The Question of Identity: Who was a Roman and who a Byzantine?
Part A: The "Roman" name
Trying today to define one exclusive “official” name for the post-330AD Empire, which had its capital in Constantinople (formerly Byzantium), is an extremely sensitive task and, in any case, totally impossible if attempted based on the modern standard of the westphalian state.
Although historical sources, undoubtedly prove that citizens of the Empire continued to call themselves Romans, incessantly, from 27 BC to 1453 AD, it is equally clear and obvious that the identity of the "Roman" changed too many times and dramatically, within the passage of so many centuries. It cannot be connoted or argued, for example, that a "Roman" resident of Constantinople, in 10th or even 6th century AD, has no difference at all from a 1st century AD Roman citizen.
From the 1st to the 5th and from the 6th to the 12th centuries, the roman state itself changes dramatically, but also both the external and internal characteristics of those who are called Romans. It is at least naïve, for someone who studies roman and byzantine history today, to deny that.
In this brief study we explain how, despite the multiple and successive evolutions that the roman name suffered over the centuries, what never changed and was never lost, altered or disappeared was the Greek nation. After the roman conquest of mainland Greece in 146 BC and subsequent conquest of hellenistic kingdoms in the East and Egypt, the Greek nation, that during Alexander the Great had spread as far as Bactria and India, was not lost. The ancient Greeks were not romanised or “byzantinised” at a later time. They were of course christianised, but that is a different issue. Hence, apart from the fact that it was Rome itself that was hellenised to a significant degree, the Greeks kept their language, their consciousness and obviously their biological continuity ceaselessly, from 146 BC up to 1453. How they called themselves, and the fact that the ancient name of "Hellen" was for a considerable time identified with the heathen, never affected the knowledge and conscience of their exact Greek origin. Now, if even today, some dispute the existence and continuity of the Greek nation through the roman and later byzantine periods that is also great historical mistake. Actually, it is either a mistake or a deliberate misrepresentation and falsification of history, which possibly serves dark political purposes against modern Greece. Besides, even though it may be presented as a "modern scientific view" it is not new at all, but rather a very old one, since its roots lie in 16th century and western historians of the Enlightenment period.
Thus, some western historians, in the past, denied the continuation of the Roman Empire by the greek Byzantium (in 16th century German historian Hieronymus Wolf invented the term "Byzantine Empire" to distinguish it from ancient Rome, successors to which the Germans wanted to present themselves), while others questioned the greek identity of Byzantine Empire itself (in the mid 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, in a very amateur and superficial way, formulated the unfounded assertion that 7th-8th century avaric and slavic raids in mainland Greece totally extinguished every trace of Greeks in that geographical region, thus Fallmerayer led himself to the maddening conclusion that from 7th century onwards there was no Greek nation left at all). But while Fallmerayer's coarse and amateurish propaganda was very easily rebuffed by his own time's historians (aside from Greeks with the leading example of K. Paparrigopoulos, Austrian and German historians, but also leading representatives of the british school such as Edward A. Freeman and his bright disciple Arthur Evans, quickly rushed to rebuff Fallmerayer's unfounded claims) the dark political interests that fuelled Fallmerayer's theories continue to exist today, and have re-disguised themselves in post-modern nation-nihilistic misinterpretations and distortions of greek history.
Hence today we see a paradox happening: while modern historians and other scholars, have come to correct Wolf’s original mistake and strongly proclaim that the Empire was never called "Byzantine" but always remained Roman until 1453, we nevertheless see Fallmerayer’s lies revived, as the direct greek identity of this historic event and phenomenon - which rightly or wrongly is widely known today in academia and around the world as "Byzantine Empire" - is questioned.
The truth is that there are two main reasons that make it incomprehensible and contradictory, based on modern political concepts, to call "roman" the empire that had its capital in Constantinople. Even the addition of the adjective "eastern" at the beginning does not help solve this problem of understanding the longest and most fascinating empire ever known to mankind. The first reason is that, over the centuries from antiquity to the Middle Ages, the roman name evolved from a national-political concept to a solely political one and then, slowly and gradually, from solely political to political-national again.
