For a start, the Byzantine Museum is not the Byzantine Museum. It's the Byzantine and Christian Museum, and covers everything from the permanent division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western spheres in 395 AD, past the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, right down to today (or at least to 2004, when it was last refurbished, in time for the Olympics). As a result, it's surprisingly large - it took me a good two hours to get through it all, even though my stomach is now conditioned to rumble at 11:30, in time for the weekday lunch break.
The museum doesn't limit itself in the information it presents to Athens or mainland Greece. In fact, you can get a good idea of the total history of the Empire - which stretched, at its greatest extent, from Gilbraltar to the Eastern shores of the Black Sea - just by reading the introductory displays in each of the rooms. (I was happy to revisit the stunningly vivid green mosaics of Theodosius' church of San Vitale in Ravenna, present here in some excellent photographs.) At the same time, the artifacts are drawn mainly from Athens and its Attic environs.
Of course, Athenian history doesn't end with the suppression of the democracy by the Macedonians in 322. (Arguably, even the history of Athenian democracy doesn't end in 322, but that's another story). It continues, through Athens' flourishing as a university town in the Roman Empire, to her conversion into a Christian bishopric. Many of the great pagan temples were transformed into churches, chief among them the Parthenon (Greek for virgin), which was turned into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. The Byzantine emperor Basil II, after smashing a Bulgarian army in 1018, dedicated his victory to the Virgin there, just as an ancient general might have done.
Just East of another impressive ancient site, the ruined hulk of the Olympaion, are the traces of one of the most important early churches, the Illisos basilica, some of whose mosaics are on show in the museum. It was dedicated to Leonidas, a Christian martyr who was killed during the persecutions ordered by the Roman emperor Decius around 250 AD. The museum also houses extensive remains of chapels taken from the monasteries that grew up around nearby Mount Hymettus in the early middle ages. Plato and Aristotle's philosophical schools were shut down by imperial decree in 529; Athens and the world were moving on.
Edward Gibbon (author of the monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) made it de rigueur in the late 18th century to denounce the Byzantines as decadent and vicious, painting a picture of the upper and lower classes alike as perpetually mired in uneducated stupor until some palace intrigue or drama at the chariot-races stirred them into frenzied riots. The scholarly fashion lasted a surprisingly long time, but is now itself regularly denounced by historians, who see in the Byzantines a resilient culture spanning the ancient and modern periods and productive of much beauty.
I'm not entirely convinced. Certainly, every age has a story to tell, though for my money the highly urbanized and egalitarian city-states of the classical age have more of interest to say to us than the exploitative and rural empire that followed them centuries later. In the end, of course, scholarly specialties come down to personal preferences. If I had as long to live as the Eastern Roman Empire (395-1453), I might spend more time scraping through 11th and 12th century layers of dust. As it is, I've now been rotated to a deeper trench, and spent some of the morning dusting off one of the interior walls of the Painted Stoa. And that may just put enough of a spring in my step to get me walking again this coming weekend.
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