) the second one is more consistent. But even in it there is an element of mixing traditions: a voiced “z” in place of a deaf Greek “s”.

Recently, for the first time, a scientific, textually verified reprint of the famous catechism compiled by St. Philaret (Drozdov) in 1822 appeared for the first time, accompanied by a preface about the history of its creation, notes and indexes. This edition uses the less commonly used form catechism, which, perhaps, will contribute to the activation of its use in modern Russian. After all, the circulation of this book is not small at the present time: 10,000 copies. In conclusion, for clarity, we present the opening lines of this outstanding theological and literary monument.

« Question. What is an Orthodox catechism?

Answer. The Orthodox catechism is instruction in the Orthodox Christian faith, taught to every Christian for the pleasing of God and the salvation of the soul.

AT. What does the word mean catechism?

O. Catechism, translated from Greek, means announcement, verbal instruction; and according to the use from the time of the apostles, this name signifies the original teaching about the Orthodox Christian faith, which is necessary for every Christian (see: Luke 1: 4; Acts 18: 25) ".

Christianity: Dictionary / Under the general. ed. L.N. Mitrokhina et al. M., 1994. S. 193.

See, for example: Dictionary of the Russian language / Ed. A.P. Evgenieva. T. 2. M., 1981. S. 40.

Dal V.I. Dictionary living Great Russian language. T. 2. M., 1998. S. 98.

Ancient Greek-Russian Dictionary / Comp. THEM. Butler. T. 1. M., 1958. S. 924; Weisman A.D. Greek-Russian dictionary. M., 1991. S. 694.

Sedakova O.A. Church Slavonic-Russian paronyms: Materials for a dictionary. M., 2005. S. 222.

Fasmer M. Etymological dictionary of the Russian language / Per. with him. and additions by O.N. Trubachev. T. 2. M., 1967. S. 210.

Vocabulary foreign words: Actual vocabulary, interpretations, etymology / N.N. Andreeva, N.S. Arapova et al. M., 1997. S. 124.

Ilyinskaya L.S. Latin heritage in Russian: Dictionary-reference book. M., 2003. S. 86.

For more on these traditions, see: Slavyatinskaya M.N. Textbook on the ancient Greek language: Cultural and historical aspect. M., 1988. S. 158-160; Ancient Greek: Starting course/ Comp. F. Wolf, N.K. Malinauskene. Part 1. M., 2004. S. 6-8.

For details see: Romaneev Yu.A. The structure of words of Greek origin in Russian: Cand. diss. M., 1965.

A lengthy Christian catechism of the Orthodox-Catholic Eastern Church / [Compiled by St. Filaret (Drozdov); Foreword, prep. text, note. and decree: cand. ist. Sciences A.G. Dunaev]. Moscow: Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 2006.

In the indicated text of the Gospel of Luke we read: "That you may know the solid foundation of the doctrine in which you have been instructed." In the original Greek, the form "was instructed" corresponds to the form of the passive aorist κατηχήθης from the verb κατηχέω already known to us. In the Acts of the Holy Apostles, a descriptive form with a passive perfect participle of the same verb ὴυ κατηχημένος is used, which is rendered similarly to the first in the Russian translation: “He was instructed in the first principles of the way of the Lord.”

1. A country called Byzantium never existed

There never was a country that its inhabitants would call Byzantium; the word "Byzantines" was never the self-name of the inhabitants of any state. The word "Byzantines" was sometimes used to refer to the inhabitants of Constantinople - by name ancient city Byzantium (Βυζάντιον), which in 330 was re-founded by Emperor Constantine under the name of Constantinople. They were called that only in texts written in a conventional literary language, stylized as ancient Greek, which no one had spoken for a long time. No one knew the other Byzantines, and even these existed only in texts accessible to a narrow circle of educated elites who wrote in this archaic Greek and understood it.

The self-name of the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the III-IV centuries (and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453), there were several stable and understandable phrases and words: romean state, or Romans, (βασιλεία τῶν Ρωμαίων), romania (Ρωμανία), Romaida (Ρωμαΐς ).

The inhabitants themselves called themselves Romans- the Romans (Ρωμαίοι ), they were ruled by the Roman emperor - basileus(Βασιλεύς τῶν Ρωμαίων) and their capital was New Rome(Νέα Ρώμη) - this is how the city founded by Constantine was usually called.

