Abstract
The official Byzantine literature is characterized by first, an imitation of ancient examples - such as historiography, rhetoric, learned poetry, epistolography, The official Byzantine literature is characterized by first, an imitation of ancient examples - such as historiography, rhetoric, learned poetry, epistolography, and second, traditional functional genres of homiletics, hagiography, and hymnography. All the texts are written in more or less archaic Greek, or Attic, standardized by Alexandrian scholars in the Hellenistic period.
In contrast, the language of vernacular Byzantine texts is a refined literary form of the spoken language, with elements of archaic Greek, according to the needs of the author.