Why Classicists Should Care about Byzantium, with Anthony Kaldellis

Well, I would like you and the audience to visualize in their mind the sum total of ancient Greek literature that survives. If it helps, they can picture a library. Now, there are a number of editions of these texts. So the Loeb Classical Library will not be a complete set. It will be, you know, the canon, the classics, plus a few other texts. It might be better to visualize the German Teubner series, that's much fuller on the Greek side in terms of comprehensive coverage. So if you put everything together, it's a fairly large library if you think about everything that survives from ancient Greece.

Now the interesting thing about that library, which we call a classical library, is that every text in it—almost every text—survives because it was transmitted throughout the Middle Ages. And normally we can access those texts only through medieval manuscripts. For most of them this means after the 9th century, and for some of them it really does mean 13th, 14th, 15th-century manuscripts. Now there are some texts that don't survive that way. They're very few and they're very rare. On papyri, this is very important for Sappho, for example, who is a lost author essentially except for the papyri and a few quotations. A work by Aristotle survives on papyrus, but just one. And then some inscriptions, gold tablets—you know, you really have to get into the archaeology to find a few more texts. The vast, vast majority are copied and survive for us in medieval manuscripts.

Which means that there must have been a direct process of transmission, which in the Greek case almost certainly passes through Constantinople for all of these texts. It's very difficult to imagine—though it certainly did happen—that some of these texts survived because of manuscript transmissions that didn't go through Constantinople but some of the other provinces or cities of the Eastern Roman Empire. But usually we're talking about Constantinople. If you put it this way, it's quite remarkable.

And you now have to assume a somewhat different relationship between the classical world and what we have for over a century called Byzantium. And I think this is an interesting way to think about it because for some time Byzantium has been theorized, especially in the West but not only, as a kind of antithesis of the classical world in terms of its values. Right? So the classical world has been valorized positively with images that lean on, right, democracy and reason and science and beauty and originality and things like that.

And for a very long time the society that I study primarily—so the Eastern Roman polity—has been characterized by largely, you can say, the opposite qualities. Right? So it's a kind of theocracy, the literature is unoriginal, its values are primarily religious, it is a monarchy, sometimes called an absolute monarchy, and even worse things are said about it, right? Especially in terms of gender—it's lacking in manliness and things like that.

So this could theoretically pose a problem to classicists, and sometimes did. In other words, why did all of the texts that we prize from antiquity survive in this civilization which we have classified historically as being kind of the antithesis of the sorts of things that we want to study if we become classicists? And this has resulted in a number of models, the most important of which is the cold storage model, called sometimes. Right? So this is the idea that, yeah, those texts survived in Constantinople and were copied, but there was no sort of active involvement on the part of, quote, Byzantine scholars in its making and so forth. It was just those texts just kind of existed there. And at some point the Italian humanists arrived and sort of rescued them from the oblivion of the medieval millennium, right? During which they had been essentially lost. Not lost in material fact, but lost in terms of like nobody was reading them in a way that could understand them. And that required Western readers to come along and rescue them. And that led to the revival of philosophy and enlightenment and renaissance and capitalism or whatever. Okay.

This had a number of requirements for this theory to work. Right? So one of those was that all of those medieval scribes and copists, they had to be cast as somewhat passive carriers of historical tradition whose importance they were largely unaware of. So they didn't quite grasp the, quote, spirit of the texts. This is an idea that goes way back—possibly 16th century—that it's Western scholars thinking that all of these Byzantine copyists were so out of touch with these texts, or just mindlessly copying them.

Or that they were doing so for purely lexicographical reasons. In other words, that their society valorized classical Greek as a form of linguistic affectation and maybe class status. And in order to access the vocabulary that you needed in order to write pretentious and unoriginal and derivative classical Greek as they did in the Middle Ages, you had to have some of those texts. So they just kind of kept them and studied them purely for those reasons. I mean, this is a view that I hear still asserted very confidently, that no, no, they never engaged with the content of these texts or were interested in the content—it was just the Attic vocabulary, right, and diction and so forth.

