I sometimes think I am the only one alive who still reads Toynbee. Toynbee is not without occasional insights as he produced endless historical monographs within his twelve volume A Study of History in which he sought to proclaim iron laws as to the birth, flourishing and deaths of the civilizations of Man. But when you seek to be an expert on all history, you tend to end up as an expert on none of it. Back in the forties and fifties, among the chattering class in this country, he was sometimes taken for an oracle of truth. He was not. Like all historians he was a blind man passing his hands over part of that vast elephant, History, and trying to describe what he was feeling.
Byzantine studies have always been hampered (in the Anglo-sphere) by the bigotry of Gibbon and the antagonisms of East and West that have grown ever since Justinian reconquered Italy. Lord Norwich’s history is good, although many of the best Byzantine historians have been French or Russian (per Vasiliev, who is my reference).
Toynbee seems (like Gibbon) to have taken his views from the elite “book culture” of the capital and the small circle of scholars, who where proud of their Atticisms and antiquarian views of what constituted the “best” in Classical Greek culture. Like Gibbon, I imagine him passing over changes in popular culture and religion where e.g. the influence of the Near East (coming from trade, the flight of Christian Syrians from Islam, and the army, chiefly recruited from Anatolia after the Slavs destroyed the old Latinized settlements in the Balkans) had rather profound effects (and indeed the journalist Robert Kaplan once remarked that modern Greece is better understood as a western extension of the Middle East that an eastern outpost of Europe).
Wouldn’t take Luttwak to seriously making remarks of that nature.
To Whom It May Concern: it’s “segue”, not “Segway”. Fingernails on a blackboard. SHEESH.