century; and sometimes it is only a touch of the diffuseness
inseparable from all Byzantine writing that separates their work in
quality from that of an earlier period.

After Justinian the art practically died out. The pedantic rigour of
Byzantine scholarship was little favourable to the poetry of emotion,
and the spoken language had now fallen so far apart from the literary
idiom that only scholars were capable of writing in the old classical
forms. The popular love-poetry, if it existed, has perished and left
no traces; henceforth, for the five centuries that elapsed till the
birth of Provencal and Italian poetry, love lay voiceless, as though
entranced and entombed.
----------

[1] Cf. Il. iii. 156; Anth. Pal. ix. 166.

[2] Il. i. 298.

[3] Il. xxiv. 130.

[4] Il. xxii. 126-8.

[5] Od. vi. 185.

[6] {ear umnon}, Anth. Pal. vii. 12.

[7] Vopisc. Aurel. c. 29.

[8] Frag. 33 Bergk.