All right, so that's the problem and the kind of problematic models that have emerged around it as a way of essentially enabling classicists to not pay much attention to this civilization and to assume that the classical library that we have is either the best of the best for some reason or a random selection depending on genre. And so we don't have to think of it as what I think it is—which is, to use the conventional terminology, a Byzantine classical library.

And so the project that I am putting in motion now—which will result, hopefully, in an edited volume written by a number of specialists, organized by genre because I think that each genre has its different dynamics in this regard—will try to assess the degree to which East Roman priorities were important in shaping the content of the literary archive that survives from antiquity. So not to assume that ancient choices were simply frozen, codified, and perpetuated passively and mindlessly, but to assume—which in many genres can actually be proven—that the selection of texts corresponds pretty closely in some areas to their own needs and interests and priorities, and that's why they kept those texts and not others.

This is obviously true more in some genres than in others. So clearly processes of canonization were already in play in antiquity—witness Homer or tragedies, right? These sorts of things—and were in place long before Constantinople was founded. And in that sense, the literary elites in Constantinople perpetuated those choices. But in many other genres that was not the case. And late antiquity and the medieval period in Constantinople played a very decisive role in shaping the contents of the canon or the archive, depending on which term you want to use.

And I think that this has consequences for the relationship between the fields specifically—that we really need to stop seeing them as kind of antithetical, and especially in training students. Classicists have a very healthy and robust sort of fear and anxiety of going too late or of getting involved in either Christian texts or texts by Christian authors regardless of their content. And this is especially the case in the anglophone world. I can give you some interesting data about that. But because those Anglo-American priorities are kind of being spread to the rest of the world—in part through the form of handbooks and companions—it's kind of becoming crystallized as a disciplinary divide.

I don't think that ancient literature and its Greek continuation can be divided quite so clearly. And while there's change—because there's always change, right? I mean, there's change between Homer and Demosthenes. It's always going on. I don't think that the kinds of changes that we see in literary practice and literary interests are that decisive that we need to divide these fields in as radical a way as we do. So that's the summary of the overall argument.

Oh yes, they're exactly parallel. And that's an excellent point to bring up. There's a key difference, which is that texts can be reproduced sort of infinitely, whereas art and monuments can't, and so that creates a distinction in use, right, between libraries that we can have—like I have one over there, and you can't see it in the camera, but a classical library, it's right there—but I can sort of have reproductions of ancient art, but it's not the same thing. So exactly the same kinds of processes were going on in the, well, 15th, but also 16th and 17th centuries.

And actually I'm publishing another book next year with the University of Chicago Press called Phantom Byzantium, which is a big survey of how Western European ideas about the Eastern Roman Empire evolved and how it is that we got to the concept Byzantium, which kind of is a nexus of all of those prejudices. And there is a chapter on precisely these processes of acquisition.

In other words, acquiring manuscripts and acquiring antiquities were parallel, concurrent processes carried out by antiquarian travelers but also diplomats, generals—people who happened to find themselves in classical land—regarded it as their right to appropriate material and textual artifacts, sometimes explicitly saying that these belong to my culture, whatever Western imperial culture they represented, and specifically not to the locals who had them until that time.

Because precisely—and here you fill in the blank—they don't understand them, they don't appreciate them, they didn't care that I was taking them, they sold them to me for nothing, or even they were afraid of them—that classical statues had demons in them and they wanted us to take them away because they were afraid—and those superstitious fools over there in Greece, how far they've sunk, right? And this kind of thing. And they would write up their adventure stories about how they stole manuscripts from monasteries and dug up statues and swindled the locals—like this was fun for many of them and an adventure. And this is how many of the museums and libraries in the imperial capitals of the West got filled up over the centuries.

