LATE ANTIQUE CULTURE AND PRIVATE LIFEA changing worldIf anything, the literary culture of late antiquity was even more class-based
than previously. It required a specialized training, not only from writers but
also from their audiences, and by the sixth century at any rate the spoken lan-
guage in Greek was diverging markedly from this high literary language.^40 The
traditional literary culture was still available in Constantinople under Heraclius
(610–41), but as urbanism declined or cities were lost to Roman rule, a sharp
decline set in; this also affected the availability of books and the knowledge
of classical authors, and did not begin to be restored in the Byzantine empire
until the ninth and tenth centuries. The social and cultural system which had
produced and sustained this very elitist literature was in fact changing fast.
One of the main changes was brought by Christianization, but Christian writ-
ers were themselves often both highly educated and extraordinarily prolifi c.^41
Many Christian writings are extremely rhetorical in character, and use all the
panoply provided by a classical education. Augustine, perhaps the greatest
Christian writer of the period, had been a teacher of rhetoric himself, and did
not hesitate to use his skill to the utmost when he later came to write religious
works. Bishops (including Augustine) and other Christian writers combined
secular learning with Christian expression, not least in the form of letters,
Figure 6.3 The shape of the world as imagined in the Christian Topography of Cosmas
Indicopleustes. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurentiana, MS Plut. IX.28, f. 95 v