Esopo
Banned
The Roman language was Greek.
Greek became the official language of some remnants of the roman empire pretty late, even much later than the empire had become ethnically eastern.
The Roman language was Greek.
If you are talking about the ERE, then yes.
If you mean the WRE, then no, it was Latin.
If you were to ask me, I would say that this whole line-drawing between "Roman" and "Byzantine" is just silly and brought about by western Europe refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Roman remnant. Why? Because of politics.
There have come arguments that the shifting structure makes it cease to be the Roman Empire, but I would say that those arguments fail to realise the fact that things evolve and change. The Romans always adapted to their circumstances, and if they had not they would never have had as much success as they did. Yes, the evolution of a state can produce something quite different in the end, but this is true for any state.
I definitely see Heraclius as a dividing line. In fact, I'd like to call it Greek to denote the change as a descriptive term, but too many people would get up in arms about it. It's the main reason I always refer to them as "the Eastern Empire" in my TL instead of the Greek Empire (as Western Europeans did) except in dialog. The Nicaean successor/survivor state is something else again to the entity that prevailed from c. 650-1204.
The official language of the Eastern Empire remained Latin until 620, when Heraclius officially replaced it with Greek.
It's true that the bulk of the literate classes in the East had always been Greek speakers. But the language of government and the army and much of the Roman elite remained Latin until the Heraclian dynasty. It was the native tongue of emperors until that time. The Theodosian and Justinianic Codes were written in Latin.
Hello Avitus,
The Romans were always fans of Greek language and culture. The shift to Greek, despite having a date where it was made official, was a gradual thing, and if I'm not mistaken post Roman Greek shared words and naming traditions with Latin. As far as I'm concerned the Roman Empire didn't switch to Greek language, since from its height Greek was the native language of most of the eastern portion anyways.
Yes, but a slightly Latinized Greek is still...Greek.
I think language is a critical part of cultural identity. It shapes how you think. It's one thing for a language to evolve. It's another for it to be replaced by an entirely different one. We can be readily understood by Shakespeare and vice versa. We'd require more effort with Chaucer - but there would still be the sense of a shared language.
Gaius Marius and Augustus (to say nothing of Marcus or Constantine) could have made themselves perfectly intelligible to Justinian I, and vice versa - in their native language. By the time of the Macedonian dynasty, translators were often needed to converse with papal diplomats.
And what was lost as well was not just mutual intelligibility, but cultural memory and legal continuity. Not all of the classical works of Latin were translated into Greek, nor for that matter even all of Justinian's Code. A diminishing cohort of elite Constantinopolitans could still read those texts, but they were no longer accessible in the same way they had been to the educated Romans of Late Antiquity. Indeed, there was a growing contempt for Latin, because of its identification with the barbaric West and papal pretensions.
It's true that Greek was widely spoken, often as a native language, in the old Roman East, and use of Latin was already in decline before the Heraclians. But the Semitic lands (Levant, Syria) were mainly Semitic-speaking peoples with an upper crust of Latin and Greek speaking elites. Latin provided a unifying tongue that Greek did not provide as easily, given Semitic resentments of the Greeks.
It may be difficult to pick an exact date in time for a break in cultural and political continuity. But I do think that break is there during the Heraclian dynasty. Roman culture had been quite adaptable to that point. But during this period, it was essentially overcome by a Koine Greek culture presiding over a Greek rump state, only with the memory of a Roman past.
Firstly, how is the Latin Empire much closer than the Ottomans? Aside from calling themselves Emperors of Rome (which the Ottomans did too) they really didn't take an interest in the Empire's culture, language, or structure.
Probably due to religion and (some) shared culture.
If the Latin Empire is a successor state, however, it's a tenuous and rather illegitimate one.
