Dante and the Greeks, PDF excerpt

DANTE AND THE GREEKS Edited by JAN M. ZIOLKOWSKI Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection WASHINGTON, D.C . Copyright © 2.014 by Dum barron Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D .C. All rights reserved Primed in rhe United Scares of America 2.2. 2.1 2.0 19 18 17 16 IS 14 2. 4 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Dame and the Greeks I edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. pages cm.-(Dumbarron Oaks Medieval Humanities) Includes index. ISBN 978-o-88402.-400-2. (first) 1. Dame Alighieri, 12.6S-132.1-Criricism and interpretation. 2.. Dame Alighieri, 12.6S-I32.I-Knowledge-Classicallirerarure. 3· Philosophy, Ancient-Influence. I. Ziolkowski, Jan M., 1956- editor. PQ4390.D2.75 2.014 8si'.1-dc2.3 2.014014301 www.doaks.org/ publicarions D Series design : Barbara Haines Cover and text composition: Melissa Tandysh TheByzan CONTENTS Introduction JAN M. ZIOLKOWSKI Greeks in Italy at the Time of Dante (126S-1321) 25 VERA VON FALKENHAUSEN Change and Continuity Italian Culture and Greek Learning in the Age ofDante 47 REKA FORRAI Homo Byzantinus and Homo Italicus in Late Thirteenth-Century Constantinople 63 ELIZABETH A. FISHER Acting against Conscience Dante and the Aristotelian, Stoic, and Christian Traditions 83 MARCIAL. COLISH From Anna Komnene to Dante The Byzantine Roots of Western Debates on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics MICHELE TRIZIO 105 Reading One's Way to Happiness Dante, Cicero, and the Promise ofthe Greeks 141 FILIPPO NAITANA Aristotle's Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante's Canzone Le dolci rime Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety 163 TEODOLINDA BAROLINI Pseudo-Dionysius and the Representation of Light in Dante's Paradiso 181 DIEGO SBACCH1 T:E< Cartographic Dante A Note on Dante and the Greek Mediterranean 197 THEODOREJ.CACHEYJR. Dante, Byzantium, and the Italian Chronicle Tradition 227 WILLIAM CAFERRO Angels, Monsters, and Hybridity in the Divine Comedy Ancient Greek Cultural Legacies and Dantes Critique ofthe Church GEORGE DAMERON Ulysses and the Three Traditions PIERO BOITAN1 Abbreviations About the Authors Index 277 2 73 275 265 247 com. roughlyth century. Y. studies" ca restricted 1 whereas "I this usageshorthand guished frc where Con eventually known as t divide of t concentrate and what is Both m stating the between the of the Crus ical, and id terns of cul between th or Graecom The broa A. Classen, 3 R. S.Ne 2. rime Introduction JAN M. ZIOLKOWSKI T: 247 HE CULTURES THAT BYZANTINISTS and medievalists explore share much common ground. In particular, both sets of experts occupy themselves with roughly the same chronological span, more or less from the fifth through the fifteenth century. Yet the two fields split geographically. Although the designation "medieval studies" can be taken to subsume Islamic, Byzantine, and Judaic studies, 1 it is generally restricted more narrowly to the interdisciplinary investigation of Western Europe, whereas "Byzantine studies" pertains to the similar exploration of Byzantium. In this usage-and it was devised only in the sixteenth century-Byzantium serves as shorthand for the Byzantine Empire and its civilization. Byzantium must be distinguished from Byzantion, a toponym for an ancient city that stood on the same site where Constantinople (or Constantinopolis Nova Roma, to use its full name) was eventually founded. In turn, Constantinople became the seat of what is commonly known as the Byzantine Empire. A conceptual break, corresponding to the physical divide of the Bosphorus, has been imposed between what is considered Byzantine, concentrated heavily in the Near or Middle East, especially Asia Minor (or Anatolia), and what is Western medieval.2 Both medievalists and Byzantinists have had motivations and incentives for understating the frequency and intensity of contacts and exchanges in the Middle Ages between the cultures of Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire. As with the study of the Crusades, scholars have shown greater interest, on the whole, in military, political, and ideological confrontations between the two worlds than in instances or patterns of cultural engagement. Furthermore, no one can deny the divisions that have run between the Latin and Greek worlds since antiquity. For every case of Philhellenism or Graecomania among the ancient Romans, we can uncover one of condescension 1 The broader sense is followed in Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms, Methods, Trends, ed. A. Classen, 3 vols. (Berlin, 2010). 2. R. S. Nelson, "Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art," Gesta 35 (1996): 3-11. or disapprobation. 3 These reservations were complexly mutual: Romans sometimes referred to the Greeks disparagingly as Graeculi, "little Greeks," while Greeks, in turn, regarded the Romans as barbaric or, at least, uncouth.4 The term Romanophilia refers to the attraction of present-day people to ancient Rome and may never have been taken to describe an inclination toward Romanness among ancient or Byzantine Greeks. Its rarity in this context speaks to the relative paucity of evidence for expressly pro-Roman sentiment among ancient native speakers of Greek. In the medieval or Byzantine period, the tensions between East and West (or Greek and Latin) modified but did not diminish, as the ownership of Roman ness itself came under dispute between the two linguistic, cultural, and political regions, and differing theological positions on various issues pulled them into conflict. Just as in considering occasional cultural tensions between any two nations today, the question is whether shared characteristics and interests between seemingly opposed groups exceed the perceived differences. In a syndrome loosely related to broader cultural frictions, modern-day experts do not always search for commonalities that tie their specializations to others, nor do they uniformly display particular eagerness to perceive and acknowledge likenesses. On the contrary, rather than strive for mutual recognition and exchange, they sometimes focus on the disparities that allow them to maintain their branches of study as separate. 5 At the same time, such scholars may feel that their specialty is underappreciated by the general public and other professionals in comparison to other fields and disciplines. The recognition and resources available to humanists are meager by most measures, but human nature being what it has always been, researchers are still tempted to begrudge or envy their peers in related fields of study for what they possess, and suspect that they have been granted more advantages and rewards than are their due. Intensifying these nearly universal predispositions are exceptional features specific to the two cultures under consideration here. The Latin West and Greek East have been defined as "sibling cultures," and scholarship devoted to them suffers from the rivalries often associated with sisters and brothers.6 Classicists often self-identify as either Hellenists or Latinists,7 and Byzantinists and medievalists (of whom Dantists are one highly evolved subset) divide similarly according 3 Most generally, see N . Petrochilos, Roman Attitudes to the Greeks, S. Saripolos's Library 25 (Athens, 1974). For the Roman response to Hellenism, see E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 52 (Ithaca, NY, 1992). 4 On Graeculus (and Graeculio), see Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 2012), 1:846. A. Henrichs, "Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek Culture," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 (1995), 243-61. s In this regard, I agree wholeheartedly with E. D. Karampetsos, Dante and Byzantium (Boston, 2009), 7· 6 D. J. Geanakoplos, Interaction ofthe "Sibling" Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (JJO-rtfoo) (New Haven, 1976). 7 For an amusing description of how the two groups differ, see D. Wender, Roman Poetry: From the Republic to the Silver Age (Carbondale, IL, 1980), ix. 2 Jan M Ziolkowski to th wi lar a( im ｩｮｾ＠ ow olo StUI mo don gua lanl igm equ "Da deac ore the t inal cultt vern: once as Sla ito us creat A distr and guag lang reassU twod rns sometimes r.reeks, in turn, eophilia refers ave been taken ine Greeks. Its pro-Roman rest (or Greek ess itself came , and differing in considering on is whether occeed the per- lay experts do fS, nor do they tesses. On the netimes focus separate. 5 At ed by the genlines. The rec·s, but human ·udge or envy at they have g these nearly es under conand scholars and brothantinists and rly according )s's Library 2.5 ftional Identity md ed., 2. vols. ure," Harvard tium (Boston, 'eMiddle Ages Poetry: From . Ziolkowski to the principal scriptural language-Greek in the first case, Latin in the second-of the cultures on which they focus. Viewed from a distance, the languages and literatures with which they grapple reveal many superficial resemblances, since in both cases the languages and literatures were built upon a classical substratum that was overlaid with a Christian layer that took shape in antiquity and late antiquity. Both strata were not immune to the dynamics (known as diglossia) between the learned and the fully living tongues. But up close, Byzantine and medieval cultures reveal many discrepancies, owing to the nuances of the classical traditions upon which they drew, the distinct theologies of the two brands of Christianity upon which they rested, and much more. Medieval and Byzantine studies each place heavy demands on their followers. The study of Byzantium or the Western Middle Ages alone could demand a lifetime (or more) oflearning, even without imposing the obligation ofbecomingversed in the other domain, too. Both areas require the mastery of challenging ancient and medieval languages, extensive primary sources, and sprawling secondary literature in several modern languages, and the temptation to justify a concentration on only one of the areas while ignoring the other is strong. Furthermore, the number of high school, college, or even graduate students who are equipped linguistically to pass the basic requirements for immersion in a topic such as "Dante and the Greeks" has plummeted from a century ago. Greek and Latin are both dead languages that demand substantial effort to master. Fewer students enter college or even leave graduate school with as much exposure to Greek, Latin, and Italian as in the times when elite secondary education had the reading of ancient classics in the original Latin and Greek as a central objective. Medievalists, who steep themselves in the cultures of Western Europe, are often required to learn not only Latin bur also medieval vernacular as well as modern languages, and many begin this study later in life than was once the case. Byzantinists face a similar but often more daunting linguistic challenge, as Slavic, Turkic, Coptic, and Semitic tongues (such as Arabic and Syriac), among others, enter the picture. Yet the continuing global ascent of English means that correspondingly less heed is paid to other modern