CHAPTER X 



BIOLOGY DURING THE CHRISTIAN MIDDLE AGES 



The Eastern Roman Empire 



IN A PREVIOUS CHAPTER mention has been made of how the culture of an- 

 tiquity, itself already become decadent, received its death-blow through 

 the transmigration of peoples which broke up the Roman Empire. The 

 first political evidence of this dissolution was the splitting up of the mighty 

 Empire in the year 395. The cultural world of the time was thereby divided 

 into an eastern and a western half, which suffered essentially different for- 

 tunes. In the eastern section the old imperial constitution was still to survive 

 for over a thousand years, maintained in power through the people's being so 

 long accustomed to a despotic form of government, and upheld by an intimate 

 connexion with the strangely established Greek Oriental Church — in actual 

 fact the bond that held together the mixed populations which gave alle- 

 giance to the sceptre of the Emperor of the East. Greek was the prevailing 

 language here and the medium for a peculiar form of culture, the Byzantine, 

 which displayed extraordinary qualities of resistance to the pressure of hos- 

 tile forces: the Mohammedans in the East, wild hordes of migratory peoples 

 from the north and "Latins," as the western Europeans were here called, 

 in the West. This constant struggle for cultural supremacy produced, as it 

 invariably does, a tendency to strict conservatism, and the value of the By- 

 zantine culture therefore lies not so much in independent creative work as 

 in all that it did for the preservation of the ancient literature which, even 

 for philological reasons, it already had some interest in preserving. The capi- 

 tal of the Empire certainly possessed valuable libraries, and educational es- 

 tablishments with highly complicated methods of instruction, but the studies 

 pursued there consisted mostly in theological subtleties, the amplification 

 of ancient authors, and the compilation of histories. The scholars of Con- 

 stantinople cared little for natural science. On the other hand, the Byzan- 

 tine physicians were famed for their great ability; they honourably upheld 

 the best traditions of the medical science of antiquity. Their training was 

 entirely practical, however — they received no academical instruction in the 

 science of medicine — and they were in fact essentially practitioners; the 

 theoretical branches of medicine, anatomy and physiology, they have done 

 very little to promote. The principal medical work of the Byzantine era, 

 written by Paulus of^^gina in the seventh century, deals only with practical 



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