Anthony Kaldellis: evaluation

Transcript context

…So one of the things I briefly mentioned just would be nice to elaborate on is this term of monarchic republic. So we’ve been throwing around words like kingdom and republic and empire and monarchy. So what is the actual… What’s a good applicable term to what this thing is- … the East Roman Empire? That’s an excellent question, and I’m glad you flagged that because we call it conventionally Byzantine Empire, and it’s neither of those things really. We talked about Byzantine. Now, empire’s a bit of a problem because first of all there’s no term in Greek, in the Greek that they use at this period, that corresponds to our notion of empire. It’s not part of the official terms. It’s not even… They didn’t even have a term for it. You could have… There’s some terms that might mean something like state, arche maybe or kratos. But for the most part, it’s either basileia, which we might translate as monarchy, or politeia, which is polity. And politeia in Greek, polity, is a Greek translation of Latin res publica. Res publica doesn’t mean republic the way we mean it for the Romans, like a non-monarchical regime, right? That’s how we mean, like, the American Republic or, you know. That’s a usage that came in later, like during the Enlightenment. In Latin, a res publica is the common affairs, the common interest of a people who are constituted as a political community, regardless of the type of regime that they have. Like even Cicero could imagine the Roman res publica governed by a king or by a senate or by a democracy. And they continue to use that term. We don’t use it according to Roman norms. We use it according to modern norms, the term republic. So they continue to call it a res publica or a polity under the emperors as well, right? And it was understood that the role of the emperor, whether he’s Caesar or basileus or whatever, whatever language, was to serve the polity. They keep saying this. So the terms that occur in the sources most commonly are basileia of the Romans, polity of the Romans, or Romania, which is the proper name of this state. Not empire. Now, empire. Empire in modern English commonly, an empire is a state that’s created when one group conquers a bunch of others and rules them. It could be an ethnic group. It could be an ethnoreligious group. It could be a political group, whatever. But there’s an act of conquest, and results in a state where one group is ruling over others. That’s not how Romania is actually constituted. We’ve talked about this. It’s, for the most part, all Roman citizens ruling themselves—like Roman subjects ruling themselves through their own government. So it’s not an empire strictly speaking. Now, occasionally, they will conquer other people, right? We talked about the warfare. Sometimes it’s not just defensive. Sometimes it’s offensive, right? ent. So it’s not an empire strictly speaking. Now, occasionally, they will conquer other people, right? We talked about the warfare. Sometimes it’s not just defensive. Sometimes it’s offensive, right? In that case, you do establish an imperial relationship. Like we, the Romans, are ruling over this other group. Could be Slavs, it could be Bulgarians for a while, it could be whatever. Or even some Muslims in northern Syria for a while in the 11th century who—and you are not Romans. And that’s an imperial relationship. The question is, how many of these imperial relationships do you need to decide that, well, we’ve reached a tipping point, and now we’re just gonna call the whole thing an empire? Personally, I don’t think we ever reach that point. I mean, all states, even today, have like minorities. Some of them are part of that state because they were conquered once upon a time. But we don’t call those states empires necessarily. Even though… Like, look at the United Kingdom. Well, Wales was conquered. And, you know, the Welsh have their own identity, their own language. I don’t know that you would call that now an imperial relationship. Maybe. I don’t know.…

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