"The Greek world" in the perception of Latin intellectuals

Abstract

The article examines the problem of the perception of "the Greek world" by the Latin intellectuals of the V and the beginning of the VI century AD, i.e. in the period of time when political, cultural and somewhat religious dissociation between the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire became visible. The hermeneutic analysis of narrative, epistolary and didactic works written in the Latin West in V–VI centuries has been carried out in the article. The «system codes» through which Latin intellectuals perceived both their own and the Greek world have been reconstructed by the identification of the tropes, metaphors and similes. It has been concluded that the Greek world had been still taking on a role of the creator and preserver of high culture, a kind of indicator of the cultural achievements of the West in the minds of Latin authors of the V–VI century. At the same time the Latin authors’ desire to establish their own self-sufficiency and even cultural superiority in the competition with the Greeks was quite obvious. The article shows that belonging to the Greek civilization served as an identifying feature of noble Roman's which also forced the representatives of German elite to strive for both the Roman and the Greek education in their ambition to legitimize their authority among the Italian population.