Echoes of Byzantium: Tracing Historical Greek Registers in Karl Benedikt Hase’s Diary

Karl Benedikt Hase (1780 – 1864) was one of the most distinguished scholars of Greek literature in the 19th-century French academia. Over his career, Hase established a network of intellectual connections among Parisian Hellenists, held positions at the Bibliothèque impériale and École polytechnique, and engaged in a variety of research, editorial, and teaching activities. As Professor of Greek and Greek Palaeography at the École des langues orientales vivantes, Hase strongly advocated for exploring all historical registers of Greek, from contemporary ῥωμαϊκά to Classical and Byzantine Greek. Hase’s broad linguistic expertise, coupled with paleographic knowledge and direct access to a large manuscript repository, enabled him to produce editions of Byzantine texts, including Leo the Deacon’s Historia, John Lydus’ De Ostentis, as well as fragments from Michael Attaleiates’ Historia and letters of Michael Psellos – his posthumous contributions to the Recueil des historiens des croisades volume. Perhaps the most notorious publication that links Hase to Byzantine studies refers to Toparcha Gothicus fragments, which were presented by Hase as a 10th-century Greek manuscript but later proven to be a forgery. Throughout his life Hase kept a private diary in a form of Ancient Greek, nine volumes of which have been recently discovered and comprise the core of the LAGOOS research project at the University of Innsbruck. This paper examines the use of Greek in Hase’s diary with a combination of close critical reading and distant reading methods – including frequency analysis, lexical diversity analysis, and stylometry – to trace the historical registers of Greek in the diary and outline linguistic elements that indicate the influence of Byzantine texts on Hase’s private writing.