And those ideas that authorized in their mind this appropriation then fed back into the picture of the civilization that they were constructing—that came to be sort of Byzantium. And I find those views prevalent among many classicists still. They still publish things where they express those kinds of attitudes. So yes, those were two very parallel processes, with, of course, the difference that texts can be copied but art is basically stolen or destroyed.

But, so to get to your first question—this is interesting. In the University of Chicago library, I came across a section of the library. There's maybe like three units that had histories of Greek literature or histories of classical literature, history of ancient Greek literature, whatever the title is, from the late 19th century down to today. And they were organized by language—so English, German, Italian, French, Polish, whatever. And I spent a couple of days in there just kind of looking at the evolution of what's covered in each tradition.

And I discovered a stark contrast between books in English—that is, whether UK or US—and those published in German and French and also Italian. Starting in the late 19th century already, the German, French, and Italian books were more likely to go down to, say, Justinian and cover Christian authors. Not as fully as they covered classical Greece, to be sure, right? Or Plutarch, but they still covered it. And obviously we have more of the church fathers than we do of earlier authors, so the disproportion is even greater than that, but still they covered it—not always, but more likely to do so than not.

Whereas the English books never did. And originally, English-language histories of Greek literature would end with Demosthenes, because that's when the Greek spirit of freedom was destroyed, and that's all there is to say. And there was a lot of racial assumptions, especially about the Hellenistic world, which is a racially mongrel world, and, yeah, we don't—this kind of thing, or that the literature is less robust or whatever.

And gradually during the course of the 20th century—and very grudgingly, this is very, very slow—the Hellenistic world was gradually, okay, we'll do that too. And it's not until the late 20th century that you get the, quote, Second Sophistic, as sort of, okay, we'll annex this in some way. Though to this day, in a number of classics departments, you can have advisers who tell their students that Hellenistic or Imperial is not really classical Greek, and don't work on that. Work on the earlier stuff. I do hear that.

Nevertheless, by and large they're in—with some question marks, but they're in. Going beyond that into late antiquity is strictly out of the question, which was not the case in other languages since the 19th century, as I said. So I was struck by this. It was very peculiar, and I sort of started asking around—why is this? Why did anglophone scholarship begin with such a narrow view?

That's an interesting question in itself, and I'm not the expert on this, but some factors that came to light were: first of all, Protestant suspicion of the imperial church and sort of late antiquity, the church fathers—all of that was definitely an issue in both the UK and the US. Another one was the valorization of democratic manliness. This I realized was a key factor. And this is why Demosthenes is so regularly chosen as the end point, and that everything after that is both racially impure and questionably masculine.

So Pindar, for example, is this hyper-masculine author, which is odd to me because he's like—

Yeah. No, I was not expecting this.

Exactly. So I thought these are like, oh, the choir singing songs—like what the—but no, it's men praising men for doing manly things. Yes. And in fact, for a long time in the 20th century, Pindar—only male scholars write on Pindar, and it took a long time to change. Unlike tragedy, which has women and lots of emotion, and so female scholars did work on that earlier. It's kind of weird.

Yeah. So there were those kinds of assumptions. And when you're starting from that point—and of course the idea in the UK and the US was that the classics are for training gentlemen and, like, republics or whatever, rather than what you definitely see on the European side, which is that you're training philologists. And so the varieties of Greek are the interesting thing, and you don't even care sometimes what they're saying. So those were key differences. It took a while for classics to become more sort of professionalized in the philological way, and even today it's not quite the same as in Europe.

And in all of these countries, what came to be called Byzantium—a term of the late 19th century—also was understood to be the antithesis of whatever good things they were looking for in ancient literature.

And so here we are in a sense that in American and UK classics, by and large, the cutoff is, let's say, Demosthenes—at whatever point Demosthenes stopped writing, the last text that he wrote. That's the end of ancient literature. And after that it's late antiquity, and we'll just leave that to the late antiquity people who are used to dealing with these unwashed ascetics and angry bishops, because we know we don't want to touch that stuff.

