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The Beast of the East?
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20388 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
4,489 Words |
| Author
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Barry Baldwin
Barry Baldwin is professor in the Department of Classics at
the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta. |
BYZANTIUM: THE APOGEE
John Julius Norwich
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
389 pp., $ 30.00
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness," says Simon Schama. True enough. But almost everybody feels confident in denouncing Byzantium and all its works. After all, it is Byzantine, not Greek or roman or even Chinese that we use as a synonym for tortuous political intrigue or the labyrinthine processes of inefficient bureaucracy. The magazine Connoisseur, for instance, commended the Hungarian film Colonel Redl in the following terms;" Ambitious closet homosexual works his way up the Byzantine court of pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian empire!" The Hungarian poet Istvan Vas described the perversion of communist ideals by Stalin thus" "No Rome, alas, instead a haughty, false/Revived Byzantium stuck in its crop." This attitude was largely the invention of Montesquieu, one of many European writers who stigmatized the Medieval Greek civilization. For him, "The history of the Greek empire is nothing but a tissue of rebellions, sedition, and treachery". "To Voltaire," Byzantium was "ridiculous, a disgrace to the human mind." To Hegel, "The general aspect of Byzantium presents a disgusting picture of imbecility; wretched, even insane, passions stifle the growth of all that is noble in thoughts, deeds, and persons." Napoleon urged his assembly in a speech during the One Hundred Days not to be like Byzantium by becoming a joke for posterity.
Nowadays, the image is a little more mixed. A London Sunday Times article on makeup advocates "the icon look in Byzantine brown." The perfume called Byzance, a sweet and cloying brand, comes in royal blue and gold packaging. In 1991, in Chicago and London, symphony orchestras performed the American and British premieres of Sir Michael Tippet's Byzantium, a mood piece with vocals base don Yeats' two poems, "Byzantium" and "Sailing to Byzantium." Yeats himself evoked the "richness and horror" of Byzantium in the paradoxical leitmotif "death in life and life in death," reapplying it as an Irishman to the "terrible beauty" of the 1916 Dublin Easter Uprising. Reviewing Norwich's earlier volume, Byzantium; The Early Centuries, the classically trained English novelist Simon Raven allows, in the London Observer, that the Byzantines were "at least subtle and sometimes funny." But this is to aid a contrast with their enemies, the Arabs, stigmatized in the same sentence by the croaking Raven as "merely horrible." And Raven took his cue from Edward Gibbon for whom "the Byzantines
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