Figure 85 Marble statue of Marcus Aurelius from Alexandria in Egypt; height 1.84 m, ca. AD 176–180.
London, British Museum, 1906. Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

East Is East and West Is Not

Well-born and well-educated men like Marcus Aurelius and Plutarch, because of their learning and their
wealth, were able to bridge the gap between the two halves of the Roman Empire: The Roman Marcus
wrote in Greek and was a devotee of Greek philosophy, while the Greek Plutarch lectured in Rome and
had many friends among the elite of the empire's capital. But the division between the Latin west and the
Greek east could not be so easily ignored by the mass of the empire's population. Despite the fact that
only a generation after Marcus' death, in AD 212, Roman citizenship was extended to every free
inhabitant of the empire, there continued to be a fundamental cultural split between the two halves of the
empire. This split widened a century later, when the emperor Constantine (ca. AD 273–337) established a
new capital for the empire in the Greek city of Byzantium. This city, the “New Rome,” came to be called
Constantinople, or “the polis of Constantine,” and rapidly became the leading city of the east and the most
important center of Greek culture. In the second half of the fourth century, the division of the empire was
formally recognized with the creation of a new administrative structure (map 18). From then on there
were concurrently two Roman emperors, one governing the Latin-speaking western empire from his
capital in Rome and one governing the Greek-speaking eastern empire (now generally referred to as the
“Byzantine” empire) from Constantinople.