ABSTRACT
The obstacle to a radically new evaluation of the four twelfth-century romances has always been their evident dependence on models from late antiquity. So great is this dependence that even those classical scholars who have done most to rehabilitate the ancient romance tend to regard its twelfth-century counterpart as little more than a footnote. 1 For the same reason these romances have seemed unpromising material for the student of modern Greek literature, whose interest has been almost exclusively restricted to texts in the vernacular, and to the appearance of demonstrably ‘new’ story-material such as we find in Digenes Akrites and the later romances ‘of chivalry’. These four romances, however, occupy a position in the history of literature which in itself should make them worthy of close study: they are among the first extended attempts to write secular fiction in medieval Europe, and as such their connections with the literature of late antiquity on the one hand and with later medieval European and modern literature on the other are of particular importance. Their sheer bulk (more than four hundred pages in Hercher’s nineteenth-century edition) and the almost obsessive care with which they seem to have been composed are proof that they were of some consequence to their authors and first readers. Eustathios Makrembolites’ romance, Hysmine and Hysminias, was copied in over twenty extant manuscripts, seventeen of them dating from between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, a sign of a continuing readership which is matched by none of the more ‘popular’ vernacular romances composed during those centuries. 2 And the citation in the fifteenth century of passages of Konstantinos Manasses’ romance Aristandros and Kallithea as texts dulce et utile for moral improvement is again proof of popularity of a kind. As we shall see later, all four of these romances exercised some influence on the vernacular writers of the fourteenth century; and there are good reasons, as we saw earlier, for seeking in them clues for the existence of contacts between Eastern and Western literature during the twelfth century.