Where did the word “Byzantium” come from, and with it the idea of ​​the Byzantine Empire as a state that arose after the fall of the Roman Empire on the territory of its eastern provinces? The fact is that in the 15th century, along with statehood, the Eastern Roman Empire (as Byzantium is often called in modern historical writings, and this is much closer to the self-consciousness of the Byzantines themselves), in fact, lost its voice heard beyond its borders: the Eastern Roman tradition of self-description turned out to be isolated within the Greek-speaking lands that belonged to the Ottoman Empire; the only important thing now was that Western European scholars thought and wrote about Byzantium.

In the Western European tradition, the state of Byzantium was actually created by Hieronymus Wolf, a German humanist and historian, who in 1577 published the Corpus of Byzantine History, a small anthology of works by historians of the Eastern Empire with a Latin translation. It was from the "Korpus" that the concept of "Byzantine" entered the Western European scientific circulation.

Wolf's work formed the basis of another collection of Byzantine historians, also called the "Corpus of Byzantine History", but much larger - it was published in 37 volumes with the assistance of King Louis XIV of France. Finally, the Venetian edition of the second Corpus was used by the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon when writing his History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire - perhaps no other book had such a huge and at the same time destructive influence on the creation and popularization of the modern image of Byzantium.

The Romans, with their historical and cultural tradition, were thus deprived not only of their voice, but also of the right to self-name and self-consciousness.

2. The Byzantines didn't know they weren't Romans

For the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans-Romans, history great empire never ended. The very idea would seem absurd to them. Romulus and Remus, Numa, Augustus Octavian, Constantine I, Justinian, Phocas, Michael the Great Komnenos - all of them in the same way from time immemorial stood at the head of the Roman people.

Before the fall of Constantinople (and even after it), the Byzantines considered themselves inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Social institutions, laws, statehood - all this has been preserved in Byzantium since the time of the first Roman emperors. The adoption of Christianity had almost no effect on the legal, economic and administrative structure of the Roman Empire. If the Byzantines saw the origins of the Christian Church in the Old Testament, then the beginning of their own political history attributed, like the ancient Romans, to the Trojan Aeneas - the hero of Virgil's poem fundamental to Roman identity.

The social order of the Roman Empire and the sense of belonging to the great Roman patria were combined in the Byzantine world with Greek scholarship and written culture: the Byzantines considered classical ancient Greek literature to be their own. For example, in the 11th century, the monk and scholar Michael Psellos seriously discusses in one treatise about who writes poetry better - the Athenian tragedian Euripides or the Byzantine poet of the 7th century George Pisida, the author of a panegyric on the Avaro-Slavic siege of Constantinople in 626 and the theological poem "Shestodnev about the divine creation of the world. In this poem, later translated into Slavic, George paraphrases the ancient authors Plato, Plutarch, Ovid and Pliny the Elder.

At the same time, at the level of ideology, Byzantine culture often opposed itself to classical antiquity. Christian apologists noticed that all Greek antiquity - poetry, theater, sports, sculpture - was permeated with religious cults of pagan deities. Hellenic values ​​(material and physical beauty, the desire for pleasure, human glory and honors, military and athletic victories, eroticism, rational philosophical thinking) were condemned as unworthy of Christians. Basil the Great, in his famous discourse "To Young Men on How to Use Pagan Writings," sees the main danger for Christian youth in the attractive way of life offered to the reader in Hellenic writings. He advises to select in them for oneself only stories that are morally useful. The paradox is that Basil, like many other Fathers of the Church, himself received an excellent Hellenic education and wrote his works in a classical literary style, using the techniques of ancient rhetorical art and a language that by his time had already fallen into disuse and sounded like archaic.

In practice, ideological incompatibility with Hellenism did not prevent the Byzantines from carefully treating the ancient cultural heritage. Ancient texts were not destroyed, but copied, while the scribes tried to be accurate, except that in rare cases they could throw out a too frank erotic passage. Hellenic literature continued to be the basis of the school curriculum in Byzantium. Educated person had to read and know the epos of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, the speeches of Demos-Phen and use the Hellenic cultural code in his own writings, for example, call the Arabs Persians, and Russia - Hyperborea. Many elements of ancient culture in Byzantium were preserved, although they changed beyond recognition and acquired a new religious content: for example, rhetoric became homiletics (the science of church preaching), philosophy became theology, and ancient love story influenced hagiographic genres.

