Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium, Episode 335: 10 Influential East Romans with Anthony Kaldellis, Part One.
With our narrative complete, we'll be spending some time looking back on Byzantium and considering its legacy. And when I thought about how to shine light on different aspects of the New Roman Empire, I naturally thought of Anthony Kaldellis. His book, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, is the defining work of our generation on this subject. And those of you who've sampled it will know that in addition to a political narrative, Professor Kaldellis touches on the great cultural figures who shaped East Roman life. And yet none of them get detailed treatment in that work, since like this cast, the focus is on political narrative.
So I asked Professor Kaldellis if he would come back and talk about 10 influential figures who stood to the side or outside of the political narrative, but who influenced East Roman life or culture in a major way. Today he takes us through his first five picks. He also recommends further reading for those who want to learn more.
For those of you randomly joining the show at this point, Anthony Kaldellis is a professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of over a dozen books on Byzantium, including the definitive history. Follow the links at the website or in the description of this episode to find out more.
And before the interview begins, a reminder that I will be part of two roundtables at the Intelligence Speech online conference on February the 28th, including a panel discussing what-if moments from Roman history. Get your tickets now at intelligencespeechonline.com and use the code BYZANTIUM to get 10% off.
Professor Anthony Kaldellis, welcome back once again to the podcast.
Pardon. Thank you for having me back.
Not at all. This is your second home on the internet, I very much feel.
I had a blast the last time you had me on, and so, you know, always happy to come back.
Well, thanks to you, I have reached 1453. Your new history of the entire New Roman Empire was invaluable, and here we are dealing with questions of legacy and kind of looking back at Byzantium as a whole. And lots of listeners ask questions about Byzantine intellectuals and non-narrative figures. Who should they know about? Who made a great contribution to Byzantine life in one way or another, or the world generally? And so I thought, I'm going to use my cheat code and call Anthony Kaldellis, who's just written the entire history. So presumably you had to read everything under the sun over the course of that. And so I thought you might have some figures in your mind ready to go.
So we're talking about non-narrative figures, thinkers, bishops, scientists, you know, as we would call them looking back. And I kind of left it to you to pick 10 figures to tell the listeners a little bit about. So how did you approach this challenge?
Right. So I excluded emperors, even though some of those, you know, fit into several categories of influence. But these are all writers or scientists in one way or another, mostly writers. They are almost all of them close to the centers of power. So this we need to acknowledge.
I briefly toyed with an alternative, which was to focus on different social classes, but it's very difficult to find individuals who exemplify many of them and do so in an interesting way. So the people we're going to be talking about are those who normally wrote a lot and played a decisive role in various sectors of knowledge or culture, and had a long-term influence and remain of interest today. So your audience is going to know most of them, and I had to cut it down to 10, whom I will be presenting in chronological order, not order of importance. It's very difficult to compare the importance of people, you know, one is in the 4th century, one's in the 15th century, and they just had a different kind of impact.
So yeah, I will be talking a little bit about their personalities insofar as we can kind of reconstruct them. But so I thought that I would tell you a little bit about who they were and what my feel for them is. Like if I were a department chair and they were a colleague in the department, what would it be like to deal with these people? But also a little bit about why their work is important. How's that?
Fantastic. It'd be interesting to know as well, are they enjoyable to read, you know, as a modern person or as a scholar or so on, but I'm sure that will come up.
All right. Or is it, you know, is it a chore, you know? If I forget to cover that, ask me about each one.
Yeah, we'll do. All right. And a lot of these figures you will have touched on in some way. But you know, normally they appear in narratives at the point where they, you know, get involved in high politics. But the rest of their lives are also kind of interesting, and we'll talk about those, too.
Okay. So, who is number one?
All right. So, number one, and standing in for the Patristic class generally, so the group that we collectively call Church Fathers. I'm not going to have too many of these. Many of them are very, very important, obviously, but I didn't want to pack the list with them because I wanted a variety. So, number one, as probably the most important Church Father in the literary culture, is Gregory of Nazianzus.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Born in Cappadocia in 329 AD, so the year before Constantinople was founded. A first-rate mind who studied in Alexandria and Athens. He went into the church and became a prominent bishop, rising to become Archbishop of Constantinople itself from 379 to 381 during the reign of Theodosius I. He was one of the leading defenders of the theology agreed at the Council of Nicaea and a very well-respected writer and preacher. He is remembered as one of the Church Fathers, the bishops and thinkers who played a decisive role in shaping Christian teaching within the Roman world.