The inability to distinguish and, often, an utter ignorance of these intermediate stages, which we analyze immediately below, cause serious problems to the understanding by a modern student of history. The second reason, that makes many today to "stumble", is that in the last stage of those transformations of the roman name - i.e. when it progressively converted back to a political-national identity - this time it indicated another nation from that which it originally meant, and that is no more the ancient Latin nation but the Greek.
So, let's have a look at these stages of evolution-transformation of the roman name. First and foremost, the Roman Empire itself, the ancient city-state of Rome was constantly evolving, in the period between the 3rd century BC and the transfer of the capital to the East in 330 AD. At first it was just another city-state of Italy - according to the example of ancient Greek city-states. It was a strong one and it was constantly expanding, but it was still just a city-state. At this stage, therefore, the roman identity contains apart from the political, also a clear national identification. That is a national identity, not in the modern nation-state legalistic sense, but according to the terms of those times, namely based on the common ethnic origin (being of the “same blood”), ethnic language and ethnic religion. Thus, the Roman citizen of the ancient times, was necessary also a Latin national. He could not have been for example, a Gaul or a Greek. Clearly, Rome began very early to integrate and assimilate its neighboring Sabines, Samnites, Etruscans and others. These people were given a lower class of Roman citizenship, with all rights except that of voting (civitas sine suffragio), but they were assimilated all the same, into the base of the early Latin-Roman nation.
Thus, that ancient Roman identity suffers its first transformation when the city-state of Rome became an empire, when it was transformed into what is today called a "cosmopolis". When the empire began to concede the right of roman citizenship to more and more nationals from outside the city limits and outside the Italian peninsula, the national element of the old “Roman” disappears. So now someone could be a non-Latin, be born and lived in a city of i.e. Asia Minor and at the same time be a Roman citizen. That’s how the roman name was expanded and that was the only way one could be called a “Roman”. Because if someone was born, in say Syracuse or Marseilles but did not acquire roman citizenship, could not be called a Roman. They would be called Syracusans or Massalians. They would be citizens of the Empire, paying their taxes, but they could not be called Romans. With the passage of time and of course mainly due to heredity, more and more were those inhabitants of the empire who had acquired the roman citizenship.
Thus we arrive at the critical year of 212 AD, when Emperor Caracalla with one single Edict, officially known as Constitutio Antoniniana, granted full status and rights of roman citizenship to all free men of the empire and to all free women the same rights as roman women held at that time. Since then, everyone in the empire could be called a Roman. After the Edict of Caracalla, it can be said that Rome was now fully evolved into a "cosmopolis" since it exceeded the boundaries of its city walls and the Italian peninsula and encompassed the entire "universe" of the then known world, which was at its largest geographical part, a conquest of the Roman Empire.
It becomes, however, immediately clear that during the period of this transformation, the ancient roman city-state identity, that clearly described the Latin nation, can no longer hold any national identification. It can no longer be anything but political. Because now, a Spaniard, a Gaul, a Greek, a Syrian, an Egyptian, etc., even though they have overnight become “Romans” due to the edict of Caracalla, they never lost their national identity, nor did this political “magic trick” suddenly change their basic national identity. The same applied, of course, to their descendents. From 212 AD onwards, the name "Roman" merely identified the political identity, the status of a citizen of the Roman Empire-cosmopolis-universe.
So when Constantine moved the capital to ancient Byzantium, he renamed the town “New Rome”, and he did so for publicity and political reasons certainly, but is was also practically necessary in order to ensure the empire’s unbroken continuity of the Roman state by a Greek city. An unbroken continuity that was indeed kept by Constantine’s successors up to 1453, and they constantly highlighted their rightful inheritance of the roman title - and the supremacy it implied to the then known world - and had to come to diplomatic disputes for this cause, with the Pope of Rome at first and the Germans later. In historical science it is universally accepted as an axiom that major change in history occurs through war. War is the historical phenomenon which marks the end of something old and allows the emergence of something new. It is some kind of "certificate" for the death and birth of empires, countries and whole eras. In this way, the ancient empires of Assyrians and Babylonians were overrun by the Persians, the Persians’ by the Greeks of Alexander, and the Hellenistic kingdoms by the Romans.
