Byzantine art is not only wonderful itself, but it shows how the Byzantines helped themselves to everything good that had been done before them. On the walls of a famous tomb in Ravenna, there is a mosaic of two doves at a drinking fountain that might have come from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. There is also Byzantine art that bubbles over with Greek love of life. Some of it is filled with early Christian saints and symbols, like the peacock and the fish. There is some with the lions and eagles of the ancient Hittites, and others whose fierce, bearded saints are like Assyrian warriors. But, of course, this practice of blending the ideas of different peoples wasn’t limited to art. It applied to everything the Byzantines did. The Byzantines preserved classic culture. They preserved Greek literature, Greek science, Greek learning, and even the Greek language. And this at a time when almost everybody in the West had completely forgotten Greek, and as a matter of fact, only churchmen and a handful of ragged scholars even knew Latin. This was a very important contribution. No civilization ever starts from scratch, and our modern one is based on the renewed interest in classic culture that is called the Revival of Learning. During that time, great writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio were willing to spend a fortune to get the services of some bearded ruffian who could teach them Greek. When Constantinople fell, the Byzantine scholars who escaped to Europe could sell any manuscript they brought with them for enough money to live on for a long time. The Byzantines never had to rediscover Homer, or Plato, or Euclid, who invented geometry, or Eratosthenes, who knew the world was round 1,700 years before Columbus, even measuring its circumference as 25,000 miles, which is almost right. They never had to rediscover the ancients; they knew about them all the time. Another thing the Byzantines did was to insist on education. Even the mighty French emperor Charlemagne had a hard time if he wanted to spell his way through a book and sign his name. Most Byzantine emperors could not only read and write but were thoroughly educated. Theophilus studied everything from Greek to natural history. Leo the Philosopher composed poems, sermons, and a life of his father. Constantine Born-in-the-Purple was famous for his books on the barbarians and on his empire. John IV and Manuel II, and above all Anna Comnena, a princess, wrote astonishingly good histories. It was not merely the emperors and some of their courtiers who were learned. Although a few poor men—like the saint from Asia Minor who had to tend his father’s swine and did not learn to read until he was forty-seven—did not have the chance to be educated, most Byzantines went to school or a university from the time they were five until they were twenty.