The Myth Reconsidered

Abstract

For almost 1000 years, the old Roman Empire was divided: between the East, centred on Constantinople, and the West. Both sides were heirs to classical (Roman and Greek) civilization, but East and West gradually went down different paths theologically, intellectually and culturally. The West went through a ‘Dark Age’, with Rome overrun by barbarians and its knowledge almost completely lost: the light of classical civilization only kept burning through the scattered monasteries of Western Europe. But in the East, the Roman Empire flourished, and came to be known as the Byzantine Empire. It expanded its power and influence across the Eastern Mediterranean, and even to Italy. For the Byzantines, there was no rupture between the Rome of Augustus and the Medieval world. The philosophy and culture of Rome, originally filtered from classical Greece, and now filtered once again through Byzantine Greece, was a living tradition, with significant intellectual centres flourishing in different periods, for instance in Athens and Alexandria.