Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

Education, learning, literature, and art 

Page 6

His brilliant inaugural oration delivered before the Athenians assembled in the Parthenon was, he himself asserted, a specimen of simplicity of style. In this speech he reminded the audience of the bygone greatness of the city, the mother of eloquence and wisdom, expressed his firm conviction in the continuous genealogy of the Athenians from ancient times to his day, urged the Athenians to keep to the noble customs and manners of their ancestors, and cited the examples of Aristides, Ajax, Diogenes, Pericles, Themistocles and others. But this oration, in reality constructed in an elevated style, filled with antique and biblical quotations, embellished with metaphors and tropes, remained incomprehensible and dark to the hearers of the new metropolitan; it was beyond the understanding of the Athenians of the twelfth century, and Michael felt it. In one of his later sermons he exclaimed with deep sorrow; Oh, city of Athens! Mother of wisdom! To what ignorance thou hast sunk! When I addressed you with my inaugural oration, which was very simple and natural, it seemed that I spoke of something inconceivable, in a foreign language, Persian or Scythian. The learned Michael Acominatus soon ceased to see in the contemporary Athenians the immediate descendants of the ancient Hellenes. He wrote: There has been preserved the very charm of the country, the Hymettos rich in honey; the still Peiraeus, the once mysterious Eleusis, the Marathonian plain, the Acropolis, but the generation which loved science has disappeared, and their place has been taken by a generation ignorant and poor in mind and body. Surrounded by barbarians, Michael feared he himself would grow uncultivated and barbarous; he deplored the corruption of the Greek language, which had become a sort of barbarian dialect and which he was able to understand only after a residence of three years in Athens. It is probable that his jeremiads were not without exaggeration; but he was not far from the truth when he wrote that Athens had been a glorious city but was no longer alive. The very name of Athens would have perished from the memory of men had not its continued existence been secured by the valiant deeds of the past and by famous landmarks, the Acropolis, the Areopagus, Hymettus, and Piraeus, which like some unalterable work of nature were beyond the envy and destruction of time. Michael remained at Athens until the beginning of the thirteenth century. After the conquest of the city by the Franks in 1204 he was forced to give up his seat to a Latin bishop, and he spent the rest of his life in the small island of Ceos, off the shores of Attica, where he died and was buried about 1220 or 1222.

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