Italian colonists in the Dodecanese the island of Rhodes. Approximately 40,000 Italian soldiers and sailors were on military duty in the Dodecanese islands in 1940. The appointment of Fascist quadrumvir Cesare Maria De Vecchi as governor of the Italian Aegean Islands in 1936 marked a turning point. De Vecchi promoted a more vigorous and forceful program of Italianization, which was only interrupted by Italy's entry in World War II in 1940. Indeed, he promoted the possible unification of the islands to Italy as part of the fascist ideal of an Imperial Italy. During World War II, Italy joined the Axis Powers, and used the Dodecanese
Transmission of the Greek Classics were mostly Nestorian and Jacobite Christians, working in the two hundred years following the Abbasid period. The most important translator of this group was the Syriac-speaking Christian Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (809-873), known to the Latins as "Joannitius". Classical Greek learning was firmly found in every metropolis of the Roman empire, including in Rome itself. In Rome, Boethius propagated works of Greek classical learning. Boethius intended to pass on the great Greco-Roman culture to future generations by writing manuals on music and astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic. Several of Boethius' writings, which were largely influential during the Middle Ages, drew from the