The Byzantinist Cyril Mango wrote an article, “Diabolus Byzantinus,” summarized by my friend the Orthodox Christian philosopher David Bradshaw as “contrasting the portrayal of Satan in Byzantium with that in the West. In Byzantium he was seen as a pitiful and laughable figure, much as in the Nativity icon. Not at all the clever Satan of Milton or the suave one of Goethe, nor even the mighty chained giant of Dante.” In it, Mango traces that “Eastern” figure all the way to Dostoevsky’s writing.

“The Byzantine Devil is a distinctly seedy character and remains so in the Orthodox tradition,” a parasite as in Dostoevsky, “a ‘devious ‘operator’ who is put to flight by the sign of the cross or the recitation of a psalm.” Orthodox iconography “defines the demonic in terms of deprivation or incompleteness.” “[T]he Byzantine Devil or demon never acquires the frightening, hybrid forms he does in the West—the horns, bats’ wings, animal head, cloven hooves,” although there is non-iconographic textual evidence for terror associated with him.

You can read the article here:

https://archive.org/details/DOP46_21_Mango/page/n7/mode/2up

(Mango was one of the great academic Byzantine scholars and writers of the last century, growing up in a family with longtime ties to Constantinople, and a mother who was a Russian exile from the Revolution there.)