THE ADVENT OF CHRISTIANITY AS AT FIRST THE DOMINANT AND THEN the only permitted religion in the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, and three centuries later the arrival of Islam as the religion of most of the peoples of western Asia and north Africa, radically changed the culture of what had been the Hellenistic world. For instance, the need to remain true to the doctrinal tenets of these overarching religions severely restricted what was open for debate on a variety of topics, and how any debates were to be conducted. Life centered around the church and the mosque was not the same as life had been under the more informal religiosity of ancient “paganism.” And the customs and outlooks that the new religions imported from the Jewish and Arabic societies and cultures in which they had their roots were certainly very different from the customs and outlooks of the preceding Greco-Roman culture. But despite all the changes of focus and outlook, all the restrictions on debate and lifestyle that accompanied the dominance of the two new religions, the Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world did not simply die out. However much that culture might be changed and restricted, its influence was still felt in the Christian and Islamic cultures of late antique and medieval times. We must consider how and in what ways the high culture of the Hellenistic world continued to inform aspects of later Christian and Islamic cultures.
1. A LATE ANTIQUE DIALOGUE AT ALEXANDRIA
When the great Muslim conqueror ‘Amr ibn al-’As entered Alexandria as victor in the year 640 CE, or AH 20 by Muslim reckoning, he found a city no longer in its glory days, but still a great and bustling metropolis, a hub of trade and culture. ‘Amr was by all accounts a cultured man himself, a member of the old Quraysh aristocracy of Mecca and a successful trader before his conversion to Islam in 629 (AH 8). As governor of Egypt—at first under the caliph Umar, and later again under the Umayyad caliph Mu’awiyah—he had a reputation as a fair-minded man, a respecter of the Christian faith and church, and an admirer of the culture he found in Egypt. He recommended to the caliph Umar, we are told, that Alexandria—the Hellenistic and Roman capital of Egypt—continue as the capital city of the province. When Umar refused this advice, ‘Amr built a new city at the base of the Nile delta, near modern Cairo, called al-Fustat, which became one of the great cities of the medieval world. But he still admired Alexandria, enchanted by the many palaces, public baths, and theaters, and spent much time there. In his wanderings about the ancient and beautifully built city, we hear that he became aware of some old men who went every day to a venerable porticoed building where they spent hours poring over rolls of papyrus. He was intrigued and inquired into the identity of these old men, and the purpose of their activity. He learned that the chief of these men was named John Philoponus, and that he was a scholar, Christian theologian, and philosopher. The building he worked at was what was left of the great library of Alexandria, commissioned and built nine hundred years earlier under the first Ptolemy and his son and heir Philadelphus. ‘Amr determined to meet John Philoponus and learn more about him and his activities, and about this mysterious library. And so began, we are told, a most unlikely friendship.
The story of this friendship, and of the fate of the great library, is retailed in a medieval document called the “Dialogues of ‘Amr”. According to the tradition, ‘Amr took to visiting John Philoponus frequently, delighting in the old man’s conversation. John was, in the eyes of the orthodox church, a heretic: his arguments concerning the unity implicit in the trinity, and the unity of the conjoined human and divine natures in Jesus, clearly smacked of the notorious monophysite (single-nature) heresy. Such ideas appealed to ‘Amr who of course rejected, as a Muslim, the idea of a three-person deity; but to orthodox Christians John’s arguments were anathema and still aroused their ire centuries later. In the ninth century the Byzantine patriarch Photios forgot his usually measured language and roundly abused John for his treatise On the Trinity:
His arguments are not only blasphemous, but utterly unsound and feeble, and he shows himself unable to give even a superficial coloring of truth to his fallacious arguments against the true faith. Inventing natures, substances and godheads, like the insolent babbler that he is, he pours forth a stream of blasphemy against the Christian faith … (Photios Bibliotheca 75).
Photios continues in this vein, with words such as puerile, insolent, weak, and silly, and broadens his field of fire to encompass all of John’s writings, which he denounces as derivative, falsified, spurious, and degenerate. In contrast to Photios, ‘Amr found John a man of wisdom and taste, a man whose conversation was charming and enlightening. But we may guess that they did not discuss Christian theology much; for much more than as a theologian, John Philoponus achieved fame as a philosopher, and especially as a commentator on Aristotle. For John was one of the leaders of the late antique Alexandrian school of Aristotle commentators, including his master Ammonius and his successors, the enigmatic David, Elias, and Stephanus.
