This text was the first systematic study of what it meant to be 'Greek' in late antiquity and Byzantium, an identity that could alternatively become national, religious, philosophical, or cultural. ...Through close readings of the sources, Professor Kaldellis surveys the space that Hellenism occupied in each period; the broader debates in which it was caught up; and the historical causes of its successive transformations. The first section (100–400) shows how Romanisation and Christianisation led to the abandonment of Hellenism as a national label and its restriction to a negative religious sense and a positive, albeit rarefied, cultural one. The second (1000–1300) shows how Hellenism was revived in Byzantium and contributed to the evolution of its culture. The discussion looks closely at the reception of the classical tradition, which was the reason why Hellenism was always desirable and dangerous in Christian society, and presents a new model for understanding Byzantine civilisation.
Byzantium Unbound Kaldellis, Anthony
2019, 20190930, 2019-09-30
eBook
This book proposes a long view of Byzantium, one that begins in the early Roman empire and extends all the way to the modern period. It is a provocative thought-experiment which posits Byzantium as ...the most stable and enduring form of Greco-Roman society, forming a sturdy bridge between antiquity and the early modern period, as well as between East and West, and which sees the ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions as flowing together. It offers a Byzantium unbound by other cultures and fields of study that would artificially cut it down to size.
Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself Byzantine. While the identities of eastern minorities were clear, that of the ruling majority remains obscured ...behind a name made up by later generations. Anthony Kaldellis says it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.
Scholars have long claimed that the Eastern Roman Empire, a Christian theocracy, bore little resemblance to ancient Rome. Here, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that ...it was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of, and sometimes by, Greek-speaking citizens who considered themselves fully Roman.
This paper proposes an intellectual history of the idea that the later Roman empire and, subsequently, the whole of Byzantium were less 'free' in comparison to the Roman Republic. Anxiety over ...diminished freedom recurred throughout Roman history, but only a few specific expressions of it were enshrined in modern thought as the basis on which to divide history into periods. The theorists of the Enlightenment, moreover, invented an unfree Byzantium for their own political purposes and not by examining the facts about its political culture. The second part of the paper proposes that the Byzantines valorized a model of positive freedom as legal-institutional protection against arbitrary oppressive power, including against both barbarian domination and domestic abuses. In contrast to modern thought, which tends to see the imperial position as the chief threat to liberty, the Byzantines viewed it as its bulwark. Yet they too had remedies for oppressive emperors, suggesting that the otherwise well-attested invocations of freedom were not a mere rhetorical trope for them but an actionable cultural norm.
Psellos and the Patriarchs: Letters and Funeral Orations for
Keroullarios , Leichoudes, and Xiphilinos contains translations
of the funeral orations written by Michael Psellos, the leading
Byzantine ...intellectual of the eleventh century, for the three
ecumenical patriarchs of Constantinople whom he knew best: Michael
Keroullarios (1043-1058), Konstantinos Leichoudes (1059-1063), and
Ioannes Xiphilinos (1064-1075). The orations are significant
sources for the lives and reputations of these patriarchs; they are
also a prime source for the educational reforms made by the emperor
Konstantinos IX Monomachos in the mid-1040s, and for many events of
that turbulent century that Psellos witnessed, including popular
uprisings, plots, civil wars, and the battle with the Catholic
legates in 1054. Never before translated into English, the orations
and letters are introduced by a detailed analysis of Psellos'
historical relationships with the patriarchs and an interpretation
of the works.
The orations are not only important historical sources: they are
crucial specimens of Byzantine rhetoric in a period of transition,
as well as being key texts in the corpus of Psellos himself.
Psellos used them to score important points in support of his own
philosophical agenda and to make broader claims about ethics and
metaphysics and the role of learning in political and
ecclesiastical life. The orations are here accompanied by
translations of a long letter that Psellos wrote to Keroullarios
and a pair of letters to Xiphilinos, in which he defended key
aspects of his philosophical project.
Historians reconstruct the Byzantine conquest of Crete in 960-961 based largely on the History of Leo the Deacon and two variants of the continuation of the Chronicle of Symeon the Logothete. ...However, the account in the continuation is modelled closely, in narrative structure, imagery, vocabulary and ideology, on Prokopios' account of the conquest of North Africa by Belisarios in 533-534. This challenges our knowledge of the campaign but sheds interesting new light on the sophisticated use of classical texts that Byzantine chroniclers could make. (Author abstract)
For their account of Ioannes Tzimiskes’ Balkan campaign of 971 AD against the Rus, Leon the Deacon and Ioannes Skylitzes independently used a common source that was written soon after the emperor’s ...triumph in Constantinople. This source classicized the emperor and his actions, drawing upon figures from the Roman Republic and including speeches and geographical digressions. This source accounts for the bulk of what we know of Tzimiskes’ reign.
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