[quanto]

> I think the traditional break when the West finally gave up is as good as any.

Except that the Greek-speaking part was as Roman as the Latin-speaking part in culture, heritage, bureaucracy, governance, and self-identity. The later Western European historians' designation of the East as "Byzantine" (read: not "real" Romans) is much motivated by the West Europe's desire to see themselves as intellectual descendants of the Roman Empire (n.b. Italian Renaissance and Classicism).

[coldtea]

>Except that the Greek-speaking part was as Roman as the Latin-speaking part in culture, heritage, bureaucracy, governance, and self-identity.

Not that much. It was roman in leadership and had the roman legal structures, but it was always the area of prior Greece and the Hellenistic kindgoms, which had millenia of history and culture all of its own (to the point of the Roman's saying that when they conquered it millitarily, it conquered them culturally).

[evol262]

That's also true of the areas in Southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa, and Illyria. Nothing about the East differentiated it, and the Romans saying that it conquered them culturally were the same as the Americans now lamenting that the US has seen cultural changes. "Oh no! You're not sending consular armies out every year to acquire new territory as your sole cultural identity!" was the complaint.

Completing the conquest of the Mediterranean basin and being left bordering only states against whom the Romans never had any particular success, the Sahara, (Parthians/Sassanids) or holding the line against rotating groups of peoples pushed further west in the Balkans and Germania left the Roman state without obvious paths to expansion. That does not mean that Hellenistic states "conquered them culturally".

If you think the West was some unified area with "Latin-speaking" culture, heritage, bureaucracy, and self-identity, you'd need to write a thesis-length paper justifying it no matter what century. Even the Italian peninsula was none of those things until long after the establishment of the Principate, at which point wealth had already precluded the existence of men like Cincinnatus.

[mbg721]

Maybe my perception is a little off, but I think of the Romans as having outsourced their "high" culture from the very moment they could afford it--formal education, medicine, and theater were for Greek slaves to do. A dignified Roman was more suited to the manly pursuits of farming, conquest, and engineering.