John, however, was more than a mere admirer and commentator on Aristotle: he was an inventive thinker in his own right. As a Christian, he could not agree with Aristotle’s theory of the eternity of the universe, and wrote extensively arguing against it and in favor of creation. More importantly, he critiqued Aristotle’s ideas of dynamics and perspective, arriving at different views that came close to discovering the principle of inertia: his ideas on mass and motion influenced no less a scientist than Galileo. And in his ideas on perspective he conceived of space as an immaterial medium in which material objects exist in three dimensions, influencing later thinkers like Pico della Mirandola and Leon Battista Alberti. It is no wonder, then, that ‘Amr reportedly found John fascinating. When their friendship was firmly enough established, John dared to bring forward a topic that was troubling him: the future of the library. He explained to ‘Amr the history and nature of the library and its vast collection of books and, while acknowledging that all this now belonged to ‘Amr as conqueror, expressed the hope that he and his fellows would be permitted to maintain the library and continue their work. ‘Amr, however, decided that making a judgement once and for all on the fate of this collection of non-Islamic material was not for him to do: he referred the matter to the caliph Umar in Mecca. After weeks of anxious waiting, the judgement of Umar arrived: if what was in these books was also in the Qur’an, then they were unnecessary; if what was in them went against the Qur’an, they were undesirable. Either way, they should be burned. And so, with great reluctance, ‘Amr ordered that the books of the library should be used to stoke the fires of the bath-houses of Alexandria; and the friendship between him and John Philoponus came to an end. It was said, according to the learned Muslim historian Ibn al-Kifti, that it took six months to burn all the books.
All this makes a charming and, in its way, rather tragic story; but it is not history. In truth, John Philoponus lived and flourished in the sixth century (he died around 570), not in the seventh, and the meeting and friendship between him and ‘Amr is pure legend, as is the burning of the library books on the orders of Umar. But behind the legend lies an interesting truth: the notion of the Muslim leader ‘Amr being intrigued by a Greek philosopher like John Philoponus is indicative of a very real fascination the Muslim elites felt for Hellenistic philosophy, science, medicine, and mathematics. Far from burning the books of Hellenistic culture, the Islamic world in fact in many cases preserved them, translated them into Arabic, and used them as the basis for creating an Islamic high culture. John Philoponus’ own commentaries on Aristotle were in fact translated into Arabic. In Arabic John is known as Yahya al-Nahwi (John the Grammarian), and his writings among others helped to form the foundation of an Islamic school of philosophy, drawing its inspiration from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, which flourished between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. It took a few centuries for Islamic thinkers to translate and absorb the writings of the Hellenistic world they had taken over; and there were areas of Hellenistic culture—drama, poetry, and oratory for example—that held little interest for them. But in the ninth century the great Muslim intellectual al-Kindi founded the study of Greek philosophy as an Islamic pursuit, arguing that rational philosophy and theology are compatible with each other (though theology is to be preferred), promoting the study of Aristotle and Plato, and beginning a long tradition of great Islamic scholars of philosophy and science.
The achievements of Islamic philosophy and science are not as well-known as they should be. Greek mathematics had achieved some very great heights: for example, Archimedes’ work on conic sections is foundational to Newton’s development of differential calculus, and Euclid’s handbook of geometry was still the basic text for learning geometry into the twentieth century. But Greek mathematics had always labored under a very clumsy system of numeration. In taking up Greek mathematics and pondering the ideas and concepts expressed, Islamic mathematicians came up with a number of improvements that changed mathematics for the better: al-Khwarizmi’s introduction to the Mediterranean world of the Hindi numbering system, with the zero and the other decimal numbers, for example. More importantly, al-Khwarizmi is widely recognized as one of the founders of the mathematical discipline of algebra. Al-Khwarizmi, who was active early in the ninth century at the great “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikma) established in Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, wrote a book entitled Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala (Compendious book on calculation by restoration and balancing). The book proposed the fundamental algebraic method for solving polynomial equations, and the term “algebra” of course comes from al-jabr. The Alexandrian Greek mathematician Diophantus had already proposed a theory of equations of sorts, but al-Khwarizmi’s work went much further in establishing how to construct and solve equations, both linear and quadratic. Islamic thinkers, that is to say, did not just borrow ideas from Greek culture: they developed and improved them. The same is true in medicine and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest medieval medical expert and writer, for example, was the early eleventh-century Muslim doctor and philosopher Ibn Sina, known in the west mostly by the Latinized form of his name, Avicenna. His Canon of Medicine, developed from Greek medical ideas admixed with Indian and Persian medicine and Ibn Sina’s own observations and experience, became the standard medical encyclopedia for the Islamic world and, in Latin translation, for western Europe too. But it is above all in philosophy that the influence of Hellenistic culture was felt in the Islamic world.