Many today ignore or try to downplay the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Greek one, in 330 AD, based on the fact that, formally, nothing more changed than the empire’s capital and its religion. But saying so is to ignore the very essence of a historic reality. For, what many modern historians ignore or try to hush up is the fact that Constantine's action did not only change the geographical center of an empire which, otherwise, continued to be Roman. Besides, everything that is associated with Constantine's rise and consolidation to power was anything but peaceful. The period between Diocletian's and Constantine's reign was a series of brutal civil war. Hence, here we have one more historic watershed that did not escape war, and further reaffirms Heraclitus' famous quote that "war is the father of all and king of all". With the transfer of the roman capital in Byzantium, an ancient Greek city on the shores of the Bosphorus, the very nature of the empire was radically and definitely transformed.
So while the state continued to be roman, with Latin as the official state language and deriving direct political origins from the ancient Romans, the heart of the empire was now adamantly Greek. Besides, Rome was never a nation-state by modern definition. Even labelling it as a "multi-ethnic" state is not as accurate as many imagine and provides a distorted connotation about it. Because the terms of a multi-ethnic state are still defined by westphalian standards of the modern era. It is to view the past - and such a distant one as roman history - through the glasses of today: the most elementary of errors to be avoided. Yet, Rome was never a sovereign state of the westphalian type. It was always a city-state and remained as such even when it built an Empire: the difference being the city-state had now become a "cosmopolis", a "city of the world". That is to say Rome's sovereignty never transceded the limits of its city walls, but rather the city itself had acquired superiority and imperial authority over all other city-states around the Mediterrenean.
Similarly, when the capital was transferred to the East, the whole imperial capacity of the cosmopolis was administered to another city-state: Byzantium, which was then renamed into New Rome, and Constantinople. And that city, it just so happened to be a Greek one. Because, the East was not only dominated by "the Greek culture and language" externally, in a “neutral way”, like english language in the British Commonwealth, as some would frivolously argue today. The East was, at that particular time of history, inhabited by a majority of Greek population. Apart from mainland Greece, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, where understandably the majority of the population was Greek, in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, there also lived Greek populations, who were direct descendants of Alexander’s colonists, while the remaining indigenous people were all more or less Hellenized. So we are talking about an East, which in the 4th century AD was not only externally, superficially, "nominally" Greek - it was Greek deep in its nature.
Moreover, apart from the political complexion that the Roman name has in the 4th century and the fact that it cannot affect or alter any consciousness of the diverse ethnic origins of the "Romans", the East had always during roman times an openly Greek identity and was always different from the West. Diocletian’s decision to implement the tetrarchy has been widely established in modern historiography as the defining act that divided the Empire into West and East. But, again, the reality is different.
Because in reality, East and West were already two different worlds long before Diocletian’s and Constantine’s time. In the East, Rome conquered and ruled over what was already a Greek world. A “Greek universe” that had been established as such in the previous centuries, during the Hellenistic era. In the East, Rome could not change anything, Rome could not - and did not - romanise anything. Instead, it was Rome itself that was hellenised to a significant degree, "captive Greece captured her rude conqueror", as has been famously confessed by Roman poet Horace. And Rome itself was obliged to do so, in order to successfully play its leading imperial role, in a world where Greek civilization was inherently superior and dominant. In the West, however, the situation was quite different. There, Rome had to civilize barbarians. But ever this process of civilizing the barbaric West was never fully completed, in only a few centuries of Roman rule. It was indeed disturbed and stalled by the endless barbaric invasions which finally crumbled it. So the West was always culturally inferior to the East, which stood out as another superior world, already from the 1st century AD.
To put it simply, while the West was Roman indeed, the East was, from the very outset, exclusively Greek - just under roman administration and roman law. So when these two different poles of the Roman world were definitively divided, in the late 4th century, there was nothing born from scratch, no significant difference emerged, that did not exist before between these two worlds. The East continued to be the same Greek world it already was centuries ago, while the poorly civilized West succumbed to the barbarian invasions and entered the prolonged "Dark Age" - as it is rightly called - a period from which it exited several centuries later. So it was the West that experienced the "Dark Ages" and not the Greek East.
