Throughout the millennium-long existence of the Byzantine state, rhetoric remained a perceptible and all-pervasive element in its literary culture; indeed the lingering influence of Byzantine rhetoric, in its widest sense, can be traced to this day in some of the more conservative aspects of the official documents of contemporary Greece.
Centred on the seventh-century BC Megarian colony of Byzantium refounded as Constantinople by Constantine in AD 324 to be the new Christian capital of the East Roman Empire, the Byzantine empire continued a vigorous independent existence until - by then consisting of little more than the City and its immediate hinterland - it finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.1 However, the terms ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantine’ that are now in general use are anachronisms created in seventeenth-century France as a useful short-hand reference to the last phases of the Later Roman Empire;2 their usefulness continues. The inhabitants of the successor empire in Constantinople paradoxically never ceased to refer to themselves as Romans - paradoxically because the language of administration and literature was from the fourth century largely, and from the late sixth century entirely, Greek. It was thus the Greek intellectual heritage from the ancient world and late antiquity that moulded the development of Byzantine literary practices, while the machinery of state and army continued in, and evolved from, the Roman pattern. Byzantine culture, now recognised as a distinctive entity rather than a mere bridge between antiquity and the modern world, is often summed up in a sweeping generalisation as being Roman in law and administration, Greek in culture and intellectual life, and Christian in religion. In time the religious aspects of life in Byzantium came to permeate every aspect of the empire’s existence, one result of which has been a legacy of distinctive visual images in icons and church architecture.
World History
