In the late 11th century, at the beginning of his Synopsis of Histories, the Byzantine bureaucrat John Skylitzes commented briefly on his predecessors:

"After the ancient writers, the best compendium of history was written first by George the monk...and then by Theophanes the confessor...George began with the creation of the world and continued to the tyrants Maximian and Maxentius [the opponents of Constantine]. Theophanes took the other's conclusion as his starting point, and brought his work to an end with the death of the emperor Nikephoros..."

John goes on to describe why he is specially qualified to take up where Theophanes left off. That he conceived his work as the latest in a series of chronicles dating back to the Creation neatly demonstrates his sense of historical continuity. Byzantines living in the tenth and eleventh centuries - a time of modest, but real, educational revival - famously still thought of and called themselves Romans. And like the inhabitants of the late antique Eastern Roman Empire from which their state and educational system emerged, they understood themselves to be heirs of both the Greek literary tradition and the Roman imperial legacy.

Despite occasional imperial patronage, there was no formal system of secondary education in middle Byzantine Constantinople. Wealthy families sent their sons to well-reputed teachers of grammar and rhetoric. Though often upwardly-mobile and connected in some way with the imperial bureaucracy, these professors had to hustle for their fees (we actually have the letters of one harried tenth-century grammarian, the so-called Anonymous Teacher). The curriculum was founded on handbooks of grammar, a selection of Greek classics, and a few edifying Christian works. The aim was to produce men who were capable of speaking (and ideally, thinking) clearly and cogently on any topic.

Since Byzantine education (like its Roman predecessor) tended to treat history as little more than a source of edifying moral examples, coverage of the past was spotty. Students often read the historian Xenophon (admired for the simplicity and clarity of his Greek), and were likely to acquire at least a vague sense of Classical Athenian history from reading so many Classical Athenian authors. Works of Roman history, however, were not on the usual curriculum. Students would learn about a few famous figures (Caesar, Augustus, a scattering of emperors) in the context of rhetorical exercises, but probably knew them as little more than names.

Only the best-educated Byzantines bothered to read Roman-era (Greek) historians. In his Bibliotheca, for example, the very learned Photius mentions reading Appian's Roman History, and briefly summarizes the end of the Republic:

"[Appian's] account of the civil wars contains first the war between Marius and Sulla, then that between Pompey and Julius Caesar, after their rivalry took the form of violent hostilities, until fortune favored Caesar and Pompey was defeated and put to flight." (57)

But most Byzantines, even those who had enjoyed a full rhetorical education, knew a great deal less about the details of Roman history. The description of Constantinople known as the Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai, which probably dates to the eighth century, provides our best look at common (literate) views of the city's history and artistic heritage at that time. The author of the Parastaseis claims (possibly falsely) to have read several late antique historians; but his historical references are almost incredibly ill-informed, and seem to reflect general ignorance about (and indifference to) Roman history before Constantine.

Few educated Byzantines in the tenth and eleventh centuries would have doubted that they were Romans. Their literary culture, however, was almost exclusively Greek, and the general (educated) understanding of Roman history quite limited.