When we speak of the heritage of the Greco-Roman world, we usually give pride of place to “the Renaissance,” the “rebirth” that is supposed to have taken place in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries and of which the rediscovery of the classical world was one of the main components. “Renaissance” is an 18th century concept that was popularized in the 19th century: the sequence of antiquity, Middle Ages, and Renaissance implied a cultural cycle: flowering, decline and fall, a dark intermediate period, and a revival. In the
19th century, however, we also find a renewed interest in the Middle Ages, and this inspired scholars to go and look for the medieval roots of what happened in 14th and 15th century Italy in order to “debunk” the Renaissance. The debate has continued ever since. Even if it cannot be denied that great changes occurred during the period commonly designated as the Renaissance, and that the speed and intensity of these changes increased, the debate has made it clear that these changes had been prepared for by developments taking place over many centuries. Hence, we now speak of “the Renaissance of the 12th century” and of “the Carolingian Renaissance.”
But by distinguishing other “renaissances,” the whole concept of “the Renaissance” has become rather hollow: in fact, the break with the past that is implied in the word “rebirth” never happened. What we call “Western culture” builds on a Greco-Roman heritage (including Christianity, even though that is only in part of Greco-Roman origin). Indeed, one can speak of a single cultural complex comprising Greek and Roman culture and what came after, and that one can distinguish from, for instance, the East Asian cultural complex. This is not to deny that besides Greece and Rome, other “genetic material” contributed to the forms and contents of “Western culture”; but the Greco-Roman heritage has been dominant in many respects or for long stretches of time.
The foregoing is not a plea to accord a special status to Greco-Roman antiquity because that is where our roots lie. It is simply the establishment of a blood relationship. The heritage left by the ancient world has been continuously (re-)interpreted, adopted, adapted, and (re-)appropriated. It is not a static entity, but very much living and changing all the time—and as the heritage changes, our image of the legators changes with it. It is the nature of this reception (“reception” is the word often used to cover this whole process of (re-)appropriation, and so on), or rather of these receptions, each within its own context, that merits our attention, not the mere fact that some things have come down to us. And we can also turn this round: the Greco-Roman world is interesting for its own sake, and not because it can be seen as a forerunner of our own world. We might add to the foregoing that the amount of heritage is changing as well: the material and nonmaterial heritage keeps growing. In the Middle Ages, texts that had been forgotten were rediscovered. In the Renaissance, this continued, but archaeology (avant la lettre) also came to play a part, and in the centuries to follow archaeology expanded hugely in scope. Epigraphy and papyrology contributed and contribute a steady stream of new documents. Our knowledge of the ancient world and the size of the ancient heritage increases every day.
We have to distinguish between instances of continuity and of rediscovery. Some aspects of the ancient world knew a continued existence in some part of what once was the Greek or Roman world, or even outside of it. The one element survived here, the other there, and subsequently, by transmission or diffusion, they could spread again. But there is also discontinuity: much was forgotten in the course of time. Some of it was rediscovered. Often, rediscovery took place in the context of, or was occasioned by, a desire to recreate the ancient world. Although this has always been, and will always remain, an impossibility, we should distinguish between say, neoclassical architecture, which has produced buildings that, if they are not imitations, still approach ancient architectural ideals, and the opera, which began as a revival of Greek drama, but developed into something that has but very little to do with ancient drama—as far as we know what that actually looked like.
The continuity is embodiedby the Romania: a world that was in many ways a continuation of the late Roman Empire, and which was felt to be that. The Germanic successor states were part of that Romania, and carried the Roman heritage in their constitutions and laws, and in their nascent state ideology. They also were, or rapidly became, Christian communities. Christianity was the main force that safeguarded continuity in the transition to the Middle Ages. The church was itself an institution from late antiquity that became the main repository of ancient culture, ancient learning, and the Greek and Latin languages. Monasteries played an important role here, and also in the Christianization of large areas, inside but also outside the old borders of the Roman Empire.
