[Footnote 1:  The earliest products of the modern technique were called ‘city’ verses, because they originated in Constantinople, which has remained ‘the city’ par excellence for the Romaic Greek ever since the Dark Age made it the asylum of his civilization.]

These humble beginnings of a new literature were supplemented by the rudiments of a new art.  Any visitor at Athens who looks at the three tiny churches [1] built in this period of first revival, and compares them with the rare pre-Norman churches of England, will find the same promise of vitality in the Greek architecture as in his own.  The material—­worked blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments, alternating with courses of contemporary brick—­produces a completely new aesthetic effect upon the eye; and the structure—­a grouping of lesser cupolas round a central dome—­ is the very antithesis of the ‘upright-and-horizontal’ style which confronts him in ruins upon the Akropolis.

[Footnote 1:  The Old Metropolitan, the Kapnikaria, and St. Theodore.]

These first achievements of Romaic architecture speak by implication of the characteristic difference between the Romaios and the Hellene.  The linguistic and the aesthetic change were as nothing compared to the change in religion, for while the Hellene had been a pagan, the Romaios was essentially a member of the Christian Church.  Yet this new and determining characteristic was already fortified by tradition.  The Church triumphant had swiftly perfected its organisation on the model of the Imperial bureaucracy.  Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical allegiance, through a hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a supreme patriarch at Constantinople, and in the ninth century this administrative segregation of the imperial from the west-European Church had borne its inevitable fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and ripened into a schism between the Orthodox Christianity of the east on the one hand and the Catholicism of the Latin world on the other.

The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its Romaic adherents.  The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek ‘koine’ and by keeping the Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors.  The vast body of Hellenic literature had perished during the Dark Age, when all the energies of the race were absorbed by the momentary struggle for survival; but about a third of the greatest authors’ greatest works had been preserved, and now that the stress was relieved, the wreckage of the remainder was sedulously garnered in anthologies, abridgements, and encyclopaedias.  The rising monasteries offered a safe harbourage both for these compilations and for such originals as survived unimpaired, and in their libraries they were henceforth studied, cherished, and above all recopied with more or less systematic care.