ABSTRACT
The Eastern Empire before its decline rendered eminent services to civilization. It restored a new life to Italy, ruined by invasions; the Romagna, the Pentapolis (Ancona and Rimini), Istria, Venetia, Sicily, and, above all, Græcia Magna became once more, thanks to the empire, oases of wealth in a peninsula ravaged by the barbarians. By its diplomacy and its military superiority, and still more by the activity of its missionaries and the prestige of its culture, Byzantium accomplished in the barbarian world of the East the same work of civilization which Rome had once performed in the Western world. She taught them the advantages of ordered and fruitful labour when she civilized them and led them to Christianity. She Hellenized and Slavized the old Roman colonies, the Vlachs of Epirus, Southern Albania, Acarnania, Thessaly, and Pindus, although she never succeeded in weaning them from their habit of brigandage and from a pastoral to an agricultural life. But if she left the Albanians to return to their wild and primitive tribal life, she did at least succeed in elevating to a civilized existence the tribes of the great Slav race, of which she was the true educator. She spread her civilization among the Slavs of Dacia, who had intermingled with Latin coloni, the Roumanians of the future, as well as among the Slavs of the Moravian Empire, who were converted to the Greek faith in the ninth century by the Byzantine Apostles Cyril and Methodius, and among the Slovenes of Pannonia and Norica. The influence of the West later displaced that of Byzantium among Moravians and Slovenes, but Byzantine civilization persisted among the Slavized Roumanians of Transylvania.
