It was this realization by the bishops of New Rome of their most cherished aspiration--the separation of the Church into two great Patriarchates--that engendered and fostered that jealousy and friction that ever afterwards existed between Rome and Constantinople and which, more than anything else, led to that ever-regrettable schism that still separates the East from the West. For the position of the Church of New Rome, as that of the “first Church of all Eastern Christendom, was so exalted that her bishops even ventured to think themselves the rivals of the Roman Pope, so influential that when at last they”--her bishops--“fell into formal schism, they dragged all the other eastern bishops with them.”[335] Besides the jealousy and overweening ambition of sycophantic bishops and tyrannical Emperors, there were other determining causes of the estrangement between the Eastern and Western halves of Christendom and of the ultimate establishment of an autonomous Byzantine episcopate. Not the least of these was the difference of language. For after Constantinople had become the capital of the Empire, the Roman Court became so completely Hellenized that the language of Virgil and Cicero was no longer heard and was understood by but few. Even Photius, the most eminent scholar of his time, was ignorant of Latin. For this reason, it is quite possible that, aside from Byzantine ambitions and aspirations, “the divergence of tongues, combined with the Hellenic contempt of the Latin race might have contributed to ... a grouping of the Eastern Churches around the See of Constantinople, and thus have brought about, more or less rapidly, the formation of a Greek autonomy. The Roman Empire had succeeded in overpowering and even in suppressing the tongues of all the other conquered nations--such as the Syriac, Coptic, Celtic, Iberian, Phœnician, Etruscan, and many others--but it had never attempted anything in the direction of the Greek language. The result was that Greek ranked side by side with Latin as a second official tongue and this cause brought about the division of the Empire. Nor was it merely a question of tongues. Latins as well as Greeks knew and recognized that all intellectual culture in the West had its origin in Greek antiquity; hence arose a superiority that, when once the Empire was divided, promptly gave to the Greek portion a preponderance over the Latin.”[336]