And this has led to what I think is an artificial, in fact false, and largely non-existent rupture in the third century, whereas I don't think that exists. I think that imperial literature from the first to the sixth century is much more of a unit. And that we shouldn't drive a wall through the third century, but that might be a different topic.

But certainly in the case of the survival of the ancient texts, right? We can just treat it as a notional point and simply ask the question: why do texts that survive from before 200 AD survive? It's not obvious. We don't have a bowl of Phoenician literature. People decided to copy this stuff at great cost. It was very expensive in medieval societies to copy these texts, so many of them that you can fill a library with them, like at least, right? Why? And I think that needs to be broken down. I mean, ultimately down to each text, perhaps, but one way of organizing the work is by genre. I think that the genres are quite different.

That is—well, there are two versions of the question. So one is, how much do we have of everything that was, let's say, written and published, disseminated to some reasonable degree at some point in antiquity? And the other is, how much of what survived around, say, 300 AD is what we have now?

Okay. That's the one that's much, much harder to answer than the first one. So there are various estimates, how much of ancient literature do we have, and they're all—everybody's like, well under 1%. Whatever the number is, it's under 1%. I have not come across any systematic effort to answer the second question, in other words, just what was lost by 300.

And one of the reasons why this is difficult to answer comes, for example, from the work by the 9th-century patriarch of Constantinople named Photius. This work in English is called the Bibliotheca, and in Greek it's called the Myriobiblon, or 10,000 books. And it's his reviews or notes on about, let's say, roughly 300 texts. And it does not include very obvious texts like Homer, in part because they were obvious—there was no reason for him to explain to his brother what's in Homer, because it was just still the basis of education. Or, I think, Thucydides and other authors like that who clearly survived and were classroom texts to some degree.

And Photius includes his summaries, thoughts, evaluations, or reviews of a number of authors—I mean, dozens of authors—whom we would otherwise have thought were lost, lost soon after they were written, in fact, in many cases, because they're just not cited by anybody else in antiquity. And yet there, that author is in Constantinople in the 9th century, and Photius is writing detailed, detailed notes. He's not pretending—no one seriously suggests that Photius is pretending to have read authors that he didn't actually have access to.

And I say this because in some cases, authors in his culture do pretend. For example, Sappho—I mentioned—was a lost author, and there's reason to think that they did not have access to her poems; they were lost already. And yet, for some reason, they found value in referencing Sappho as a poetess that exemplified certain kinds of traits.

Because those fragments are in papyri mostly. Right. And so all of these references to Sappho—where they're referring to Sappho just sort of echoing what Plato says about her, like this sort of thing. It's just derivative—they're faking it in a sense. They're not exactly faking it because they're not saying that they've read her, but they're just kind of gesturing towards Sappho even though we can guess that they had not read it. Okay, that's not the worst thing. Anyway, but Photius is not doing this at all. He's actually reading those texts. And there's so many of them that, as I said, we would imagine to have been lost, that it's just very difficult.

So another example: Julian, the emperor in the 4th century. He's polemicizing against some Cynics. And it's odd—Cynic philosophers, really active in the 4th century? It's a bit of a surprise. He wrote two whole works—an emperor dedicating two whole works to push back against some Cynics' interpretation of mythology in the 360s. And you're like, what? Where did they come from? You would have thought that that school was lost. And he mentioned somewhere that no one's really paying any attention to Epicureans anymore. And that might actually be true. In other words, by that point, maybe the majority of Epicurean works was lost.

Right? So it's not as if scholars in Constantinople are starting with a complete library of everything that had been written in antiquity. No, of course not. But there's certainly—and this is mind-blowing if you think about it—that at least in the early period, Constantinople is a repository of more classical texts than we have. Like, way, way more. Like, Callimachus and all kinds of authors we know they were reading until, like, 1200—maybe the Fourth Crusade.