3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity

When does Byzantium begin? Probably, when the history of the Roman Empire ends - that's how we used to think. For the most part, this thought seems natural to us, due to the enormous influence of Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Written in the 18th century, this book still prompts both historians and non-specialists to look at the period from the 3rd to the 7th centuries (now increasingly called late Antiquity) as the time of the decline of the former greatness of the Roman Empire under the influence of two main factors - the invasions of the Germanic tribes and the ever-growing social role of Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the 4th century. Byzantium, which exists in the mass consciousness primarily as a Christian empire, is drawn in this perspective as a natural heir to the cultural decline that occurred in late Antiquity due to mass Christianization: the focus of religious fanaticism and obscurantism, stretching for a whole millennium of stagnation.

Amulet that protects from the evil eye. Byzantium, 5th-6th centuries

On one side, an eye is depicted, at which arrows are directed and attacked by a lion, a snake, a scorpion and a stork.

Hematite amulet. Byzantine Egypt, 6th–7th centuries

The inscriptions define him as "the woman who suffered from bleeding" (Luke 8:43-48). Hematite was believed to help stop bleeding, and amulets related to women's health and the menstrual cycle were very popular from it.

Thus, if you look at history through the eyes of Gibbon, late Antiquity turns into a tragic and irreversible end of Antiquity. But was it just a time of destruction of beautiful antiquity? Historical science has been sure for more than half a century that this is not so.

Especially simplified is the idea of ​​the supposedly fatal role of Christianization in the destruction of the culture of the Roman Empire. The culture of late Antiquity in reality was hardly built on the opposition of "pagan" (Roman) and "Christian" (Byzantine). The way late antique culture was organized for its creators and users was much more complex: the very question of the conflict between the Roman and the religious would have seemed strange to Christians of that era. In the 4th century, Roman Christians could easily place images of pagan deities, made in antique style, on household items: for example, on one casket, donated to newlyweds, naked Venus is adjacent to the pious call "Seconds and Project, live in Christ."

On the territory of the future Byzantium there was an equally problem-free fusion of pagan and Christian in artistic techniques for contemporaries: in the 6th century, images of Christ and saints were made using the technique of a traditional Egyptian funeral portrait, the most famous type of which is the so-called Fayum portrait. Fayum portrait- a kind of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in Ι -III centuries n. e. The image was applied with hot paints on a heated wax layer.. Christian visuality in late Antiquity did not necessarily strive to oppose itself to the pagan, Roman tradition: very often it deliberately (and perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is seen in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the deeds of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the middle of the 5th century (by this time there were different forms of monasticism here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonn from the city of Panopol (modern Akmim) writes an adaptation (paraphrase) of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also deliberately borrowing whole verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epos Gospel of John 1:1-6 (synodal translation):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.

Nonn from Panopol. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, Canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelov, A. V. Markov):
Logos, God's Child, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, you are the primordial
He shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
Oh, Ancient of the universe! All things were done through Him,
What is breathless and in the spirit! Outside the Speech, which does a lot,
Is it manifest that it abides? And in Him exists from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of a short-lived people ...<…>
In the bee-feeding more often
The wanderer on the mountain appeared, the inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
God's man, John, the leader. .

Portrait of a young girl. 2nd century©Google Cultural Institute

Funeral portrait of a man. 3rd century©Google Cultural Institute

Christ Pantocrator. Icon from the monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, mid 6th century Wikimedia Commons

St. Peter. Icon from the monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, 7th century© campus.belmont.edu

The dynamic changes that took place in different layers of the culture of the Roman Empire in late Antiquity are difficult to directly relate to Christianization, since the Christians of that time were themselves such hunters for classical forms both in the visual arts and in literature (as well as in many other areas of life). The future Byzantium was born in an era in which the relationship between religion, artistic language, its audience, as well as the sociology of historical shifts were complex and indirect. They carried the potential of the complexity and diversity that developed later over the centuries of Byzantine history.

