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Updated: June 10, 2025
The patrician Photius, perhaps, alone was resolved to live and to die like his ancestors: he enfranchised himself with the stroke of a dagger, and left his tyrant the poor consolation of exposing with ignominy the lifeless corpse of the fugitive.
The treasures of antiquity, as Gibbon has said, were imparted in such extracts and abridgments 'as might amuse the curiosity without oppressing the indolence of the public. The Patriarch Photius stands out as a literary hero among the commentators and critics of the ninth century.
He behaved admirably at the beginning of his reign and during 1812, but acted badly by giving a constitution to Poland, forming the Holy Alliance, entrusting power to Arakcheev, favoring Golitsyn and mysticism, and afterwards Shishkov and Photius. He also acted badly by concerning himself with the active army and disbanding the Semenov regiment."
One party held that God had wonderfully brought this precious volume to light, for the guidance of His Church at a most critical moment. The other party wondered that any importance could be attached to the nonsense of a nameless scribbler of the thirteenth century. Much was written about the deprivations of Chrysostom and Photius, of Nicolaus Mysticus and Cosmas Atticus.
It may be proper to add, that in the extracts from Agatharcides, given by Photius, it is expressly mentioned that ships from India were met with by the Egyptian ships in the ports of Sabaea.
He was a layman at the time of his appointment, but in six days he passed through the inferior orders which led up to the patriarchate. Still, the party that remained faithful to Ignatius numbered many adherents, and therefore Photius thought it well to enlist the support of the Bishop of Rome on his side.
Yet Photius has enumerated eight books of the Discourses and twelve books of the Conversations. Schweighaeuser observes that Photius had not seen these works of Arrian on Epictetus, for so he concludes from the brief notice of these works by Photius.
This mutual jealousy of the old and the new Rome was only one of the causes of quarrel between them, a quarrel which was fanned from time to time by the appeal of a defeated party in some ecclesiastical dispute at Constantinople to the Pope. The most famous of these disputes was that begun by the deposition of the aristocratic Ignatius from the patriarchate in favour of the learned Photius.
Tradition reports that "The patriarch Photius took the virginal robe of the Mother of God from the Blachern Church, and plunged it beneath the waves of the strait, when the sea immediately boiled up from underneath and wrecked the vessels of the heathen. Struck with awe, they believed in that God who had smitten them, and became the first-fruits of their people to the Lord."
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 æras of the Byzantine literature.
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