Sailing from Byzantium

As the "repository of reason's ancient secrets," the Roman splinter empire of Byzantium helped preserve the works and thoughts of the ancient Greeks, and played a vital role in the Italian Renaissance. Author Colin Wells explains that, although time ran out on this great empire, its influence helped Europe through the Dark Ages. Wells's arguments are delivered with scholarly precision by Lloyd James. While the narration seems too much like a university lecture when the book focuses on names and dates, generally James reads with the passion that Wells has for his subject. Byzantium's history is complicated--written charts and timelines to follow might have been helpful--but fascinating as well. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from May 29, 2006
In this deft synthesis of scholarship, classicist Wells shows how the Byzantines exerted a profound influence on all neighboring civilizations. Concrete examples still exist that testify to that influence—such as Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy—but this book focuses on the more ineffable products of culture that traveled from the Bosporus, influencing Western, Islamic and Slavic cultures. The story of Renaissance Europe's embrace of pagan learning is familiar, but Wells tells of a fascinating intellectual circuit that begins with the transmission of Greek learning to the newly powerful Arabs and leads to Averroës's commentary on Aristotle, Aquinas's use of this commentary and finally to the Byzantine Cydones's translation of Aquinas in the 14th century. By then, the dominant Orthodox movement of Hesychasm deemed pagan learning incompatible with Christian faith, forcing many humanists to the Catholic West. Wells devotes much space to the Hesychasts and blames them for this betrayal of Greek heritage and for weakening the empire before its final collapse in 1453, but duly credits them with shaping the Russian Orthodox Church and positioning Moscow as the Third Rome. This volume, which contains a useful glossary of historical figures, detailed maps and a time line, is a superb survey of Byzantium's many cultural bequests.