4. In Byzantium they spoke one language, but wrote in another

The language picture of Byzantium is paradoxical. The empire, which not only claimed succession from the Roman Empire and inherited its institutions, but also, from the point of view of its political ideology, was the former Roman Empire, never spoke Latin. It was spoken in the western provinces and the Balkans, until the 6th century it remained the official language of jurisprudence (the last legal code in Latin was the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529 - after it laws were already issued in Greek), it enriched Greek with many borrowings (before only in the military and administrative spheres), early Byzantine Constantinople attracted Latin grammarians with career opportunities. But still, Latin was not a real language even of early Byzantium. Let the Latin-speaking poets Corippus and Priscian live in Constantinople, we will not meet these names on the pages of the textbook of the history of Byzantine literature.

We cannot say at what exact moment the Roman emperor becomes Byzantine: the formal identity of institutions does not allow us to draw a clear boundary. In search of an answer to this question, it is necessary to turn to informal cultural differences. The Roman Empire differs from the Byzantine Empire in that the latter merged Roman institutions, Greek culture and Christianity and carried out this synthesis on the basis of the Greek language. Therefore, one of the criteria on which we could rely is the language: the Byzantine emperor, unlike his Roman counterpart, is easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin.

But what is this Greek? The alternative that bookstore shelves and philological programs offer us is misleading: we can find either ancient or modern Greek in them. No other reference point is provided. Because of this, we are forced to proceed from the fact that the Greek of Byzantium is either a distorted ancient Greek (almost the dialogues of Plato, but not quite) or Proto-Greek (almost the negotiations of Tsipras with the IMF, but not quite yet). The history of 24 centuries of continuous development of the language is straightened out and simplified: it is either the inevitable decline and degradation of ancient Greek (as Western European classical philologists thought before the establishment of Byzantine studies as an independent scientific discipline), or the inevitable germination of the modern Greek (as the Greek scholars of the time of the formation Greek nation in the 19th century).

Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be viewed as a series of progressive, successive changes, since for every step forward in language development there was a step back. The reason for this is the attitude towards the language of the Byzantines themselves. Socially prestigious was the language norm of Homer and the classics of Attic prose. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who dared to introduce into his text the Old Attic elements, which seemed archaic already in the classical era, is a witness to the fall of Constantinople, Laonicus Chalkokondylus), and the epic is indistinguishable from Homer. From educated Byzantines throughout the history of the empire, it was required to literally speak one (changed) language and write another (frozen in classical immutability) language. The duality of linguistic consciousness is the most important feature of Byzantine culture.

Ostracon with a fragment of the Iliad in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640

Ostraca - shards of clay vessels - were used to record Bible verses, legal documents, accounts, school assignments and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.

Ostracon with a troparion to the Theotokos in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640© The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The situation was aggravated by the fact that from the time of classical antiquity, certain dialectal features were assigned to certain genres: epic poems were written in the language of Homer, and medical treatises were compiled in the Ionian dialect in imitation of Hippocrates. We see a similar picture in Byzantium. In ancient Greek, vowels were divided into long and short, and their ordered alternation formed the basis of ancient Greek poetic meters. In the Hellenistic era, the opposition of vowels by longitude left the Greek language, but nevertheless, even a thousand years later, heroic poems and epitaphs were written as if phonetic system remained unchanged since the time of Homer. Differences also permeated other linguistic levels: it was necessary to build a phrase, like Homer, select words, like Homer, and decline and conjugate them in accordance with a paradigm that died out in living speech millennia ago.

However, not everyone was able to write with antique liveliness and simplicity; often, in an attempt to achieve the Attic ideal, Byzantine authors lost their sense of proportion, trying to write more correctly than their idols. Thus, we know that the dative case, which existed in Ancient Greek, has almost completely disappeared in Modern Greek. It would be logical to assume that with each century in literature it will occur less and less until it gradually disappears altogether. However, recent studies have shown that the dative case is used much more often in Byzantine high literature than in the literature of classical antiquity. But it is precisely this increase in frequency that speaks of the loosening of the norm! Obsession in using one form or another will tell about your inability to use it correctly no less than its complete absence in your speech.

At the same time, the living linguistic element took its toll. We learn about how the spoken language changed thanks to the errors of manuscript copyists, non-literary inscriptions and the so-called vernacular literature. The term "folk-speaking" is not accidental: it describes the phenomenon of interest to us much better than the more familiar "folk", since often elements of a simple urban colloquial speech were used in monuments created in the circles of the Constantinople elite. It became a real literary fashion in the 12th century, when the same authors could work in several registers, today offering the reader exquisite prose, almost indistinguishable from Attic, and tomorrow - almost rhymes.