Just to clarify, Nazianzus was a town in Asia Minor he was from. And so you can call him Gregory or Gregorios of Nazianzus, or the adjective from Nazianzus, which is Nazianzen in English or Nazianzenos in Greek. So it's Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory Nazianzen, but never Gregory of Nazianzen. Just to be, because you see that in print, it's like, no, no, that's not what that is.
Okay. So, why is he important?
Well, I think in the long term, he is important because he created models of Christian classical literary culture that were just decisive in the evolution of, you know, Christian writing under the empire. In the sense that up until that point, up until him, it was entirely possible for Christians to feel insecure about the rhetorical quality, that is the literary quality of their writing, which, you know, starting in the New Testament, they knew this was not great prose. This was not sophisticated Greek. And they had a chip on their shoulder about that. And their enemies, opponents, critics, whatever, on the non-Christian side were also aware of this and held it against them.
Within Gregory's lifetime, so this is a lifetime that spans roughly most of the 4th century, right? The Emperor Julian had called Christians out for this. It's like, yeah, you're using our literary giants, who were people inspired by the gods, because your literature is so lacking. He makes this argument.
And Gregory, his corpus is in a sense an answer to that challenge in that he uses the highest level of rhetorical sophistication and intelligence to produce Christian versions of many of the literary genres that were prized in that society, right? Especially, for example, orations, because rhetoric is like the core literary practice. And they are often not easy to read, which was a plus, right? But not obscure in a way that you don't know what he's talking about. They're difficult to read in the technical sense that you have to like stare at a sentence for a while until it clicks and you're like, oh, now I get it. And it's like, wow, okay, you really put some thought into composing this sentence, right?
So a lot of rhetorical fireworks. He wrote poems as well in lots of different meters and styles, and different kinds of narratives are embedded in the orations and the poems. Also letters, epistolography. And some of the orations are just theological. So we have to add to his importance that he was the main theologian on the Nicene side in the 4th-century controversies, that is against what we call the Arian position. So he was the one who developed the main arguments for the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.
And he was Archbishop of Constantinople very briefly during the Council of 381, right? And which was the council by which Theodosius reinstated Nicaea as the official doctrine of the empire. So for those reasons, and especially for being the mainstay of Christian literary classical culture, in other words, for the next millennium, when writers are saying, well, you know, we have the ancient authors, the pagan authors, and they're great, and we also have our authors, the Christian authors, and they're great too, Gregory of Nazianzus is at the top of the list, and he's the foundation for all of the rest. And so he's often the person they point to as vindicating the possibility of a Christian literary culture in Greek.
Plus the theology, he's also called Gregory the Theologian for that reason. So he's just very, very important for those reasons. Now, having said that, this is not an easy character. It is very difficult to like him unless you really like insecure... He's a whiny little... I mean, I'll just say it, right?
No, he comes from a wealthy background. He never lived without servants, even when he's doing ascetic retreats, right? Like, this is someone who doesn't, right? He likes to talk about withdrawing from the world. That always means on an estate somewhere with lots of servants and books. I mean, it's like, yeah, that's... I do that too. I don't call it asceticism, right?
And he had daddy issues, for sure. A very difficult father who had him when he was 50, so an older man who lived to a hundred. And Gregory was always under the shadow of this very stern, difficult father, and kind of trying to get away from him. Gregory of Nazianzus did not like responsibility. He hated being put in positions of responsibility. What he wanted, probably more than anything, was just to go to Athens and just study rhetoric and classical culture, where he was there for 10 years, and he was dragged away from there against his will. Basically, his father was like, I'm cutting you off.
And then he's constantly manipulated by Basil of Caesarea, his friend, but that was a difficult friendship. Basil is always putting him in positions of authority for his own ends, just like manipulating him. And Gregory doesn't like that either, and he runs away, and he's like whining. Anyway, he's just a fickle... I've had colleagues like this. You know, and they're not the worst, but you can't count on them, you know? They just won't be there when you need them to do something, and they just whine all the time.
And so an example, when he's Archbishop of... when he's Bishop of Constantinople during the council, he's like again so difficult and whining, whining, that at some point he goes to the Emperor Theodosius and he threatens to resign, you know, if he doesn't get his way about whatever. And Theodosius had had it with him at that point. He said, oh, okay. And Gregory was floored. He never expected that it would just be taken. And he goes off and he whines and pouts some more, and he wrote a bunch of poems just whining. Anyway, so yeah, a difficult, difficult person like that.
Fantastic. Okay, well, so I have lots of questions following that. So just starting with the writing, are Christian leaders like him having to write in a style that's been established by the pagan authors of the past in order to have their writing appreciated as being as good?
Okay. And so that is then an influence on East Roman writers all the way to 1453.
Yes. Okay. Yeah. The standards of what counts as eloquence had been set in the past, and they were judging their own work by those. Yes.
