ABSTRACT
In a previous chapter mention has been made of how the culture of antiquity, itself already become decadent, received its death-blow through the transmigration of peoples which broke up the Roman Empire. The first political evidence of this dissolution was the splitting up of the mighty Empire in the year 395. The cultural world of the time was thereby divided into an eastern and a western half, which suffered essentially different fortunes. In the eastern section the old imperial constitution was still to survive for over a thousand years, maintained in power through the people's being so long accustomed to a despotic form of government, and upheld by an intimate connexion with the strangely established Greek Oriental Church — in actual fact the bond that held together the mixed populations which gave allegiance to the sceptre of the Emperor of the East. Greek was the prevailing language here and the medium for a peculiar form of culture, the Byzantine, which displayed extraordinary qualities of resistance to the pressure of hostile forces: the Mohammedans in the East, wild hordes of migratory peoples from the north and "Latins," as the western Europeans were here called, in the West. This constant struggle for cultural supremacy produced, as it invariably does, a tendency to strict conservatism, and the value of the Byzantine culture therefore lies not so much in independent creative work as in all that it did for the preservation of the ancient literature which, even for philological reasons, it already had some interest in preserving. The capital of the Empire certainly possessed valuable libraries, and educational establishments with highly complicated methods of instruction, but the studies pursued there consisted mostly in theological subtleties, the amplification of ancient authors, and the compilation of histories. The scholars of Constantinople cared little for natural science. On the other hand, the Byzantine physicians were famed for their great ability; they honourably upheld the best traditions of the medical science of antiquity. Their training was entirely practical, however — they received no academical instruction in the science of medicine — and they were in fact essentially practitioners; the theoretical branches of medicine, anatomy and physiology, they have done very little to promote. The principal medical work of the Byzantine era, written by Paulus of Ægina in the seventh century, deals only with practical Antony van Leeuwenhoek https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203704929/d410b27e-9bec-4300-a13c-e317203e46bd/content/fig1_10_4.jpg"/> Ulisse Aldrovandi https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203704929/d410b27e-9bec-4300-a13c-e317203e46bd/content/fig1_10_5.jpg"/> 75medicine; its surgical section is celebrated for its excellence and has had great influence on the medical science of both Arabia and the Occident.— The Byzantine Empire and its culture eventually succumbed to the Turks, but before that it had had time to exercise considerable influence upon western European civilization, especially by spreading a wider knowledge of classical Greek literature and thereby paving the way for the great cultural regeneration of the Renaissance.