Diglossia, or bilingualism, also gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transcription, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source with new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, refined figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations), and along the line of language simplification. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have the status of sacred: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonn of Panopolitan did) - and this did not bring down anathema on the head of the author. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (in fact, the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of the language renewal to the streets and led to dozens of victims. In this sense, the indignant crowds who defended the “language of the ancestors” and demanded reprisals against the translator Alexandros Pallis were much further from Byzantine culture, not only than they would like, but also than Pallis himself.

5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery

Iconoclasm is the most famous period for a wide audience and the most mysterious even for specialists in the history of Byzantium. The depth of the trace that he left in the cultural memory of Europe is evidenced by the possibility, for example, in English language use the word iconoclast (“iconoclast”) outside of the historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, subverter of foundations”.

The event line is like this. By the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, the theory of the worship of religious images was hopelessly lagging behind practice. The Arab conquests of the middle of the 7th century led the empire to a deep cultural crisis, which, in turn, gave rise to the growth of apocalyptic sentiments, the multiplication of superstitions and a surge of disordered forms of icon veneration, sometimes indistinguishable from magical practices. According to the collections of miracles of saints, drunk wax from a melted seal with the face of St. Artemy healed a hernia, and Saints Cosmas and Damian healed the suffering woman by ordering her to drink, mixing with water, the plaster from the fresco with their image.

Such veneration of icons, which did not receive a philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clerics, who saw signs of paganism in it. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), finding himself in a difficult political situation, used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology. The first iconoclastic steps date back to 726-730, but both the theological justification of the iconoclastic dogma and full-fledged repression against dissidents occurred during the reign of the most odious Byzantine emperor- Constantine V Copronymus (Gneemy) (741-775).

Claiming for the status of the ecumenical, the iconoclastic council of 754 took the dispute to a new level: from now on, it was not about the fight against superstitions and the fulfillment of the Old Testament prohibition “Do not make an idol for yourself”, but about the hypostasis of Christ. Can He be considered pictorial if His divine nature is "indescribable"? The “Christological dilemma” was as follows: the iconodules are guilty either of imprinting on icons only the flesh of Christ without His deity (Nestorianism), or of limiting the deity of Christ through the description of His depicted flesh (Monophysitism).

However, already in 787, Empress Irina held a new council in Nicaea, the participants of which formulated the dogma of icon veneration as a response to the dogma of iconoclasm, thereby offering a full-fledged theological basis for previously unregulated practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “official” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while with the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the archetype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became real motto of iconodules). Secondly, the theory of homonymy, that is, the same name, was proposed, which removed the problem of portrait similarity between the image and the depicted: the icon of Christ was recognized as such not due to the similarity of features, but due to the spelling of the name - the act of naming.

In 815, Emperor Leo V the Armenian again turned to iconoclastic politics, hoping in this way to build a line of succession towards Constantine V, the most successful and most beloved ruler in the army in the last century. The so-called second iconoclasm accounts for both a new round of repressions and a new rise in theological thought. The iconoclastic era ends in 843, when iconoclasm is finally condemned as a heresy. But his ghost haunted the Byzantines until 1453: for centuries, the participants in any church disputes, using the most sophisticated rhetoric, accused each other of covert iconoclasm, and this accusation was more serious than accusation of any other heresy.

It would seem that everything is quite simple and clear. But as soon as we try to somehow clarify this general scheme, our constructions turn out to be very unsteady.

The main difficulty is the state of the sources. The texts, thanks to which we know about the first iconoclasm, were written much later, and by iconodules. In the 40s of the 9th century, a full-fledged program was carried out to write the history of iconoclasm from icon-worshipping positions. As a result, the history of the dispute has been completely distorted: the iconoclasts' writings are available only in tendentious selections, and textual analysis shows that the iconodules' works, seemingly created to refute the teachings of Constantine V, could not have been written before the very end of the 8th century. The task of the icon-worshipping authors was to turn the history we have described inside out, to create the illusion of tradition: to show that the veneration of icons (and not spontaneous, but meaningful!) has been present in the church since apostolic times, and iconoclasm is just an innovation (the word καινοτομία - “innovation” on Greek - the most hated word for any Byzantine), and deliberately anti-Christian. Iconoclasts appeared not as fighters for the cleansing of Christianity from paganism, but as "Christian accusers" - this word began to refer specifically and exclusively to iconoclasts. The parties in the iconoclastic dispute turned out to be not Christians, who interpret the same teaching in different ways, but Christians and some external force hostile to them.