So obviously his theology had to be good enough to stand up with the quality of his writing, but it is the quality of his writing that makes you choose him in this category, as in that writing lasted, you know, until...
Yeah, I'm not sure that we can separate those things because his theological writings established him as an authority on doctrine as well. And so, and you know, what he did was... Look, I mean, in a sense we owe him a lot because there were Christians who were very anti-classical culture and who would like just get rid of it. Not actively destroy, we're not talking about bonfires necessarily, but just kind of let it fall by the wayside and ignore it and just create their own kind of more vernacular Christian culture. Like, we have the Psalms and we have the Bible. Why do we need all of this Homer stuff?
And he loved all the Homer stuff. He really did. And he worked it into his works in various ways, from literary allusions to the language to the rhetorical templates. And so he made it so that aspiring Christian writers had to not only take on his writing, but his sources as well. So they needed that kind of training, right?
In fact, in the 5th century there was a scholar we call Pseudo-Nonnus, whatever. And he wrote a commentary on some of Gregory's orations to explain all the classical references because there's so many of them. Right? And he kind of made it necessary for Christians to know all the mythology and...
Yeah. Yeah. But that's already an interesting point because, you know, the last figure I covered in detail was the emperor Manuel Palaiologos. And of course, we only know him through his writing. And of course, we only know his writing through all the things he had to read as someone living, you know, a thousand years after this, but he's still having to read all the same things, you know, in order to participate in this culture and understand all the references.
Yes. Gregory became standard reading. Yeah.
Why him and not Basil of Caesarea?
That was a close one. So Basil was very important in a different way. I think as a model bishop, like this is how he was understood subsequently. As an organizer of charitable institutions, as getting things done as a bishop, that is liaising with the imperial authorities even when those authorities aren't necessarily friendly to you, in kind of trying to persuade local elites to go along with your projects, fund Christian projects.
But also as a theologian, you know, and a writer and an organizer of monastic communities. He was one of the first to do that outside of Egypt. Subsequent monasticism is very indebted to Basil. So definitely. It was very close. But because we're going to have other bishops and monastic organizers on the list, and because Gregory, I think, is just way more important as a writer and also as a theologian. They called him the theologian, not Basil. In the end, I went for Gregory. Now, Basil's also Santa Claus in Greece, you know.
That's a different legacy altogether. Okay. That's interesting.
Should I recommend a book about Gregory?
I think it would have to be McGuckin's biography, Gregory of Nazianzus or Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, it's called something like that.
Fantastic. So if listeners want to find out more, check that out. How enjoyable was he to read just for you? Obviously, you've had the classical training, so it's not comparing it to how easy it would be for someone else to read, but just for you personally.
It's always a test with him. You're kind of being tested, and that is not a virtue in modern writing, that's not what we look for, but it was then. So he's on the difficult side. Obviously, some of his works are easier than others. The poetry used to be reviled by classicists and even Byzantine philologists and whatever, like it used to be held in very, very low esteem, but it's being rehabilitated in recent years.
So let's see if we manage to get, I don't know, the classicists to read his poetry or anything like that. But sometimes his orations, even his theological expositions, are an intellectual pleasure to read, just the way he unwinds his ideas in this prose. It can be. There are passages that are just very, very well done.
I mean, I'm talking about reading it in the original.
Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah.
Number two, this is a figure who simply could not be left out of any list, and it is John Chrysostom.
John Chrysostom. Born 20 years after Gregory in 349 in Antioch. John was a brilliant speaker, hence his nickname Chrysostom, golden-mouthed. This skill saw him headhunted by the imperial regime, and he became Archbishop of Constantinople in 398 under Theodosius' son, Arcadius. Unfortunately, his willingness to criticize the rich and powerful for not living up to Christian ideals won him many enemies. These forces conspired to kick him out of office in 404 AD. To hear this story in full, sign up at Patreon at the highest pledge level, as he was the subject of my first Byzantine story, a four-part series.
A Christian preacher from Antioch, who was like a star preacher. Superstar on the preacher circuit, as it were, though I mean, there's not that much of a circuit though in Antioch. There probably wasn't internally. Who got poached from Antioch by Constantinople to be its bishop. So he was bishop of Constantinople then, 398 to 404. And it didn't end well for him. As I'm sure you've probably covered in the history, he got on the wrong side of court politics and ended up in exile under hard conditions. Not necessarily harsh, but he died in exile in the mountains of the eastern borders of the empire.
So John Chrysostom is huge because of both the volume and the quality of his homilies. And he also wrote some essays and a few letters, but it's the homilies that are the star attraction in his corpus. They are the massive set. In fact, I think he might even be larger than Galen in word count. Possibly. And between the two of them, I have read... between Galen and John Chrysostom together account for something like one-fifth of all extant Greek literature down to that time.
