d have
told us all about it. But nobody did tell: or if anybody did, the tale
has not survived.

[Sidenote: _Anna Comnena, &c._]

But this interest of problem is not the only one that attaches to the
"drama," as he calls it, of Eustathius or Eumathius "the philosopher,"
who flourished at some time between the twelfth and the fourteenth
century, and is therefore pretty certainly ours. For the purposes of
literary history the book deserves to be taken as the typical
contribution of Greek during the period, much better than the famous
_Alexiad_ of Anna Comnena[181] in history, or the verse romances of
Eustathius's probable contemporaries Theodorus Prodromus and Nicetas
Eugenianus.[182] The princess's book, though historically important,
and by no means disagreeable to read, is, as literature, chiefly
remarkable as exhibiting the ease and the comparative success with
which Greek lent itself to the formation of an artificial _style
noble_, more like the writing of the average (not the better)
Frenchman of the eighteenth century than it is like anything else. It
is this peculiarity which has facilitated the construction of the
literary _pastiche_ called Modern Greek, and perhaps it is this which
will long prevent the production of real literature in that language
or pseudo-language. On the other hand, the books of Theodorus and
Nicetas, devoted, according to rule, to the loves respectively of
Rhodanthe and Dosicles, of Charicles and Drosilla, are written in
iambic trimeters of the very worst and most wooden description. It is
doubtful whether even the great Tragic poets could have made the
trimeter tolerable as the vehicle of a long story. In the hands of
Theodorus and Nicetas its monotony becomes utterly sickening, while
the level of the composition of neither is much above that of a by no
means gifted schoolboy, even if we make full allowance for the changes
in prosody, and especially in quantity, which had set in for Greek as
they had for other languages. The question whether these iambics are
more or less terrible than the "political verses"[183] of the Wise
Manasses,[184] which usually accompany them in editions, and which
were apparently inserted in what must have been the inconceivably
dreary romance of "Aristander and Callithea," must be left to
individual taste to decide. Manasses also wrote a History of the World
in the same rhythm, and it is possible that he may have occasionally
forgotten which of the two books