Аннотация:The purpose of the report is to illustrate some features in the use of the dative in Late Byzantine canonical question-and-answers (ἐρωταποκρίσεις) and to understand how these data can shed light on the functioning of the dative in Byzantine Greek of the late period.
Erotapokriseis (questions and replies) are the genre (or rather genre form) that had been invented in the ancient literary tradition and was widespread in the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Christian countries. It assumes formation of dialogue and it is similar to didactic genres (for instance catechism, treatises, apophthegm etc.). The format of the question-and-replies was borrowed from the Ancient Greek dialogue, and the very stylistics came from the genres of chapters (κεφάλαια) and apophthegm (ἀποφθέγματα - "Sayings of the Fathers"). In Byzantium the question and answer collections became one of the most preferred ways of organizing and imparting knowledge in a number of such fields as theology, philosophy, grammar, medicine, law (Y. Papadoyannakis, Instruction by Question and Answer: The Case of Late Antique and Byzantine Erotapokriseis, in S. F. Johnson (ed.), Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didactism,Classicism. Adlershot 2006, pp. 91-92).
The object of the research are nine Byzantine church-canonical questions-and-answers of the late XI-th and the early XV-th centuries (among them: canonical answers by Niketas, metropolitan of Herakleia (XI c.), Nikolas III Grammatikos, patriarch of Constantinople (XI c.), Peter Chartophylax (XI c.), Nikephoros Chartophylax (XI c.), Elias, metropolitan of Crete (XII c.), Loukas Chrysoberges, patriarch of Constantinople (XII c.), Niketas, metropolitan of Thessalonike (XII c.), Neilos, metropolitan of Rhodes (XIV c.), Joasaph, metropolitan of Ephesus (XV c.)). These texts are collections of different answers by leading clerics concerning to canon law, liturgy, spiritual practices, marriages and so on and they correspond inherently to the epistolary genre (rather to the genre of an official correspondence) (A. Anashkin, Problemy zhanra voprosootvetnoy literatury v kontekste tserkovno-kanonicheskoy pis'mennosti pozdnevizantiyskogo perioda (Genre Problems of Question-and-Answer Literature in Context of Late Byzantine Canonical Writing), in St Tikhon’s University Review, III: 4 (39). Moscow 2014, pp. 7-16.). So these texts reflect some features of living language to a certain extent.
The observation shows that the dative is still alive and productive case form in these texts.