- red queen's race: so, if you had time travel, would your primary concern be sending weapons to the greeks to fend off the arabs? the byzantines actually had a rather sophisticated level of technological development, something asimov seems to have missed - a level that the turks could not emulate and that european civilization did not transcend for centuries, afterwards. they had truly descartian robot animals, and would set them in motion in jungle scenes - no joke, look it up. robot lions, in byzantine greece. really. one of the ways that the emperor used to scare barbarians into submission was to levitate himself in a flying throne that we don't fully understand today, but is thought to have operated using a series of mechanical levers, the likes of which would not be known again until the industrial revolution, in britain. they certainly didn't have nuclear weapons, but i think that suggesting that the empire might have survived if they were granted to them is naive, at best. the greeks truly fell to christianity, and not to the barbarians around them; in a twisted display of religious depravity, they welcomed the end, as they longed for the return of christ. to the delusional byzantine christians, the end of the empire on earth meant the beginning of the kingdom of heaven; they might merely have bombed themselves to bring upon the rapture. so, asimov's philhellenism is blinding, here; greece destroyed itself in a fit of religiosity-induced madness and the greece asimov longs for the extension of was, in truth, very much long gone by the 15th century, collapsed from within. although we still don't know what the greek fire was, do we?