Byzantine identity

[Vitalis]

So, I talked with some Greeks online about the "Romanness" of the Byzantines. Most of them deny it, claiming that there was nothing Roman about them other than their citizenship. Which isn't a suprising answer, but then one of them said that Anthony Kaldellis isn't a viable source, as he is biased.

That made me think. I based my entire opinion about the topic on what Kaldellis wrote in his books, but how certain are we that he is right? Now that I think about it, he is really the only one (at least the only one I know) pushing this idea forward. Most of historians aren't that certain of how "Roman" were the Byzantines.

So, my question is: Is Kaldellis really the only one supporting this idea? Or are there other historians out there?

Also, what about the Roman identity AFTER 1453? I've heard this story about some Greeks on Lesbos, I think, still adhering to their Roman identity in 1912. And, supposedly some Greek minorities in countries like Ukraine or Moldova identify as some derrivaration of a Roman.

Lastly, would the Byzantines identify as Romans had their state survived longer, maybe until today? Or would Greek part of their identity be more important?

 

[Skallagrim]

The problem is that this kind of thing is highly subjective and -- often -- political. To me, an arch-Aristotelian, your essence is demonstrated by your characteristics and your behaviour... which means that Byzantines at some point stopped being Roman in any significant way. If you have a different political system, a different culture, a different language, etc. etc. and when in fact the only thing constituting your "Roman" identity is that you still call yourself Roman... then you are not (or: no longer) Roman. At that point, the only question remaining is: "When did the Byzantines stop being Roman?" -- and the oft-heard answer (to which I also tend to subscribe) is: "It was a gradual process, but the reign of Heraclius (who called himself Herakleios) is a pretty safe time to place the transition".

But there is also the opposite view, which is that your subjective identity is inherently valid, even when contrary to all facts and evidence. By that approach, Byzantines were always (and always remained) solidly Roman. And then questions of proof are meaningless, because subjective experience is all that matters.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

One point which may be relevant is the term "Hellenes" came in the late antique period to mean specifically one who followed the Ancient Greek religion, i.e., a pagan. So whilst in (IIRC) the 14th century people started using "Hellenic" as a national designation once again, for most of the Byzantine period calling yourself a Greek/Hellene would have meant calling yourself a pagan. Though it seems to me that this fact could be used to support either position -- "See, their identity was so bound up with Rome that they didn't even have a *concept* of non-Roman Greekness" vs. "See, 'Greek' to them was just a religious designation, so the fact that they didn't call themselves 'Greek' tells us nothing about their national identity."

If you have a different political system, a different culture, a different language, etc. etc. and when in fact the only thing constituting your "Roman" identity is that you still call yourself Roman... then you are not (or: no longer) Roman.

Agreed, though with the caveat that if there is sufficient continuity between each of the stages of the process then I think the earlier and later stages would still count as the same country. A lot has changed in China over the past thousand years, but I'd still say that China today is the same country as China during the Han Dynasty.

With the Byzantines, though, their cultural inheritance was clearly that of Greece rather than Rome. And contrary to what is often asserted, Greek and Roman cultures never fused into one, even during the height of the Roman Empire, and even amongst the upper classes. Roman authors imitated Greek models, but they were mostly imitating the "classics" written centuries before their time, not contemporary Greek authors; for their part, few in the Greek-speaking parts of the Empire even bothered to learn Latin. Even during the late Empire the Greek-speaking half of the Empire tended to regard the Latin-speaking half as uncultured and uncultivated, and the contempt in which the Byzantines held the "Latins" is well-known.

It might be worth separating out cultural nationality from political nationality here. Culturally speaking, the Byzantines were clearly Greek (duh, just look at their language). In terms of political nationality, the situation is more complex, and indeed I sometimes think the real break should be placed during the Crisis of the Third Century rather than the seventh, thirteenth or fifteenth centuries. To oversimplify matters somewhat, I'd say that there's a broad continuity in classical political thought and organisation from the archaic period right down to the third century, based on the importance of self-governing city states as the fundamental political units. (Even big empires such as Rome were in some ways just unions of lots of city-states; the classical Roman Empire was basically like Switzerland on steroids.) With Diocletian, though, this system was swept away, with the main political unit becoming the (centrally-defined) province rather than the city, and local city councils lost their previous importance and status, instead becoming just a bunch of people who had to undertake various burdensome duties with no real power. (So far did the city councils decline that by the 360s certain categories of criminals were literally being enrolled in them as a punishment.) So basically you've got a move away from the old ideal of the political community as a group of free individuals taking council together for the common good (as laid out in Aristotle's Politics) to a new and much more autocratic ideal whereby the Emperor is exalted above everybody else and his every word is law. This was also echoed on the local level, where cities were increasingly being run by the local landowner or bishop rather than a civic council. And of course this new imperial philosophy would end up lasting until the end of the Byzantine Empire.

