I gotta crow.

Today I did something extraordinarily cool at work. Per my recommendation, the Modern Greek Division decided to purchase the following book:

Author : Photius I, Saint, Patriarch of Constantinople, ca. 820-ca. 891.
Title : Bibliotheca. Modern Greek & Ancient Greek. Selections.
Title : Vivliotheke : hosa tes historias anthologia / eisagoge, metaphrase, scholia Stephanos Euthymiades
Published : Athena : Ekdoseis Kanake, 2000.

which I then promptly ordered, as I do for all the other books that my supervisor selects for the collection. But this selection was mine! I'd been reading about Photius in Nigel Wilson's "Scholars of Byzantium". Not only is he an important figure in Byzantine history (as well as History with a capital 'h'), as he is right smack in the center of the theological/political controversy that results in the schism between Western and Eastern Christendom, but Photius' work as a Hellenist and classicist is just as meaningful - perhaps even more so. His Bibliotheca is a master list of all the Greek literature he'd read, including critical synposes of each author's material, some of them short and sweet, some of them going on for thousands of words. Nigel Wilson has an English translation of selected portions of this mammoth, 1600-page work, which I picked up in the stacks today. It's fantastic, and what's more, it reads like a blog! But what makes the Bibliotheca such a valuable resource is that it's the last good snapshot we get of the corpus of ancient Greek literature by a person still privy to it in its near-completeness. More than half of the authors and books in this compilation we only know of from Photius, since except in the case of dumb luck the only writers who survived the intervening centuries were those who were part of the Byzantine educational canon and thus mass-produced. Although the danger of losing the bulk of Greek literature through neglect was something the Byzantines were well aware of very early on - there's an address to the Emperor Constantine from the 4th Century expressing just such a fear, as well as the proposed remedy of a state scriptorium dedicated to reproducing all of Greek letters, and not just the "popular" texts - neglect would nevertheless have carried the day entirely, if not for the work of such individuals as Photius. He may not have been able to preserve all of Greek literature singlehandedly, but at least he gives us a glimpse of what was lost!

I'm eager to see this Modern Greek edition of the Bibliotheca, and pleased as punch that my boss trusted my opinion as a Hellenist to go ahead and order it. I think Photius would approve.