Hagiography, i.e. the literature of the acts of the martyrs and the lives of the saints, forms an independent group and one comparatively unaffected by dogmatic struggles. The main interest centres here round the objects described, the personalities of the martyrs and saints themselves. The authors, on the other hand--the _Acts of the Martyrs_ are mostly anonymous--keep more in the background than in other branches of literature. The man whose name is mainly identified with Greek hagiography, Symeon Metaphrastes, is important not as an original author, but only as an editor. Symeon revised in the 10th century, according to the rhetorical and linguistic principles of his day, numerous old _Acts of the Martyrs_, and incorporated them in a collection consisting of several volumes, which was circulated in innumerable copies, and thus to a great extent superseded the older original texts. These _Acts of the Martyrs_, in point of time, are anterior to our period; but of the _Lives of Saints_ the greater portion belong to Byzantine literature. They began with biographies of monks distinguished for their saintly living, such as were used by Palladius about 420 in his _Historia Lausiaca_. The most famous work of this description is that by Athanasius of Alexandria, viz. the biography of St Anthony, the founder of monachism. In the 6th century Cyril of Scythopolis wrote several lives of saints, distinguished by a simple and straightforward style. More expert than any one else in reproducing the naive popular style was Leontius of Neapolis in Cyprus who, in the 7th century, wrote, among other works, a life of St John the Merciful, archbishop of Alexandria, which is very remarkable as illustrating the social and intellectual conditions of the time. From the popular _Lives of Saints_, which for the reading public of the middle ages formed the chief substitute for modern "belles lettres," it is easy to trace the transition to the religious novel. The most famous work of this class is the history of BARLAAM AND JOSAPHAT (q.v.). Religious poetry.