iS8 RENAISSANCES

Christendom by resorting to a device that had been employed by the
Late Roman Emperor Justinian's own architect Anthemius of Trallcs
as his solution for the physical problem of imposing a cupola on the
cathedral church of the Ayia Sophia without risking a collapse of the
supporting pilasters. The light Rhodian bricks of which, according to
the legend,1 Anthemius's etherial cupola was ingeniously constructed,
found their Byzantine juristic counterpart in Vasilikti whose ponderous-
sounding Justinianean titles were affixed to contents covertly fabricated
from the more etherial substance of the Ecloga.

In a Western Christendom where the resuscitation of the Justinianean
Roman Law in Orthodox Christendom under the Macedonian Dynasty
was emulated, some two hundred years after the time of the East Roman
Emperor Basil I (imperabat A.D. 867-86), by academic enthusiasts, no
corresponding precautions were taken to temper the rigour of an obso-
lete legal system to the exigencies of a social terrain with which it was
still more out of keeping than it was with the life of a ninth-century
Orthodox Christian World; and it is therefore not surprising to find the
'reception' of the Civil Law in the West having Atlantcan sequels, We
have seen2 how the Hohenstaufen Dynasty's academic pretension to
benefit by a post-Diocletianic Roman imperial prerogative, which, in the
West, had never been exercised effectively since the death of the Emperor
Theodosius I in A.D. 395, committed the Holy Roman Empire to a
policy of self-assertion that was so ludicrously beyond its strength that it
inevitably resulted in the collapse registered in 'the Great Interregnum*
of A.D. 1254-73. This Atlantean doom which the Holy Roman Empire
thus brought down upon its own head might have seemed tit the time
to be offset by an Antaean sequel to the contemporary reception of the
Civil Law in the North and Central Italian city-states. Yet, though the
first effect may have been stimulating both in a Late Medieval Western
cosmos of city-states and in an Early Modern Western chaos of nation-
states, it could be seen in retrospect that the ultimate effect had been
Atlantean here likewise; for the reception of an oecumenical Roman Law
within the cramping framework of a parochial state had manifestly ag-
gravated the explosiveness of an idolization of parochial sovereignty
which the Western World had resuscitated from the charnel house of a
pre-imperial Age of Hellenic history.

If, in conclusion of our present survey of Antaean and Atlantean
reactions, we now take a second glance at some of those pilgrimages in
which renaissances of elements of dead cultures had been transposed
from the Time-dimension into the Space-dimension, we shall observe

* According to Lethaby, W. R., and Swainson, H.: Th* Church of JSancta Sophia,
Constantinople (London 1894, Macrnillan), p. 156, 'there wan no trace [in the dome} of
the light bricks made in Rhodes which the Anonymous mention**, although in the
pendentives a light substance, whitish, with impressions of plants in it. wa» used In
irregular masses'.

An English translation of this Anonymus Combtfisii (or flandurii or Lam&teii) will be
found ibid., pp. 129-43, and the passage about the JRhodian brick* appear* on pp. 136-7:

'The Emperor sent Troilus the cubicular, Theodosius the prefect, and BjwifeidSa the
quaestor to Rhodes to have bricks of Rhodian clay made, all equal in weight and length.
... And they sent bricks of measured sizes to the Emperor—twelve of them weigh [the
weight of) one of ours; for the clay is light, spongy, fine, and white,'

* In II. ii. 170-1.