research languages. Despite the persistence of emigration, immigration, and exile in the present day, the particular brands of serendipitous polyglottism that the military and political conflicts of the mid-twentieth century created within European and American academic settings have vanished. Against this backdrop, it has been convenient to exaggerate the divisions, mutual distrust and disinterest, and unintelligibility, admittedly great, between the Latin and Greek worlds. Under the circumstances, it has made sense to overstate the divide between Rome (the Old, or original, Rome) and Constantinople (the New, or Second, Rome), as well as between the Latin and the Western European vernaculars, on the one hand, and Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Turkish, Old Church Slavonic, and other such languages, on the other. No one, not even a linguistic prodigy, could gain facility in all the languages involved in the two spheres and so, consequently, it may come as a relief to be reassured that the people who lived from soo to 1500 were, themselves, partitioned into two discrete groups in their use oflanguage and their cultural preferences. Introduction 3 Yet the sense of an iron curtain-or at least an iron portcullis-between what happened on one side of the Adriatic and the other is misleading. Even more erroneous is an impression of a "clash of civilizations" between the Latin West and Greek East. 8 A seductive but false analogy would be to ring a change on the celebrated saying, ascribed to various celebrities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that characterizes the special relationship between the United States and Britain as "two cultures separated by a common language": thus, we would be oversimplifying to speak of"two cultures separated by a common religion." The relative neglect of the Hellenic, and especially the Byzantine, components in Western European culture may be gauged by how long it took for even the roughest Greek equivalent to Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (German 1949; English 1953) to be produced.9 Walter Berschin's Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From jerome to Nicholas oJCusa (German 1980; English 1988) was itself published nearly forty years after Albert Siegmund's monograph on the transmission of Greek Christian literature in the Latin Church up to the twelfth century (1949).10 On the other side of the equation-the Byzantine reception of ancient and medieval Western culture-the failings are no less and may be even greater, since to date no corresponding book exists for Byzantium: no one has written Latin Letters and the Greek Middle Ages or Latin Literature and Byzantium, although Elizabeth Fisher, represented by a very clear stocktaking in this volume, has published most of the requisite prolegomena for such a synthesis. Communication between scholars of Byzantine and medieval studies (again, encompassing Dante studies) ought not remain static or dwindle but instead intensify: for such grand intellectual endeavors to survive, and even to thrive, in the twenty-first century, we can no longer afford (if ever we could) the luxury of splendid isolation. We must uphold the integrity of our specialties while simultaneously crossing the boundaries of our fields and disciplines, nurturing the consequent intellectual growth within them (and ourselves), and in the process maintaining public awareness and appreciation of them. Failure to attain such success would have costs none of us can afford. But the difficulties in acquiring the requisite background and scope to make a responsible contribution to a topic such as "Dante and the Greeks" are enormous. In a we and fut Ages (i1 eredabi contem the rate as well 1 we can civiliza ' theveht Dan rested UJ high am At the s. ofthela contrar The that reli plum be digitize printed haps arti The phrase and concept "clash of civilizations" originated with a short working paper that was followed a few years later by a book, both by S. P. Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations?, working paper I Project on the Changing Security Environment and American National Interests 4 (Cambridge, MA, 1993), and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996). 9 E. R. Curtius, Europdische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Francke, 1948); European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (New York, 1953). 10 A revised and expanded edition of Berschin's book was translated into English by]. C. Frakes (Washjngton, DC, 1988). Siegmund's book is Die Oberlieftrung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwolften ]ahrhundert, Veroffendichung des Byzantinischen lnstituts Scheyern, Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Benedjktiner-Akademie 5 (Munich, 1949). Kara Acar guageinD 13 For a Century," that is gea (Cambrid 14 "Digi jan M. Ziolkowski lntroducti 8 4 Be let ala know1 aries b Greek ited as Greece much: Meditc in this 11 12. what haponeous is k East. 8 A . ascribed erizes the oarated by tures sep- onents in roughest n Middle etters and lish 1988) the trans1 century cient and ce to date rsand the sher, reprequisite gain, enntensify: !nty-first tion. We :boundh within ieciation But the ible con- that was s?, worklterests 4 ler (New Beyond the obstacle of achieving competency in even just one of the three fields, let alone all three, we must weigh the possibility that the closetful of preconceptions known as Orientalism may have prompted, long ago, the drawing of more rigid boundaries between the Latin West and the Greek East than was warranted _II Associating the Greek East with the Orient may look problematic, because ancient Greece is often posited as the foundation of what would eventually emerge as the West. But the place of Greece between East and West has always been, and remains, a cultural conundrum as much as a geographical reality. The understanding Dante would have had of the Greek Mediterranean is analyzed with a special cartographic twist in Theodore Cachey's essay in this volume. In a world that trains its sights heavily and even, in my view, unwisely on the present and future to the exclusion of earlier times, the devotees of Byzantium and the Middle Ages (including, of course, Dante) are best qualified for mediating what can be discovered about their respective pasts for the education, edification, and entertainment of our contemporaries. On a planet that supposedly witnesses the extinction of languages at the rate of one every two weeks, we count ourselves among the protectors of already dead as well as still-living tongues. 12 And in a world that idolizes new devices and products, we can convey the excitement of an old and seemingly superseded technology, since the civilizations we all scrutinize rested largely on texts preserved and transmitted through the vehicle of the manuscript codex. Dante lived in an age in which authority held true to the etymology it presupposes: it rested upon the command of earlier, authoritative authors. 13 The great Italian poet ranks high among authors who have staked their authenticity on dialogue with earlier writers. At the same time, he was anything but detached from the distinguishing characteristics of the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century world that surrounded him. On the contrary, he was rooted deeply in the specificities oflife and events in his own day. The poet of the Commedia is an ideal candidate for intensive scholarly examination that relies upon digital or conventional research methods. No medieval author can be plumbed more searchingly through digital philology with a broader array of tools for digitized texts and images, 14 but by the same token none can be read more attractively in printed books, while deliberately refraining from any electronic distraction except perhaps artificial lighting. No medieval author-and perhaps no author, period-is more Karampetsos, Dante and Byzantium, xv. A cardinal exposition of the once-every-two-weeks extinction rate is provided by A. Dalby, Language in Danger (London, 2.002.). 13 For a setting of the stage, see]. M. Ziolkowski, "Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century," journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 108 (2.009): 42.1-48. For a book on the topic that is geared to Dante in particular, see A. R. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge, 2.008). 14 "Digital Dante," http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu (accessed 16 July 2.013). 11 12. ':uropean 53). :::. Frakes Literatur Instituts olkowski Introduction s profoundly intertexrual in his interaction with both predecessors and successors, but likewise none more richly deserves to be set in a historicizing context thanks to his connections with the politics, polemics, and personages of his lifetime. The symposium in which this volume originated was cosponsored by the Dante Society of America, founded in z881, in conjunction with its annual meeting. The event took place fittingly under the auspices of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, which was bequeathed to Harvard University in stages between 1940 and 1969 for the furthering of Byzantine studies. The name ofDumbarton Oaks is familiar to the musically inclined owing to compositions commissioned for performance there, not only the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (Concerto for Chamber Orchestra in E Flat Major) by Igor Stravinsky (1882.-1971), but also the later Nonet for Solo Strings by Aaron Copland (1900-1990) and Dumbarton Quintet by Joan Tower (1938-). To history buffs, Dum barton Oaks calls to mind the negotiations among Allied Powers that took place on its premises as the world lay in the ruins of the Second World War in 1944: the "Dumbarton Oaks Conversations" led ultimately to the formation of the United Nations. But the overriding aim of the founders was not to further musical composition or diplomacy: it was to foster advanced research in the humanities, and the field for which it was established, to repeat, was Byzantine studies. Flanking (and even protecting) what became the primary entrance to the main building of Dum barton Oaks as the mansion of Robert and Mildred Bliss was expanded to render it suitable for service as a research institute are inscriptions that offer insight into the values that guided them in making their donations. The Blisses wished for this institute to be a paradise for scholars, above all for Byzantinists, and for their gardens and museum to be accessible on a regular basis to a cultured public. They intended the institution they founded to be, in their words, "a home of the humanities." 