The example set by al-Kindi was followed by a succession of remarkable Islamic philosophers, of whom only the most important can be noticed here. A foundational figure is al-Kindi’s successor, al-Farabi, who came to be known as “the second master” (Aristotle being the first). Born around 873 in the eastern part of the Islamic world, perhaps in modern Kazakhstan, al-Farabi spent the bulk of his active life in Baghdad, at the “House of Wisdom” that was one of the cultural beacons of the medieval world. Both an influential commentator on Aristotle and a Neoplatonist, al-Farabi strove to gather and develop the ideas of the “two philosophers” (i.e. Plato and Aristotle) for Islamic audiences. Among his most influential works were his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which Ibn Sina credited with having a profound impact on his thought, and his Al-Madina al-fadila, a treatise on the ideal state in the manner of Plato’s Republic. Al-Farabi’s work and influence played a major role in ensuring the preservation of the writings of Aristotle and Plato, not just in the Islamic world but in the Christian west too. Thirty years after al-Farabi’s death in 951 was born one of the greatest Muslim philosophers, the above mentioned Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Like Farabi, Ibn Sina was born in the eastern, Iranian part of the Islamic world, but unlike Farabi he spent his whole life in that region, in cities such as Bukhara, Balkh, Isfahan, and Hamadan. Making his living primarily as a doctor, Ibn Sina was also one of the most prolific and widely influential Muslim philosophers. His writings on logic, ethics, and metaphysics gave rise to a philosophical movement called “Avicennism” after him, which influenced not only many Islamic philosophers but also such key western thinkers as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. He died of a serious illness at the relatively young age of fifty-eight, refusing to moderate his activities until the end, telling his friends that he preferred “a short life with width to a narrow one with length.”
Probably the best known of the Islamic philosophers, thanks to his major impact on western Christian philosophers such as Aquinas and the scholastics, was the great Andalusian sage Ibn Rushd, better known in the west as Averroes. Born in 1126 at Cordoba in the Islamic province of al-Andalus in southern Spain, Ibn Rushd represents the western end of the Islamic world and the great cosmopolitan cultural center that Cordoba was in this era. Probably the greatest of the medieval commentators on Aristotle, he was hugely influential via Latin translations of his commentaries in re-introducing Aristotle’s works and thought into the Christian world, and helped to spark the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance in medieval Europe. Ibn Rushd was a determined rationalist, and one of his most important works is the Fasl al-Makal, the “Decisive Treatise” in which he showed that reason and revelation do not contradict each other, but are merely alternative ways to arrive at the truth. Aquinas was to adapt Ibn Rushd’s thought on this into his own defense of rationalism alongside theology. In addition, Ibn Rushd wrote an important work defending philosophy itself, the Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence). The Persian philosopher and mystic al-Ghazali had written, after a spiritual crisis in which he abandoned his career in philosophy to become a Sufi mystic, an attack on philosophy called Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of Philosophy). Ibn Rushd’s defense of philosophy, declaring the incoherence of al-Ghazali’s argument, may be his most original work, though it failed in the end effectively to counteract al-Ghazali’s influence.
Despite al-Ghazali’s assault, however, Muslim philosophy continued, and produced many more notable thinkers. Among the greatest of them, and drawing this brief survey of Greek-inspired Islamic thought to a close, is the fourteenth-century thinker Ibn Khaldun. A north African Arab from Tunis, Ibn Khaldun studied the works of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, among others, but determined to make his own mark as a historian. His universal history, the Kitab al-’Ibar, won wide acclaim. The first section (of seven) of this history, the Muqaddimah or Introduction, is often read as a book in its own right. In it Ibn Khaldun introduced ideas of social conflict and social cohesion that have had a significant impact in the discipline of sociology, and he was one of the first thinkers to emphasize the importance for a civilization of its political economy, which he described as being composed of value-adding processes carried out by the people. No less a historian than the great Arnold Toynbee, author of the influential multi-volume Study of History, praised Ibn Khaldun’s work for introducing a “philosophy of history” which is among the greatest of its kind.