The arsenal of polemical techniques that were used in these texts to denigrate the enemy was very large. Legends were created about the hatred of iconoclasts for education, for example, about the burning of the never-existing university in Constantinople by Leo III, and participation in pagan rites and human sacrifices, hatred of the Mother of God and doubts about the divine nature of Christ were attributed to Constantine V. If such myths seem simple and were debunked long ago, others remain at the center of scientific discussions to this day. For example, it was only very recently that it was possible to establish that the cruel massacre committed against Stefan the New, glorified as a martyr in 766, was connected not so much with his uncompromising icon-worshiping position, as life claims, but with his proximity to the conspiracy of political opponents of Constantine V. disputes about key questions: what is the role of Islamic influence in the genesis of iconoclasm? what was the true attitude of the iconoclasts towards the cult of saints and their relics?

Even the language we use to talk about iconoclasm is the language of the conquerors. The word "iconoclast" is not a self-designation, but an offensive polemical label invented and implemented by their opponents. No "iconoclast" would ever agree with such a name, simply because the Greek word εἰκών has many more meanings than the Russian "icon". This is any image, including non-material, which means that to call someone an iconoclast is to declare that he is struggling with the idea of ​​God the Son as the image of God the Father, and man as the image of God, and the events of the Old Testament as prototypes of the events of the New etc. Moreover, the iconoclasts themselves claimed that they were defending the true image of Christ - the Eucharistic gifts, while what their opponents call an image, in fact, is not such, but is just an image.

In the end, defeat their teaching, it would be called Orthodox now, and we would contemptuously call the teaching of their opponents icon-worship and talk not about the iconoclastic, but about the icon-worshipping period in Byzantium. However, if it were so, the whole subsequent history and visual aesthetics of Eastern Christianity would have been different.

6. The West never liked Byzantium

Although trade, religious and diplomatic contacts between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe continued throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to talk about real cooperation or mutual understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire crumbled into barbarian states and the tradition of "Romanness" broke off in the West, but survived in the East. Within a few centuries, the new Western dynasties of Germany wanted to restore the continuity of their power with the Roman Empire and for this they entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. The court of Charlemagne competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and in art. However, the imperial claims of Charles rather increased the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.

By the 10th century, the overland routes from Constantinople to northern Italy through the Balkans and along the Danube were blocked by barbarian tribes. The only way left was by sea, which reduced the possibilities of communication and made cultural exchange more difficult. The division into East and West has become a physical reality. The ideological gap between East and West, fueled throughout the Middle Ages by theological disputes, deepened during the Crusades. The organizer of the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the capture of Constantinople in 1204, Pope Innocent III openly declared the primacy of the Roman Church over all the rest, referring to the divine establishment.

As a result, it turned out that the Byzantines and the inhabitants of Europe knew little about each other, but were unfriendly towards each other. In the 14th century, the West criticized the depravity of the Byzantine clergy and attributed the success of Islam to it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in his Divine Comedy in limbo, a special place for virtuous non-Christians), but did not do this because of the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew the Greek language. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals learned Latin only to translate Thomas Aquinas and did not hear anything about Dante. The situation changed in the 15th century after the Turkish invasion and the fall of Constantinople, when Byzantine culture began to penetrate Europe along with Byzantine scholars who had fled from the Turks. The Greeks brought with them many manuscripts of ancient works, and humanists were able to study Greek antiquity from the originals, and not from Roman literature and the few Latin translations known in the West.

But Renaissance scholars and intellectuals were interested in classical antiquity, not in the society that preserved it. In addition, it was mainly intellectuals who fled to the West who were negatively inclined towards the ideas of monasticism and Orthodox theology of that time and who sympathized with the Roman Church; their opponents, supporters of Gregory Palamas, on the contrary, believed that it was better to try to negotiate with the Turks than to seek help from the pope. Therefore, Byzantine civilization continued to be perceived in a negative light. If the ancient Greeks and Romans were “their own”, then the image of Byzantium was fixed in European culture as oriental and exotic, sometimes attractive, but more often hostile and alien to European ideals of reason and progress.

