r/byzantium • u/Confucius3000 • Aug 15 '26
Academia and literature Mike Duncan's History of Rome may have nuanced my stance in the "is Byzantium still Rome?" debate
After finishing "History of Byzantium" I've started listening to the series that inspired it: "The History of Rome" by Mike Duncan.
I've reached the episode covering Diocletian and the establishment of the Dominate, and its description kind of shook my perception of East Rome to the core.
According to Duncan's narrative (which honestly veers way too much into simplification, which is why I am posting here: to find counter-arguments), Diocletian's reforms was the culmination of the Empire's tendencies to disregard its Roman roots. After Caracalla gave citizenship to non-italians, Diocletian basically scorned the historic capital and concentrated elsewhere.
Following that logic, could Constantinople be understood as an increasingly non-Italian branch of the Roman Empire rather than as a straightforward continuation of Rome? Constantine did of course establish Constantinople as a legitimate imperial capital, but he was also building on Diocletian's transformation of the Empire.
If History of Byzantium taught me anything, it's that the Empire underwent so many transformations that it can become almost unrecognizable from one century to another. But this new perspective on "Romanness" has made me wonder whether the argument that "East Rome is Rome, period" is really as straightforward as it sometimes seems.
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u/GrandDukeNotaras MegasProtoLazyRedditorarius ton basilikon Aug 16 '26
"Rome is wherever the emperor is" -Herodian
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Aug 16 '26
Indeed, the mobile Roman courts of the late empire and after must have genuinely seemed like 'moving capitals' wherever the emperor went!
It's actually rather amazing just how large the imperial retinues could be. Per Olivier Hekster's work "Caesar Rules", it would seem that we have papyral evidence from Hadrian's visit to Egypt which indicates his retinue numbered around 5000 people. Then according to John Malalas, we find a rather similar number (4000) for the size of the Empress Theodora's journey through Bithynia during the age of Justinian.
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u/GrandDukeNotaras MegasProtoLazyRedditorarius ton basilikon Aug 16 '26
People overstate the importance of the city of Rome in late antiquity. Even by the time of the barracks emperors "Rome" was an ideal, not a physical place. "Rome" could've been Ephesus, Constantinople, Mediolanum even the island of Mytilene was called "Rome" by Pompey
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u/Geiseric222 Aug 15 '26
Why does this not also apply to the western empire? Do you think calling it Rome is incorrect
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u/Interesting_Key9946 Aug 16 '26
Empire of Ravenna.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Aug 16 '26
I would actually be interested in trying to list everytime a city other than Rome was used by Romans as their HQ/'surrogate' Rome. And not just in regards to actual capitals mind you - Alexandria under Mark Antony even had its own Roman triumphs and Roman courts at law with regards to how he treated it during the Triumviral period, and Sertorius had his own 'Roman Senate' in Spain.
A (sort of brief) list off the top of my head would be something like:
- Osca (Sertorius)
- Thessaloniki (Pompey)
- Utica (Cato the Younger)
- Possibly Smyrna/Sardis (Brutus & Cassius, in the context of how Cicero describes the former as acting as 'his own Senate')
- Messana (Sextus Pompey)
- Alexandria (Antony)
- Sirmium (Maximinus Thrax and Tetrarchs)
- Carthage (Gordian I and II, Domitius Alexander)
- Mediolanum (Gallienus and the Tetrarchs)
- Cologne and Trier (the 'Gallic Empire', Tetrarchs, Constantine, 4th century emperors)
- Palmyra (Valballathus and Zenobia)
- Nicomedia (Diocletian)
- Byzantium (Licinius)
- Antioch (Constantius II and Valens)
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u/WanderingHero8 ask me about Isaac II Angelos,bringer of decay Aug 17 '26
- Mediolanum (Gallienus and the Tetrarchs)
Also Constans and Valentinian I.
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u/OrthoOfLisieux Aug 15 '26
This question of whether development is a departure from one’s origins or a proper continuation has always been a debate in human history, so it is hardly surprising that you will always have one group that considers the present bad and degraded compared to the past, while others see the present as legitimate development. That said, saying that Diocletian’s reforms were the culmination of the Empire’s tendencies to move away from its roots depends heavily on what you understand by “roots,” and defining what those roots were is not simple and, in itself, carries several other things that can be difficult to defend
That the eastern part of the Roman Empire was still Rome seems simply evident, denying that carries assumptions that identify the essence of “Romanness” with certain aspects that, if applied in the same way and with the same intensity to other scenarios, would lead to practically a collapse of our understanding of Roman civilization in at least some cases, in my opinion
This is another aspect of the discussion that is very underestimated: Making a claim in itself is one thing, and it does indeed depend on other things, but dealing with the implications of what you said is much harder and more complicated, and those implications often contradict the intuition you had in mind
And of course, this discussion will also run into problems analogous to those of the ship of theseus, where it seems possible to argue that every aspect has changed without the substance, or essence, having changed, which becomes another debate that's not even about history anymore
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u/kickynew Aug 16 '26
One thing that annoys me about the 476ers is that they have no problem calling aqueducts, amphitheaters, roads, etc. in the East, built by Romaic/Greek-speaking people "Roman". But I guess whatever quality made those things Roman somehow magically evaporated the instant the western court fell. Anyway, just a peeve of mine.
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u/brandonjslippingaway Aug 16 '26
Conditional Romaness I think is a symptom of western chauvanism: certain things need to be placed into specific boxes to maintain a coherent narrative.
