Going back over this and taking better notes. (Have I blogged about this before?)

https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/1c3c7cc6-8e5a-4ed9-b7cb-e59897ac714b

«Among the rash of laws passed in the first decade of Justinian’s reign was a decree that pagans were not allowed to teach students. In itself this did not stand out from the other collections of anti-pagan legislation collected in Justinian’s law codes. But its effect on one important institution was soon made clear. John Malalas spelled out what it meant. In an entry covering the year 529, he wrote, “The emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no-one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.”20

Another chronicler, Agathius, reported that the last headmaster of the Athens school was forced to leave not only the school and the city, but the empire itself. (In 531 he and several of his fellow teachers fled to Persia.) And this was more than mere relocation. In effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital—the city of Plato and Aristotle—where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations.

The closure of the Athens school was important. It did not kill at a stroke all non-Christian learning in the eastern empire.21 Nor did it immediately throw up an intellectual wall between the classical age and the dawning era of Christian hegemony in Europe and the west. But it was both significant and symbolic. For while scholarship in Persia and other eastern parts flourished, with libraries in Baghdad and other Middle Eastern capitals preserving and transmitting copies of the works of Aristotle and other non-Christian greats, Justinian’s reign, and the sixth century in general, was marked by a self-blinkering in the Christian world. Doctrinal minutiae assumed ever bigger and bloodier importance, while anything non-Christian was regarded with gathering suspicion. The Roman Empire had once been a super-spreader of classical learning across its vast territories. But as it fell to pieces in the west and became ever-more doctrinally obsessed in the east, it became an active blocker to knowledge chains across the ages, and the transmission of ancient learning throughout the empire began to fail.

One reason that the label “the Dark Ages” has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years—between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth—the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west. This was not simply an unfortunate symptom of creeping cultural dementia. It sprang from the deliberate policies of eastern emperors like Justinian, who made it their business to hound out of their world the self-appointed but unfortunately unchristian guardians of priceless knowledge.»