A Critical Reappraisal of Eustathios Makrembolites’ <i>Hysmine and Hysminias</i>

Historians of literature have not been kind to the Byzantine learned romance, least of all to Eustathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias , written in the second half of the twelfth century. As early as 1670, P. D. Huet wrote: ‘… rien n’est plus froid, rien n’est plus plat, rien n’est plus ennuyeux: nulle bienseance, nulle vray-semblance, nulle conduite; c’est le travail d’un escolier, ou de quelque chetif sophiste, qui meritoit d’estre escolier toute sa vie’. Krumbacher calls it ‘ein in nervösen Windungen aufgeführter stilistischer Eiertanz’; and Rohde considers its only originality to be that it is ‘die echt byzantinische Verquickung von süsslicher Ziererei mit wahrhaft ungeschlachter Rohheit des Wesens, welche sie überall merken lassen’. As recently as 1967, B. Perry curtly dismisses all four Byzantine learned romances in one paragraph as ‘slavish imitations of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus …written in the twelfth century by miserable pedants’