So I opted

for "Scholars of Byzantium" today, figuring I'd polish off Nigel Wilson's books about the classical tradition in the proper chronological order after all, exciting as the introductory chapter of the latter work ("From Byzantium to Italy") - about the early Italian Renaissance and Leonzio Pilato's word-for-word translation of the works of Homer from ancient Greek into Latin - was already proving to be. It's a dense read, but a good one; Late Antiquity and the early Byzantine period are mostly unfamiliar territory to me, a blind spot I'd much like to fill in.

Already I'm learning some nifty new things, such as the surprising resurgence of Aristophanes into the Byzantine educational canon after a period of relative obscurity, to the point at which his comedies displaced those of Menander, who for centuries had been an indispenable part of the Greek curriculum. The reason why? Aristophanes was the more difficult author. To be successful in Byzantine society, one needed not only to be educated, but as fluent as possible in the ancient Greek of Periclean Athens - or at least what the latter-day Greeks thought their language had been, circa 400 B.C.! This tendency towards an artificial archaic speech was called "Atticism", and had arisen originally after the Roman conquest of Greece, an attempt by the Greek literati to regain some of the glory of their forebears (if only in word). As time went on, Atticism became an ever stronger influence, to the point at which there was a cottage industry in the publication of lexica of "proper" and "improper" words and lists of phrases deemed to be genuinely Attic; and in truth the phenomenon persisted all the way until modernity, and to this day still has a lasting effect on the written language in Greece, to varying degrees.

As the disconnect between everyday Greek and "Attic" Greek grew, the architects of the Byzantine curriculum must have felt that their students needed a better challenge than Menander, and as a result brought back Aristophanes, who is considered even now one of the most difficult authors of classical literature on account of his vocabulary and idiom. In fact, it is probably due to his inclusion into the Byzantine canon as a form of grammatical uber-torture that we have as many of Aristophanes comedies as we do! No wonder the ancient Greek word for "to educate" (παιδευω) slowly but surely came to have a secondary meaning of "to torment" in the Byzantine and modern periods.