The Eastern Roman Empire

A new Rome

The Eastern Roman Empire — known to later historians as Byzantium, after Byzantion, the old Greek colony on whose site it stood — was the eastern, Greek-speaking continuation of Rome. When the emperor Constantine founded Constantinople in 330 CE, he created a capital that would outlast the western city by a thousand years. Its people called themselves Romans, though their language and culture were Greek.

Christianity and the closing of the schools

The empire was thoroughly Christian, and its relationship to the pagan philosophical tradition was fraught. In 529 CE the emperor Justinian — who also raised the great church of Hagia Sophia, 'Holy Wisdom' — forbade pagans to teach, closing the Academy at Athens and driving its last head, Damascius, into exile. The unbroken life of the ancient schools came to an end.

Keeper of the flame

Yet Byzantium became the great preserver of Greek learning. Its scholars copied and studied the texts of antiquity, and in its libraries the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus survived. Platonism was revived there by Michael Psellos in the eleventh century and by Gemistos Plethon in the fifteenth, whose teaching helped kindle the Renaissance in the West. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, scholars fleeing westward carried their manuscripts with them — a final gift of the golden chain to the modern world.