ABSTRACT
It is worth bearing in mind that a resurgence of interest in the culture of the classical Greek and Roman worlds occurred at the court of Charlemagne, while yet another resurgence is notable from the twelfth century onwards rather than, as is so often stated, only as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, we would probably do best to realize that this fascination with the ‘Ancients’ had always been present since the decline of the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. Though many classical texts were deliberately destroyed or simply lost in the course of time, the Catholic Church assiduously retained all those elements of classical civilization that in their underlying ideas did not conflict with Christian doctrine, and had passed these on through the manuscript texts which were the primary carriers of information. Thus, the ‘great tradition’ was born, in which Europe’s cultured elite always had access to, and communicated with, the culture of the ancient Mediterranean.