Thus, we reach the definitive year 476 AD. It is the year when the last Roman emperor of the West, the fifteen-year old Romulus Augustulus was overthrown by the barbarian Odoacer. Meanwhile, the Italian peninsula had already been conquered by the Goths, so the lands under official Roman rule were now limited to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Greek world of the East. The year 476, therefore, caused another key historical result. The name "Roman" gradually began to connote the Greek national identity and descent more than the holder of Roman citizenship. Besides, while Caracalla's edict formally continued to exist, since no new legislation was ever produced to render it null, historical reality showed that any new nations that came to permanently settle into roman territory, such as Goths and Slavs, they never became or were called Romans.
And in such cases, the conclusion is always derived from what has been recorded as the norm. That norm, of course, is the state in which a nation is recorded by historical facts, and not by the rare individual personal cases of foreigners who, under various circumstances, happed to be romanised, assimilated and rise in roman society, such as Stilicho in western Rome or some Armenians, Khazars and Slavs in Constantinople. The same applies to the Sclaveni of the Peloponnese, who firstly never acquired the identity of a "Romios" before they were hellenised, and secondly they were hellenised and assimilated quite slowly and only when they had lost physical contant with Slavs of the northern Balkans, due to geographical isolation. These are exemptions that do not cancel the rule, but rather confirm it. And that is the rule of historic reality which informs that, Goths, Slavs and Bulgars, even when they settled permenantly into roman territory, they were never romanised or assimilated into the roman and later byzantine society and state. They always remained what they were: Goths, Slavs and Bulgars.
Therefore, at a time when all the inhabitants of the empire, everyone who can be called a Roman, is now either a Greek or hellenised peoples, and while few non-Greek populations remain within the limits of the empire (some minorities in western and northern Balkans and the Armenians in the East), who else may be Roman if not the Greek? This is clearly demonstrated by how the Greeks call themselves and the foreigners, but also by how foreigners, i.e. Westerners, Arabs, Turks and others, identify the Greeks. So, within the limits of the empire, gradually and increasingly overtime, Greeks who were the “genuine Romans” began to differentiate from non-Greeks. But how exactly this did happen will be the subject of our next chapter.
Ioannis Dandoulakis ©
Part A: The "Roman" name
Trying today to define one exclusive “official” name for the post-330AD Empire, which had its capital in Constantinople (formerly Byzantium), is an extremely sensitive task and, in any case, totally impossible if attempted based on the modern standard of the westphalian state.
Although historical sources, undoubtedly prove that citizens of the Empire continued to call themselves Romans, incessantly, from 27 BC to 1453 AD, it is equally clear and obvious that the identity of the "Roman" changed too many times and dramatically, within the passage of so many centuries. It cannot be connoted or argued, for example, that a "Roman" resident of Constantinople, in 10th or even 6th century AD, has no difference at all from a 1st century AD Roman citizen.
From the 1st to the 5th and from the 6th to the 12th centuries, the roman state itself changes dramatically, but also both the external and internal characteristics of those who are called Romans. It is at least naïve, for someone who studies roman and byzantine history today, to deny that.
In this brief study we explain how, despite the multiple and successive evolutions that the roman name suffered over the centuries, what never changed and was never lost, altered or disappeared was the Greek nation. After the roman conquest of mainland Greece in 146 BC and subsequent conquest of hellenistic kingdoms in the East and Egypt, the Greek nation, that during Alexander the Great had spread as far as Bactria and India, was not lost. The ancient Greeks were not romanised or “byzantinised” at a later time. They were of course christianised, but that is a different issue. Hence, apart from the fact that it was Rome itself that was hellenised to a significant degree, the Greeks kept their language, their consciousness and obviously their biological continuity ceaselessly, from 146 BC up to 1453. How they called themselves, and the fact that the ancient name of "Hellen" was for a considerable time identified with the heathen, never affected the knowledge and conscience of their exact Greek origin. Now, if even today, some dispute the existence and continuity of the Greek nation through the roman and later byzantine periods that is also great historical mistake. Actually, it is either a mistake or a deliberate misrepresentation and falsification of history, which possibly serves dark political purposes against modern Greece. Besides, even though it may be presented as a "modern scientific view" it is not new at all, but rather a very old one, since its roots lie in 16th century and western historians of the Enlightenment period.