Secondly, why is Nicea a successor state rather than a continuation of the whole, and why are Trebizond and Epirus omitted entirely? Each one was founded by a member of the current imperial family within the empire's borders in an attempt to recover the capital and be proclaimed emperor, and from the beginning they all believed that they were in a kind of temporary exile rather than at the head of a new state (though Trebizond came to believe that their chances of reconquest were over after David of Trebizond's death, and started to move in a new direction). Realistically, if something had changed to make Trebizond or Epirus recover Constantinople I would consider them the rightful successor too, and as far as I'm concerned the empire ended when Trebizond fell in 1462, and not a moment sooner.
I think you can make an argument for Nicaea, especially since it was close at hand to Constantinople and managed to retake it.
Trebizond and Epirus, on the other hand, were more distant and ended up cut off from the the old heartland of the Empire. They may have started out as remnants of the whole, but they settled into their independent status.
I suppose the real difficulty is that we all have no shared definition of "successor state."
Well I certainly disagree with this.Well to be fair, "Greek" is basically as incorrect as the Byzantines calling, say, the Seljuk Turks "Babylonians".
It would have been better to include a group that actually can realistically claim heritage from the extinct state...Well I certainly disagree with this.![]()
It would have been better to include a group that actually can realistically claim heritage from the extinct state...
However, Greek Civilization around the Polis died with Philip and Alexander, the subsequent Hellenic civilization died with the Roman conquest, aspects of Greek culture flourished under the Romans, especially in language, but it was not the same Greek as the Hellenics, and certainly not the same Greeks that had three separate languages and suffered from the contentions of Athens and Sparta, this Greek civilization would die later on though in a way that Frank became French rather than the previous ones with clear markers. And then this Greek identity and civilization would die under the Ottomans. And the new, revived Greek civilization, is a completely different thing from the rest.
The only thing making modern day Greece Greek in the classical Greek perspective is a language and a geopolitical location, everything else is rhetoric based on nostalgia. The people sure as hell weren't the same anymore due to the massive human migrations population transfers various conquests and so on. If people called the Italian Peninsula the Roman Peninsula, you would be sure that it would be called Rome instead of Italy that currently resides there.
This sequence of ideas were first presented by Fallmerayer and other racist-imperialist "historians", in mid-19th c., based on the idea of the purity of the blood, and falling in the traps of time lag. These ideas were dropped already at their time, by scientists such as Kopitar, Thiersch and Zingeisen, not to mention modern historians.
Summing up, nothing "died" concerning the Greek, Hellenic, or whatever you call it, language, civilization and culture. What happened is called evolution, no matter on how one evaluates it. Nowadays Greeks speak the same language as Plato, Aristoteles and Xenophon, only this language has evolved in 2500 years, and it would be weird if it didn't. Nowadays Greeks share a lot of customs with their ancestors of the archaic or clasical era, especially those concerning the remnants of the earth-cult, or their traditional fairy-tales.
I guess it is purely worthless to speak about comments such as that migrations led to a situation that the Greeks were no Greeks anymore....
If my point was purely based on purity of blood you may have an argument, however it most certainly was not and I would appreciate it if you did not imply that my argument is inherently racist and based on ethnic purity.This sequence of ideas were first presented by Fallmerayer and other racist-imperialist "historians", in mid-19th c., based on the idea of the purity of the blood, and falling in the traps of time lag.
If my point was purely based on purity of blood you may have an argument, however it most certainly was not and I would appreciate it if you did not imply that my argument is inherently racist and based on ethnic purity.
If you want to make the argument that nothing died you'd be fighting on a foundation of sand with every point you make tearing down at the foundation of your footing.
If you wish to be objective, apart from the language and some remnant ideals, greek civilization has changed massively. To the point of being a far more severe change from any single moment from the birth of the Eastern Roman Empire and the fall of Trebizond and even to modern day Greece, as that is simply 'evolution'. If we continue that standard then modern day Greece is actually Rome, not anything else, because the changes were not even close to enough to cause that color to change by your standard. Would you agree with that statement or are you looking for an arbitary line in the sand? Perhaps Rome becomes purple after the conquest of Egypt?