That is an excellent question, and I'm not aware of any work on it—that is, a systematic attempt to catalog works that we know survived in Constantinople in medieval times that are now lost.

Yes. This is why I find the positive approach to be more productive. And that is—I kind of experimented with that in an article that I published over 10 years ago about historiography, because that's a case where I believe it can be shown pretty clearly that what survives mirrors their historical interests so closely that you can explain why those texts survived that did. Specifically, why we have—this is just a general observation about ancient historians.

Historians of ancient Greece rarely need to use Latin texts. Historians of ancient Rome absolutely need to use Greek texts, right? And the reason they need to do that is because—

East Romans in Constantinople saw themselves as Romans, and so they were invested in Roman history, which they had, however, to have in Greek because after a certain point they didn't have access to Latin. And also they were very interested in Roman civil wars, since they fought many of them themselves, and also in the origins of the Roman monarchy, the imperial monarchy of Augustus.

And that is why so many of our ancient Greek historical texts are about Rome. So from Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Dio and Plutarch and Nicolaus of Damascus and so on. That is a very, very large archive that is very much an East Roman archive.

Added to that is Josephus, because that's the link between Roman history and the sacred history of the Bible and text, and you begin to get a sense of, oh, okay, that's why we have those texts. So this is where the distinction between the canon and the archive is kind of important, depending on how you define those terms, of course.

So if the canon is Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon—Xenophon's a curious author in his own right just for all kinds of reasons. And then you have a much broader archive of historical texts that maybe were not treated as canonical from a literary standpoint in that way, though some were. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, obviously not. Polybius—you develop this model or framework that I—

Yes. So I think it's a matter of degree, and obviously I'm going to let my colleagues who have taken on the different genres to, you know, work it out however they see best in each case. So there's some where the argument for a heavy East Roman intervention is, it's obvious, it's shooting fish in a barrel. Like for example, to take the one non-Greek genre, Roman law. Roman law, what we call Roman law, is something that was put together by Justinian's team in the sixth century, and for a long time, especially in the Middle Ages, it was treated as some sort of, it fell from, like Sinai, like it just fell from the sky, and this is Roman law. After a certain point, legal scholars began to realize that it reflects Justinian's interests and the needs of Justinian's time, and yet it's still to this day very difficult to find an account of how exactly sixth-century needs and interests shaped the corpus that we have, namely the corpus of Justinian, but it very clearly did. And anyway, that's there are genres.

Another one is, and the interesting thing is that they have such different shapes, right? So, tragedy, well, this is a collection of texts from the, you know, fifth and fourth centuries, and that's it. There's no broader archive other than commentaries and scholia and things like that. And so that's very clearly much, that's on the other side of the spectrum. Like these are some ancient choices that were made probably already in that period that were perpetuated later in later centuries, and the question then is like, why are they being perpetuated? Because it's not clear what kind of active shaping is taking place, though, you know, some of the patterns can be worked out. I don't know, we'll leave it to the volume. Take a different case, epigram. Epigram has a completely different shape to it. This is a series of collections from Hellenistic times down to the ninth century and beyond in some cases, where epigrams are being collected and organized repeatedly, and the previous anthology subsumed into a bigger later one, not always in its entirety, not always in the same order, until you get something like the Greek Anthology.

But there's no break in the production of epigrams ever. It's a genre that just continues to be produced in mass quantity for all kinds of reasons, right? From buildings to books to just purely literary epigrams to whatever. And this is an activity. It's a literary genre that doesn't have any breaks, whether philosophy or other. So it is a single evolving corpus, and it doesn't really, like, lock down, at least the Greek Anthology doesn't lock down until the 10th century AD. And so, you know, anyway, Christian and pagan, sometimes put together, sometimes separated, but they're clearly in dialogue with each other. This is another thing that might really annoy many classicists, which is, and here we're getting into some, like, where it gets political and really problematic, which is that in some cases ancient texts were preserved. I suspect, it's possible that ancient texts were preserved because they were perceived as kind of necessary or important prequels to their Christian counterparts, which were sometimes considered equally or more canonical.

