THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION 127

fessional task of trying to make an Ostrogothic barbarian successor-state
of the Roman Empire work.

The compilation of encyclopaedias and dictionaries, which is apt to
follow after the collection of texts in the evolution of a renaissance,1
comes before them in an antecedent society's cultural history; for, even
when a disintegrating civilization has reached a stage of cultural decay
at which it gives up the attempt at further creation in order to concen-
trate its dwindling energies on trying to preserve the cultural legacy of
the Past, it makes, at first, an effort to bequeath the quintessence of this
heritage to Posterity in a systematized form worthy of a rational mind,
before eventually resigning itself to the ultima ratio of a mere mechanical
reproduction of texts. Lexicographical activities thus occupy not the
last, but the penultimate, chapter in the cultural history of a disinte-
grating civilization, whereas, in the evolution of a renaissance, they come,
as we have observed, not first, but second, after the texts of the ante-
cedent society's literature have been retrieved and explored. The fourth-
century commentators Servius and Macrobius, the fourth-century
grammarian Aelius Donatus, and the fifth-century encyclopaedist
Martianus Capella, who were labouring for the preservation of the
Latin version of the Hellenic literature in the western provinces of the
Roman Empire on the eve of a fifth-century collapse, had to wait for
their Modern Western avatars until the sixteenth century and after. In
the Greek-speaking heart of the Roman Empire, where Hellenism sur-
vived for some two hundred years longer than in the western provinces,
a sixth-century Hesychius of Miletus was the encyclopaedist who, in
a Byzantine renaissance of Hellenism, found his avatar in a tenth-
century Souidhas;2 and Hsu Shdn's Shuo WGn, comprising 10,000
characters arranged under 540 radicals,3 which was the model for all
the dictionaries compiled in a Far Eastern renaissance of Sinic letters
from the T'ang Age onwards, had been produced at some date during
the first half of the second century of the Christian Era, before the
collapse of a Posterior Han Dynasty which was the Sinic counterpart of
the Hellenic Civilization's post-Diocletianic regime.

The inversion of an original chronological order persists as a cultural
renaissance continues to unfold itself. The writing of original works in
the antecedent culture's literary language, which, in the antecedent
civilization's own history, is apt, as we have seen, to be on the wane by
the time when lexicography comes to the fore, is apt, in the evolution
of a renaissance, to hang fire until the reincarnate lexicographers have
prepared the ground for it.4 We have noticed this sequence in the
history of a Byzantine renaissance of Hellenic letters,5 and we have
also noticed6 that the Byzantine writers in the medium of Ancient Greek
were content to imitate a Neo-Attic Kowr] which had been the vehicle

See pp. 57-58, above.

See Sandys, J. E.: A History of Classical Scholarship from the Sixth Century B.C. to
th End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1903, University Press), p. 371.

See Der Orosse JBrockhazts (Leipzig 1929, Brockhaus, 30 vols.), vol. iv, p. 55, and
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 19*9, vol. v, p. 573.

See pp. |9~6a, above. s See pp. 60-62, above.

See pp. So-61, above.