There are more than sufficient grounds to conclude that the Byzantine political sphere was defined in large part by a distinctly Roman and republican ideology. It is no longer possible to say dismissively that all these Roman notions survived only "in an antiquarian and vestigial sense". They were very much alive. The basileia belonged to the politeia (ie, the Greek rendition of the Latin term res publica), not the person who happened to occupy the throne, and the politeia belonged to all members of the republic, including the people. The emperor's sole responsibility was to labour on behalf of the republic, and he was morally and politically accountable to his subjects. The people may not have had much say in determining who was thrust before them as a candidate for the throne, but their consent was absolutely necessary for his accession and reign to be legitimate. There was no source of authority that could override the will of the people in this matter. They were, as Cliff Ando called them, "the shareholders in the res publica and in their corporate capacity still sovereign in the state."
Not only did imperial legitimacy have popular roots, it was contingent upon the people's continued good will. Popular opinion could not be taken for granted even when it had formally approved an emperor at a ceremony of accession; it had to be cultivated continuously. In this respect, Byzantium was the exact opposite of an oriental despotism or a monarchy by divine right. This emerges clearly when we consider the fate of emperors who lost the people's favour. What happened to them demonstrates that this republicanism was not a fiction or merely propaganda deployed by the monarchy to mobilise popular support. It corresponded to what the law stated, and the populace believed, was within the people's right and power. Episodes of popular intervention "illustrate how conscious all sections of Constantinopolitan society were of their constitutional role in the making and unmaking of emperors, and not just of emperors." No imperial legislation ever denied that the collective will of the Roman people had the right to exert itself in this way, even when it was doing so regularly and bloodily.
The people were at almost all times a foremost factor in the political life of the Romano-Byzantine republic: the emperor had to cultivate public opinion and keep it on his side, because the moment it began to slip from his grasp, which happened often, there were many rivals present who would use it to attempt to raise themselves to the throne. In this sense, politics in Byzantium was always popular. One's hold on the throne was always a function of public opinion. This explains more about the picture that Byzantine political history presents than does the rhetorical fiction of divine favour presented in imperial panegyric.