So, to return to the question "Were the Byzantines Roman?", I'd say it depends on what you mean. If you mean "Was the culture of the Byzantine heartland in the medieval period a recognisable continuation of that of the Roman heartland in the Classical period?" the answer would have to be no. If, on the other hand, you mean "Was the political entity of which the Byzantines were citizens the same as the political entity known to history as the Roman Empire?" then I think that it was certainly identical with the late Roman Empire, although I'm less certain that the late Roman Empire was identical with the early Roman Empire.

 

[CHKeeley]

...but then one of them said that Anthony Kaldellis isn't a viable source, as he is biased.

How so? If anything, I’d say modern peoples wishing to transpose their national identity onto those of medieval peoples would hold more bias as a rule.

 

[mrmandias]

The problem is that this kind of thing is highly subjective and -- often -- political. To me, an arch-Aristotelian, your essence is demonstrated by your characteristics and your behaviour... which means that Byzantines at some point stopped being Roman in any significant way. If you have a different political system, a different culture, a different language, etc. etc. and when in fact the only thing constituting your "Roman" identity is that you still call yourself Roman... then you are not (or: no longer) Roman. At that point, the only question remaining is: "When did the Byzantines stop being Roman?" -- and the oft-heard answer (to which I also tend to subscribe) is: "It was a gradual process, but the reign of Heraclius (who called himself Herakleios) is a pretty safe time to place the transition".

But there is also the opposite view, which is that your subjective identity is inherently valid, even when contrary to all facts and evidence. By that approach, Byzantines were always (and always remained) solidly Roman. And then questions of proof are meaningless, because subjective experience is all that matters.

Good points, but the subjective identity argument isn't the only basis for calling the Byzantines Roman. You've heard of the ship of theseus, right? Where over the years each individual piece gets swapped out so by the end its a completely different ship, components wise. But some people claim its still the same ship because its in continuity with the original, and that is not a crazy position. So you can argue that the Byzantines were in continuity with Rome, legally and institutionally, even though the end result was pretty different from the original.

 

[Skallagrim]

Good points, but the subjective identity argument isn't the only basis for calling the Byzantines Roman. You've heard of the ship of theseus, right? Where over the years each individual piece gets swapped out so by the end its a completely different ship, components wise. But some people claim its still the same ship because its in continuity with the original, and that is not a crazy position. So you can argue that the Byzantines were in continuity with Rome, legally and institutionally, even though the end result was pretty different from the original.

I've had that discussion at some length, albeit sadly in Dutch, so I cannot simply reproduce my earlier observations on the topic here. The gist of my view is that if you replace parts of the ship with faithful reproductions, that is all well and fine. Some alterations can certainly not be avoided: Rome wasn't the same throughout its history, after all. But the shape of the thing, the materials from which it was crafted, the colour which it was painted, the shape of its sails and the curve of its prow... these were recognisable enough. Should those be kept, then the same ship can still be recognised even much later, after many a time of being patched up.

But now suppose that we take the ship and start replacing elements with different parts. Say that over time we gradually change the ship so much that its silhouette is wildly different; that it is wholly made of metal instead of wood; that it is painted in a completely different colour; that its sails have been replaced by a steam engine; that, in fact, the only thing that remains the same is the name painted on the hull. Is that still the same ship, at the end? I would say not. The only way to claim that it is the same ship -- when everything about it is in fact different -- is to rely on the assumption that identity is retained in some miraculous way that is divorced from physical (objective) reality. In other words: to rely on a subjective feeling of identity and identification.