In sum, the high culture spread all around the Mediterranean and near east in the Hellenistic era did not vanish in the parts of that world that were conquered by the Muslims. Ibn Khaldun had argued that when desert nomads or other less “civilized” outsiders conquer a great civilization, they inevitably become attracted to its refined literacy and arts, and assimilate and/or adapt aspects of that culture to become their own. In accordance with Ibn Khaldun’s principle, under the impact of Hellenistic philosophy and science the Islamic world enjoyed a “Golden Age” of high culture between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, with great cultural centers from Balkh in the east, to Baghdad in the center, to Cordoba in the far west. This era of Islamic culture still influences Muslims to the present day; and the Hellenistic-influenced high culture of the Islamic “Golden Age” in turn influenced the Christian west.
2. A BYZANTINE LIBRARY
Not all of the Hellenistic world was conquered by the Muslims. Despite repeated assaults in the eighth century and later, including several sieges of the city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire—comprising Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Balkan peninsula as its core lands—held firm for many centuries as an orthodox Christian realm using the Greek language and viewing itself as a continuation of the old Roman Empire: the people we call Byzantines referred to themselves as Rhomaioi or Romans. After an era of crisis in the seventh and eighth centuries, involving attacks from outside by the Muslims from the south and Slavic peoples (especially the Bulgars) from the north, and also internal dissensions in the form of the great “iconoclastic” dispute within orthodox Christianity, the Byzantine Empire entered a period of revitalized prosperity and success in the ninth and tenth centuries.
At some time, most likely in the early 850s, an important official in the imperial service in Constantinople named Photios was sent on an embassy to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Preparing himself for this task, Photios decided to undertake a literary work of great importance. We have his own words about it:
Photios, to his beloved brother Tarasios, in the name of the Lord, greeting. After our appointment as ambassador to Assyria (i.e. Baghdad) had been confirmed … and approved by the emperor, you asked to be supplied with summaries of those works which I had read and discussed during your absence. Your idea was to have something to console you for our painful separation, and at the same time to acquire some knowledge, even if vague and imperfect, of the works which you had not yet read in our company … Accordingly … we engaged a secretary and set down all the summaries we could recollect … If during your study of these volumes, any of the summaries should appear to be defective or inaccurate, you must not be surprised. It is no easy matter to undertake to read each individual work, to grasp the subject matter, and to remember and record it … Certainly such records will assist you to refresh the memory of what you have read by yourself, to find more readily what you want, and to acquire more easily the knowledge of what has not as yet been the subject of intelligent reading on your part.
These words introduce Photios’ famed work, the Bibliotheca (Library). In it he gives more or less concise summaries of some 280 works he had read, works which evidently constituted his personal library. Photios, that is to say, personally owned one of the great libraries of early medieval times, and emerges as one of the most learned men of his era. Photios, in fact, became a great and famous man. In the year 858 the Byzantine emperor Michael III and his uncle and chief minister Caesar Bardas fell out with the Patriarch of Constantinople, Ignatios, and decided to depose and replace him. Their choice fell on the chief secretary of the palace, Photios. In the space of four days, beginning on December 20th, Photios was tonsured as a cleric, successively ordained lector, sub-deacon, deacon, and priest, and then on Christmas Day of 858 he was enthroned as Patriarch of Constantinople, that is to say head of the eastern Orthodox church, in succession to Ignatios. This was no doubt the most meteoric ecclesiastical career in history, only paralleled by the fictional Pope Hadrian in Frederick Rolfe’s much overlooked novel Hadrian the Seventh. Photios served as Patriarch under Michael III until the emperor’s assassination in 867, when the new emperor Basil I the Macedonian deposed him and restored Ignatios. But Photios soon ingratiated himself with Basil, and when Ignatios died in 877 it was inevitably Photios who succeeded him, serving again as Patriarch until Basil’s death in 886. During his time as Patriarch and his final years in retirement at the monastery of Gordon, he became arguably the most important and influential theologian of the Orthodox tradition, played a key role in the schism between the eastern Orthodox and western Catholic churches, and established the reputation that sees him still today revered as one of the great saints of the Orthodox church.