In other words, the current, like, modern classicist tendency to separate these two, to split them apart and treat the ancient corpus as a self-standing thing, fails to see that the jagged edges sometimes fit very perfectly. They align with the Christian counterparts of those genres that were written later. And it's possible that the earlier stuff survived precisely for that reason. And so preferences in, like, rhetoric, for example, because Christian rhetoric is a major, right, like, let's back off, like, the template for all writing in the imperial period throughout the Middle Ages, right, is rhetoric, training in rhetoric. And our rhetorical handbooks, there's manuals of how to do it right, start in, well, I mean, there's a few earlier ones, but the tradition doesn't really get started until around 200, the Hermogenian tradition, and then it just, you know, it's just an avalanche of more and more and more such texts, and they don't stop. It's just another one of these continual traditions, and also there is Christian rhetoric and Gregory of Nazianzus and many other authors, especially of late antiquity.

So if you were to be in, like, let's say, situate yourself in the 10th, 11th century rhetorical classroom, and you are studying rhetoric and you want to study the Christian texts, but these are Atticist authors and they're writing in the same tradition, and so the ancient texts are used as templates or kind of precursors in a way, and sometimes studied as such. And this is very interesting, is that when my authors say, well, here are the best orators, and they'll mention some ancient ones, like pre-300 BC, so classical period, and then they'll mention some imperial ones, like Aelius Aristides, so 2nd century AD, and then some Christian ones from the Patristic period, right, they're much more willing to look at different religions and different periods than the modern classical curriculum is.

But I think because that was their training, they were trained in both of these traditions, which they saw as a part of one evolving tradition, an Atticist one. And so, for example, I think, I mean, think about it, why do we not have any Hellenistic prose, and we have Polybius and the Septuagint? Like, yeah, it's because it doesn't conform to the Atticist priorities that were very much entrenched in the second century thereafter. And in that sense, I don't think that there's any purpose in splitting off, quote, Byzantium from the classical world, whatever. No, these are priorities in rhetoric that were very important in the Roman Empire in any period. There are a number of things that I think can be explained this way, that, how shall I put it, where classicists aren't even aware of the problem. I think I'll give you an example, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I haven't come across references to this, but it's easy to do in the TLG, the online database of Greek texts, right? This is fairly comprehensive for these periods. So compare the number, just the word count of the century that ends around 90 AD with the century that begins in 90 AD. So it's incredible. It's just astonishing that there's almost nothing before 90 AD in Greek. And what there is, half of it is Philo and Josephus. Now, Philo and Josephus are Jewish authors who are preserved in almost their entirety precisely because they were regarded as proto-Christian. There's no evidence that anyone else read them in that period, at least, other than Christians, and thereafter. And then the rest is like some New Testament and then really, really esoteric authors that, you know, no one's ever heard of. Anyway, the first century AD is a wasteland. It's just empty, and the second is like millions and millions of words.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And here's the thing. It's not that no texts were written in the first century AD. No, no, no, no, no. It quite possibly might have been even fuller, but none of it survives because of selection. And the second century survives again because of selection. So I want to understand the principles behind those selections.

