so the author of a _Bibliotheca_
reviewing and criticizing the contents of 280 MSS., and incidentally
preserving important extracts from the lost Greek historians.

In the time of Photius the poets usually studied at school were Homer,
Hesiod, Pindar; certain select plays of Aeschylus (_Prometheus, Septem_
and _Persae_), Sophocles (_Ajax, Electra_ and _Oedipus Tyrannus_), and
Euripides (_Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae_, and, next to these, _Alcestis,
Andromache, Hippolytus, Medea, Rhesus, Troades_,) also Aristophanes
(beginning with the _Plutus_), Theocritus, Lycophron, and Dionysius
Periegetes. The principal prose authors were Thucydides, parts of Plato
and Demosthenes, with Aristotle, Plutarch's _Lives_, and, above all,
Lucian, who is often imitated in the Byzantine age.

One of the distinguished pupils of Photius, Arethas, bishop of Caesarea
in Cappadocia (c. 907-932), devoted himself with remarkable energy to
collecting and expounding the Greek classics. Among the important MSS.
still extant that were copied at his expense are the Bodleian Euclid
(888) and the Bodleian Plato (895). To the third quarter of the 10th
century we may assign the Greek lexicon of Suidas, a combination of a
lexicon and an encyclopaedia, the best articles being those on the
history of literature.

Meanwhile, during the "dark age" of secular learning at Constantinople
(641-850), the light of Greek learning had spread eastwards to Syria and
Arabia. At Bagdad, in the reign of Mamun (813-833), the son of Harun
al-Rashid, philosophical works were translated by Syrian Christians from
Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic. It was in his reign that
Aristotle was first translated into Arabic, and, shortly afterwards, we
have Syriac and Arabic renderings of commentators on Aristotle, and of
portions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen; while in the 10th century new
translations of Aristotle and his commentators were produced by the
Nestorian Christians.

The Arabic translations of Aristotle passed from the East to the West by
being transmitted through the Arab dominions in northern Africa to
Spain, which had been conquered by the Arabs in the 8th century. In the
12th century Toledo was the centre of the study of Aristotle in the
West, and it was from Toledo that the knowledge of Aristotle spread to
Paris and to other seats of learning in western Europe.

The 12th century in Constantinople is marked by the name of Tzetzes (c.
1110-c. 1180), the a