15 My mission as director of the institution, as organizer of the symposium, and as editor of this volume has been to undergird as vigorously as possible the subjects that Dumbarton Oaks was established to promote. Anyone who steps across the threshold of the main building treads upon a mosaic from ancient Antioch that contains in the Greek alphabet the noun apolausis, meaning "enjoyment." The Blisses' appropriation of this inscription was a signal from them: all the erudition and culture that the research library and collection purvey are supposed to be suffused with a spirit and ambience of joy. The person who proceeds into the Byzantine courtyard gallery in the museum that lies beyond the entrance foyer finds on a lintel a longer Greek inscription, taken from Menander. Strikingly, the gardens that surround most of the main building contain not a word of Greek (a language too little known, even in the well-cultured set of the donors, 15 relati' ltaliaJ Blisse ers in posiut A mer. (1887- partn< alread the em when anexp Dante The syt markec Byzantl which l Weitzn Hugo I ous oth trade 0 theirwi thing t< their yo rual rna "publish ize.The mid-tw than do more th The efforts GreekE create t onelon A Home ofthe Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage ofMildred and Robert Woods Bliss, ed. J. N. Carder, Dumbarton Oaks Museum Publications 1 (Washington, DC, 2.010). 6 jan M Ziolkowski Introduc successors, but nks to his con- Dante Society he event took Library and veen 1940 and Oaks is famil. performance )rchestra in E 1olo Strings by · 38-). To hisd Powers that Warin1944: >f the United ical composid the field for to the main ras expanded offer insight shed for this heir gardens mended the ｾｵｲｮＬ＠ and as ubjects that te threshold rains in the L>priation of (he research d ambience 1e museum tion, taken relatives, and friends) but rather inscriptions in Latin, English, Middle English, and Italian. Significantly, the two Italian inscriptions are drawn from the Commedia. The Blisses were evidently fond of Dante (and of the canonicity he embodied), as were others in their circle of friends and associates. The Music Room, the hall in which the symposium lectures were delivered, was constructed in 192.9 from a design by the storied American architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Lawrence Grant White (1887-19s6), son of the founding partner Stanford White (18s3-19o6), was a senior partner when the Music Room was built in 192.3 and may have had a passion for Dante already at the time, seeing that he published a translation into English blank verse of the entire Divine Comedy a quarter-century later (in 1948). These tidbits of information, when put together, leave little doubt that the Blisses would have approved heartily of an exploration devoted to Dante and the Greeks, bringing together as it does nor only Dante and Byzantium but also scholars and the public. The symposium "Dante and the Greeks" took place in 2.010. By happenstance, that year marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 196s Dum barton Oaks symposium on "The Byzantine Contribution to Western Art of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," in which such luminaries of art history as the German- and Austrian-born emigres Kurt Weitzmann (1904- 1993), Ernst Kitzinger (1912-2003), Otto Demus (1902-1990), and Hugo Buchthal (1909-1996) participated. 16 All four of these art historians-and various others could be identified as well, such as Andre Grabar (1896-1990)-plied their trade on both sides of the academic aisle, as Byzantinists and medievalists. Although their willingness and ability to cross the gulfbetween the two areas of studies owe something to superior grounding that training in classical gymnasia imparted to them in their youth, they may also reflect the circumstance that these men achieved intellectual maturity long before the growth of higher education and the entrenchment of a "publish or perish" ethos that encouraged scholars to specialize and even to overspecialize. The sense of common ground that existed among art historians for decades in the mid-twentieth century bespeaks perspectives that may have come closer to the truth than do the fault lines and even rifts that opened as scholarly specialization became ever more the norm and necessity in the years after the Second World War. The end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first have not lacked efforts at bridging the gaps that have persisted in scholarship on the Latin West and the Greek East, bur we can do far more to span the divide. In the hopes of helping others to create the necessary trestles rather than inflicting my own pontifications, I will invoke one long quotation: rain not a he donors, 9ds Bliss, ed. Ziolkowski 16 E. Kitzinger, "The Byzantine Contribution to Western Art of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Report on the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium of 1965," DOP 20 (1966): 265-66 . Otto Demus wrote a book that he acknowledged was inspired by the symposium: Byzantine A rt and the West, Wrightsman Lectures 3 (New York, 1970). Introduction 7 To the historian of Western culture in the Middle Ages, the Greek East is a subject of ever increasing importance. Long considered an alien ... civilization, Byzantium has now come to be regarded as a great reservoir of material from which the less civilized West continued to draw throughout the mediaeval period. The channels of communication between East and West, however, often ran beneath the surface, and many of the contacts were occasional or accidental, so that the process of transmission often eludes us. Again and again our only evidence is a fine piece of craftsmanship, an obviously Byzantine type in art, a sacred relic from Constantinople, or a Latin translation of Greek hagiography or science, with no indication ofhow these came westward. Under such conditions the story of Byzantine influence must be built up by the slow accumulation of individual detail. The author of this passage was the erstwhile Harvard professor of medieval history, Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), in an essay devoted to "Contacts with Byzantium" that was published in 192.9, about the time when the setting of the symposium, the Music Room of Dum barton Oaks, took shape. 17 The Music Room has at its east end two large sixteenth-century marble arches, reportedly from Ravenna, where Dante was buried after his death in 132.1. Enough has now been said about Byzantium and Dumbarton Oaks, with a nod to medieval studies in general. Fairness demands thatwedevoteequal time to Dante. It would be wrong to suggest that the topic of Dante and the Greeks has gone utterly unexamined. Every contributor to this volume has established a track record relating to one or another aspect of the complex relationship between Dante and the Greeks, who comprehend not merely ancient Hellenes but early Christians and Byzantines, as well. Entries on relevant topics appear in the six-volume Enciclopedia Dantesca (1970-78). 18 A wide-ranging book devoted to Dante and Byzantium was published by E. D. Karampetsos in 2.009, a topic on which the most comprehensive study theretofore had been a single Italian essay. 19 Last but not least, the title Dante and the Greeks acknowledges an article by Glenn Most that has been disseminated in English (2.0o6), French (2.005), and Italian (2.006). 20 Most set for himself the goal of answering the question: "Who are the Greeks for Dante?" 21 At the same time, despite these groundbreaking contributions, the topic has not been treated 17 Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford, 192.9), 160. 18 Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols. (Rome, 1970-78). 19 See above, n. 5· The essay was Antonio Carile, "Dante e Bisanzio," Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 40, no. 2. (1999), 535-58. 2.0 G. W Most, "Dante's Greeks," Arion 13, no. 3 (winter 2.006): 15-47. This was an expanded version of an essay originally published in French under the tide "Les Grecs chez Dante," in Colloque: La Grece antique sous le regard du Moyen age occidental; Actes, ed. J. Leclant and M. Zink, Cahiers de Ia Villa Kerylos 16 (Paris, 2.005), 95-117. The Italian version is "I Greci di Dante," Belfogor: Rassegna di varia umanita 61, no. 2. [362.] (2.0o6): 181-2.01. 2.1 Most, "Dante's Greeks," 18. 8 Jan M. Ziolkowski asful ultim tudes an en Byzar tively A ｄ｡ｭｾ＠ promi he reel with tl maini tually AsiaN subsun of the Yen hadsc later, li speak, afeww lar regi occupa speaken Whene Yes, the ver via the 1 attested the Byz uchlex 2.2. J. Zi forrhcom 2.3 TheD York, 2.00 2.4 M. T toriograph Language (Amstcrd 2.5 B.M 2.6 C. B lntroduc :k East is a .. civilizaof material mediaeval rever, often accidental, 1ｾｵｲ＠ only >e m art, a ionditions ulation of .ieval history, 1 Byzantium" posium, the t its east end reDantewas rith a nod to lnte. It would mexamined. eoranother prehendnot · on relevant mgingbook 009, a topic essay. 19 Last Most that 20 • Most set ,e?" 21 At the een treated ,. sec. 3, 40, 1, panded vec"olloque: La .ahiers de Ia Rassegnadi "Ziolkowski as fully as one would expect. Dante's attitudes toward Islam and possible indebtedness to ultimately Arabic sources have been probed far more often and intensively than his attitudes and indebtedness to Greek culture. 22 Revealingly, The Dante Encyclopedia contains an entry on "Islam and Islamic Culture" but no corresponding one on "Byzantium and Byzantine Culture," the Greek Orthodox Church, or Constantinople. 23 The comparatively brief entry on "Greeks" is restricted to ancient Greeks. As a gambit for opening this consideration, let us evaluate what can be gleaned from Dante's texts. To begin with the matter of language, Dante recognized the linguistic prominence ofGreek. 24 In De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular; 1.8.2) he recounts how people who came westward after the fall of the Tower of Babel brought with them the original "threefold idiom" (ydioma tripharium) that gave rise to the three main families of European spoken languages: proto-Romance in the south (itself eventually tripartite), proto-Germanic in the north, and Greek in the east of Europe and in Asia Minor. Thus, he indicates that the Greeks, by whom he means the people we now subsume as the Byzantines, are one of the three groups that together constitute the whole of the linguistic world. Yet despite acknowledging the foundational importance of Greek, Dante himself had scant exposure to the language or its literature. Unlike humanists of a few decades later, he resembled most educated Western Europeans of his day in his inability to speak, read, or write Greek. The prolonged Byzantine presence in parts of Italy caused a few words to be nativized throughout Italian and others to become rooted in particular regions, but its effects may well have been less pronounced than those of the Arabic occupation of Sicily and southern Italy. The origins oflinguistic islands formed by Greek speakers in such venues as Calabria and Terra d'Otranto have been much debated. 25 Whenever the archipelago of such enclaves formed, it has had little or no impact on the evolution ofltalian. Yes, a few common words can be pinpointed in modern Italian that seeped into the vernacular in the Middle Ages either directly from Byzantine Greek or indirectly via the local reflex of medieval Latin. The premiere case in point would be gondola, first attested in 1094, perhaps by way of a hypothetical regional Latin form *condua, from the Byzantine Greek neuter plural kondya and its diminutive kondylion, "vessel." 