Anthony Kaldellis: evaluation

Transcript context

…And so that’s the tension we have to be constantly dancing with. Yeah, so as historians, this is a point of method, and it’s very important. There are moments when, like, individuals with a great deal of power make choices that impact everybody else and have, you know, long-term consequences downstream. Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, for example, right? Not something that anybody could have or did predict. Okay. Otherwise, most of the developments that we identify by specific dates, like you mentioned 395, the division of the eastern and the western empires, those are conventional dates that we use to actually capture what is in fact a much longer process. There was no split between the two halves. It was one among many allocations of jurisdiction to, like, one son and another son in the east and the west. The two halves were subsequently reunited, then they kind of divided again among different emperors. It’s just a process, and so we sometimes use fixed dates for what is in fact a process. Or for 476, the fall of the Western Empire, that’s just the last date. It’s actually a very long process that took decades. Right? So that’s just something to keep in mind, that sometimes we’re talking about processes, sometimes we’re talking about very discrete events with long-term consequences. Yeah. Maybe an impossible question for a Roman state that lasted over 2,200 years, but is there a kind of through line, a thread, a soul that runs through the entire history of the Roman Empire? As you said, it’s a slow transformation and evolution. But if we dare call the whole thing Roman, Rome, the Roman state—…

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