Thus, some western historians, in the past, denied the continuation of the Roman Empire by the greek Byzantium (in 16th century German historian Hieronymus Wolf invented the term "Byzantine Empire" to distinguish it from ancient Rome, successors to which the Germans wanted to present themselves), while others questioned the greek identity of Byzantine Empire itself (in the mid 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, in a very amateur and superficial way, formulated the unfounded assertion that 7th-8th century avaric and slavic raids in mainland Greece totally extinguished every trace of Greeks in that geographical region, thus Fallmerayer led himself to the maddening conclusion that from 7th century onwards there was no Greek nation left at all). But while Fallmerayer's coarse and amateurish propaganda was very easily rebuffed by his own time's historians (aside from Greeks with the leading example of K. Paparrigopoulos, Austrian and German historians, but also leading representatives of the british school such as Edward A. Freeman and his bright disciple Arthur Evans, quickly rushed to rebuff Fallmerayer's unfounded claims) the dark political interests that fuelled Fallmerayer's theories continue to exist today, and have re-disguised themselves in post-modern nation-nihilistic misinterpretations and distortions of greek history.
Hence today we see a paradox happening: while modern historians and other scholars, have come to correct Wolf’s original mistake and strongly proclaim that the Empire was never called "Byzantine" but always remained Roman until 1453, we nevertheless see Fallmerayer’s lies revived, as the direct greek identity of this historic event and phenomenon - which rightly or wrongly is widely known today in academia and around the world as "Byzantine Empire" - is questioned.
The truth is that there are two main reasons that make it incomprehensible and contradictory, based on modern political concepts, to call "roman" the empire that had its capital in Constantinople. Even the addition of the adjective "eastern" at the beginning does not help solve this problem of understanding the longest and most fascinating empire ever known to mankind. The first reason is that, over the centuries from antiquity to the Middle Ages, the roman name evolved from a national-political concept to a solely political one and then, slowly and gradually, from solely political to political-national again.
The inability to distinguish and, often, an utter ignorance of these intermediate stages, which we analyze immediately below, cause serious problems to the understanding by a modern student of history. The second reason, that makes many today to "stumble", is that in the last stage of those transformations of the roman name - i.e. when it progressively converted back to a political-national identity - this time it indicated another nation from that which it originally meant, and that is no more the ancient Latin nation but the Greek.
So, let's have a look at these stages of evolution-transformation of the roman name. First and foremost, the Roman Empire itself, the ancient city-state of Rome was constantly evolving, in the period between the 3rd century BC and the transfer of the capital to the East in 330 AD. At first it was just another city-state of Italy - according to the example of ancient Greek city-states. It was a strong one and it was constantly expanding, but it was still just a city-state. At this stage, therefore, the roman identity contains apart from the political, also a clear national identification. That is a national identity, not in the modern nation-state legalistic sense, but according to the terms of those times, namely based on the common ethnic origin (being of the “same blood”), ethnic language and ethnic religion. Thus, the Roman citizen of the ancient times, was necessary also a Latin national. He could not have been for example, a Gaul or a Greek. Clearly, Rome began very early to integrate and assimilate its neighboring Sabines, Samnites, Etruscans and others. These people were given a lower class of Roman citizenship, with all rights except that of voting (civitas sine suffragio), but they were assimilated all the same, into the base of the early Latin-Roman nation.
Thus, that ancient Roman identity suffers its first transformation when the city-state of Rome became an empire, when it was transformed into what is today called a "cosmopolis". When the empire began to concede the right of roman citizenship to more and more nationals from outside the city limits and outside the Italian peninsula, the national element of the old “Roman” disappears. So now someone could be a non-Latin, be born and lived in a city of i.e. Asia Minor and at the same time be a Roman citizen. That’s how the roman name was expanded and that was the only way one could be called a “Roman”. Because if someone was born, in say Syracuse or Marseilles but did not acquire roman citizenship, could not be called a Roman. They would be called Syracusans or Massalians. They would be citizens of the Empire, paying their taxes, but they could not be called Romans. With the passage of time and of course mainly due to heredity, more and more were those inhabitants of the empire who had acquired the roman citizenship.
