Ancient History: the Fall of Greek and Romans in Byzantine Empire

In every culture we have traditions, values, and even texts/manuscripts that not only define who we are but tell our part of history. Without these the next generation and the future of others will have forgotten who we are and what we valued (at that time). Unfortunately, after the fall of the Roman Empire, ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as early Christian texts were at risk of being lost forever. However the Byzantium, Islam, and the Christian monastic movement helped preserved and even translated these classic texts.

It was Constantine who began the rebuilding of Byzantium in 324, renaming the city Constantinople and dedicating it in 330. Constantinople became the sole capital of the Empire, although the Byzantine Empire remained in existence until it was defeated by the Turks in 1453. The greatest of all the eastern emperors was Justinian who reigned for thirty-eight years between 527 and 565. Justinian’s desire was to restore the Empire both East and West to the way it was before, former glory. Some say this became an obsession of Justinian. However, his greatest accomplishment towards the end was the revision and codification of Roman Law.

Justinian understood that a strong government could not exists without good laws. Although the Romans had prided themselves on their written laws, several centuries of written laws had brought nothing but confusion. Justinian created a commission of sixteen men to bring order out of all the laws. These men worked for six years and studied more than two thousand texts. In 534, the commission produced the Corpus Juris Civilis, The Body of Civil Law. The Corpus was written in Latin and became the standard legal work until the middle of the 19th century. This had became one of the most sophisticated legal systems ever produced. This was just one of the many ways of Byzantium preserving what could have been lost.

Byzantium had survive a thousand of years after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. Byzantine families valued education, especially classical learning. Basic courses for students focused on Greek and Latin grammar along with philosophy. They kept the Roman and Greek culture alive be their literature of Homer and medicine from Galen for examples. The Byzantines also preserved and copied classical manuscripts, and they are regarded as transmitters of the classical knowledge, as important contributors to the modern European civilization, and as precursors of both the Renaissance humanism and the Slav Orthodox culture. Byzantines had preserved the Greek and Roman cultural heritage until it was taken up in the west during the Renaissance.

The Byzantine Empire influenced many cultures, primarily due to its role in shaping Christian Orthodoxy. The modern-day Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian church in the world. Orthodoxy is central to the history and societies of Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia, and other countries.The Byzantine architecture, particularly in religious buildings, can be found in diverse regions from Egypt to Russia. During the Byzantine Renaissance from 867 to 1056 art and literature flourished. Artists adopted a naturalistic style and complex techniques from ancient Greek and Roman art and mixed them with Christian themes.

After the fall of Rome some of the artistic and literary creations of classical culture survived, but others were lost. It was during the Middle Ages where Western Europe was broken up into small regions with economies based on agricultural labor. This meant that most places had little time for education and the arts. For the most part only a few monks in the monasteries had exposure to classical literature and many of them knew Latin but not Greek. However not all hope was lost. Some of the most significant advances in scholarship was made during the Middle Ages by Islamic Scholars. During the 600 and 700s Muslims spread their religion across North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula through the Middle East and into the Byzantine Empire.

Some of these areas had previously been conquered and governed by Alexander the Great, who exposed them to Hellenistic Greek culture and then by the Romans. The Muslim conquerors eventually came into possession of various Greek and Roman manuscripts. Rather than destroy these works, Muslim scholars carefully preserved them, translating them into Arabic, studying them, and in some cases building on ideas set down by the ancient writers in their own works. The Muslims were particularly interested in philosophic and scientific works.

It was mainly through the efforts of these scholars that the works of the Greeks and Romans were preserved for later Europeans. Although artists and scholars were working in any number of Muslim cities, the cities of Andalusia in southern Spain were especially rich centers of scientific work and artistic development. Scholars working in these cities translated works that had originally been written in Greek out of Arabic and into Latin. Over time, these Latin translations began to be studied at European universities that sprang up in the late Middle Ages, and Greek began to be studied again as well.