It is no surprise, then, to find that the library of this man consisted, for rather more than half of its total works, of Christian literature; theological and controversial treatises, homilies, church histories, letters, and other Christian writings of all sorts featured very prominently. But for present purposes, it is the non-Christian segment of Photios’ library that is of interest. More than sixty of the works Photios held were non-Christian books. A few of them may nevertheless have been kept for essentially Christian reasons: Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, and some of the writings of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, had long been of interest to Christian scholars as background to the rise of Christianity. But at the core of Photios’ non-Christian books was a set of texts that might have formed the personal book collection of any well-to-do and well-educated Hellenistic gentleman of the second or first century BCE: the works of classic historians such as Herodotus, Ctesias, and Theopompus of Chios, and the speeches of the great Attic orators—Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isaeus, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides, Deinarchus, Lycurgus; supplemented by a few specifically Hellenistic works such as Agatharchides’ Periplous of the Red Sea and the histories of Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The rest of the non-Christian library contains a veritable who’s who of the literary culture of the Hellenistic east during the high Roman Empire: Plutarch, Lucian, Galen, Aelius Aristides, Iamblichus, and Philostratus, along with historians such as Arrian, Appian, Herodian, Memnon of Heraclea, Zosimus, and Dio Cassius, and even some less highbrow literature such as the novels of Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Lucius of Patrae. Finally the collection was replete with technical treatises on language and style, including various lexica explaining the obscure words of the Attic orators and philosophers. None of these are works we would be surprised to find being read by any educated man of an eastern Mediterranean city during the second or third centuries CE, as the study of papyri found at the regional metropolis of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt has shown. Leaving aside the specifically Christian works, that is to say, the rest of Photios’ library was essentially a collection of works representing the literature and reading habits of the late Hellenistic civilization of the middle Roman Imperial period.
This should be surprising, since Photios did not live during that era, but half a millennium later. Photios’ library tells us that the literary culture of the high Byzantine Empire was still very much Hellenistic literary culture, though with a heavy Christian overlay. That is not something that should be taken for granted: half a millennium is plenty of time for an old culture to be forgotten and a new culture to arise. What we find instead is a Byzantine Empire, a Christian Greek state governing the north eastern end of the Mediterranean region for a thousand years between about 450 and 1453, that was not just Christian by religion and Greek in language: it also continued to be Hellenistic in literary culture.
Just one hundred years after Photios’ first enthronement as Patriarch of Constantinople, in the year 959, one of the more remarkable men in Byzantine history died at the age of fifty-four. Despite his relatively young age, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus had nominally ruled the Byzantine Empire for fifty years, having been elevated to co-emperor by his uncle, the emperor Alexander, when he (Constantine) was only three years old in 908. Alexander died in 913, leaving Constantine as his successor, but having appointed a regency council to govern on his behalf. The dominant figure on this regency council, the Patriarch Nicolaus Mysticus, governed for several years until he was supplanted by Constantine’s mother Zoe, who ran the empire on her son’s behalf until 919. Due to her failure to deal effectively with the Bulgar threat, however, she was then deposed and replaced by the great admiral and military leader Romanus Lecapenus. He was not content just to rule as regent: in 920 he had himself declared co-emperor with Constantine, regularizing this position by having Constantine marry his daughter Helena Lecapene. And so, until 944, Constantine was emperor in name but the empire was actually ruled by his father-in-law and co-emperor Romanus, who was assisted by his sons Christophorus and Stephanus. It was only in 945 that Constantine, after Romanus had been forced into retirement by his sons in 944, and he and his wife Helena had then succeeded in deposing his ambitious brothers-in-law, was able finally to rule the empire independently, though in truth Helena seems to have played a significant role.
