Athens, the Neoplatonist Academy is closing thanks to Justinian’s proclamation, breaking a tradition of learning stretching back hundreds of years.

Constantinople where Justinian is rebuilding the city, rewriting the legal code and issuing proclamations limiting the practice of Pagan faiths and philosophy.

The Daily Telegraph called it “popular intellectual history at its best.” And on a rocky hill in central Italy, a new monastic order that will have a spectacular future, is founded.ĭr Violet Moller is the author of The Map of Knowledge, winner of the Royal Society for Literature’s Jerwood Prize.

In Athens a “Golden Chain” of learning is about to be severed after many centuries. In Constantinople we see the last great Roman emperor. Violet’s travels through the past takes us on a picaresque tour of this significant year. In this episode of Travels Through Time the historian Dr Violet Moller takes us back to one of the most crucial years of all: 529, when the Roman Empire was in its latter days and a new Christian world was emerging. Often knowledge was lost at specific moments of conflict or tumult in the human story.

Just seven out of around eighty plays by Aeschylus survive, seven out of the hundred and twenty written by Sophocles and a similar proportion of those by Euripides.

In many cases only a fraction of what was once known has reached us today. The passage of knowledge between the Ancient World and today’s modern one, has not been smooth.

Violet moller the map of knowledge