or of letters, a title
which alone has preserved his memory and excused his ambition. A
particle of the treasures of his nephew was sometimes diverted from
the indulgence of vice and folly; a school was opened in the palace
of Magnaura; and the presence of Bardas excited the emulation of the
masters and students. At their head was the philosopher Leo, archbishop
of Thessalonica: his profound skill in astronomy and the mathematics
was admired by the strangers of the East; and this occult science
was magnified by vulgar credulity, which modestly supposes that all
knowledge superior to its own must be the effect of inspiration or
magic. At the pressing entreaty of the Caesar, his friend, the celebrated
Photius, renounced the freedom of a secular and studious life, ascended
the patriarchal throne, and was alternately excommunicated and absolved
by the synods of the East and West. By the confession even of priestly
hatred, no art or science, except poetry, was foreign to this universal
scholar, who was deep in thought, indefatigable in reading, and eloquent
in diction. Whilst he exercised the office of protospathaire or captain
of the guards, Photius was sent ambassador to the caliph of Bagdad. The
tedious hours of exile, perhaps of confinement, were beguiled by the
hasty composition of his _Library_, a living monument of erudition
and criticism. Two hundred and fourscore writers, historians, orators,
philosophers, theologians, are reviewed without any regular method:
he abridges their narrative or doctrine, appreciates their style and
character, and judges even the fathers of the church with a discreet
freedom, which often breaks through the superstition of the times. The
emperor Basil, who lamented the defects of his own education, intrusted
to the care of Photius his son and successor, Leo the philosopher; and
the reign of that prince and of his son Constantine Porphyrogenitus
forms one of the most prosperous aeras of the Byzantine literature.
By their munificence the treasures of antiquity were deposited in the
Imperial library; by their pens, or those of their associates, they were
imparted in such extracts and abridgments as might amuse the curiosity,
without oppressing the indolence, of the public. Besides the _Basilics_,
or code of laws, the arts of husbandry and war, of feeding or destroying
the human species, were propagated with equal diligence; and the history
of Greece and Rome was digested into fifty-three heads