Wow. Galen being a doctor under Trajan sort of time?
A bit later, a bit later. Like Septimius Severus, the Severan dynasty.
Right, right, right. But he wrote an incredible amount about medicine.
Yes. So think massive medical textbooks on the one hand and the homilies of John Chrysostom on the other. And in part the corpus is so huge because he was such an authority for homilies that many, many, many other homilies were attributed to him subsequently. And so there's this huge corpus of spurious, that is they're not his, but they survived under his name because if you wrote a homily and you wanted it to have good chances for survival, you might attribute it to him. Right?
So why are these important? Well, for a number of reasons. The first is his general outlook. This is someone who really took the Christian message to heart, that is about its ethical implications. About what sorts of things you should do in daily life and what sorts of things you should not do in daily life. And he was very astute at tracing its psychological nuances and implications through every kind of feeling and situation that people might have, right? In relation to their wives, in relation to their slaves, in relation to each other, in relation to God, in relation to their conscience, and so on.
And he's rather stark about it. In other words, in his homilies, he will rail at people, he will denounce them for being hypocrites, for pretending to be Christians but not taking the message to heart, for not being charitable, for being wealthy and powerful and angry and all of this stuff. And he doesn't spare his audience. And by the way, I think that was his attraction. I mean, I don't think that people felt offended at this. I think they went precisely in order to have him dish it out.
And yeah, I think on a certain kind of psychological level, the whole approach might have backfired because I think Christian audiences may have felt that they were actually doing their Christian duty just by being subjected to that, rather than actually doing the things that he said, which are hard, hard.
And so he basically, like ultimately, in a certain sense, he just wanted society to turn into a big monastery. Not that he was a monk or inclined to the monastic life, really. But just that kind of like, oh well, sharing of wealth and, you know, yeah, anyway. And that was utopian and he knew it. Like he always knows that he's just this person who is always at odds with the world, the secular world.
Okay. So that is a huge attraction of the homilies. This is like why such an enormous corpus was preserved in so many copies. Like it's impossible probably to even count them. But also because many of those homilies are exegetical. In other words, they are on specific passages of scripture, especially the New Testament. And he will go through, like he will devote a sequence of homilies week by week on each passage in this gospel or, you know, that letter, the epistle, and so forth. And so these texts also became standard exegetical commentaries, right? That not just preachers, but anyone interested in what the Christian message was consulted for the next, well, down to today. In fact, he still is, right?
And so preachers in Greek-speaking societies ever since use those same homilies. Like you will just, and today I will read to you John Chrysostom's homily on, you know, Romans 3:13 or, you know, whatever. And that's not plagiarism. That's, I mean, okay, maybe you come up with your own homily, but that was, you know, that was done. So they were practically useful in that sense too, right? So a Christian message, exegetical, that is it kind of explaining, working out the nuances of the passages in the New Testament or, you know, the Bible generally. And for those reasons he merits inclusion.
But also the homilies are in a somewhat more accessible register of Greek. So they're not like Gregory of Nazianzus's much more rhetorically elaborate ones. There are a few moments when he kind of almost becomes vernacular. I mean, he's keeping it higher than that. But they're much easier to read and follow than Nazianzus's orations. And so that also increased his appeal. And he just has a very kind of vivid personality. Like you're reading him and you know you're in the presence of a person, right? Not just someone who's following some sort of rhetorical rules. A person who's like really passionately engaged with this material.
All right. That's why his work is so important. Now, he certainly was a difficult character and made enemies. In other words, he was not diplomatic. And not that he was like this kind of inflexible, you know, intolerant. I mean, he was those things, but I think he was better in person than his writings, than his homilies will sometimes imply. Nevertheless, he was difficult. He made enemies very, very easily, including powerful enemies. I think he just sometimes lacked a sense of who not to offend.
And by the time that he was put on trial and deposed, there were so many enemies in Constantinople just waiting to testify, including enemies at the court, that I think it was strike one against hiring fiery preachers from Antioch. Right? Strike two is Nestorius. And I think after that it was, okay, we're just going to stick with patriarchs should be bureaucrats. Let's not get the star speakers.
And of course at the same time he also had partisans. And so these groups would like physically clash. And the burning of Hagia Sophia, take one, the first version of Hagia Sophia, it burned in one of those clashes. Eventually the court decided he was just too much trouble. Decades later they brought him back with honors and reburied him in the imperial mausoleum right next to Gregory of Nazianzus, who's also buried there next to Julian.
Yeah, all these people end up in the same place, by the way.