Thus we arrive at the critical year of 212 AD, when Emperor Caracalla with one single Edict, officially known as Constitutio Antoniniana, granted full status and rights of roman citizenship to all free men of the empire and to all free women the same rights as roman women held at that time. Since then, everyone in the empire could be called a Roman. After the Edict of Caracalla, it can be said that Rome was now fully evolved into a "cosmopolis" since it exceeded the boundaries of its city walls and the Italian peninsula and encompassed the entire "universe" of the then known world, which was at its largest geographical part, a conquest of the Roman Empire.
It becomes, however, immediately clear that during the period of this transformation, the ancient roman city-state identity, that clearly described the Latin nation, can no longer hold any national identification. It can no longer be anything but political. Because now, a Spaniard, a Gaul, a Greek, a Syrian, an Egyptian, etc., even though they have overnight become “Romans” due to the edict of Caracalla, they never lost their national identity, nor did this political “magic trick” suddenly change their basic national identity. The same applied, of course, to their descendents. From 212 AD onwards, the name "Roman" merely identified the political identity, the status of a citizen of the Roman Empire-cosmopolis-universe.
So when Constantine moved the capital to ancient Byzantium, he renamed the town “New Rome”, and he did so for publicity and political reasons certainly, but is was also practically necessary in order to ensure the empire’s unbroken continuity of the Roman state by a Greek city. An unbroken continuity that was indeed kept by Constantine’s successors up to 1453, and they constantly highlighted their rightful inheritance of the roman title - and the supremacy it implied to the then known world - and had to come to diplomatic disputes for this cause, with the Pope of Rome at first and the Germans later. In historical science it is universally accepted as an axiom that major change in history occurs through war. War is the historical phenomenon which marks the end of something old and allows the emergence of something new. It is some kind of "certificate" for the death and birth of empires, countries and whole eras. In this way, the ancient empires of Assyrians and Babylonians were overrun by the Persians, the Persians’ by the Greeks of Alexander, and the Hellenistic kingdoms by the Romans.
Many today ignore or try to downplay the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Greek one, in 330 AD, based on the fact that, formally, nothing more changed than the empire’s capital and its religion. But saying so is to ignore the very essence of a historic reality. For, what many modern historians ignore or try to hush up is the fact that Constantine's action did not only change the geographical center of an empire which, otherwise, continued to be Roman. Besides, everything that is associated with Constantine's rise and consolidation to power was anything but peaceful. The period between Diocletian's and Constantine's reign was a series of brutal civil war. Hence, here we have one more historic watershed that did not escape war, and further reaffirms Heraclitus' famous quote that "war is the father of all and king of all". With the transfer of the roman capital in Byzantium, an ancient Greek city on the shores of the Bosphorus, the very nature of the empire was radically and definitely transformed.
So while the state continued to be roman, with Latin as the official state language and deriving direct political origins from the ancient Romans, the heart of the empire was now adamantly Greek. Besides, Rome was never a nation-state by modern definition. Even labelling it as a "multi-ethnic" state is not as accurate as many imagine and provides a distorted connotation about it. Because the terms of a multi-ethnic state are still defined by westphalian standards of the modern era. It is to view the past - and such a distant one as roman history - through the glasses of today: the most elementary of errors to be avoided. Yet, Rome was never a sovereign state of the westphalian type. It was always a city-state and remained as such even when it built an Empire: the difference being the city-state had now become a "cosmopolis", a "city of the world". That is to say Rome's sovereignty never transceded the limits of its city walls, but rather the city itself had acquired superiority and imperial authority over all other city-states around the Mediterrenean.
Similarly, when the capital was transferred to the East, the whole imperial capacity of the cosmopolis was administered to another city-state: Byzantium, which was then renamed into New Rome, and Constantinople. And that city, it just so happened to be a Greek one. Because, the East was not only dominated by "the Greek culture and language" externally, in a “neutral way”, like english language in the British Commonwealth, as some would frivolously argue today. The East was, at that particular time of history, inhabited by a majority of Greek population. Apart from mainland Greece, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, where understandably the majority of the population was Greek, in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, there also lived Greek populations, who were direct descendants of Alexander’s colonists, while the remaining indigenous people were all more or less Hellenized. So we are talking about an East, which in the 4th century AD was not only externally, superficially, "nominally" Greek - it was Greek deep in its nature.