Well, I'm afraid that it's even worse than that. It's not, it wouldn't just be starting from a zero basis, right? It's worse. And you ask, it's interesting that you should put it that way, like, for their work, because right now, being perceived as someone who works on late texts or Christian texts or, quote, Byzantine texts can be a professional disadvantage, like, serious. And there's a question of disciplinary identity here that needs to be policed, right, and monitored closely, because many classicists, especially, you know, junior graduate students and junior faculty, can't afford to be perceived as stepping that far outside their field. In many cases, that's not universally true, and there are classics departments who hire experts in late antiquity now. I mean, that's a bit more common. Beyond that, in North America, there are only like three or four departments of classics who feature such, who feature specialists or scholars who work on later things. So I think the first item of business would be to overcome that sense of professional jeopardy. That is, like, I tease colleagues sometimes about this. Like, for example, I remember actually in grad school already, there's a fellow graduate student in a class I was in, classics, I was in history, but I took many classics courses, and there was one who was working on the Life of Thucydides by Marcellinus. And I said, 'Ah, you're a Byzantinist. This is very likely like a sixth-century text.' And it's essentially like how to make sense of Thucydides in the late antique rhetorical classroom. That's kind of what it is. And, 'No, no, no, no, not at all, totally not. No, I'm a classicist, that I, you know, I'm not interested in that period. I'm just interested in what it says about Thucydides.' Like, yes, so were many people in the sixth century. Like, ah, it's like, anyway, but yeah, there's this anxiety of, you know, the fear of the loss of disciplinary identity by doing, you know, Christian or Byzantine things or whatever. And I understand it because since it's such a decentralized system where these values are spread out, so they're so widespread, and we don't have any central committee that can say, oh, from now on, if you're working on Greek literature, even if it's 10th century, you're a Greek literature scholar. It's the same language essentially, right? It's not like, and many of the same literary templates are still being used. It's not, this is the frustrating and fascinating thing about classicists is that they're trained in this language that they can then, if they wanted to, go on and use for so many more centuries' worth of literature, and they don't. Be that as it may. So that is a major problem because it's not something that is stated in works of scholarship. It's something that's enforced by dissertation advisers and hiring committees and things like that, which are all like private or secret. However, to answer your question on a basic level, classicists would benefit, I think, from not taking their archive at face value the way they do, as if it's something that just fell from the sky and we can now work on it. Generations of philologists have worked very hard to extract quotations from later authors and publish them as fragmenta, and sort of created the illusion of something that never had a context.

But we don't want to read that existing text, even though it would explain why this is being quoted in the first place and perhaps whether it's being quoted accurately. And not just accurately in a sort of very strict philological sense, but it's possible that, you know, some editorial interventions have been made. Anyway, yeah. So don't take this for granted and be more curious about where it comes from and why you have it. Why do you think that you have it? And why don't you have what you don't have? And there's a lot that we don't have, obviously, right? But why don't we have it? And I think that in some respects this illuminates aspects of even ancient history or puts them under a different light. But I won't hide that this also is, that I have, I mean, not selfish so much, but like my field's interests are also at stake here.

I simply don't like my field being treated as a kind of adversary or negative, you know, negative, a polar opposite of the classical world. It cannot have been, since it was full of people who were doing very much the same kinds of things that classical scholars do today. That is, learning to read that ancient language, loving its texts, commenting on them and so forth, who moreover had a native relationship to the language in question, who were superb, some of them, at using it, like way beyond any modern attempts at prose composition. Like it was just, it's just on a different level. And who read them sometimes with a different eye and in some cases able to provide considerable insight. So I mentioned Photius, he has a very brief entry on Herodotus. He does have one. I think it's so brief because he kind of assumed, okay, well, Herodotus is probably well known and I'm not going to spend that much time on whatever. But he reads Herodotus as a text in the Persika tradition, as a history of Persia, which is not, to put it mildly, is not how most classicists read it, though there are some who independently have picked this up. So a while ago, this German scholar in the early 20th century, Felix Jacoby, had argued that Herodotus' history is actually two works, that Herodotus started as an ethnographer and geographer and only later turned to history, and so the first half of the work is more sort of geographical and ethnographic, and the second half is more historical about the Persian Wars. And this does not appear to be true, and I think Photius is actually correct, that you can identify by the thread that runs throughout the Histories, and it is very specifically the sequence of Persian kings, and the ethnography is ordered according to the sequence in which the Persian kings encountered foreign people. And then there's like digressions upon the digressions, and so when he's talking about, I don't know, the Egyptians or the Scythians, and the Scythians meet a people, then he digresses on those people and so forth, then comes back to the Scythians, then comes back to the Persians, but there's always a Persian king in the background whose reign is structuring that part of the work. And so Photius is right. Now, Photius is also interested in Herodotus in a sense, because a history of Persia is very useful for understanding many of the books of the Bible, right? And he notes, like, they were explicit about this, that Herodotus fills in some of the background for understanding some of the other works in the Septuagint, right? Without, however, even mentioning Jerusalem. Like, was it Mann who had said that a single page by Herodotus on Jerusalem would have put legions of biblical scholars out of work? Anyway, so that's another reason why Herodotus interested them, because he provides the political and historical background for events in the Old Testament.

Yes. So I would make two recommendations. Before either of those, they should dismiss the idea of Byzantium from their head. There never was such a thing. There was only the Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire, and it's the same state, the same polity as what they might know from, let's say, the second century. And they should try to think about it that way, because the term Byzantine brings all of that baggage that makes them allergic to what they're about to read. Get rid of it and build up your own idea of what this civilization, what this society was like from your own readings, and without importing all of the baggage about eunuchs and, you know, unwashed aesthetics and angry bishops. So the first thing would be read a short history of the thing. Just, I got 150 pages. There are so many now, brief histories, concise histories, whatever, just to get a sense of the big picture. It will only take you a couple of hours, and you will be better off for it. And you will kind of know generally what's going on in each period. If you want to read a long one, I can recommend one of those too. And the second thing would be to start by reading Filippo Maria Pontani's about 150-page survey of, I think it's called Byzantine Scholarship. Anyway, it's a survey of how scholars in the East Roman tradition engaged with ancient texts, like what they wrote about them, often like the scholia, the manuscripts, these kinds of things. It's a very well-written, clear, and in many cases detailed survey. It can't capture everything. Just think, for example, of Eustathius of Thessaloniki, 12th-century bishop of Thessaloniki, but also a Homeric scholar who wrote commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey that are in aggregate something like 7,000 pages or something insane. I don't think there's any human being who's ever read both. Maybe he was the last person who ever got them both, and only because he wrote them. But they are major sources for ancient commentaries that are lost, but also his own observations, which are sometimes very, very sharp, sometimes wacky, but sometimes sharp. And this is a man who just loved, he adored Homer, and he thought that Homer was just the best guide to life and the best author to think with in just about every context. And anyway, we have lots of his other works, and this is a very serious scholar in general. Okay, so there's a whole book on that. Bolk Vanderberg has written a book on how Eustathius read Homer through rhetorical templates and manuals. It's not the only way he reads Homer. There's a lot of allegory. There's other things. But that's a good introduction. So then once you identify the one tradition or the genre or the author you're interested in, then there's scholarship that can help you follow through on the rest.

And here I got to say, classical scholars are always looking for new material to work on. I mean, how many, you know, more dissertations can I have? Say, this is a rhetorical question because obviously it would be an infinite number of dissertations on any ancient author. But remember when I mentioned earlier that the scope of anglophone classical scholarship gradually expanded during the 20th century to include Hellenistic and to include Roman imperial. Part of the reason for that is just the sheer need for more authors to work on. Like at some point it becomes very exciting to look at, you know, what's off the edges of the map that you're allowed to see, and you're like, what's over there? And you just go a little bit further, and you know, this isn't entirely bad. And with your classical training, you start to see things that maybe people who are trained only in like patristics or only in late antiquity don't see. And this is now happening. I mean, it's always been happening, but it's happening still, and there are lots of works that do this. And Stephen Smith's book on the sixth-century erotic epigrams is an interesting case, and I mentioned this because it won an award in your organization with...