Ethical Themes in the Antioch Mosaics

Abstract

Students of the cultural history of the late Roman and Byzantine periods sometimes speculate as to what may have been the ordinary daily intellectual interests—the private store of detached thought and emotion—of the average educated men of those times. To us, the literary activity of those centuries seems a barren skeleton, picked bare by the sophists, an abhorrent thing in which we can find no real interest. The formal philosophy of the schools was a wild business whose fantastic flights seem to many of us today to be quite incredible and absurd. We can perhaps understand a little better the intellectual and political interest which attached to the theological controversies, though these often went to lengths which seem to us to be excessive. Private religious experience there was, of course, and there was an emotional outlet in Christian art which we can understand quite well. But even the total of these things will not perhaps satisfy our curiosity; whether rightly or wrongly, we find it difficult to understand that a man's life can have been made up of these things alone, and we wonder what a mind of at least some independence and vigor can have found as a basis for its individual existence.