ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι μέτεστι γινώσκειν ἑωυτοὺς καὶ σωφρονεῖν.
The fall of Stilicho was the signal for the Roman troops to massacre with brutal perfidy the families of the barbarian auxiliaries who were serving in Italy. The foreign soldiers, 30,000 of them, straightway marched to Noricum, joined the standard of Alaric, and urged him to descend on Italy. Continue reading “The sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths”
From the days of Diocletian the style of architecture which we call Byzantine, for want of a better name, had been slowly developing from the old classic forms, and many of the emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries had been given to building. Continue reading “Emperor Justinian’s codification of the laws & his work as a builder”
After Theodora’s death, Justinian seems to have trusted no one: his destined successor, Justinus, son of his sister, was kept in the background, and no great minister seems to have possessed his confidence. Continue reading “Flavius Belisarius saves New Rome in his last military act”
The slackness with which the generals of Justinian prosecuted the Gothic war in the period between the triumph of Belisarius at Ravenna in A. D. 540, and the final conquest of Italy in A. D. 553, is mainly to be explained by the fact that, just at the moment of the fall of Ravenna, the empire became involved in a new struggle with its great Eastern neighbour. Continue reading “The last years of Justinian’s reign: Antioch sacked by Chosroes’ Persians – The Plague irreversibly weakens the Empire”
In this post we present selected parts of the very interesting paper titled “Greco-Roman and Byzantine views on obesity“, by Niki Papavramidou & Helen Christopoulou-Aletra. Continue reading “Graeco-Roman and ‘Byzantine’ views on obesity”
In this post we present selected parts of the paper titled “Byzantium, its Slavic elements and their culture (sixth to ninth centuries)“, by Speros Vryonis, Jr. Continue reading “The acculturation of Slavs within the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) milieu (6th to 9th centuries) – Part 2”
Novo Scriptorium 