The age of European enlightenment completely stigmatized Byzantium. The French Enlighteners Montesquieu and Voltaire associated it with despotism, luxury, lavish ceremonies, superstition, moral decay, civilizational decline and cultural barrenness. According to Voltaire, the history of Byzantium is "an unworthy collection of grandiloquent phrases and descriptions of miracles" that dishonors the human mind. Montesquieu sees the main reason for the fall of Constantinople in the pernicious and pervasive influence of religion on society and power. He speaks especially aggressively about Byzantine monasticism and clergy, about the veneration of icons, as well as about theological controversy:

The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence in the court, which weakened as it became corrupted, it turned out that the monks and the court mutually corrupted each other and that evil infected both. As a result, all the attention of the emperors was absorbed in first calming down, then inciting theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the hotter, the more insignificant was the reason that caused them.

Thus, Byzantium became part of the image of the barbaric dark East, which paradoxically also included the main enemies of the Byzantine Empire - the Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was opposed to a liberal and rational European society built on the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. This model underlies, for example, the descriptions of the Byzantine court in the drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert:

“The king wipes fragrances from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his peoples. Now, out of a whim, he will take and burn his palace with all the guests. He thinks to restore the Tower of Babel and overthrow the Almighty from the throne. Antony reads from a distance on his forehead all his thoughts. They take possession of him, and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar."

The mythological view of Byzantium has not yet been completely overcome in historical science. Of course, there could be no question of any moral example of Byzantine history for the education of youth. School curricula were based on samples of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and Byzantine culture was excluded from them. In Russia, science and education followed Western patterns. In the 19th century, a dispute about the role of Byzantium in Russian history broke out between Westerners and Slavophiles. Peter Chaadaev, following the tradition of European enlightenment, bitterly complained about the Byzantine heritage of Russia:

“By the will of fateful fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to corrupted Byzantium, to the subject of deep contempt of these peoples.”

Byzantine ideologist Konstantin Leontiev Konstantin Leontiev(1831-1891) - diplomat, writer, philosopher. In 1875, his work “Byzantism and Slavdom” was published, in which he argued that “Byzantism” is a civilization or culture, the “general idea” of which is composed of several components: autocracy, Christianity (different from Western, “from heresies and splits”), disappointment in everything earthly, the absence of an “extremely exaggerated concept of the earthly human personality”, rejection of the hope for the general welfare of peoples, the totality of some aesthetic ideas, and so on. Since all-Slavism is not a civilization or culture at all, and European civilization is coming to an end, Russia - which inherited almost everything from Byzantium - needs Byzantism to flourish. pointed to the stereotypical idea of ​​Byzantium, which has developed due to schooling and the lack of independence of Russian science:

"Byzantium seems to be something dry, boring, priestly, and not only boring, but even something pitiful and vile."

7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die

In 1935, the book of the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, Byzantium after Byzantium, was published - and its title established itself as a designation of the life of Byzantine culture after the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantine life and institutions did not disappear overnight. They were preserved thanks to Byzantine emigrants who fled to Western Europe, in Constantinople itself, even under the rule of the Turks, as well as in the countries of the "Byzantine commonwealth", as the British historian Dmitry Obolensky called Eastern European medieval cultures that were directly influenced by Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia. The participants in this supranational unity preserved the heritage of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, the standards of literature and art.

In the last hundred years of the existence of the empire, two factors - the cultural revival of the Palaiologos and the Palamite disputes - contributed, on the one hand, to the renewal of ties between the Orthodox peoples and Byzantium, and on the other hand, to a new surge in the spread of Byzantine culture, primarily through liturgical texts and monastic literature. In the XIV century Byzantine ideas, texts and even their authors got into the Slavic world through the city of Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian Empire; in particular, the number of Byzantine works available in Russia doubled thanks to Bulgarian translations.

In addition, the Ottoman Empire officially recognized the Patriarch of Constantinople: as the head of the Orthodox millet (or community), he continued to manage the church, in whose jurisdiction both Russia and the Orthodox Balkan peoples remained. Finally, the rulers of the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, even after becoming subjects of the Sultan, retained Christian statehood and considered themselves the cultural and political heirs of the Byzantine Empire. They continued the traditions of the ceremonial of the royal court, Greek education and theology, and supported the Greek elite of Constantinople, the Phanariots. Phanariots- literally "inhabitants of Phanar", a quarter of Constantinople, in which the residence of the Greek patriarch was located. The Greek elite of the Ottoman Empire were called Phanariotes because they lived predominantly in this quarter..