26 Yet such lexical items are rare by any measure. Many more Grecisms in Italian are due to the 22 J. Ziolkowski, issue editor, Dante Studies 125 (2007), revised as Dante and Islam (New York, forthcoming). 23 The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. R. Lansing, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1836 (New York, 20oo). 24 M. Tavoni, "'Ydioma Tripharium' (Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I 8-9)," in History and Historiography of Linguistics, Papers .from the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), Trier, 24-28 August I9S7, ed. H.-J. Niederehe and K. Koerner, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1990), 1:233-47. 25 B. Migliorini, The Italian Language, ed. T. Gwyn for Griffith (London, 1984), 40. 26 C. Battisti and G. Alessio, Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols. (Florence, 1950-57), 3:1843. Introduction 9 robust presence of Greek in both classical and medieval Latin than to the ramifications of any Byzantine occupation or Greek exilic communities from any period. 27 From Latin sources, Dante gleaned etymologies for some Greek words, but he manifested no grasp of the distinctive workings of the language. The furthest he could go was to neologize by extrapolating from a rudimentary grasp of Greek etyma, as in coining the noun teodia, "song directed to God" (Par. 25.73), by analogy with such words as com(m)edia, "comedy"; melodia, "melody"; and tragedia, "tragedy."28 One of his main wellsprings was Huguccio of Pisa's Derivationes (Derivations, II9 7-IlOI), which contains clues that its author had contact with contemporary Greek speakers. 29 Dante credited Huguccio as his source in Convivio 4 .6.5 when considering the origins of the word auctor and may have relied on him for information about various other words and allusions.30 Dante's limited exposure to Greek is examined in this collection by Reka Forrai in her scrutiny of the place Greek learning held in Italian culture during his life.31 To turn from language to culture, Dante demonstrates a degree of acquaintance with ancient and medieval Greece typical of an educated medieval Westerner of his era. Since Dante epitomizes the medieval Western-medieval Latin-ambience, it is not surprising to find that he crystallizes much of the complementarity and friction between it and Greek culture in his writings. The positive side of his vantage point can be gauged from his approving nods to Greek myth, literature, and history, as well as to Greek attainments in the arts and sciences, and, above all, to the archetypically Greek innovation of philosophyY Put simply, Dante's familiarity with the highlights of ancient Greek culture means that he can drop names, as is evident from a roster that contains Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Zeno, Dioscorides, Orpheus, Linus, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and GalenY At Inferno 23.4 - 6, Dante mentions one of Aesop's fables . In Purgatory 22, he touches upon three tragedians-Euripides, Antiphon, and Agathon-and the lyric poet Simonides. But the names do not imply intimacy with the works of these figures. After all, many major Migliorini,ltalianLanguage, 55 · P. Manni, Il Trecento toscano: L a lingua di D ante, Petrarca e B occaccio (Bologna, 2003), 155- 56. M anni points out that antomata in Purgatorio 10 .128, once thought to have been a calque of the same sort, is, in fact, a borrowing via Latin translations of Aristotle. An alternative explanation of teodia would relate it to psalmodia: E. Moore, Studies in D ante, First Series: Scripture and Classical A uthors in D ante (O xford, 1896), 66. 29 H. D. Austin, "Notes on the Greek in Dante's Latin Dictionary," Studies in Philology 44 (1947): 477-82, at 480 - 81. 30 P. Toynbee, "D ante's Obligations to the M agnae D erivationes of Uguccione da Pisa,n Romania 27 28 26 (189 7) : 537-54· 31 The fullest consideration of Dante's knowledge of Greek is G. M. Gianola, "II greco di Dante," in M emorie (Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti. Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti) 37> no. 3 (1980). 32 Most, "Dante's Greeks,n 21. 33 10 T. Hudson-Williams, "Dante and the Classics,n Greece and Rome 20, no. 58 (1951): 38-42. jan M Ziolkowski aurhon Demos rect, ca far over into La· Vie' her essa Dante i Teodoli that pet ity, L e a uponD1 the mai1 tomarily tioned b tack, by ness, wh malorurt, issue of I Nicomacl commen1 As a except as gious glm Purg. 22. betoken eminence who are i secondha 100 that Latinus ( pondexa (24.258-5 Likewise, Horace's Dante's in 34 Forqu rheGreekE Interaction 15- 30. 35 Most, Introductio o the ramifications Jeriod. 27 .vords, but he manrthest he could go etyma, as in coinfith such words as 8 One of his main ·1201), which cooers. 29 Dante credrigins of the word er words and alluon by Reka Forrai ing his life. 31 e of acquaintance Westerner of his l-ambience, it is arity and friction vantage point can itory, as well as to n.etypically Greek l ek culture means ristode, Socrates, leraclitus, Zeno, Jen. 33 At Inferno 1ches upon three monides. But the all, many major gna, 2003), 155-56. calque of the same planation of teodia d Classical Authors ilology 44 (1947): authors, even philosophers, are omitted: Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, and Pythagoras. Furthermore, Dante's exposure, both direct and indirect, came solely through Latin sources. Pardy for this reason, he privileges Aristotle far over Plato: the only Platonic dialogue familiar to Dante is the Timaeus, as translated into Latin by the fourth-century Calcidius (or Chalcidius). 34 Views diverge on the specific aspects of Aristotle that mattered most to Dante. In her essay for this volume, Reka Forrai argues that the Aristotle who holds sway over Dante is not so much the metaphysician or logician as the practical philosopher. As Teodolinda Barolini elucidates in her contribution to this volume, the Aristotelianism that pervades the Italian poet's oeuvre is evident even in his canzone on true nobility, Le dolci rime. Marcia Colish, in her essay, admits the sway that Aristotle exercised upon Dante's thinking about actions taken against conscience, but points out that, in the main, it does not stem from the specific Aristotelian passages that have been customarily flagged as sources and that, in addition, the Italian poet may have been conditioned by various classical and medieval Latin authors. Filippo Naitana takes a similar tack, by arguing that in the Convivio Aristotelianism is above all a science of happiness, which Dante understands as mediated through Cicero's De Jinibus bonorum et malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). Michele Trizio gives a special spin to the issue of Dante's Aristotelianism by demonstrating that Western debates on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, specifically those that influenced Dante, were rooted in Byzantine commentaries. As a principle, we may state that Dante knew nothing of ancient Greek culture except as transmitted through either the works of canonical Latin authors or the prodigious gloss and commentary tradition upon them. 35 Thus, in Inferno 4.94-96 (compare Purg. 22.101-2), he is welcomed first by Homer, who is distinguished by his sword to betoken his associations with the martial genre of epic. The Greek bard is accorded preeminence, walking before the major Latin poets-Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucanwho are introduced with him in limbo. Yet Dante's knowledge of Homer comes only secondhand, and he recognizes this shortcoming. His assertion in Convivio !.7·93IOO that no Latin translation of Homer exists may signal his awareness that Homerus Latinus (Latin Homer), also known as the !lias Latina (Latin Iliad), does not correpond exactly to the Greek Iliad. In Vita Nuova 2.8, Dante quotes a bit of Homer's Iliad (24.258-59) but via a Latin translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (7.1.II45a). Likewise, in Vita Nuova 25.9, he gives the opening of the Odyssey but as borrowed from Horace'sArs poetica 141-42. Beyond such testimony (and other scraps can be found) for Dante's indirect exposure to Homer, there is no evidence that he had read other Greek da Pisa," Romania U greco di Dame," e ed arti) 37, no. 3 34 For quick orientation in the major phases of philosophical exchange between the Latin West and the Greek East during late antiquity and the Middle Ages, seeS. Ebbesen, "Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction," in Byzantine Philosophy and Its Ancient Sources, ed. K. lerodiakonou (Oxford, 2002), 15-30. 35 an M. Ziolkowski Most, "Dante's Greeks," 24. Introduction II belles-lettres even in translation. 36 In Vita Nuova 25, Dante seems to lend credence to the notion that Greek love lyric existed in antiquity, but he names no lyricists to substantiate this view. In limbo, Dante parades many personages before us. Of the non-Christians, the Greeks are usually first, followed by ancient Romans, and finally Muslims. He imbues his underworld in Greek myth and especially Greek mythic geography, but mostly by way of Virgil. Thus, in his underworld we meet Hades, Minos, Phlegyas, Charon, Cerberus, Pluto, and the infernal rivers of Acheron (Inf 3), Styx (Inf 7), Phlegethon (Inf 12), and Cocytus (Inf 32-34), as well as Lethe (Purg. 28-33), in the earthly paradise atop Mount Purgatory, where it is twinned with a river whose name, Eunoe, he coined from the Greek elements eu, "good," and noe, "mind." 37 George Dameron, in his essay for this volume, focuses upon the treatment of the hybrid Geryon in Inferno 16. Elsewhere, in cantos 20 and 30 of the Inferno, Dante draws an example from Greek myth more than once, but at least partly to signify that it impresses him less than something more closely contemporary with him. From the Trojan War he singles out Helen, Dido, Sinon, Tiresias, Achilles, and Diomedes. Central to the puzzle ofDante's stance toward the ancient Greeks is the Ulysses episode in canto 26 of the Inferno, which has spawned a bibliography more limitless than the briny seas the Ithacan adventurer allegedly sailed. 38 In this collection, our helmsman through the turbulent interpretative waters is Piero Boitani. In this canto of the Divine Comedy, Virgil asks Ulysses how he died, to which the wanderer replies by explaining that before capsizing and drowning, he and his crew navigated from the Mediterranean beyond the pillars of Heracles-the promontories that flank the Strait of Gibraltarinto the Atlantic Ocean and the Southern Hemisphere. 39 For reasons that have been disputed, Virgil does not allow Dante to converse directly with the Homeric hero, so the poet must rely on Virgil as mediator. 40 Whatever the explanation for Virgil's intervention, it signals Dante's Roman, and hence Trojan, perspective that his Odysseus goes by the Latinized and Romani zed name of Ulysses. In this same canto, Dante qualifies the Trojan race as being "the noble seed" of the Roman people chosen by God to rule the world (Inf 26.6o). 