Yet the days of Hellenic culture were also numbered.  Even Plutarch lived[1] to look down from the rocky citadel of Chaeronea upon Teutonic raiders wasting the Kephisos vale, and for more than three centuries successive hordes of Goths searched out and ravaged the furthest corners of European Greece.  Then the current set westward to sweep away[2] the Roman administration in the Latin provinces, and Hellenism seemed to have been granted a reprieve.  The Greek city-state of Byzantium on the Black Sea Straits had been transformed into the Roman administrative centre of Constantinople, and from this capital the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.D. still governed and defended the whole Greek-speaking world.  But this political glamour only threw the symptoms of inward dissolution into sharper relief.  Within the framework of the Empire the municipal liberty of the city-state had been stifled and extinguished by the waxing jungle of bureaucracy, and the spiritual culture which the city-state fostered, and which was more essential to Hellenism than any political institutions, had been part ejected, part exploited, and wholly compromised by a new gospel from the east.

[Footnote 1:  About A.D. 100]

[Footnote 2:  A.D. 404-476]

While the Oriental had been compelled by Rome to draw his political frontier at the Euphrates, and had failed so far to cross the river-line, he had maintained his cultural independence within sight of the Mediterranean.  In the hill country of Judah, overlooking the high road between Antioch and Alexandria, the two chief foci of Hellenism in the east which the Macedonians had founded, and which had grown to maturity under the aegis of Rome, there dwelt a little Semitic community which had defied all efforts of Greek or Roman to assimilate it, and had finally given birth to a world religion about the time that a Roman punitive expedition razed its holy city of Jerusalem to the ground.[1] Christianity was charged with an incalculable force, which shot like an electric current from one end of the Roman Empire to the other.  The highly-organized society of its adherents measured its strength in several sharp conflicts with the Imperial administration, from which it emerged victorious, and it was proclaimed the official religious organization of the Empire by the very emperor that founded Constantinople.[2]

[Footnote 1:  A.D. 70.]

[Footnote 2:  Constantine the Great recognized Christianity in A.D. 313 and founded Constantinople in A.D. 328.]

The established Christian Church took the best energies of Hellenism into its service.  The Greek intellectuals ceased to become lecturers and professors, to find a more human and practical career in the bishop’s office.  The Nicene Creed, drafted by an ‘oecumenical’ conference of bishops under the auspices of Constantine himself,[1] was the last notable formulation of Ancient Greek philosophy.  The cathedral of Aya Sophia,