From Ancient Models to Byzantine Literature: Studying Classics in Byzantium, Gus­tav Karls­son Bian­nual Lec­ture on Byzan­tine Civ­i­liza­tion by Baujke van den Berg (Cen­tral Eu­ro­pean Uni­ver­sity, Bu­dapest), Swedish In­sti­tute at Athens, November 1, 2019, 7:00 pm

An­cient Greek lit­er­a­ture was an im­por­tant source of in­spi­ra­tion and im­i­ta­tion for Byzan­tine au­thors: they mod­elled their lan­guage on the At­tic au­thors of the Clas­si­cal pe­riod, were in­spired by an­cient gen­res, and in­cluded nu­mer­ous al­lu­sions to and quo­ta­tions from an­cient lit­er­a­ture in their writ­ings. The role of an­cient texts in Byzan­tine lit­er­ary cul­ture is in­ex­tri­ca­bly con­nected to ed­u­ca­tion and schol­ar­ship: Byzan­tine schol­ars and teach­ers ap­pro­pri­ated an­cient lit­er­a­ture to ex­press con­tem­po­rary di­dac­tic aims and so­cial val­ues. They taught their stu­dents gram­mar and rhetoric through an­cient texts, while also pro­vid­ing them with strate­gies for cre­atively en­gag­ing with the lit­er­a­ture of the past. This lec­ture ex­plores the close con­nec­tion be­tween ed­u­ca­tion and lit­er­ary pro­duc­tion by study­ing var­i­ous texts that fa­cil­i­tate the use of an­cient lit­er­a­ture in Byzan­tine lit­er­ary cul­ture. It ad­dresses such ques­tions as how Byzan­tine schol­ars and au­thors per­ceive their re­la­tion­ship to the au­thors of the past and how they trans­late the study of an­cient mod­els into new lit­er­ary prod­ucts ex­press­ing con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary aes­thet­ics.