36 The most efficient approach to the bits and pieces of Homer is through G. Martellotti, Enciclopedia Dantesca 4 :145-48, s.v. "Omero." 37 Charles Singleton pointed out that Dante followed the analogy of Protonoe, presumably by way of Huguccio's Derivationes, glossed in Convivio 2.3.II as "the first mind": see Dante, The Divine Com edy, trans. C . S. Singleton, Bollingen Series So (Princeton, NJ, 1970-75). 38 ]. C . Hirsch, "Dante among the Greeks: Paradiso XXVII, 82-84," Neophilologus s6 (1972): 162-63. 39 Most, "Dante's Greeks," 34· 40 The scholarship is vast. For a clear presentation of the episode, see D. Donno, "Dante's Ulysses and Virgil 's Prohibition: Inferno XXVI, 70-75," Italica so (19 73): 26-37. 12 Jan M. Ziolkowski Allth ｡ｳｩｮｧｬ･ｴ ｾ＠ monplace! of power) Rome and more spec. by the Ro1 Christiani inherited, hadformeJ Determini ing bone oJ or neither? they were, the Greek c impossible Dante's out mune as th that bestow whichiswh the new Jer Christ him! aRoman;P idea. But in Romanness, and an ancie Romans, wb themselves a Christianize Theorig human remn Italy. Across 41 The locus 25-42, ed. A. Translatio imp Mittelalter un tudii and Co 1979). 42 C. T. Dav 43 Geanakop Imroduction lend credence to o lyricists to sub- the lims. He imbues tphy, but mostly illegyas, Charon, . 7), Phlegethon the earthly pararne, Eunoe, he Dameron, in his on in Inferno 16. rom Greek myth than something mt Helen, Dido, Ulysses episode nidess than the our helmsman to of the Divine !s by explaining Mediterranean of Gibraltarthat have been omeric hero, so >r Virgil's inter; Odysseus goes Dante qualifies by God to rule All the Greek sages and heroes imported by Dante into the Commedia belongwithin a single stage in world history or, rather, in salvation history. The medieval Western commonplaces of translatio studii (transfer of knowledge) and translatio imperii (transfer of power) held that both learning and empire passed from ancient Greece to ancient Rome and again from ancient Rome to medieval Europe, in particular France (and still more specifically Paris). 41 By this way of thinking, the Greeks of old were vanquished by the Romans so that Rome could become Christian and thus prevail as the seat of Christianity. When the Romans embraced Christianity, those Roman Christians inherited, in accordance with providence, the birthrights oflearning and rulership that had formerly belonged to the Greeks and Romans of antiquity. Determining who the true Roman Christians or Christian Romans were was an unending bone of contention and anxiety. Were they Holy Romans, Roman Catholics, both, or neither? Perhaps the greatest jolt is to discover that the overarching issue was whether they were Westerners within the purview of the Latin Church or Easterners within the Greek one. To a degree that may be at .first astonishing and even paradoxical, it is impossible to consider the nexus of Dante and the Greeks without taking into account Dante's outlook on Rome and Romanness. 42 To him, Rome was not so much the commune as the seat and symbol of universality in both empire and Church. The Rome that bestowed peace upon the world was even the model for the eternal peace of heaven, which is why Beatrice could assure Dante that they would be citizens of the City of God, the new Jerusalem. This heavenly Rome has as its foremost citizen-as its emperorChrist himself: "quella Roma onde Cristo e romano" (that Rome in which Christ is a Roman; Purg. 32.102). Thus, Rome was less a specific location than a more pervasive idea. But in fundamental ways it was also not merely one place-and the concepts of Romanness, Roman Empire, and Roman Church were disputed between Rome in Italy and an ancient, or at least late antique, rival. Not without very good cause, the Eastern Romans, who have been called the Byzantines since the sixteenth century, regarded themselves as heirs to ancient Greek culture, Roman government, and the faith of the Christianized Roman Empire.43 The original city of Rome, itselflegendarily a New Troy that gave a new home to the human remnants transplanted from a city destroyed in the East, was and is in Latium, in Italy. Across the Mediterranean-or, more specifically, across the Adriatic, Ionian, and ellotti, Enciclope, presumably by ante, The Divine 41 The locus classicus that presents the two concepts in tandem is Chretien de Troyes, Cliges, lines 2.5-42., ed. A. Micha (Paris, 1957). For background and context on each in the pairing, see W. Goez, blogus s6 (1972.) : Transiatio imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der Jruhen Neuzeit (Ti.ibingen, 1958), and M.A. Freeman, The Poetics of translatio srudii and Conjointure: Chretien de Troyes's Cliges, French Forum Monographs 12. (Lexington, KY, "Dance's Ulysses 1979). 42. C. T. Davis, Dante and the Idea ofRome (Oxford, 1957) . 43 Geanakoplos, Interaction ofthe "Sibling" Byzantine and Western Cultures, 113. n M. Ziolkowski Introduction 13 Aegean Seas-stood the New Rome of Constantinople in Asia Minor, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, what Dante labeled the "imperial city" (civitade imperatrice; Conv. 4·4.13). But though Constantinople explicitly recreated and incorporated elements of the city after which it was modeled, Dante had no truck with identifying the people we call the Byzantines with the idealized Romans he wished to have in power as peace-givers.44 From Dante's perspective, how distinct from the ur-Rome was Constantinople? We are afforded a glimpse into his thinking when Justinian (482.-565; r. 52.7-565) comes on the scene in Paradiso 6, a canto extraordinary and even unique in being delivered by a single speaker, who happens (not that Dante would have known) to have been the last Latin-speaking emperor of Constantinople, and the Byzantine emperor in whose reign the famous churches in Ravenna and Classe, which Dante must have experienced in all their glittering splendor, since he spent his last years living there, were completed.45 In fact, during his residence in Ravenna, Dante could not have failed to see Justinian as represented in the mosaics nearby. Dante was deeply conversant with Justinian's legal corpus. In the preamble to the Corpus iuris civilis, the emperor had written that the text had been perfected by the grace of God.46 In the Commedia, Justinian, in telling of the Roman Empire and its providential history, emphasizes that when Constantine (2.72.337; r. 306-337), the first Christian emperor ofRome, transplanted the seat of the empire eastward from Rome and founded the new capital that took his name, he moved against the nature of the sun and the providential westward course of empire and culture, in the opposite direction-the wrong direction-from the trajectory Aeneas traversed while en route to Latium. 47 Far beyond the borders of either city stretched the status of citizenship and the style of life that constituted Romanitas, "Romanness." Roman ness became something tied not to the city Rome but rather more broadly to the political power of the Roman Empire and the culture of Roman civilization. This expansion helps to account for the Romanness of peoples spread throughout the Western Roman Empire who became Romanized to the point of speaking Latin, and who later became speakers of the Romance languages, the designation for which pays tribute to the Roman citizenship (and language and culture) to which those speakers laid claim. 44 W. Caferro, "Dante and the Problem of Byzantium," in The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor ofjaroslav Pelikan, ed. W. Caferro and D. G. Fisher (New York, 1996), 93-111. a 45 G. Arnaldi, "II canto di Giustiniano," in Liber largitorius: Etudes d 'histoire medievale o.ffertes Pie1·re Toubert parses tleves, ed. D. Barthelemy andJ.-M. Martin, Hautes etudes medievales et modernes 84 (Geneva, 2003), 3-14, and P. Sabbatino, "La felicira di raccontare: Lettura del canto VI del Paradiso," in Miscellanea di Studi Danteschi in memoria di Silvio Pasquazi, ed. A. Paolella, V. Placella, and G . Turco, 2 vols. (Naples, 1993), 2:769-800. 46 L. M. Valterza, "Infernal Retainers: Dante and the Juridical Tradition" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 2010), 11. 47 Sabbatino, "La felicira di raccontare," 772. 14 jan M. Ziolkowski Th as Ron dering origina Roman known of such whatwl nected 1 from thi to be ki medieva ticism. J their de1 The as the Ei collectio the illust Rome he feredmo Latinnes Greek, as of "citize barism). neighbori Thus, a ca. 587), the territ Greek-sp so long to poet and monlywr of al-And ers (and s European stitutes a Byzantine To civiliz the Greek Introductio eat of the peratrice; orated elefying the power as ople?We comes on vered by a n the last wse reign teed in all Ｔ Ｕ＠ In itinian as Ｇ ｳ＠ legal text ngofthe ne (1711eempire dagainst re, in the ed while and the nething Roman : for the became of the zenship :Papers wYork, 1/fertes a et mod- ? VI del >Jacdla, tutgers, fkowski The Romance languages famously comprehend such far-flung and isolated members as Romansh, in southeastern Switzerland, and Romanian, spoken in the region bordering the Black Sea. Romansh and Romanian, as well as the very term Romance, all originated ultimately in aspirations to Romanness. In one of the major Latin-derived Romance languages, Old French, were written the medieval narratives that became known as romances (because of the language in which they were composed). The ethos of such narratives included attitudes toward women and love that are associated with what we call romance, romantic, and romanticism when referring to relationships connected with love. The architecture of the early Middle Ages, with features that emerged from the state architecture associated with ancient Roman imperial constructions, came to be known as Romanesque. Those who revived and adapted the earlier attitudes of medieval romance in the nineteenth century belonged to the movement we call romanticism. All these phenomena go back ultimately to Romanness or in claims to it, even if their derivation remains unknown to many. The Western pretension to a monopoly on Romanness hardly went undisputed, as the Eastern Romans likewise called themselves Roman. In his contribution to this collection, William Caferro, through analysis ofltalian chronicles contemporary with the illustrious Italian poet, sets forth problems in the implications that Dante's idea of Rome held true for the New Rome of Byzantium. Dante's outlook could not have differed more radically than it did from that of Eastern Romans. Because Roman ness and Latinness were separate matters, the Byzantines went so far as to label their language, Greek, as "Roman" and to call themselves Rhomaioi, meaning "Romans" in the sense of"citizens of the Roman Empire" or "upholders of Roman civilization" (against barbarism). As a result, both the Byzantine Empire and Greek Christianity were known to neighboring cultures, such as the Arabs, as Rome (Rum) and their people as Romans. Thus, a companion of the prophet Muhammad was called Suhayb ar-Riimi (born ca. 587), after his origins as a slave in the Byzantine Empire and his fair-haired appearance. Coins that resembled the denarii produced by the Eastern Roman