ce, their superior claim to the language and dominion of
Rome. They insulted the alien of the East who had renounced the dress
and idiom of Romans; and their reasonable practice will justify the
frequent appellation of Greeks. But this contemptuous appellation was
indignantly rejected by the prince and people to whom it was applied.
Whatsoever changes had been introduced by the lapse of ages, they
alleged a lineal and unbroken succession from Augustus and Constantine;
and, in the lowest period of degeneracy and decay, the name of Romans
adhered to the last fragments of the empire of Constantinople.

While the government of the East was transacted in Latin, the Greek was
the language of literature and philosophy; nor could the masters of
this rich and perfect idiom be tempted to envy the borrowed learning and
imitative taste of their Roman disciples. After the fall of Paganism,
the loss of Syria and Egypt, and the extinction of the schools of
Alexandria and Athens, the studies of the Greeks insensibly retired
to some regular monasteries, and above all, to the royal college of
Constantinople, which was burnt in the reign of Leo the Isaurian. In the
pompous style of the age, the president of that foundation was named the
Sun of Science: his twelve associates, the professors in the different
arts and faculties, were the twelve signs of the zodiac; a library of
thirty-six thousand five hundred volumes was open to their inquiries;
and they could show an ancient manuscript of Homer, on a roll of
parchment one hundred and twenty feet in length, the intestines, as it
was fabled, of a prodigious serpent. But the seventh and eight centuries
were a period of discord and darkness: the library was burnt, the
college was abolished, the Iconoclasts are represented as the foes of
antiquity; and a savage ignorance and contempt of letters has disgraced
the princes of the Heraclean and Isaurian dynasties.

In the ninth century we trace the first dawnings of the restoration of
science. After the fanaticism of the Arabs had subsided, the caliphs
aspired to conquer the arts, rather than the provinces, of the empire:
their liberal curiosity rekindled the emulation of the Greeks, brushed
away the dust from their ancient libraries, and taught them to know and
reward the philosophers, whose labors had been hitherto repaid by the
pleasure of study and the pursuit of truth. The Caesar Bardas, the uncle
of Michael the Third, was the generous protect