What made Constantine remarkable was what he did during all those years, two decades in fact, when he was grown up and nominally emperor, but in fact was not permitted to rule. Rulers are often flattered by their entourages as men of learning and culture, though few really deserve the flattery. Constantine was one who did. From an early age he showed a passionate interest in reading and books. He encouraged and patronized writers, scholars, and artists of all sorts, and he was himself a writer and scholar of no mean talent. During his reign, the literary revival that had begun under Photios flourished as never before, and Constantine contributed strongly to it. He wrote works on court ceremonial and how to rule that provide us with unique insights into the governing system of the Byzantine Empire; he wrote a biography of his grandfather, the great emperor Basil I; and he was a passionate collector of books and manuscripts of all sorts. Few men did more than Constantine to foster the preservation of Classical and Hellenistic literature and learning at Constantinople and in the Byzantine Empire. Constantine felt, in particular, that the study of history was being neglected in his time, and that the great histories of the Greeks and Romans had much to teach his contemporaries. He decided that the problem was the great length of the works of history written during Classical and Hellenistic times, so he commissioned a series of excerpts that would bring together, under a set of thematic headings (fifty-three altogether, though only six survive), the essential lessons of the great historians of the past. Incidentally, these excerpts reveal how much that is now lost was still available to readers in tenth-century Constantinople. Sadly, Constantine’s own project hastened the loss of some notable historical works, as the availability of the excerpts caused the original works to be neglected. But the literary and scholarly activity of Constantine and his contemporaries reveals again how much the Byzantine Empire was still Hellenistic in literary culture, the libraries of Constantinople and other major cities stocked with old Greek texts of which too many no longer survive. But most of what does survive of Classical and Hellenistic literature survives because of the Byzantine interest in and preservation of it.
3. EXILES IN ITALY
In the summer of 1471 the plague was raging in the city of Florence in northern Italy. In his study at the Florentinum Studium, the university at which many of the great Italian humanists got their education, a man was packing up his books and belongings, preparing to go and seek safety at Rome. He was in his mid-fifties, and this was not the first time he had been forced to pack up his belongings and flee. His name was Ioannis Argyropoulos, and he had been born in Constantinople in 1415, in the declining years of the once great Byzantine Empire. There, in his youth, he had studied theology and philosophy, and eventually became a teacher himself, counting among his pupils the notable scholar Constantinos Laskaris. In 1439 he had been selected to participate in an embassy to Italy, to attend the ecumenical Council of Florence as part of an attempt to heal the great schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He even received a doctorate in theology from the University of Padua in 1444. Argyropoulos seemed set for a brilliant career in scholarship and public service. But in 1453 everything changed: the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror captured the city of Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire was no more. Argyropoulos fled the captured city, taking refuge at first in the Morea (Peloponnese in southern Greece), and then in 1456 moving to Italy. In Italy his career revived. After teaching for a time at Padua, he became head of the Greek department at the Florentinum Studium, where his fame grew. Argyropoulos did not just teach Greek: he played a major role in the revival of Greek literary learning in western Europe, in particular the study of Greek philosophy in the original language, rather than from Latin translations that were themselves often derived from Arabic translations. He was a noted Aristotelian, and was part of a wave of Byzantine scholars who fled to western Europe, especially Italy, at this time, bringing with them Greek texts that had long been unavailable in the Latin west. At the Florentinum Studium, Argyropoulos’ lectures were attended by such future luminaries as Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo il Magnifico as he was to become) and Poliziano; indeed it has even been suggested that the great Leonardo da Vinci listened to Argyropoulos.
Safely at Rome, Argyropoulos continued his career as a teacher of Greek language and philosophy for years. He finally died in 1487, back in Florence, reputedly from the effects of eating too much watermelon. Lovers of watermelon will agree, I am sure, that there are worse ways to die. Argyropoulos’ position as head of the Greek department at the Florentinum Studium did not remain vacant, of course. Within a few years another Byzantine Greek held the position: Demetrios Chalkokondyles. Born in Athens in 1423 to a family of the Athenian nobility, he and his family soon migrated to the Peloponnese, and then in 1447—not waiting for the inevitable end of Byzantine Constantinople—to Italy. At Rome in 1449 the Greek cardinal Bessarion, himself a refugee from the Byzantine Empire (born in the 1390s in Trapezous [Trebizond] on the Black Sea), took Chalkokondyles under his wing. He was able to study with the noted Byzantine humanist Theodore Gaza, established a friendship with Marsilio Ficino, and eventually attained a position teaching at the University of Perugia, where one of his pupils supposedly likened him to Plato to see and hear. From Perugia Chalkonondyles, following in Argyropoulos’ footsteps, moved to Padua in 1463, and then to Florence where he was, by 1479, the head of the Greek department at the Florentinum Studium, enjoying the patronage of the great Lorenzo il Magnifico. Besides teaching the likes of Lorenzo’s son, the future pope Leo X, Castiglione, and Giraldi, Chalkokondyles during his time at Florence helped to pioneer a project that changed the future of western education and secured the role of Greek literature as a crucial part of it.
