Literature in Frankish Greece 315
I’m Afraid I’ll Become Barbarised Like the Lakonians...
Thus the Greek satirist Mazaris, stranded in the Peloponnese in the early years
of the 15th century and hating it, was scathing about the locals—their dubious
loyalties, their love of a fight and especially their appalling Greek.76 In this, he
set himself in a long line of elite Byzantine disdain for the provinces. One feels
he would not have approved of the Chronicle of the Morea, which in its rela-
tively unsophisticated use of the vernacular was a world away from educated
Byzantine culture.
In the Byzantine Greek world any education beyond the most basic imparted
ancient models and a value system which placed worth on the antique and dis-
paraged the spoken tongue.77 In this way, education and language were woven
into and formed part of the complex elite Byzantine identity with the result for
all written literary styles of a tendency towards grammar, syntax and vocabu-
lary that had passed out of general usage. For the Byzantine elite, the process of
learning to write militated strongly against writing as one spoke. With regard
to the production of literature, then, in the medieval period Greek was and
had for centuries been in a state of diglossia.78 We may note the typical pat-
tern of a high form (or forms) with specialized functions, formal acquisition,
literary associations and prestige, with an accompanying low form, the spoken
language, “naturally” acquired, non-prestigious and broadly not recognized as
a literary style. As the Byzantine world shrunk and fractured after 1204, this
diglossia was expressive of a divergence of interests between provinces and
capital. The synchronous rise of vernacular literature that was linguistically
much closer to everyday speech may have been expressive of a new value given
to the spoken language.79
76 Mazaris, Journey to Hades, or Interviews with Dead Men about Certain Officials of the
Imperial Court ed. and trans. John N. Barry, Michael J. Share, Andrew Smithies and
Leendert J. Westerink (Buffalo, 1975), p. 64.
77 Robert Browning, “Literacy in the Byzantine World,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
4 (1978), 39–54 and “The Language of Byzantine Literature,” in The Past in Medieval and
Modern Greek Culture, ed. Speros Vryonis (Malibu, 1978), 103–33, repr. in Robert Browning,
History Language and Literacy in the Byzantine world (Northampton, 1989), xv; more
recently, Martin Hinterberger, “Vernacular literature”.
78 Charles Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Wo rd 15 (1959), 325–40; more recently and specifically, Notis
Toufexis, “Diglossia and Register Variation in Medieval Greek,” Byzantine and Modern
Greek Studies 32 (2008), 203–17.
79 Hinterberger, “Vernacular Literature” points out that earlier instances of vernacular
fifteen-syllable metre are characteristically attempts to render direct speech.