It's well known that the Greek novel played an important role in early modern Europe, especially here in France. It is even clear that the transmission and popularity of the Greek novel - in particular the novels of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius - provided a model for, and influenced, the novels composed in France from the seventeenth century onwards. Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée was a pastoral novel, but clearly influenced by Héliodore. Mademoiselle de Scudéry's Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus drew its material from Herodotus and Xenophon, but the plot was designed to reproduce a novelistic atmosphere. Madame de Lafayette's works, notably Zayde and La Princesse de Clèves, now considered the first psychological novels, were also composed under the influence of the ancient tradition.
But what was the fortune of the novels of the Comnene period, composed in Constantinople in the 11th century, and written under the influence of the ancient novel? Were they not part of the Greek heritage that reached France and the rest of Europe in the 16th century? Or were they not considered worthy of the same attention as the ancient novels, considered to belong to the classical heritage? The answer to the first question is simple enough: Byzantine novels, as we shall see, were indeed transmitted to the West during the Renaissance, just like other Greek texts. The second question requires a more complex answer, and this lecture is an attempt to offer a provisional clarification and interpretation.
I have focused my investigation on one of the Byzantine novels and its reception in seventeenth-century France, namely Hysminé and Hysminias by Eumathios Makrembolitès. I focus on three cases of adaptation: a translation by Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps (1729), an analysis of erotic pleasure in Julien Offray de La Mettrie's philosophical treatise L'art de jouir (1751), and an opera by Pierre Lejaun and Jean Benjamin de La Borde, premiered in 1763. Each of the three authors examined adapted Hysmine et Hysminias in their own way and for their own purposes. In Beauchamps' version, it was transformed into a short novel with a more coherent, less descriptive and even more "Greek" story, still with allegorical, emotional and erotic implications. Although eroticism is something we've come to associate with the libertine milieu, I'd say emotional is the key word here, rather than erotic per se. If we move on to La Mettrie and his use ofHysminé and Hysminias as the ideal couple, it's not their physical love that primarily affects the philosopher, but the emotional quality that accompanies it. The presence of the Byzantine couple in the writings of Beauchamps and La Mettrie can therefore be understood from the libertine point of view, in the sense that the story found in Hysminé and Hysminias seemed to adhere to the ideal love from an emotional and erotic point of view. As for the opera, it was again the story's emotional potential that made it suitable for the stage. Opera and lyric tragedy in particular were supposed to arouse strong emotions in the audience with the combination of plot, drama and music. This effect could be further enhanced, as in this case, by the inclusion of an action ballet.
It has sometimes been assumed that Byzantine literature had no place in the European tradition until it was "discovered" during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I hope to have shown that this idea is false, and that Byzantine secular literature was indeed present in Europe, albeit sometimes in forms different from those we expect.
