In effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital—the city of Plato and Aristotle—where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations. The closure of the Athens school was important. It did not kill at a stroke all non-Christian learning in the eastern empire.21 Nor did it immediately throw up an intellectual wall between the classical age and the dawning era of Christian hegemony in Europe and the west. But it was both significant and symbolic. For while scholarship in Persia and other eastern
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