Empire were termed rumi, "Roman." The designation Rumi, transferred gradually from the people to the heartland of the territory they once occupied, continued to be applied even to non-Byzantine (nonGreek-speaking and non-Christian) inhabitants ofAnatolia, as the region had belonged so long to the Byzantine Empire. For example, the thirteenth-century Persian Muslim poet and mystic Jalai ad-Din Muhammad Riimi is often called in English Rumi (commonly written without any diacritical marks). Furthermore, the Christian inhabitants of al-Andalus were sometimes designated as Rumi. But in general, Arabic speakers (and speakers of other languages in countries such as Ethiopia) labeled Western Europeans in the .first instance with an Arabic word Faranji, "Frankish," which constitutes a further piece of evidence that the West was not irrefutably Roman. The Byzantines labeled the Western Romans Italikoi, "Italians." The lesson to be drawn? To civilizations neighboring the Byzantine Empire, for most of the Middle Ages only the Greeks-the Rhomaioi-were Romans (Rumi), though as the Byzantine Empire Introduction IS contracted, those who occupied the parts of Asia Minor that had been Byzantine were often called "Roman," too. 48 Byzant papal p Consta (and th Roman that th( In the fifth century, the Western half of the Roman Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. In contrast, the Eastern half remained alive-despite being diminished greatly by Islam and perhaps even more by the Western European assault of the Fourth Crusade-until 1453, when it succumbed to the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror (1432-1481). When in the fifth century the Roman Empire collapsed, the bishop of Rome was subject at least theoretically to the authority of the Christian emperor in theN ew Rome of Constantinople. Later emperors in the West endeavored to affirm their authority over the bishops of Rome-the popes-even to the point of deposing them. But in the second half of the eleventh century, shortly after what turned out to be the enduring schism between Rome and the Eastern Church, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) decreed that the pope had sole right to imperial authority (in the form of insignia) and that papal supremacy extended even to the power to depose emperors.49 In Dante's time, Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303) reaffirmed the supremacy of the pope as spiritual power over the emperor as temporal power, and even enlarged the pope's authority by asserting papal privilege to shift at will the control of the empire from the Romans to the Franks or elsewhere. Thus, one part of the picture in the balance between Rome and Constantinople related to what could be called Church-State relations, and it was an issue of surpassing urgency to Dante, who in the third book of the De monarchia (On Monarchy) refuted the pope's claim over translatio imperii. Another element in the equilibrium between Rome and Constantinople pertained to primacy among the chiefbishoprics of the Church. Pope Leo I (r. 440-461) laid claim to dominion over all Christians. Rome had been one of four episcopal sees, with the others being Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. The bishop of Constantinople was elevated to similar status in 381, and afterward the other three cities fell under Muslim domination. The Roman Church, which became the Roman Catholic Church, placed increasing emphasis on its preeminence-on the primacy of the bishop of Rome. Should we accept as a sign ofignorance or disinterest the absence in Dante's entire oeuvre of overt references to "Byzantium" and the "Byzantines"? 50 Hardly, since no one in the Eastern Roman Empire referred to Constantinople as Byzantium or called their empire use onl' To 1 the real six teem antique Rome. The Empire disciplili Chonia carried, have ha Roman have str related t periodfr once an land, an thanks t of their c< their Ron Rome be ｾ＠ On Co aero, ed. F. 51 Hiero D"Vaurd 48 Many of the Crusaders were indeed Franks or French, but the overarching category which they belonged was Latin. Omnis Latinitas was a phrase that enfolded all Latin Christendom, both Western Europe and Crusader states: see R.J. Hexter, "Medieval Latin: Horizons and Perspectives," in "Latinitas: The Tradition and Teaching of Latin," Helios 14 (1987): 69-92.. 49 For full information, see H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VIL I07J-IOSf (Oxford, 1998). so Most, "Dante's Greeks," 2.5. 16 to jan M. Ziolkowski H.-G. Beck, The ch For full infc S Abstr4cts of Un1vn-sity 0;) OED•. amine were nto a patchve-despite n European >man Turks fRome was New Rome r authority tern. But in the endur- I073-I08s) signia) and ante's time, tual power y by asserttans to the Rome and lit was an lrchia (On pertained laid claim , with the nople was :r Muslim ch, placed me. Ire oeuvre me in the irempire to which dom, both spectives," }iolkowski Byzantine. The toponym Byzantium was an archaism, pressed into use by Westerners in papal propaganda in the late eighth century so as to deprive the city known officially as Constantinopolis Nova Roma of both its onomastic association with a Roman emperor (and the first Christian Roman Emperor, at that) and, more importantly, of its official Romanness. 51 The adjectival derivative "Byzantine" is an exonym, not a self-designation that the Romans of the East ever used. Furthermore, it is an anachronism that came into use only after the people and their empire had ceased to exist. To those who ruled and inhabited the Eastern Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, the realm was Roman, plain and simple. To Westerners it was Greek. But in the midsixteenth century it was felt necessary to devise a term that could disambiguate the postantique afterlife of the Eastern Roman Empire from both ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Thus was spawned the adjective Byzantine. The neologism, at least in this sense, was first employed in reference to the Eastern Empire in ISS?· Hieronymus Wolf (ISI6-Is8o), a German humanist who founded the discipline of Byzantine studies, used the word when he published the History of Niketas Choniates (ca. II40-1213).52 Since the adjective was first used by Wolf, Byzantine has carried a heavy freight of political and ideological associations.53 With it, Westerners have had a ready means of refuting the assertions of those who inhabited the Eastern Roman Empire that they were the more authentic Romans: the Romans of the West have stripped the Easterners of their Romanness by deploying in place of any word related to Rome the term Byzantine to denote them and their civilization during the period from the Arabic conquests of the seventh century until the fall of Constantinople in I4S3·' 4 Byzantine is thus a final and definitive attempt to sort out the whole tangle about Romanness to the disadvantage of the Eastern Romans, by de-Romanizing them once and for all. From an Eastern Roman vantage point, it is the insult that stripped them of their identity after they had endured the mortal injury oflosing their city, their land, and their empire. And it must have stung that when the end came, it arrived partly thanks to the systemic damages inflicted by the Fourth Crusade, partly owing to the unwillingness of the Westerners to come to their aid when they were in the final throes of their collapse. Coincidentally, but still tellingly, the terminological expropriation of their Romanness from the Eastern Romans occurred at the same time as the Church of Rome became the Roman Catholic Church: the seesaw of religion and power landed 51 On Constantinopolis Nova Roma, see A. Carile, "Costantinopoli Nuova Roma," in La citta e il sacro, ed. F. Cardini (Milan, 1994), 203-42. 52 Hieronymus Wolf's autobiography, composed in Latin and first printed in 1773, can be found in Der Vater der deutschen Byzantinistik: Das Leben des Hieronymus Wolf von ihm selbst erzii.hlt, trans. H.-G. Beck, Miscellanea Byzantina Monacensia 29 (Munich, 1984). 53 The scholarship on the political and ideological freight of the term Byzantium has become vast. For full information, see Byzantium: Identity, Image, Influence, Index ofColloquia as ofjuly 15, 1990; Abstracts of Communications; Index of Authors: XIX International Congress of Byzantine Studies, University ofCopenhagen, 18-24 August 1990, ed. K. Fledelius (Copenhagen, 1996). 54 OED, s.v. "Byzantine." Introduction 17 heavily on the western side of the Mediterranean for the first time since before Emperor Constantine I the Great. The Western outlook upon the Eastern Roman Empire during the Byzantine period was often unfavorable even during the Middle Ages. For instance, Dante questioned the legitimacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, since in his view (Mon. 3.n; Par. 6.94-96), the authority underlying it had been transferred to the West in the time of Charlemagne, who saved the Western continuation of the Roman Empire from the Lombard invasion. Dante was approximately correct in his understanding, although in De monarchia 3.10.18 he put the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Hadrian !-actually by Pope Leo III-during the reign of Emperor Michael in the East. (In this same passage, he makes his only explicit reference to Constantinople. His only implicit reference to the city is in Paradiso 6.s, where he accentuates the geographical marginality of its location vis-a-vis Europe: "ne lo stremo d'Europa.") At the same time-when the Eastern Roman Empire fell in northern Italy-the Western Church embarked upon the twin processes of redesignating Constantinople as Byzantium and thereby depriving it of its onomastic attachment to the first Christian emperor. Just when Westerners dissociated Constantinople from Constantine, they linked the city of Rome powerfully to the same emperor-the Christianizer of the Roman Empire. The same crucial stretch of time, the second half of the eighth century, saw the the papal chancery's production of the forgery known as the Constitutum Constantini (Donation of Constantine), a supposed Roman imperial decree by which Constantine had in 314 allegedly transferred to the pope authority over Rome and the Western part of the Roman Empire, including, of course, the cities of Italy.55 Dante, who referred to the Donation five times, accepted it (although with regret) as genuine, as did Western Christians until the fifteenth century, when the humanist Lorenzo Valla (ca. 14001457) proved it to be inauthentic.56 Attitudes toward the "Byzantine" have remained negative in the modern period, perhaps sharpened by the legacy of the historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), whose views on Byzantine culture as expressed in the supremely influential six-volume The History ofthe Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire (1776-88) have continued to hold sway.57 However bad the connotation of the adjective medieval in modern English, Byzantine, me con Alo lurk cul and ued, cent and rion or he sions Byza rhis coins, phrase ofrhe ss For broad context surrounding the Donation, see A. Linder, 1he Myth ofConstantine the Great in the West: Sources and Hagiographic Commemoration, Estratti dagli "Studi medievali" 7 (Spolero, 1987). s6 See G. Puletti, "La 'Donazione di Costantino' nei primi del '3oo e la 'Monarchia' di Dame," Medioevo e Rinascimento 7, n.s. 4 (1993): II3-3S · 57 The groundbreaking exploration of Gibbon's expertise in and effects upon the Church history of Byzantium was D . J. Geanakoplos, "Edward Gibbon and Byzantine Ecclesiastical History," ChHist 35 (1966): 170-85. More recently, Geanakoplos's foray has been ramified in multiple essays in Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. R. McKitterick and R. ｾｩｮ｡