(Which, to be fair, is not illegitimate. My initial reply has surely betrayed that this is very much not my view, and that I am constitutionally inclined to oppose it, but that's my, ah, subjective hang-up. People who wish to believe that Rome fell in 1453 are entirely within their rights to cherish that notion, just as old professor at my university had every right to insist -- as he did, quite vehemently -- that Napoleon murdered the Roman Empire in 1806.)

 

[mrmandias]

Your point isn't unreasonable, but at each step of the way the change isn't quite so large, and that matters, even if over time the changes cumulatively add up. You when you are 60 is going to be markedly different from you when you were 6 months, but its not obviously wrong to think you are in some sense the same being.

 

[herkles]

The question about identity here can be applied to pretty much any long lasting empire. Culture is not a static thing after all.

 

[snerfuplz]

So, I talked with some Greeks online about the "Romanness" of the Byzantines. Most of them deny it, claiming that there was nothing Roman about them other than their citizenship. Which isn't a suprising answer, but then one of them said that Anthony Kaldellis isn't a viable source, as he is biased.

Honestly I see this as more of because of how the modern Greek State shaped its modern identity rather than what the Byzantines thought of themselves. The modern Greek state made sure to emphasis its ancient Hellenic past rather than the medieval Byzantine state. Ironically the Byzantines themselves seemed more enamored with the ancient Hellenes then the much closer Romans while still calling themselves Romans. Though of course the Byzantines also identified more with the ancient Israelis as the Romans instead of the Jews were now God's chosen people

 

[Spatharios]

Hmm, this sort of question always tends to mix up two different things: one, were the Byzantines "Roman" or rather "Greek", and two, what are the continuities/relationships to the modern Greeks.

On the first, the Byzantines were politically "Roman", and IMO culturally as "Roman" as anyone could be. The Roman Empire of the 3rd-4th centuries was no longer the "Empire of Rome", but the "Empire of the Romans", and it had always had distinct regional cultures, dominated in the west by Latin and the east by Greek, and subject to the movement and mixture of populations during the Pax Romana, invasions, or forcible resettlements. The Byzantines were merely what remained of this empire after losses due to war, and the natural evolution of cultures over time and due to catastrophic external factors. I always found the argument that at some point they ceased to be "Roman" disingenuous; the Romans of Cicero's time would have been unrecognizable to those of Tarquinius Superbus, and the Christian Empire of Theodosius the Great would have been thoroughly alien to Cicero, but there is no one arguing that they were not "Roman".

Primarily, I suspect, because no one else claimed that title, and because they preserved the aura of the invincible/inevitable empire. The Byzantines got short shrift by Western historians until relatively recently; the (mostly unstated) argument goes something like this: Surely an empire that did not conquer everything in its path could not lay claim to be truly "Roman", because if they did not conquer everything, they were effeminate/weak/cowardly, and hence not "true Romans". Plus they abandoned Latin for Greek (cue Liutprand of Cremona and all the Crusaders' stereotypes about silk-wearing, effeminate, arrogant, treacherous Greeks), and hence (not coincidentally) left the mantle of Rome to be claimed by others more worthy (Charlemagne, Germany, Britain, depending on the writer and the age).

What the average Byzantine identified as is a difficult question to answer. Much like the average Balkan peasant in the 19th century, the most common answer would probably be just "Christian" or "local". But it is reasonable to assume they also knew that they were part of a Roman commonwealth, the "Romania", ruled from the City. At the same time, the upper elites clearly aped 5th-century BC Attic culture rather than that of the Roman Republic; but that was common in the Eastern Mediterranean since the time of Alexander, and had not been different even among the educated, Latin-speaking Romans.

Now, on the second part, the connection to the modern Greeks, culturally, geographically, and even ethnologically, the modern Greek nation is the direct offspring of the last three centuries of Byzantium, and of the peoples who still laid claim to be "Roman" right up to 1453, and who survived through the Ottoman rule after that. Modern Greeks are, as one historian has put it, "Byzantines living under the shadow of the Acropolis", and the (re)adoption of the term "Hellene" as an ethnonym occurred chiefly as part of the Modern Greek Enlightenment, which was greatly influenced by Western European ideas about Classical civilization (and also that Byzantium was theocratic and responsible for the worst kind of obscurantism, a notion that many of the Greek scholars, themselves quite familiar with the corruption of the Greek Church during their time, wholeheartedly agreed).