The area in which Greek MSS. were produced in the medieval period was
(with negligible exceptions) confined to Greece proper, "Turkey in
Europe," the Levant, and South Italy. In the monastic centres,
particularly Mount Athos, there were and are large stores of Greek
books, the vast majority of which are theological or liturgical; and the
theological authors most in vogue are those of the fourth and later
centuries. Copies of primitive Christian authors or classical ones are
comparative rarities. True, one or two of surpassing interest have been
found in such libraries; a famous Plato was brought by Dr. E. D. Clarke
from Patmos, and is at Oxford now; the treatise of Hippolytus against
heresies came in the forties from a monastery to the Paris library. But
these are exceptions. We have to look at Constantinople as by far the
most important centre of learning and of book-production. The city was
full of libraries, public and private, and of readers. The culture of
the place was, no doubt, self-contained; it did not aim at enriching the
outer world, which it despised; its literary productions were imitative,
the work of _dilettanti_ and decadents. Nevertheless, it preserved for
us wellnigh all that we now have of the best literature of Greece, and,
but for a few catastrophes, it would have handed on much more. Of
thirty-two historical writings read and excerpted by Photius in his
_Bibliotheca_, late in the ninth century, nineteen are lost; of several
of the Attic orators, Lysias, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus, he
possessed many more speeches than we have seen. Michael Psellus, who
died about 1084, is credited (I must allow that the evidence is not of
the best) with writing notes on twenty-four comedies of Menander, of
which, as is well known, we have not one complete. In the twelfth
century John Tzetzes and Eustathius apparently had access still to very
many lost authors. In short, before the Latin occupation of
Constantinople in 1204, the remains of ancient Greek literature very
notably exceeded their present bulk. Much of it, no doubt, was preserved
in single copies, and only a narrow selection of authors was in constant
use for educational purposes. Only three plays out of seven of Æschylus,
for example, were read in the schools. The rest, with Sophocles and
Apollonius Rhodius, practically depended for their survival on the
famous copy now at Florence. Instances might be multiplied. The threads
of transmission to which we owe most of the Euripidean plays, the
Anthology, the History of Polybius, the works of Clement of Alexandria,
the Christian Apologists, the commentary of Origen upon St. John, are
equally slender. We cannot doubt that the sack of Constantinople by the
Crusaders was, in its obliteration of works of art and of literature,
far more disastrous than the capture of the city by the Turks in 1453.
For the best part of a century before the latter date, the export of
precious MSS. to Italy had been going on, and many of our greatest
treasures were already safe in the hands of scholars when the crash
came. Nor is it possible, I believe, to show that between 1204 and 1453
many authors whose works no longer exist were read in Byzantine circles.
That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within
a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of
them, and the sale and export went on at a great rate.