Iorga believes that Byzantium died after Byzantium during the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in 1821, which was organized by Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti. On one side of the banner of Ypsilanti there was the inscription “Conquer this” and the image of Emperor Constantine the Great, whose name is associated with the beginning of Byzantine history, and on the other, a phoenix reborn from the flame, a symbol of the revival of the Byzantine Empire. The uprising was crushed, the Patriarch of Constantinople was executed, and the ideology of the Byzantine Empire then dissolved into Greek nationalism.

It occupies a special place. For several millennia of its existence, it has changed more than once, but retained its relevance and importance.

Dead language

Today Latin is a dead language. In other words, he does not have speakers who would consider this speech native and use it in everyday life. But, unlike others, Latin received a second life. Today, this language is the basis of international jurisprudence and medical sciences.

In terms of its importance, ancient Greek is close to Latin, which also died, but left its mark in a variety of terminologies. This amazing fate is connected with the historical development of Europe in ancient times.

Evolution

The ancient Latin language originated in Italy a thousand years before our era. By its origin it belongs to the Indo-European family. The first speakers of this language were the Latins, thanks to whom it got its name. This people lived on the banks of the Tiber. Several ancient trade routes converged here. In 753 BC, the Latins founded Rome and soon began wars of conquest against their neighbors.

Over the centuries of its existence, this state has undergone several important changes. First there was a kingdom, then a republic. At the turn of the 1st century AD, the Roman Empire arose. Its official language was Latin.

Until the 5th century it was greatest civilization She surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea with her territories. Under her rule were many peoples. Their languages ​​gradually died out and were replaced by Latin. Thus it spread from Spain in the west to Palestine in the east.

Vulgar Latin

It was during the era of the Roman Empire that the history of the Latin language took a sharp turn. This adverb is divided into two types. There was a primitive literary Latin, which was the official means of communication in public institutions. It was used in the preparation of documents, worship, etc.

At the same time, the so-called Vulgar Latin was formed. This language arose as a lightweight version of a complex state language. The Romans used it as a tool to communicate with foreigners and conquered peoples.

This is how the folk version of the language arose, which with each generation was more and more different from its model of the ancient era. Live speech naturally brushed aside the old syntactic rules that were too complex for quick perception.

Latin heritage

So the history of the Latin language gave rise to In the 5th century AD, the Roman Empire fell. It was destroyed by the barbarians, who created their own national states on the ruins of the former country. Some of these peoples could not get rid of the cultural influence of the past civilization.

Gradually, the Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese languages ​​arose in this way. All of them are distant descendants of ancient Latin. The classical language died after the fall of the empire and ceased to be used in everyday life.

At the same time, a state was preserved in Constantinople, the rulers of which considered themselves the legal successors of the Roman Caesars. It was Byzantium. Its inhabitants, out of habit, considered themselves Romans. However, Greek became the colloquial and official language of this country, which is why, for example, in Russian sources, the Byzantines were often called Greeks.

Use in science

At the beginning of our era, the medical Latin language developed. Prior to this, the Romans had very little knowledge of human nature. In this field, they were noticeably inferior to the Greeks. However, after the Roman state annexed the ancient policies, famous for their libraries and scientific knowledge, in Rome itself, interest in education increased markedly.

Medical schools began to spring up. A huge contribution to physiology, anatomy, pathology and other sciences was made by the Roman physician Claudius Galen. He left behind hundreds of works written in Latin. Even after the death of the Roman Empire in European universities, medicine continued to be studied with the help of documents. That is why future doctors must have known the basics of the Latin language.

A similar fate awaited the legal sciences. It was in Rome that the first modern legislation appeared. Lawyers and legal experts played an important role in this. Over the centuries, a huge array of laws and other documents written in Latin has accumulated.

Emperor Justinian, the ruler of Byzantium in the 6th century, took up their systematization. Despite the fact that the country spoke Greek, the sovereign decided to reissue and update the laws in the Latin edition. This is how the famous codex of Justinian appeared. This document (as well as all Roman law) is studied in detail by students law faculties. Therefore, it is not surprising that Latin is still preserved in the professional environment of lawyers, judges and doctors. It is also used in worship by the Catholic Church.