ABSTRACT
The West, in fact, entered a period of widespread breakdown of its intellectual life, with a corresponding effect on all aspects of education, which became vigorous again only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when contact with Byzantium and the Islamic Empire increased appreciably. Educational development, in the period between the breakdown of the Roman Empire and the late-eleventh-century intensification of contact between Occident and Orient, remained centred in the East. There were relatively few Christian teachers in fourth-century Byzantium, and those who were most eloquent in supporting the case for Christian education, like Lactantius, were themselves products of the classical tradition. The Arabs gave the Nestorians freedom to preserve their minority culture; in the centuries following the decline of Athens much of the Greek tradition in learning and education was preserved, right in the centre of the Moslem world.