In the east, Byzantium and eastern Christianity took care of the ancient heritage. Continuity is evident, in the case of Constantinople-Byzantium, but it is also part of their self-image: the Byzantine Empire called itself the Roman Empire. They were also part of the Romania, albeit an increasingly exclusively Greek Romania, in the same way in which the west became almost exclusively Latin. The crisis between the death of Justinian and the first quarter of the 7th century resulted in a purely Greek Byzantium that did not any longer look primarily to the west. Religious differences between east and west slowly became an unbridgeable divide.
And then there was Islam. As already said, the Arabs put their mark on the territories they conquered. But, of course, according to the laws of acculturation, they themselves did not remain unaffected. This was not anything new: thanks to the caravan routes, large parts of the Arabic world had been in close contact with the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire. These contacts persisted into late antiquity, especially by missionaries spreading Christianity. But now the contacts became more intense than ever: the first Arabic conquests put them in possession of thoroughly Hellenized areas: Syria, Egypt, and the western part of the Sassanid Empire. Under the orthodox caliphs and the Umayyad dynasty, we see Arabs distancing themselves from Greek culture and language, which were associated with paganism, but nevertheless this period already sees some translations from Greek and Syrian into Arabic in the fields of alchemy and medicine.
The ‘Abbasids, who moved away from the Greek world, from Damascus to Baghdad, were quite self-assured, and thus less defensive about their own religion, language, and culture. There were ever more translation from Greek and Syrian, but also Indian languages and Persian, into Arabic, mostly done by polyglot Jews and Christians. This was still done for practical reasons: the Islamic world was eager to acquire knowledge from the sciences and pseudo-sciences of the Greco-Roman world. But theology became important too: Christians had access to a lot of ancient philosophy, and Islam followed suit. Also, Mohammed was supposed to have stressed the importance of learning in religion and all of human life, so study was deemed important.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, there came into being a specific Islamic culture based in large part on the ancient heritage, especially in its late antique manifestations. This has also been called a renaissance. The Islamic world, with its specific culture, and its large numbers of Jews and Christians, can certainly be called part of the Romania—but in this instance, that was not an ideology shared by that Islamic world itself.
The west (re)discovered much Greek philosophy and scholarship, the knowledge of which had been lost, or which in some cases might never have been known at all, by way
Of the Islamic world, especially through contacts in Spain and on Sicily, usually by way of Latin or Hebrew translations of Arabic translations of Greek originals. But however indirect the transmission of these texts, they still were of great importance for the development of philosophy, scholarship, and science. And this was not only because of the ancient knowledge, but also because of the important additions made to it by Arab scholars. Of course, the Crusades also meant contact, but culturally speaking they were not very productive. Even the conquest of Constantinople by western crusaders resulted in more Christian relics than Greek manuscripts being brought to the west.
In the west, we can see two moments in time when interest in the ancient heritage peaked: the aforementioned Carolingian renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. But the 10th and 11th century should not be supposed to be devoid of such interest. How much was actually known about the ancient world during the Middle Ages, the meaning of a “medieval humanism” and what they actually made of it all, are the subject of lively debate. We can say with certainty that almost all knowledge was restricted to Latin texts or Greek thought as transmitted in Arab sources. Aristotle’s Logic (in a Latin translation) was the most important example of the latter category.
In the 14th century, in northern Italy, we enter a completely new phase: ancient manuscripts, Latin and Greek ones, started to be systematically collected. Contacts with Byzantium not only produced texts, but also teachers of the Greek language. Ancient poetry, fictional prose, and drama came to be appreciated, something that earlier had been lacking outside of Byzantium. The availability, soon byway of the printing press, of a huge body of forgotten texts was one of the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance, the cultural flourishing of 15th-century northern Italy, radiating to Europe north of the Alps. In this Renaissance, a re-creation of the ancient heritage was undertaken on a large scale: in architecture, art, literature, and music, the goal was to overcome existing discontinuities by consciously imitating ancient examples. In 1453, the year Constantinople was taken by the Ottoman Turks and the Byzantine Empire ceased to exist, Greeks who fled to Italy found there an interest in Greek culture that was alive and kicking.
World History
