The most famous Byzantine art is the Byzantine mosaics. A Byzantine mosaic is a picture made of little pieces of glass and gold and precious stones. These mosaics were usually very large and set right into the walls of churches, and so it is almost impossible to see one unless you visit the church itself. You would have to go at least to Italy where there are some very fine ones in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. These Byzantine mosaics are quite stiff, and the people in them usually look straight ahead. But if you ever see a real one, or even a good picture of one, you will never forget it.
The Byzantines also did oil paintings and frescoes, particularly in their later days and particularly in the Balkans and Greece. There are frescoes in Yugoslavia and in southern Greece that are almost as good as those of the great Italian artist Giotto, and they were done 200 years before him. Byzantine sculpture ranged from richly carved marble, like the big throne of a patriarch in Ravenna, to ivory caskets and plaques. Byzantine illuminated manuscripts are also among the most beautiful ever made. Most of them are Bibles and other religious books, but there are several about the travels of Cosmas Who-Sailed-to-India. They are filled with saints in blue and scarlet, and one manuscript has a picture of a boatload of escaping martyrs showing what travel was like in Byzantine days.
Byzantine art is not only wonderful itself, but it shows how the Byzantines helped themselves to everything good that had been done before them. On the walls of a famous tomb in Ravenna, there is a mosaic of two doves at a drinking fountain that might have come from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. There is also Byzantine art that bubbles over with Greek love of life. Some of it is filled with early Christian saints and symbols, like the peacock and the fish. There is some with the lions and eagles of the ancient Hittites, and others whose fierce, bearded saints are like Assyrian warriors. But, of course, this practice of blending the ideas of different peoples wasn’t limited to art. It applied to everything the Byzantines did.
The Byzantines preserved classic culture. They preserved Greek literature, Greek science, Greek learning, and even the Greek language. And this at a time when almost everybody in the West had completely forgotten Greek, and as a matter of fact, only churchmen and a handful of ragged scholars even knew Latin.
This was a very important contribution. No civilization ever starts from scratch, and our modern one is based on the renewed interest in classic culture that is called the Revival of Learning. During that time, great writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio were willing to spend a fortune to get the services of some bearded ruffian who could teach them Greek. When Constantinople fell, the Byzantine scholars who escaped to Europe could sell any manuscript they brought with them for enough money to live on for a long time.
The Byzantines never had to rediscover Homer, or Plato, or Euclid, who invented geometry, or Eratosthenes, who knew the world was round 1,700 years before Columbus, even measuring its circumference as 25,000 miles, which is almost right. They never had to rediscover the ancients; they knew about them all the time.
Another thing the Byzantines did was to insist on education. Even the mighty French emperor Charlemagne had a hard time if he wanted to spell his way through a book and sign his name. Most Byzantine emperors could not only read and write but were thoroughly educated. Theophilus studied everything from Greek to natural history. Leo the Philosopher composed poems, sermons, and a life of his father. Constantine Born-in-the-Purple was famous for his books on the barbarians and on his empire. John IV and Manuel II, and above all Anna Comnena, a princess, wrote astonishingly good histories.
It was not merely the emperors and some of their courtiers who were learned. Although a few poor men—like the saint from Asia Minor who had to tend his father’s swine and did not learn to read until he was forty-seven—did not have the chance to be educated, most Byzantines went to school or a university from the time they were five until they were twenty.
If you had been a Byzantine, you would have trotted off to your classes accompanied by a pedagogue—in the old days, he was a slave—who carried your books and saw to it that you obeyed your teachers. Until you were ten, you would have studied reading, writing, and spelling. The last was very important because the way words were pronounced was always changing, although the spelling remained the same. After this you would have studied what the Byzantines called grammar. But it was not exactly like our grammar. It was more like literature. For instance, you would have had to learn Homer by heart and been able to explain everything he had written word by word. You were in trouble if you weren’t able to do this. The teacher merely nodded to the pedagogue, who always had a rod in his hand. After grammar, you would have studied rhetoric, and to pass your rhetoric courses you had to be able to discuss eloquently anything from a fable by Aesop to the pictures on the walls of the city council. Finally, and this was especially important if you were going to be a churchman or go into the government, you would have gone on to a university. That was the case only if you were a boy. Although many Byzantine women were as well educated as the men, everything they learned was in the home. None of them went to college or even to grammar school.