One of the great inventions of the fifteenth century, which in its way had as great an impact on western civilization as the modern invention of the personal computer and the internet, was the printing press. Before the advent of printing, books had to be laboriously copied out by hand, over and over through the generations. One of the major reasons why texts became lost is that no one had a great enough interest to copy them out again, or pay for them to be copied. Without that process, aged manuscripts would simply deteriorate until they crumbled away. Fortunately, many of the more significant works of Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture had continued to be copied until the fifteenth century, but as long as they were dependent on the process of copying by hand, texts were vulnerable to becoming lost; and in addition books were rare and expensive so long as they were handwritten. The printing press changed all of that. The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with their strong interest in Greek civilization stimulated by the influx of Byzantine refugee scholars with their manuscripts, realized that preserving and spreading the Greek texts they admired would be greatly enhanced by use of printing. Chalkokondyles was one of these humanists, and he helped to set the tone by preparing for printing the first editions of Homer (1488), Isocrates (1493), and the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (1499). These were among the first in a wave of printed editions of ancient Greek texts, securing the preservation of Greek literature once and for all, and establishing its place as a crucial component of western literary culture ever since. In 1492 Chalkokondyles was invited by Ludovico Sforza to move to Milan, where he continued his teaching and editing career until his death in 1511.
Argyropoulos and Chalkokondyles are only two examples of a much wider phenomenon. Dozens of Byzantine Greek scholars visited Italy or moved entirely to western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but especially in the fifteenth century when the Byzantine Empire collapsed entirely. The list is too long to offer here, but it includes such notable figures as Maximus Planudes, who introduced the Greek Anthology collection of short verse to western Europe; George of Trebizond, famed for his work on Greek rhetorical principles; and George Hermonymos, who taught in Paris, and among whose pupils were influential intellectuals such as Erasmus and Johann Reuchlin. Among the greatest was the aforementioned cardinal Bessarion, who was not only an influential writer on Greek philosophy and defender of Plato, but a great patron and protector of the numerous Greek scholars who fled to Italy, a collector and preserver of manuscripts (his personal library was the foundation of the great library of St Mark’s in Venice), and was even a candidate to become pope at one time despite his Greek origin. The term “Renaissance” to refer to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe has been overused and come under criticism in recent times, but it cannot be denied that the fifteenth-century influx of Greek scholars, writers, and teachers and the Greek literary texts they brought with them had a profound influence on western European culture.
4. CONCLUSION
It is clear that Hellenistic civilization did not just die out at the end of antiquity. Its high literary, philosophical, and scientific culture and ideas lived on in the successor civilizations of Islam and Christianity, influencing them until the present day. We have moved a long way in this chapter from that self-confident young man in fourth-century BCE Macedonia who looked disaster in the face in 360 and decided that he would not allow his family and people to pass away, who decided instead that he would build a new and better Macedonia that could dominate the world as he knew it. Philip of course had no inkling, as he built his army and state up from the ruins of defeat, that the effects of his actions would still be felt two millennia later. But if not for Philip’s new Macedonia, if not for his unification of Greece, if not for his bold plan to invade and conquer the Persian Empire and spread Greeks, the Greek language, and Greek culture all around the eastern Mediterranean, it is very debatable whether Greek literature and ideas would or could hold the place in western and even Islamic culture that they do. For millennia it has been the custom, if one recognized this phenomenon at all, to give the credit to the romantic young conqueror Alexander. I think the analysis offered in the chapters above shows clearly that Alexander is one of the most overrated figures in world history. The truly great man was Alexander’s father Philip; and credit belongs too to the generals—Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus—who took on the role of governing the lands Alexander had merely marched through and fought battles in, and of turning those lands into viable empires with Greek cities and Greek culture. Without their efforts, the history and civilization of the lands and cultures of western Asia, Europe, and north Africa would be very different than they are today.