ｵｬｴ＠ (New York, 1997): J. Matthews, "Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire: Causes and Circumstances," 12- 33; Av. Cameron, "Gibbon and Justinian," 34-52; J. Howard-Johnston, "Gibbon and the Middle Period of the Byzantine Empire," 53-77; J. Shepard, "Byzantine Soldiers, Missionaries and Diplomacy under Gibbon's Eyes," 78-100; and A. Bryer, "Gibbon and the Later Byzantine Empires," 101-16. 18 jan M. Ziolkowski 74s-s6. 59 Sec ｃＮｕｲｴｾ＠ 1997). 4JS 6o M B 6a 1991),uo Emperor meaning "Reminiscent of the manner, style, or spirit of Byzantine politics; intricate, complicated; inflexible, rigid, unyielding," arguably suffers from a worse odor.58 zantine period e questioned the r. 6.94-96), the f Charlemagne, lombard invain De monarctually by Pope e passage, he ,eference to the of its location Roman twin processes fits onomastic le, they linked of the Roman ntury, saw the rn Constantini 1 Constantine Western part ho referred to ' did Western Ja (ca. 1400n period, per, whose views e Ihe History > hold sway. 57 h, Byzantine, ·ne the Great in (Spoleto, 1987). ia' di Dante," rch history of story," ChRist ays in Edward ews, "Gibbon "Gibbon and tine Empire," ｾ ｹ･ｳＬＢ＠ 78-roo; . Ziolkowski Alongside the contempt that medieval Westerners harbored for the Eastern Romans lurked respect, and alongside the envy, awe. For much of the Middle Ages, the material culture of Constantinople was held in high regard. Ivories, metalwork, enamels, relics and reliquaries, manuscripts, silks, gems, and coins from the great city were and are valued, and imports seem to have arrived in the West at an even faster rate in the thirteenth century than they had previously.59 The intimate trade relations between the New Rome and Italy meant that Constantinople hosted communities ofltalian merchants, in addition to ecclesiastic legations, brides and their attendants, and travelers and residents of other sorts. From encounters with these visitors, the Eastern Greeks formed impressions of Western Europeans, and through such sojourns, in turn, stereotypes of the Byzantines were transported back to Italy and other Western lands. In her chapter for this volume, Elizabeth Fisher conjures up fascinating pictures for such intersections. The gold coins mimed in Constantinople were particularly esteemed and were commonly called bezants, after Byzantion, the original Greek name of the city. The words Byzantius, Byzantinus, and Byzanticus, and a multitude of orthographic variants, surface in Latin texts from the second half of the eleventh cemury. 60 The French besant is attested in the twelfth century, and the Italian bisante in the thirteemh. 61 But it speaks to the strengthened economy ofltalian municipalities that in 1260 the city of Florence began miming gold coins that became known as florins, which eventually displaced the bezants. Dante nowhere uses outright the name of either the Greek or the Florentine coins, but he does make two indirect references to the florin. In Paradiso 9.130 the phrase il maledetto jiore ("the cursed flower") plays on the lily that appeared on one side of the florins, while in Inferno 30.74 he alludes to the image of Saint John the Baptist stamped on the other side of the coins. 62 While composing important stretches of the Commedia, Dante would have been surrounded by the splendors of early Byzantine achievements in art and architecture: in Ravenna at the latest from 1318 to 132.0, when working on the Paradiso, he was under the patronage of Guido Novello da Polema (d. 1333; podesta or mayor of the city, 1316-132.2.). Yet although Dante's poetry incorporates recollections ofRavenna (Jnf 5·97 and 2.7.40; 58 On the connotations, see F. C. Robinson, "Medieval, the Middle Ages," Speculum 59 (1984): 745-56. For the specific definition cited, see OED, s.v. "Byzantine A.2." 59 See W. D. Wixom, "Byzantine Art and the Latin West," in The Glory ofByzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era AD S43-I20I, ed. H. C. Evans and W. D. Wixom (New York, 1997), 435-507. 6o Mittellateinisches Worterbuch bis z um ausgehenden IJ.]ahrhundert (Munich, 1959-), 1:1637-38. 61 Battisti and Alessio, Dizionario etimologico italiano (above, n. 26), 1:529. 62 For an image of both sides of a florin, see P. Grierson, The Coins ofMedieval Europe (London, 1991), 110, fig. 250 . Introduction Par. 6.61), he makes no explicit reference to the Byzantine edifices and artworks of the municipality, not even the famed mosaics in the sixth-century basilica ofSant'Apollinare Nuovo or to the Byzantine Christian artists who fabricated them. Nonetheless, scholars have assumed that the glittering splendor of the mosaics affected his portrayal of heaven in Paradiso 20, even if he did not indicate Ravenna overtly as a source of inspiration, and that the iconography of the Commedia corresponds somehow to the city's mosaics. 63 Similarly, Dante would have had occasion to gaze upon many Italian paintings and other works of art deeply informed by Byzantine style. Italy has been called "an artistic province of Byzantium."64 Although such a conception of Italian art requires nuances that are being achieved only gradually, it would be misguided to deny that centuries of interaction failed to leave a mark. 65 But what imprint would such exposure have made? Dante's contemporary, the artist Giotto di Bondone (ca. 12.67-1337), was praised subsequently in the Lives ofthe Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (ISII-1574) for having rejected the manieragreca ("Greek manner") in art and thus having enabled Italian art to progress beyond the Byzantine style. For Vasari, the "Greek manner" was as much of a pejorative as foreign designations have often been in assigning names to diseases or disapproved practices. Vasari delimited Byzantine art as what preceded rather than accompanied the medieval and Renaissance art that were closely contemporary with Dante. This legacy of attraction to the art of Byzantium in tandem with distaste for much else that has been regarded as typical of broader Byzantine culture has held true even in recent times. At many points in history, the notion of Greekness has had complex linguistic, cultural, and geographic dimensions. In the Middle Ages, Greek constituted not only past languages and cultures, but also a present (and often rival) religious and political entity. To each of these layers the inhabitants of the Latin West related somewhat differently. Doctrine, politics, linguistics, culture, and education all played important roles in shaping attitudes, as did travel and diplomacy. As a consequence of the Fourth Crusade, Latin rulers occupied Constantinople from 1204 to 12.61, and lingered until 1291 in the Crusader state of Jerusalem. They held much of Greece, especially the Peloponnesus 63 E. Vance, "Images and the Mediation of Power: Dame's Paradiso and the Byzantine Art of S. Apollinare Nuovo," in 1he Growth of Authority in the Medieval West: Selected Proceedings of the International Conference, Groningen 6-9 November I997, ed. M. Gosman, A. Vanderjagt, and ]. Veenstra, Mediaevalia Groningana 2.5 (Groningen, 1999), 332.-53; L. Pasquini Vecchi, "Riflessi dell'arre ravennate nella Commedia dantesca," in Corso di cultura sull'arte ravennate e bizantina: Seminario internazionale sui tema; Ricerche di archeologia cristiana e bizantina; Ravenna, I4-I9 maggio I995, in memoria del prof Giuseppe Bovini 42. (Ravenna, 1995), 699-719, at 719; and L. Pasquini, Iconografie dantesche: Dalla luce del mosaico all'immagine profetica (Ravenna, 2.008). 64 Geanakoplos, Interaction ofthe "Sibling" Byzantine and Western Cultures (above, n. 6), 84. 65 L. Safran, "'Byzantine' Art In Post-Byzantine South Italy?: Notes on A Fuzzy Concept," Common Knowledge 18 (2.012.): 487-504. 20 jan M. Ziolkowski (kno· Crus arion diate A hadd of the leavet invoc; aliCH tion a1 strua of the ll in are cholars heaven on,and cs. 63 gsand artistic ries of made? subseiorgio d thus Greek ssignwhat losely udem : cul- ural, lantity. )dy. taptde, the sus of of (known to them as Morea) and Greek islands such as Rhodes and Cyprus. 66 Yet these Crusader occupations go utterly unremarked by Dante in his writings, as do the negotiations and strategies of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1258-1282) and his immediate successors in their relations with the Latin West. 67 Also omitted are details about the Greek Church. The Eastern and Western churches had doctrinal polemics with each other. These emerged over such matters as the primacy of the bishop of Rome-the papacy; the dating of holidays, notably Easter; and the use of leavened or unleavened bread for the Host. Also relating to the Eucharist is the epiclesis, an invocation of the Holy Spirit at the moment of Transubstantiation that was once made in all Christian liturgies but has been maintained only in Eastern Churches. Additional friction arose from differing views on clerical celibacy and beards, as well as on whether menstruating women could be allowed Communion and when infants could be baptized. 68 The Eastern and Western Churches diverged as well in their attitudes toward images, with the intense contest between iconoclasts (those who supported the destruction of icons) and iconodules (those who revered such images). The first iconoclastic period in the East (730-787) concluded with the Second Council ofNicaea (787). The findings of that council in regard to images prompted Charlemagne, in turn, to commission (ca. 790) the drafting of the treatise Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (The Work of King Charles against the Synod), known also as Libri Carolini (The Books of Charles), to refute what Westerners understood of the Second Council. Among other controversies between the Churches, an important one took place in the second half of the ninth century over the so-called double procession of the Holy Spirit. This contention arose because in the West the key wordJilioque ("and the Son") was added to the Nicene Creed to explain that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son." Another doctrinal altercation came about later, when the doctrine of purgatory took hold in the West but was not accepted in the East. 69 The final straw for the East came in the claim to universal jurisdiction ofthe papacythe bishop of Rome-over all other seats of Christianity, including the Church of the Rhomaians. This claim was made by Pope Leo IX (r. 1049-1054) and presented on his behalf by the papal legate to Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida (d. 1061), to the ecumenical patriarch of the city, Michael I Cerularius (Keroularios, r. 1043-1059). The rejection of this claim resulted in the East-West schism of 1054, the consequences of which remain today. Dante lived between the time of the church councils of Lyons in 1274 (which he neglected to remark upon in any of his extant writings) and Florence in 1439 (only little nd lSi a: gti, 66 D. Jacobi, "The Latin Empire of Constantinople and the Frankish States in Greece," in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5, c. II93-c. IJOO, ed. D. Abulafia (Cambridge, 2.008), 52.5-42.. 