Byzantine literature

Literature of the Byzantine Empire, 4th–15th centuries. It was written mainly in the Greek koinē, a form of Greek accepted as the literary language of the 1st century and increasingly archaic and separate from the spoken tongue of the people. Byzantine literature is chiefly concerned with theology, history, and commentaries on the Greek classics. Its chief authors are the theologians Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria (all 4th century), and John of Damascus (8th century); the historians Zosimus (c. 500), Procopius (6th century), Psellus (1018–1097), Bryennius and his wife Anna Comnena (c. 1100), and Georgius Acropolita (1220–1282).

The literary encyclopedia Suda, which provides a wealth of information on classical and Byzantine literature, was compiled in about 975. Drama was nonexistent, and poetry, apart from the hymns of the 6th–8th centuries, was scanty and stilted, but there were many popular works about the lives of the saints. The tradition ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.