Classical Antiquity - Late Antiquity (4th To 6th Centuries AD)

Late Antiquity (4th To 6th Centuries AD)

Late Antiquity saw the rise of Christianity under Constantine I, finally ousting the Roman imperial cult with the Theodosian decrees of 393. Successive invasions of Germanic tribes finalized the decline of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, while the Eastern Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages as the Byzantine Empire. Hellenistic philosophy was succeeded by continued developments in Platonism and Epicureanism, with Neoplatonism in due course influencing the theology of the Church Fathers.

Many individuals have attempted to put a specific date on the symbolic "end" of antiquity with the most prominent dates being the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476, the closing of the last Platonic Academy by Justinian I in 529, or the invasion of Italy in 535 by the forces of Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I. This last act, ironically, resulted in damage or destruction to Rome and much of the Italian countryside, inorexorably and permanently altering the socioeconomic structure of classical Rome.

In spite of this fact, the original Roman Senate continued to express decrees into the late 6th century and so some historians even place the symbolic end of antiquity at the death of Justinian I in 565, because Justinian was the last emperor to speak Latin and the last to use wholly Roman (as opposed to Greek) customs and rules for his court and government. Furthermore, the ascendency of Heraclius in 610, in Constantinople, who truly emphasized the Laventine, and Greek nature of what remained of the Roman Empire, may have contributed to turning the Eastern Roman Empire into the medieval Byzantine Empire.

Ultimately, though, it was a slow, complex, and graduated change in the socioeconomic structure in European history that led to the changeover between Classical Antiquity and Medieval society and no specific date can truly exemplify that.

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Famous quotes containing the words late, antiquity and/or centuries:

    It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.
    Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)

    When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.
    Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)