Ten Centuries of Byzantine Prose

Gift of the Muses, remedy against oblivion, fixing and making solid what is fluid and raising it as upon a column for future generations: writing is an invaluable instrument, and in the written word, in the production and use of written texts, lies the truest sense of the millennial experience of Byzantium. Greek-medieval civilization is characterized by the presence of many, extremely different literary and documentary genres in prose, ranging from the recording and interpretation of historical events to the lives of the saints, from the expression of feelings to the transmission of intellectual values, from the revelation of the occult to the elaboration of rules for court ceremonial, for life in the monastery, for the acts of a basileus or a general, from documents and scientific texts to the finest products of literary excellence. In this book you can explore them and obtain an overall view of their wide variety, their relationship with tradition and innovation; works always useful to the reader, widening his knowledge, increasing his rhetorical, scientific or technical skills, and even his moral progress.