Moreover, apart from the political complexion that the Roman name has in the 4th century and the fact that it cannot affect or alter any consciousness of the diverse ethnic origins of the "Romans", the East had always during roman times an openly Greek identity and was always different from the West. Diocletian’s decision to implement the tetrarchy has been widely established in modern historiography as the defining act that divided the Empire into West and East. But, again, the reality is different.
Because in reality, East and West were already two different worlds long before Diocletian’s and Constantine’s time. In the East, Rome conquered and ruled over what was already a Greek world. A “Greek universe” that had been established as such in the previous centuries, during the Hellenistic era. In the East, Rome could not change anything, Rome could not - and did not - romanise anything. Instead, it was Rome itself that was hellenised to a significant degree, "captive Greece captured her rude conqueror", as has been famously confessed by Roman poet Horace. And Rome itself was obliged to do so, in order to successfully play its leading imperial role, in a world where Greek civilization was inherently superior and dominant. In the West, however, the situation was quite different. There, Rome had to civilize barbarians. But ever this process of civilizing the barbaric West was never fully completed, in only a few centuries of Roman rule. It was indeed disturbed and stalled by the endless barbaric invasions which finally crumbled it. So the West was always culturally inferior to the East, which stood out as another superior world, already from the 1st century AD.
To put it simply, while the West was Roman indeed, the East was, from the very outset, exclusively Greek - just under roman administration and roman law. So when these two different poles of the Roman world were definitively divided, in the late 4th century, there was nothing born from scratch, no significant difference emerged, that did not exist before between these two worlds. The East continued to be the same Greek world it already was centuries ago, while the poorly civilized West succumbed to the barbarian invasions and entered the prolonged "Dark Age" - as it is rightly called - a period from which it exited several centuries later. So it was the West that experienced the "Dark Ages" and not the Greek East.
Thus, we reach the definitive year 476 AD. It is the year when the last Roman emperor of the West, the fifteen-year old Romulus Augustulus was overthrown by the barbarian Odoacer. Meanwhile, the Italian peninsula had already been conquered by the Goths, so the lands under official Roman rule were now limited to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Greek world of the East. The year 476, therefore, caused another key historical result. The name "Roman" gradually began to connote the Greek national identity and descent more than the holder of Roman citizenship. Besides, while Caracalla's edict formally continued to exist, since no new legislation was ever produced to render it null, historical reality showed that any new nations that came to permanently settle into roman territory, such as Goths and Slavs, they never became or were called Romans.
And in such cases, the conclusion is always derived from what has been recorded as the norm. That norm, of course, is the state in which a nation is recorded by historical facts, and not by the rare individual personal cases of foreigners who, under various circumstances, happed to be romanised, assimilated and rise in roman society, such as Stilicho in western Rome or some Armenians, Khazars and Slavs in Constantinople. The same applies to the Sclaveni of the Peloponnese, who firstly never acquired the identity of a "Romios" before they were hellenised, and secondly they were hellenised and assimilated quite slowly and only when they had lost physical contant with Slavs of the northern Balkans, due to geographical isolation. These are exemptions that do not cancel the rule, but rather confirm it. And that is the rule of historic reality which informs that, Goths, Slavs and Bulgars, even when they settled permenantly into roman territory, they were never romanised or assimilated into the roman and later byzantine society and state. They always remained what they were: Goths, Slavs and Bulgars.
Therefore, at a time when all the inhabitants of the empire, everyone who can be called a Roman, is now either a Greek or hellenised peoples, and while few non-Greek populations remain within the limits of the empire (some minorities in western and northern Balkans and the Armenians in the East), who else may be Roman if not the Greek? This is clearly demonstrated by how the Greeks call themselves and the foreigners, but also by how foreigners, i.e. Westerners, Arabs, Turks and others, identify the Greeks. So, within the limits of the empire, gradually and increasingly overtime, Greeks who were the “genuine Romans” began to differentiate from non-Greeks. But how exactly this did happen will be the subject of our next chapter.
Ioannis Dandoulakis ©
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