67 D.]. Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, I2S3-I232: A Study in ByzantineLatin Relations (Cambridge, MA, 1959). 68 On aU these issues contributing to the schism, see A. Louth, Greek East and Latin West: The Church, AD 68r-IOJI, Church in History 3 (Crestwood, NY, 2.007), 305-18. 69 Karampetsos, Dante and Byzantium (above, n. 5), 2.3-2.4. Introduction 21 more than a decade before the final defeat and collapse of Constantinople). Neither council led to the rapprochement it sought to achieve. Indeed, the tale of the repeated attempts to reconcile the two Churches and empires ends tragically, as the final mass celebrated in Hagia Sophia was conducted in Latin in the presence of the last reigning emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos (1404-1453). Constantine's conversion to Catholicism, if intended to secure the allegiance ofhis Christian brethren in the West in a joint defense against the Ottoman Turks, failed. Thus, Dante's lifetime unfolded in a breach between two periods of close engagement between Latin Christians and Orthodox Greeks. Both earlier and later than him, the tallies of both ecclesiastics and lay people with knowledge of Greek might well have ranged higher. Of course, the occasional friar contemporary with the great poet may have spent sufficient time abroad to attain fluency in Greek. Additionally, the same small Greek settlements remained entrenched in southern Italy and Sicily as had been there before. Finally, the Italian merchants from municipalities such as Venice who traded in the eastern Mediterranean would have persisted in doing so. In an essay entitled "Greeks in Italy at the time of Dante (12.65-132.1)," Vera von Falkenhausen gathers adroitly what can be discerned of merchants, diplomats, and other travelers from the Greek East in the Italy of Dante's day. Furthermore, Dante chanced to live at the same time as-although halfway across the Mediterranean from-Maximos Planoudes (ca. 12.6o-ca. 1305), a Byzantine who translated much patristic Latin and perhaps even texts of Thomas Aquinas into Greek. But a permeation of Italian culture by Greek immigrants as happened after the downfall of Constantinople or the steady exchange that can be traced during the era of the Crusades and Latin Kingdoms cannot be detected in the time of Dante. Dante manifests relatively meager awareness of holy men from the Greek East. True, in a letter written after 2.0 April 1314 to the Italian cardinals in conclave at Carpentras, he touches upon, in a fairly long list of notable theologians, John of Damascus (d. 754), a Byzantine who lived in the city associated with his name? 0 According to Dante, John is a theologian whose works had come to be almost wholly neglected. Apart from John, all the figures Dante mentions in the Commedia come from the heroic early days of late antiquity, not from his own time. The two saints from the Greek East he names there are both fourth century, to wit, Macarius (Par. 2.2..49-whether the Elder, also called the Egyptian, or the Younger, of Alexandria, is uncertain) and Nicholas of Myra, a bishop in Asia Minor (Purg. 2.0.32.), whose legends lead eventually to that of Santa Claus.71 Among the multitude of Greek writers from the patristic period, Dance 70 Epistola u.x6, in Dame Alighieri, Opere minori, 2 vols., ed. D. De Roberds and G. Contini, Letteratura iraliana: Scoriae testis (Milan, 1979-88), 2.:s8o-83, at s86-87. 71 A. Perrusi, "Culrura greco-bizantina nel tardo medioevo nelle Venezie e suoi echi in Dame," in Dante e Ia cultura veneta: Atti del convegno di studi organizzato dalla Fondazione "Giorgio Cini" in 22 jan M. Ziolkowski sin: of1 (12.: in . . Aqt mOl beeJ Gro d. I ple). Neither the repeated he final mass he last reignonversion to in the West lose engageerthanhim, ght well have at poet may ly, the same as had been Venice who n essay entitausen gathtvelers from olive at the sPlanoudes erhaps even te by Greek ,yexchange cannot be singles out only two: prolific Greek Church Father, Archbishop John Chrysostom of Constantinople (John "golden-mouthed," 345-407), cited by Saint Bonaventure (12.21-1274; Par. 12.136-37), and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who was converted in Athens by Saint Paul and martyred there in 95, discussed by first Saint Thomas Aquinas and then Beatrice (Par. 10.115-17 and 28.130-32).72 Pseudo-Dionysius was of great importance already in the twelfth century and only more so for scholastic theology from the thirteenth century onward.73 His works had been translated repeatedly into Latin, especially in the thirteenth century by Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), but the Latinization of Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great; d. 12.8o) is likeliest to have reached and affected Dante?4 Dante may have gained a direct awareness of the so-called Corpus Dionysiacum only during his stay in the Lombardy and the Veneto75 Whatever the specific source of transmission, Dante was profoundly beholden to the Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius. He distributes the nine angelic hierarchies in accordance with the order followed in Dionysius's Celestial Hierarchy, and he shows indebtedness to Dionysius in his understanding of theophany. Diego Sbacchi, in his chapter for this volume, looks into the influence ofPseudo-Dionysius on the presence and elements of light in Dante's Paradiso. Sbacchi finds parallels between Dante's conception of light and the treatment of it in icons, a situation he explains by hypothesizing their shared debt to Pseudo-Dionysius. Yet, in many ways, Pseudo-Dionysius stands out in his isolation as a postclassical Greek writer who left a deep imprint on Dante's thought. No Byzantine text has been proven to have exercised a similarly far-reaching influence on him76 Not too long after Dante, Greek-speakers such as Michael Apostoles (ca. 1420-after 1474) and Demetrios Chalkokondyles (1423-1511) arrived in the West and expressed st. True, in Jentras, he Dante," in [o Cini" in collaborazione con l'Istituto universitario di Venezia, l'Universita di Padova, il Centro scaligero di studi danteschi, e i comuni di Venez ia, Padova, Verona; Venez ia, Padova, Verona, 30 marzo- s aprile rg66, ed. V. Branca and G. Padoan (Florence, 1966), 157-97, at 177. Pertusi's article was later reprinted in A. Pertusi, Saggi veneto-bizantini, ed. G. B. Parente (Florence, 1990). 72 Pertusi, "Cultura greco-bizantina," 177. 73 J. Leclercq, "Influence and Noninfluence ofDionysius in the Western Middle Ages," in PseudoDionysius: 1he Complete Works, trans. C. Luibheid (New York, 1987), 25-32, at 25-29, and D. Poirel, Des symboles et des anges: Hugues de Saint-Victor et le reveil dionysien du XII' siecle, Bibliotheca Victorina 23 (Turnhout, 2013). 74 D. Sbacchi, La presenza di DionigiAreopagita nel "Paradiso" di Dante, Biblioteca di "Lettere italiane," ST 66 (Florence, 2006). 75 Perrusi, "Cultura greco-bizantina," 189. 76 The anonymous or pseudonymous Byzantine treatise De virtutibus et passionibus (On Virtues and Vices) was definitely written and circulating widely well before Dante. It has been argued that in adumbrating the moral order of the Inferno, Dante drew upon a Latin translation of a Byzantine Greek treatise on vice and virtue based on the Platonic threefold division of the soul. See C. A. Trypanis, "Dante and a Byzantine Treatise on Virtues and Vices," Medium A evum 19 (1950): 43-49. But this proposition has been refuted by Pertusi, "Cultura greco-bizantina," 179-82. ｾｩｯｬｫｷｳ＠ Introduction (d. 754), a ante, John John, ·ly days of he names ｾｬ､･ｲＬ＠ also tcholas of to that of >d,Dante rom '.Contini, 23 an acute appreciation for the humanistic culture of Latins (and Italians)? 7 The respect of the Greeks was more than reciprocated by the admiring attitudes of the humanists toward the ancient Greeks. Yet the cultural engagement between the Italian (or Latin) humanists and the Byzantine (or Greek) humanists took hold too late, and was too intellectual and not political enough to help motivate an alliance between the Latin and the Greek Churches that could have saved Byzantium from the final collapse of 1453. In 1463, Chalkokondyles delivered an inaugural address to launch the study of Greek at the University of Padua. At the end of the address, he drew a distressing comparison between the state ofhis countrymen under the Turkish occupation and the plight of the damned in Dante's Inferno. 78 Sufficient room existed for interaction between the two worlds to warrant the title of a book by a Byzantinist, Interaction ofthe "Sibling" Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (Joo-I6oo). The same author emphasized the debt Dante owed to Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius, offsetting the apparent obliviousness of the Italian poet to the literature and theology of Byzantium. But even this Byzantinist took pains to describe how much the Westerners and the Byzantines diverged in their outlook on the literary cultivation of spoken and vernacular languages. And he made a point of conceding the consequent uniqueness of Dante in comparison with Byzantine literature: "Dante's great Divine Comedy, to take but one example, reaches creative heights never approached, I believe, by any Byzantine literary work." 79 The collection that follows brings together the fruits of two distinct and distinguished fields, Byzantine and medieval studies, with the admixture of Dante studies, as well. My hope is that assembling exponents of three such heterogeneous fields to share their findings and perspectives in regard to a large and radically underexplored topic might open new vistas, resolve old controversies, and perhaps even kindle new debates. Fields can have the solidity but rigidity of railroad tracks in enabling efficient transportation at the cost of freedom and autonomy. The endeavor of this investigation was to encourage not only developing an awareness of other tracks-the rails conventional in other fieldsbut also to leave behind the ferrous rigidity. To the readers of this collection I can only invoke the spirit intended by the Blisses' installation of the Antiochene mosaic, already described, with its verbal noun ap6lausis: read, learn, and enjoy. 77 On Apostoles, see D.]. Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination Greek Learning.from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1962), 73-uo. 78 Geanakoplos, Interaction of the "Sibling" Byzantine and Western Cultures (above, n. 6), of 112, 248-49· 79 24 Ibid., u6. jan M. Ziolkowski (12. By wa