Armenian

Recognizing Hellenism and Greek as the hemispherically dominant culture and language of late antiquity, this chapter applies a dynamic model to chart the incremental Armenian reception of such trends over the fifth–eighth centuries. Acknowledging the contemporary affinity between elite literacy and Christianity’s regional integration, it analyses the resulting bifurcation in Armenian society and literature whereby Persianate aristocratic epic persists in an oral verse repertoire, while the novel written medium largely in prose propagated by a new literate class not only appropriates all the ecclesiastical genres but reconceptualizes the Armenian worldview within a Christian dispensation from a Greek cultural ethos. Adopting the trivium and quadrivium from Antioch and Alexandria, scholars replicate lay schools in Armenia and contribute to those disciplines by their commentaries. Elaborating an indigenous theological literature in continuity with Syria and Egypt, Armenians defend it in dialogue with Constantinople as the eastern Mediterranean littoral enters into the Umayyad Caliphate.