Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 336, 10 influential East Romans with Anthony Caldellis part two.

We continue with the second half of my conversation with Professor Cordellis,

as he tells us about another five influential East Romans who contributed to Byzantine

culture outside of the political narrative.

I hope you enjoy part two of this conversation. Next week will be a bonus episode

for patrons only about Byzantine Christmas. Okay, so we're into the second half. Who is number

six? Number six is Fosius.

Fosius, or Foteus, as I called him on the podcast.

Born around 8.10 AD in Constantinople, he was an outstanding intellectual, a master of multiple different fields.

He was selected to become patriarch in 858 to replace the sitting Archbishop Ignatius.

This caused a schism within the church, with Ignatius eventually returning, and then Fosius also

returning to office after Ignatius' death.

Fosius presided over the triumph of the iconophiles, and the first major figurative mosaics went up in Hageo Sophia under his watch.

He was also involved in the first intellectual clashes with the church in Rome,

and he made a catalogue of the books in his library,

which is a vital source for Byzantine intellectual life and for works that we have lost.

I actually vacillated on this one, but there was one criteria that led me to put him on the

list.

I'll tell you what that was, but there are obvious reasons why Fosius would make the list,

for example, his, what we call the bibliotheca, or the title in Greek is Medio Viblos, which is 10,000 books, which is his collection of book reviews, almost 300 of them, of ancient, mostly ancient, early Christian, and saw a dribble of later sort of late antique or post-late antique texts, which is just a huge source of

information for lost works, but also, finally, we're getting someone comment on

how they're reading, what their reactions are to various texts, and we can see, you know,

...