BYZANTINE LITERATURE 2*9
Christians from Commagene and Cappadocia presented as a
message of peace upon the troubled eastern frontiers of the
Byzantine Empire.
JOHN MAVROGORDATO
Lyric Poetry. Of genuine lyric poetry, before the influence
of Western chivalry made itself felt, Byzantine literature had
nothing. In a fifteenth-century manuscript, preserved in the
British Museum, is contained an attractive group of love-
songs, known, without much justification, as Rhodian.1
They form a kind of lover's handbook. The lyrics include a
dialogue between a youth and a maiden, arranged in alpha-
betical stanzas, complaints of a lover, also arranged alpha-
betically, and a love-test for a short and bashful youth, ^ in
which he has to compose a hundred stanzas beginning with
the numbers one to a hundred, a sentence which is subse-
quently reduced. The girl says:
Young one, upon a hundred words I will now question thee;
If thou resolvest these aright, kisses in full there'll be.
In reality these so-called Rhodian love-songs are popular
songs belonging to the Archipelago, reminiscences of which
can still be heard, though the freedom accorded to women
is perhaps a Prankish trait. There seems little doubt that
they go back to a date earlier than the fifteenth century.
Miscellanea. In late Byzantine literature there is a large
class of miscellaneous poetry in the popular fifteen-syllable
'political' metre, at first unrhymed, then rhymed. Verses of
a popular character emerge here and there at an early period,
and they appear to have been used to give vent to the satiric
strain inherent in the populace. Such were those shouted by
the crowd to the Emperor Maurice at the end of the sixth
century with allusion to his numerous illegitimate offspring,
or to Alexius Comnenus in recognition of his cleverness in
counteracting a plot against his family. A popular song of a
different type is the spring-song quoted by Constantme
Porphyrogenitus. Satiric poems were composed by the ever-
fertile Theodore Prodromus in the twelfth century in the
form of beast and bird fables; those of Archilochus and
Semonides of Amorgos remind us how long a tradition lies
1 See Hesseling and Pernot, Chansons d*Amour (Paris, 1913)'