As for its “classical tradition,” when pagan Greek texts were translated, they were received within a Byzantine interpretative context for reasons of convenience: successive generations of Byzantine commentators and adaptors had smoothened out the internal inconsistencies of the great scientific and philosophical corpora of antiquity and had found ways to by-pass the disagreements of pagan thought with Judaic, Christian, and Muslim monotheism. This indicates that Byzantium’s contemporaries were vividly interested its older Christian and Roman traditions. However, a survey of medieval translations of originally Greek material into Arabic and Latin reveals that Byzantium’s contemporaries viewed its literary culture under a very different light: medieval Latin and Arabic translations of Greek texts are not limited to the ancient classics but extend to biblical, patristic, hagiographical, liturgical, and legal texts. Narratives on the development of world civilization generated in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and largely not replaced since) accord a central position to the “classical tradition” as a constituent element of modern “Western” identity and assign to Byzantium the marginal role of preserving this tradition immutable without innovation or creative elaboration.
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