A NEW PERIODIZATION | 51Before we ask why the First Millennium makes a coherent and useful pe-
riodization, note the principal shortcoming of the division—devised as early
as Petrarch and conventional since the sixteenth or at latest the seventeenth
century—into Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modernity. The point of this pe-
riodization was to present the Italian Renaissance and the Modernity that
flows—ultimately—from it, as a return to the pure Grecian sources after the
barbarism of the Christian Middle Ages.^2 Among contemporary historians
of late Antiquity, Wolf Liebeschuetz is—we already saw—a prominent rep-
resentative of this binary and polarizing approach, identifying Christianiza-
tion and a fortiori Islamization with the setting aside or even destruction of
the “classical” heritage and with decline, the Verfall Nietzsche’s drunken
Sibyl laments.
It would be no less simplistic to respond to this attitude of contempt for
the Middle Ages by pointing out how much of Antiquity was preserved by
Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Latin, and other Christianities. Texts were labori-
ously written out and carefully preserved—one thinks of the famous Paris
Plato (Parisinus graecus 1807) copied in Constantinople c. 850, taken to
Armenia c. 1045 and partly translated there, then transported in the thir-
teenth century to the West where by c. 1350 it became the first Greek manu-
script to enter a humanist library, Petrarch’s. It was finally removed to Paris in
1594.^3 Whole buildings were preserved, in at least one instance—the Athens
Parthenon—complete with their “pagan” sculptures. A recent student of the
Christian Parthenon has concluded that its holiness was more regarded in
this phase than when it was a temple of Athena.^4
More interesting than this swallowing- whole approach to the Greco-
Roman heritage, whose motives and techniques are so complex, is the grad-
ual digestion of, for instance, Roman law as it passed through the distilla-
tions of the high imperial, especially Severan jurists, the Diocletianic
codifications of the 290s, then the Theodosian code, the Justinianic code, and
the aptly named Digest (on all of which see chapter 6), to become a hand-
book of Christian imperium and society. One could copy the works of Vir-
gil out just as he had written them, and illustrate them, even in the Chris-
tianized empire, with scenes of ritual addressed to the old gods.^5 Or one
might take Virgil to bits line by line or half line by half line, and make him
recount something quite different—the Bible story in the hands of the mid-
fourth- century poetess Proba, or a pornographic wedding night in Ausoni-
2 Gibbon 2: 1.84; cf. F. Graus, “Epochenbewusstsein im Spätmittelalter,” and K. Schreiner, ““Diver-
sitas temporum”: Zeiterfahrung und Epochengliederung im späten Mittelalter,” in Herzog and Koselleck
(ed.), Epochenschwelle [2:21] 153–66, 381–428.
3 H. D. Saffrey, “Retour sur le Parisinus graecus 1807,” in C. D’Ancona (ed.), The libraries of the
Neoplatonists (Leiden 2007) 3–28.
4 Kaldellis, Christian Parthenon [2:44].
5 Al. Cameron, The last pagans of Rome (New york 2011) 706–12.