THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYaccession of Justin II in 565 (Chapter 5); it seems that Virgil went on being
taught in North Africa after the reconquest in traditional school contexts, at
least for a while. Everyone learning to write Latin seriously learned it from
Virgil: papyrus finds from the small town of Nessana in a remote spot on the
present Egyptian border show that this continued in the seventh century, long
after the Arab conquest.
The literary production of late antiquity has been judged inferior to that
of earlier more ‘classical’ periods. But it can also be seen as refl ecting an age
of fragmentation, when traditional literary accomplishment was fraught with
uncertainty, defended with displays of virtuosity or applied to unfamiliar
Christian uses. In some fi elds this presented itself as a new kind of poetics,
observable from the fourth century onwards, with an emphasis on display and
surface glitter, a style as eclectic in its way as that of contemporary architecture
with its juxtapositions and its unashamed incorporation of earlier elements,^28
less a late antique mentality than a late antique aesthetic, and one that can all
too easily mislead.^29
High culture – philosophyPhilosophy was vigorously practised in the fi fth and sixth centuries, particularly
at Athens and Alexandria, and the infl uence of philosophical ideas was clearly
Figure 6.2 Mosaic of the first bath of Achilles, from the House of Theseus, Paphos, western
Cyprus, late fourth century