The Middle Ages are, roughly, the period from about 500 to 1500, though we must not take the limits too sharply. Here I propose to make it cover the writers of the literary Renaissance period, or of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europe was so demoralized after the fall of Rome that art almost perished; and the Greek Empire was too fossilized to produce great literature. From the second to the thirteenth century no literary worth of the first, or even second, rank appeared in Europe. Then art was reborn and the Renaissance in the broader sense, the re-awakening of Europe, began. §1. ARAB AND PERSIAN WRITERS There are, however, two works belonging to that period which will be known to every reader, at least by name: the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar Khayyam and the _Arabian Nights_. Omar was a Persian poet-astronomer of the twelfth century: one of very many gifted poets of the revived civilization of Persia. The refined Epicurian creed of life in his well-known poem reminds us that outside of Europe there was a brilliant and artistic civilization. The _Arabian Nights_ reflects a similarly brilliant civilization at Cairo and Bagdad and Damascus. This new Mohammedan, though really very skeptical, culture spread from Persia to Spain, and had much to do with the re-awakening of Europe. The _Rubaiyat_, which took the modern world by storm in the nineteenth century, is a unique case of a translation being superior to the original. The current version, by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald, is not, in fact, a translation, but to a very great extent a new poem based on that of Omar. Sir Richard Burton’s translation (in 16 volumes) of the _Arabian Nights_ is, on the other hand, so accomplished and faithful a version of that immortal collection of oriental tales that it is generally kept behind locked doors in a library. The current translations are much pruned, and are therefore false. The tales (by various authors) are generally said to be of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but Burton held that many are earlier. The well known stories of Sinbad and Aladdin come from this classic. It is a rich reflection of Arab-Persian life. §2. DANTE AND THE MIDDLE AGES