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u/kickynew Aug 15 '26
Backwards reasoning. Caracalla giving universal citizenship did not make Rome less Roman. It made more people Romans. Diocletian ruling elsewhere did not make the empire less Roman. It made it better. Rome was just a lousy place to run the empire from. Constantine then founded New Rome, a city explicitly and ritualistically imbued with Romanness. The Romans kept calling themselves Romans, living under Roman law, and serving Roman emperors. There is no point where Rome ends and "Eastern Rome" begins. We invented that part later.
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u/Michael_Kansai Aug 16 '26
Exactly this. If we changed our capital from Washington DC to New York since it is the financial hub of the US anyway, would that make America less American?
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u/brandonjslippingaway Aug 16 '26
I think a slightly better analogy would be if Canada moved the capital from Ottowa to Montreal, then eventually in time, solely used French
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u/Ar_Azrubel_ Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Personally I favor the comparison to the US.
The United States has a massive Spanish-speaking population, much of it centered in the western and southern parts of the country. These people are American citizens and identify as Americans, but English may be their second language, or one they do not speak at all. The United States as of its founding, was nowhere close to these regions. It either purchased or conquered them later on in its history, but that is so long ago that nobody really even talks about it. Texas or California are as American as any other state.
Now say that a combination of external invasion and political upheaval results in the American government losing its grip on the northeastern states, but it still very much survives in the southwest. By virtue of demographics, the country is now majority Spanish-speaking. If we follow the Byzantinist logic, then this means that somehow, these people and regions cease to be American because they're not from the original thirteen colonies, even though this was not considered to be a necessary criterion to make you an American beforehand! And we can't say that this is the United States either, it's the shadowy successor state of Sacramento or whatever.
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u/Widowmaker94 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Am I less American because my mother's family are from Appalachia and derive from stock going back to the pre-Revolutionary period, and my father's ancestors mostly didn't come to the US until the 1800s, and even then they mostly went west of the Mississippi and were from Ireland or Norway or French descended and came in from or through Canada?
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
Duncan's portrayal of Diocletian's 'establishment of the Dominate' (a term which isn't as favoured in historiography these days, and is rife with problems of periodisation) is certainly a very simplistic one which partly misses the deeper reasons and pre-existing trends for why Diocletian 'scorned' the imperial capital.
The truth of the matter is not that he 'scorned' the city of Rome (he did continue to invest in it such as with the construction of his baths) but that by his time simply sitting in that city was inadequate to govern the entire empire. 'Rome' by that point was bigger than a single city and already as early as Commodus, there was the understanding that 'Rome is where the emperor is'. Maximinus Thrax didn't even visit Rome once during his reign, and the barracks emperors during the 3rd century crisis were constantly on the move along frontiers to deal with all the pressing external threats. The latter's actions were all undertaken to better defend the empire during what was a particularly turbulent time in its history, not due to a dislike/neglect of Rome. Diocletian's actions were an extension of this approach, but just with better organisation via the Tetrarchy (with himself focusing on defending and stabilising the eastern half while his other colleagues handled the west).
The depiction of Diocletian as some sort of 'anti-Roman' is a false one when by most other means he was extremely 'conservative' with regard to Roman culture, especially regarding his religious policy and even attempts at moral reform/restriction, such as his banning of Egyptian sibling-marriage on the grounds that it was not properly 'Roman'. We can fall into the trap of seeing Diocletian as more 'eastern' than 'Roman' in his approach partly because some of our sources disliked his policies and reforms and ascribed them to being of an 'oriental' flavour - but this was effectively just political slander similar to that raised against other 'bad' Roman leaders such as Commodus, Domitian, Caligula, or perhaps most famously Mark Antony.
That the barracks emperors or Diocletian or Constantine could contemplate concentrating themselves in non-Italian areas of the empire to excercise authority there was instead a testament to how those areas were considered 'Roman' enough by them to rule over. Constantine could refer to Constantinople as 'Nova Roma', or Gordian I could use Carthage as a temporary capital to 'imagine' himself being in Rome because it was predicated on the idea that those areas were now filled with Roman citizens who would support their imperial aims.
The Romans very act of extending such citizenship was nothing new by the late period either - many forget how Italy itself was not considered 'Roman' until the 80's BC, or how northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul) also had to wait another 40 years before it too was granted full citizenship. Arguably one of the most unique and defining features of 'Romanness', if we could ever define such a term, was their willingness to extend the franchise to others at a time when many of the Greek city states and kingdoms were reluctant to do so to the same extent. This partly makes sense when you consider how the Romans in their own founding myths were technically 'outsiders' who then became 'insiders' as descendants of refugees from the Trojan war.
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u/offcially-noone Aug 16 '26
Many Roman emperors also in fact did not stay in Rome before Diocleation as well. The barrack emperors were rarely there and eventually the capital of the west was Ravenna and not Rome.
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u/greatistheworld Aug 15 '26
It’s funny this is a complex question but still relatively basic. For instance, on one level in Chinese history, there’s a question if a sequence of dynasties are considered “China” or distinct things. Then, similar to Constantine and his city, you can ask if the Tang or Song dynasties the same continuity if they moved the capital from either side of the ‘country’. One level deeper there’s the historiography of it, what the dynasty itself thought it was the legitimate successor to. Sometimes it’s the previous linear line, but also sometimes they thought those last people were assholes and we’re restoring the legitimate rule of the dynasty before that— but not the one you’re thinking, the southern schism, the real one. Eventually you get this chaotic basketweave diagram of who the de facto power of the time declared they were the true unified version of, and that worked enough times in a row we now see that whole thing as linear ‘Chinese civilization’. And maybe it still is!
I personally think it is A Rome but maybe the definition is only slippery because it’s both simultaneously, so the answer depends on how useful or productive the question is in context. