Sidequest 12 - Anthony Kaldellis on the "Byzantine Empire" and Roman Identity

I am well. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

I've been at it for five years now, and I do take an extended break during the summer. I'm coming to the end of one of those long breaks. I think I haven't posted an episode since mid-July, but I do need a break because I have to do my own work, and making podcasts, as you know, is a lot of work. So I had been thinking about starting some kind of discussion about my field in a podcast medium for many years before I actually did. So eventually I did so, and I can no longer remember what the catalytic factors were for deciding to start in the fall of 2019, but I had the strong impression for a long time that my field was not taking advantage of all of the sort of media of communication by which people were learning and engaging with ideas and history, among other things, that we are kind of trapped in the media in which we are trained in grad school, right? So my colleagues are trained to write articles and, you know, book chapters and books and give conference papers and academic lectures and teach their students, not anything remotely like this medium, right? Which is why a number of them feel very, very nervous when you invite them on. They want to come on, they understand that this is a very good idea, but it makes them feel very nervous. And in part that's because it's outside their training, but it does reach larger audiences than any monograph, any article, or any academic conference would. I mean, it just does. So I thought that the ideas and the latest developments in my field would benefit from being sort of broadcast more widely, I mean, as widely as interested, you know, Byzantine studies would get. So those were the... I wanted to try a new medium, basically. I wanted just to play around with it and see how it goes.

Oh, they almost always think that, if not always. And some have done podcasts elsewhere or before, and I've had guests on sometimes a couple of times, and no, they all find it in retrospect to be a happy experience after all. They get email afterwards from people who listen to it who would never have been exposed to their ideas. You know, there's one other place where academics actually talk about their ideas in a more casual way, and that's like over dinner or at bars. Like, I don't drink, I don't go to bars, but there are places where we talk shop and where we kind of, you know, let our hair down or, you know, are more unguarded, like among friends, because without our apparatus of footnotes and hedging and qualifiers and all of that, academics feel a little naked. And this is what makes them so insecure. Like, you go out on the podcast and you're expected to kind of generalize a little bit, and academics are terrified of that because they're always calling each other out about it, right? Like, that's the whole game of academic one-upmanship is like, well, that's a generalization, and here I found an exception, or we need to qualify that, or blah blah. You know, like, there's a lot of that. It's kind of pedantic, and, you know, we do it because we're academics. So when you go out into a podcast medium and you don't have your arsenal of, you know, footnotes and references and all the hedging language that we use when we write academic prose, it can feel a little, um, exposed. You can feel a bit exposed.

Well, the last thing that you said, definitely. In other words, there is always a sense among academics about, like, outreach. You know, how do we get the message, whatever the message is, out? How do we reach broader audiences? That always elicits a certain amount of hand-wringing among academics who are thinking more about the social context of academic life, right? It's not, however, something that is institutionalized in any way. And because it's not a canonical medium, for example, it's not something I put on my annual reports. It's not something that counts as a professional activity, nor have I ever asked that it be counted that way. I don't want it to be folded into the bureaucracy of CVs and annual evaluations and things like that. The moment that happens, it might actually start to feel less pleasant for me to do it. I wanted it to be outside, so I don't expect anybody in the university administration, as it were, to treat this as academic work that I need to be recognized for. But sometimes colleagues will tell me, oh, I listened to that, it's very good, you know, thanks for doing it. I've had a dean who apparently listens to some episodes every once in a while and has told me that she enjoys it, and so that's great, okay, you know. So I think it's sort of understood that I'm doing something general, may be important for the mission of the university, but it's not something that the university can institutionally see, or at least I've not made the effort to help it see it, nor do I necessarily want to.

Yes. So because these terms like antiquity, the Middle Ages, whatever, whatever, these are very abstract and fuzzy terms. They don't, you can't pin them down to very specific things in such a way that you can then easily say, ah, it ends here, right? So if you define antiquity with reference to a particular tax structure, a particular army structure, a particular type of intellectual activity, and then you say, well, this ends here, therefore antiquity ends here, therefore the Middle Ages begin here. But we don't. These are very broad and fuzzy terms. So we shouldn't be looking for very clear-cut, you know, beginning and end points to any of them, unless you're saying something like Islamic history. Well, okay, or Christian history, like that's a different kind of thing because that refers to some very specific events, individuals, texts, beliefs, and so forth. Let me correct what you started with, that Byzantium and antiquity might be antithetical, and you are correctly reflecting very widespread views when you say that. I'm not calling you out for being out of touch with how these terms are defined, right? And I don't agree with that assessment of late with the reading that I've done. But yeah, please, this is part of why I wanted to have you on, right? So let me flip that exactly on its head and say that there is no antiquity without, at least on the Greek side, without what we call Byzantium, for many reasons. But here's one of them: the reason why classical antiquity exists as a thing for us at all is because of the survival of a corpus of literature, right? Without Homer, the tragedies, Plato, Thucydides, etc., there is no Greek antiquity. There's just a... without those things, there would just be a period of history of mild interest for a few specialists. It would be something like, you know, ancient Anatolian studies or Assyriology or whatever. I'm not putting those fields down, but they do not have the cultural presence of something like classical antiquity or Greek antiquity, right? The Greek classics, we have classics departments. We don't have Assyriology departments, you know, they're folded in with other things, and we have classics departments everywhere, or almost everywhere, or we used to. But anyway, not only that, the origin of the modern Western European university is in the classics. Like when universities began, that's what they were, plus, you know, Roman law, depending, plus theology, depending on where you are. But that's what it is. When you studied disciplines, it meant you're an expert on those books by Aristotle, right? That's how our academic departments came about. It's which book of Aristotle do you study? So classics is like the matrix of this intellectual life in universities. It is pervasive in the culture, and that is because of those texts. And those texts survive solely because they were preserved in the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople by people who liked to read them and comment on them and teach them. Had they not done that, we would not have those texts. We do not have Greek texts surviving outside of that channel of transmission, right? Okay, we have a few on papyri. You know, we might have been able to, you know, pull a few fragments out of the papyri, some inscriptions. It's a long one that has some Epicurean philosophy on an inscription, yeah, things like that, but it would be nothing compared to what we have. We have those texts because the people we label Byzantines and assume to be, quote, antithetical to the classical tradition, were actually the ones who kept it. And they didn't keep it for us. They didn't know about us. They kept it for themselves because this meant something to them. But instead, we've written this narrative where they and the classics are antithetical cultures, right? So in Western tradition, the classics are like all freedom and science and reason and logic and light, and the Byzantines are all like, ah, you know, superstitious and intrigue and eunuchs and decline and fall and all of that, and never the two shall meet. When in fact it's the exact opposite. We owe them everything. And not only do we owe them everything, they made choices about what texts to keep and what texts not to keep, and they made those choices based on their own priorities. Now, for some things like Homer and some of the tragedians and Plato and so forth, those, in a sense, choices that those authors are canonical and they're like super important and we need to keep them, had already been made in antiquity. And so in a certain sense, you can say, okay, the, quote, Byzantines are sort of following ancient priorities because they accepted them, they had internalized them, they were established by that point, right? But for all the rest, you look at a classical library, what got a lot more than just those authors, those are their choices, and they're meaningful, significant choices that they made for their own sake. So it's not antithetical in that sense, just saying.

Sure. So that's just one part of the story. The question that you asked is the important one: why do we separate these things? And this is part of a long Western tradition of disparaging the Eastern Empire for political reasons. And there are lots of... I'm writing a separate study of the whole thing in its larger dimensions, right? But to make a long story short, as they emerged from what you call the Dark Ages, Western European societies began to appropriate elements of Eastern Roman culture, things like Roman law, which they accessed through the codification of Roman law made by Justinian in Constantinople in the sixth century. So that, like, what counts as Roman law in subsequent European tradition is what a sixth-century Eastern emperor in Constantinople and his scholars said it was, just flat out like that. They were accessing things like classical Greek learning after a certain point, all of which they got from the East in Constantinople. They had almost no local access to that in Western Europe. Forms and protocols and symbols and insignia of imperial rule. So how do you start to get, like, Western emperors, like in the Holy Roman Empire and things like that? Like, where are they getting their idea of what an emperor looks like? So a lot of those came from Constantinople, not all of them, but a lot of them did. And so there's this process of appropriation that is almost never explicitly acknowledged. Instead, you have a, you know, starting around the eighth century, a very persistent sort of drumroll of disparagement. And so the Easterners are considered sort of, they're labeled Greeks, not Romans. And Greeks in the Middle Ages means shifty, unreliable, treacherous, kind of sexually ambiguous, unmanly types. Anyway, and that continues for quite a while. You add religious polemic to it because the Church of Constantinople did not recognize the Pope as the supreme head of the church, and so that led to another layer of polemic and distrust and dislike. So what you're referring to in the Crimean War, this is a mid-nineteenth-century war between Britain and France on the one hand and Russia on the other. Britain and France sort of coming to the aid of the Ottoman Empire. Anyway, this is a complicated, messy situation. The, okay, so the Crimean War is a turning point in what Western societies call the Eastern Empire. So until that point, they called it the Empire of the Greeks, following medieval practice. They rarely ever called it the Roman Empire or the Eastern Roman Empire. Sometimes it was a very, very minority, marginal view in the West to acknowledge it for what it was. They usually called it the Empire of the Greeks. And the reason why that term became problematic in the mid-nineteenth century is because, you know, in the 1820s, Greece had its revolution, independence from the Ottoman Empire. It established its own state. And in the Crimean War, Greece more or less sided with Russia, sort of unofficially, but it did. Athens was occupied by French and British troops. And the Greek slogan for those Greeks who fought in the war was Greek Empire or death, right? And that made the idea of a medieval Empire of the Greeks kind of problematic for Western historians because it seemed to be endorsing a kind of imperialism on the part of the modern Greek state, which was perceived to be allied with Russia, because at that time it was. And Russia was perceived as this kind of Orthodox despotism that wanted to retake Constantinople, which it often said it did, and reestablish the Greek Empire in place of the Ottoman Empire as a kind of proxy Orthodox state controlling the Balkans, but also the Bosporus and the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. So European powers are thoroughly alarmed, and their sort of scholarly wing drops Empire of the Greeks and gradually phases in this term Byzantium and the Byzantines, which is kind of nebulous and neutral and doesn't really mean anything, as a safer alternative than identifying this medieval tradition with a modern nation-state, the Greeks. And that's how we got stuck with this term Byzantine and Byzantium, which is just an archaic name for the city of Constantinople, right? It doesn't, it would be like calling people New Amsterdamians or something, just instead of New York or Americans. It's just kind of a weird archaism. It's buried deep in the antiquarian vocabulary that was used, you know, even in the Middle Ages, but it's not an identity. And so then we got the field of Byzantine studies, and that's the one that we're currently occupying. And the history of these terms is all very problematic. We don't need them. We have actual, authentic, reliable terms from that time.

Yeah, what you're seeing there are attempts to reverse-engineer a justification for a practice that's pre-existing. In other words, when you're seeing those kinds of claims, we're dealing with scholars who are operating in a tradition that has already decided that these people are not Romans, or they're something else, they're Greek, or they're Byzantines, or whatever. And then you have to sort of counterintuitively find reasons to justify it. And so historians just come up with all kinds of... I have come across so many reasons to ostensibly justify why they're not who they said they were. One of them is this, the language, which, as you know, is not a real reason, because ancient Romans, many of them also spoke Greek. Marcus Aurelius is a Roman, Latin-speaking emperor from Rome, wrote his memoir, you know, his Meditations in Greek. Julius Caesar spoke Greek. He was native, and he was in fact native in Greek. The moment when Julius Caesar is being assassinated, and what's his name, Casca or whoever is stabbing him in the neck, Julius Caesar blurts out when he sees Brutus coming at him, well, we all know that phrase in Latin, but in fact he said it in Greek. This is explicitly stated in the sources. So Julius Caesar, at the moment when he's being assassinated, is not trying to perform, like, oh, I know Greek and I'm going to say this in Greek. No, no, he's perfectly comfortable in Greek, because Roman culture had always been, always, you know, part of the broader Greek world. And it's, you know, anyway, whatever. I can go on and on and on about that particular criterion. Rome was one of the largest Greek-speaking cities in the Empire. It always was. This is why St. Paul wrote to the Romans in Greek, because the Christian community in Rome was Greek-speaking, because Rome was a very large Greek city. Anyway, setting that aside, I've come across other reasons such as, oh, Byzantium is not Roman, it's too small, or it's not Roman because there are too many eunuchs at the court. I've even come across one that is like, well, Byzantines are not interested in oral sex, and so they're not Romans. I'm not kidding, in a publication. Then you realize, okay, you're just looking for things to say here. It's not like you're starting from the reasons. Anyway, they're pretty funny.

So I have no idea what you just said, but I'm assuming it's on point.

Yes. So to give the relevant background to your audience, in the fifth century, the western half of the Roman Empire collapses into pieces and essentially disappears. The eastern half does not. The eastern half continues on for another thousand years, and this is the Eastern Roman Empire, a.k.a. Byzantium. I think you're right that if there had, if the Western imperial tradition had continued, see, even down to that point, the two halves, as it were, of the Empire, even though they had their own emperors, were still regarded as sort of the same state, the same society, you know, Romans here, Romans there. In the fifth century, you begin to get terminology such as East Romans, West Romans, which is just like a very broad kind of noun. Romans from each half could hold office in the other half. This was not a problem. Even the highest offices, consulships, praetorian prefects, this sort of thing, they were administratively divided into two halves, but not always two. In other words, even the distinction that we have between the western half and the eastern half, it wasn't always divided that way. Sometimes you would have three emperors, sometimes you would have one. Usually you had two as a matter of convenience, and they, you know, evolved in somewhat different ways. So they...

weren't entirely in lockstep. The western administrative and military structures were a little different. They're sort of more archaic into the fifth century. The eastern half made some changes to its military structures. Certainly the churches had... so the churches of Rome and Constantinople had very different ideas about who's supposed to be in charge and things like that. But those kinds of divisions are not like... they're not cosmic, you know, end-of-story kinds of things. They're the sorts of things that always happen in any society and had been happening at Rome for a while. So unless you get post-Roman Western institutions like the papacy, like the German emperors in the Middle Ages, who want to claim the Roman legacy for themselves exclusively and deny it to Constantinople, you're never going to get this kind of bias with which we've been living all of this time. That's, in other words, we're living within a framework that was defined by those medieval institutions, all of which are post-Roman Empire in the west, that were trying to kind of reinvent or reimagine the Roman Empire under their leadership in different ways, like the Republic of St. Peter at Rome being a kind of authentic Romanness, or, you know, the German emperors claiming to be the imperator Romanorum or whatever. I mean, those are... yeah, unless you get those kinds of phenomena, there would have been no, you know, none of this denialism that we've got today.

The narrative about Western Civ keeps changing so much. We'd have to be more specific about, you know, which version of it we mean. But generally, the relationship, I think, the Eastern Empire is seen in a more utilitarian way. In other words, what can we take from it while still othering it? If you were to... I mean, look, it kind of depends on how invested you are in the narrative of sort of Westernness. Is this a thing? Because its genealogies are constructed in very strange ways. For example, you might have a genealogy of Western Civilization like a textbook. I'm not, I'm not like, you know, reaching into some obscure corner of a textbook, and it's got like Mesopotamia and Egypt, but like in antiquity, right? And then Greece, and then Rome, and then the Western Middle Ages. So the genealogy keeps moving from the past, you know, toward the present, but it's also moving in this northwesterly direction. So it starts in the East and over time moves westward. It moves to Greece, it moves to Rome. So there's a point when like the ancient Near East is quote Western, but then it stops being Western for some reason. There's a point when Greece and Rome are Western, then they stop being Western, in part because especially during the late Middle Ages you have this flip from southern Europe to northern Europe, right? And eventually it's the northern European powers that have all the money and the resources and the empires and are writing all the histories and creating all the universities and hiring the professors who talk about how important northern Europe is, right? And it's Berlin and Paris and London, and they're now looking down at southern Europe, right? Like Naples and Athens, it's kind of backward, you know, not just Mediterranean, which sounds nice, but like southern Europe, which means like, you know, the economic crisis, bank failures, and corruption and so forth, right? That's traveled to the States, it seems like, but we can stay away from that.

Yeah, yeah, that's a different... Anyway, so the locus of being Western keeps sort of shifting in these narratives. Is it so, you know, ancient Greece we want, but medieval and modern Greece we don't want. Ancient Rome we want, but it's not clear that we want medieval Rome, but we certainly don't want early modern Rome, like that's icky. Anyway, it's a strange way of constructing a narrative. But the society that I study, so the Eastern Roman Empire, only little bits of it get caught up here, but they're pretty big bits. So for example, Christianity, Christianity as it is historically known in the West, is an Eastern Roman creation in late antiquity. All of the basic texts are in Greek, the doctrines are all in Greek, the church councils were all in that part of the world, they're all like around Constantinople. So all of the beliefs that a Western Christian holds and the canonical, the most important texts, are in Greek. And so we want, quote, we want those, so we carve them out and kind of take them. We also want Roman law, so we carve that out and we take that too. And we also want all the ancient Greek classics, and so we'll say, well, okay, well, you know, tip of the hat, those Byzantines kept those texts for us. Thank you guys. I know you didn't read them very carefully, you didn't care for them, you just kept them somewhere for us. We'll take them now, thank you very much, they belong to us. And so you keep taking things from their context but not acknowledging that context as part of your story. This is where it's problematic. In other words, if you were to take all of those... I mean, like, you know, these are Western societies, if you were to take all of those things but acknowledge that society, which no longer exists, as part of your story, that's a different kind of narrative. But they don't acknowledge it as part of their story, and so it becomes very exploitative because the appropriation is mixed at all times with sort of these pejorative, disparaging, not just names and insults, but whole narratives about the Eastern Empire and it's decadent and all of that.