The half of the empire to which the young emperor Arcadius succeeded in 395 was one of some geographical and cultural complexity. It included not only the Danube provinces, as far west as to include Illyricum, the Balkans, and Greece, but also Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the eastern Mediterranean. Latin remained as a language of the army and law. Some emperors, such as Justin I and Justinian, came from a predominantly Latin cultural background and the language was kept up by the courtiers and lawyers of the imperial palace in Constantinople. However, the language of administration was Greek, which had spread widely in the east after Alexander’s conquests. Antioch, the second city of the empire, and Alexandria were both Greek speaking and, as former capitals of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic monarchies, prided themselves on a Greek heritage that was much older and richer than that of Constantinople.
Although Greek had spread outside the cities (and is found as the normal language of inscriptions even in rural areas) local cultures had become more prominent since the third century. Christianity was a religion where the written text was important and minority languages developed their own Christian literature. Syriac was used for a wide variety of such writings, including lives of the saints, sermons, and church histories. Greek texts were translated into Syriac and vice versa while Syriac texts were in their turn translated into Armenian, Georgian, and, even in later times, into Arabic. In Palestine the Jewish teachers understood Greek but debated in Hebrew and conversed in Aramaic. In Egypt Coptic, which is essentially Egyptian written in a Greek script, had appeared in the late third century as the medium used by the Christian church to communicate with the Egyptian-speaking masses. Many Egyptians were bilingual in Greek and Coptic and Coptic became more widespread century by century until the Arab invasions of the seventh century. The mass of linguistic Christianities hampered any form of Christian uniformity and made the nuances of theological debates even more perplexing.
Yet despite its cultural complexity the eastern part of the empire saw itself as the proud heir of Rome. Its inhabitants called themselves Romaioi, or Romans, right up to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in ad 1453. The fact that an empire with its own distinct ethos emerged in this area and sustained itself as a multicultural entity for over a thousand years was a remarkable achievement and
The comments of the Irish historian William Lecky writing in 1869 that ‘Of the Byzantine empire, the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, with scarcely an exception, the most thoroughly debased and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed’ has long been superseded. In fact over the next thousand years the empire showed much resilience in resisting the attacks of surrounding peoples and empires. A scholarly elite survived in Constantinople for centuries. Even though there was relatively little original new literature, it is through their careful copying of Greek texts, for instance, that so much of the work of Plato, Euclid, Sophocles, and Thucydides has been saved. Constantinople fell only once, in 1204, before 1453 and, ironically, that was to an army of Christian crusaders who looted it of its treasured relics, claiming that the Greeks were heretics and unworthy of them.
World History
