The passage of knowledge between the Ancient World and today’s modern one, has not been smooth. In many cases only a fraction of what was once known has reached us today. 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.
Often knowledge was lost at specific moments of conflict or tumult in the human story. 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.
Violet’s travels through the past takes us on a picaresque tour of this significant year. In Constantinople we see the last great Roman emperor. In Athens a “Golden Chain” of learning is about to be severed after many centuries. And on a rocky hill in central Italy, a new monastic order that will have a spectacular future, is founded.
Dr Violet Moller is the author of The Map of Knowledge, winner of the Royal Society for Literature’s Jerwood Prize. The Daily Telegraph called it “popular intellectual history at its best.”
Show notes:
Scenes:
Memento: A crate of books, saved from the Neoplatonic Academy
People / Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Violet Moller
Producer: Maria Nolan
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Digital Production: John Hillman
Titles: Jon O.
John Darlington: The Port Royal Earthquake (1692)
Katja Hoyer: Beyond The Wall (1973)
Company of Heroes 3: David Milne (1942-4)
Sarah Bakewell: Petrarch and Boccaccio (1348*)
Nandini Das: The first English embassy to India (1616)
[From the archives] Ariana Neumann: When Time Stopped (1944)
Nicholas Spencer: The Great Debate (1860)
Christopher Hadley: Roman Roads and the Invasion of Britain (51 AD)
Don Hollway: The Year of Three Battles (1066)
[From the archives] Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Neanderthals (Eemian)
James Hall: Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence (1504)
Tania Branigan: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (1966)
Marion Turner: The Wife of Bath (1397)
John Sellars: Aristotle (347 BC)
Simon Akam: The Changing of the Guard (2006)
[From the archives] Diarmaid MacCulloch: Thomas Cromwell (1536)
Tim Clayton: James Gillray and a Revolution in Satire (1792)
Harry Sidebottom: The Mad Emperor (218)
Josiah Osgood: Caesar, Cato and the Fall of the Roman Republic (46BC)
Philip Mansel: Louis XIV, The Sun King (1700)
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