It is impossible, indeed, to say whether there was not in Byzantium, behind the official scenes, a higher intellectual life. It was from Michael II ("the Stammerer") that Louis the son of Charlemagne received (824) the copy of the writings of Dionysius "the Areopagite," from which was made the first Latin translation; and as this writer had a great influence on John Scotus, who may even have acquired his first knowledge of him from that very copy, which he translated afresh, it may be that in Greece also, where Dionysius was much admired and studied among the monks, there were deep thinkers whom he stimulated. But whereas even Scotus could reach few in the West, any higher thought there may have been in the East remained entirely latent. Learning fared better. After Photius, the East produced for posterity the important Lexicon of Suidas, which apparently belongs to the tenth century; and in the twelfth Eustathius of Thessalonica produced his valuable commentary on Homer. But the populace in the East was as ignorant and superstitious as that of the West; and the system of caste occupations or hereditary pursuits made eastern learning even a less communicable influence than western. In the political life there were fluctuations; and though in all ages alike there were dethronements, assassinations, and mutilations of emperors and of their suspected relatives, the time of the Basilian dynasty (867-1057) was one of relative stability, with even some military glory, and temporary recovery or expansion of territory, as against Saracens and Bulgarians. Still the sum-total of each century's life was practically stagnation. Under emperors, empresses, or eunuchs, the administration was substantially the same. Alien elements, which might under other conditions have generated new life, had entered the empire with the Slavonians, whose race, after occupying Dalmatia and Illyricum at the wish of Heraclius in the seventh century, flourished and multiplied, and invaded the Peloponnesus early in the ninth. The later iconoclastic emperors were vigorous enough to bring them to submission; but Roman imperialism and Christian ecclesiasticism between them undid all progressive influences, just as the policy of militarism and fanaticism finally did among the Saracens.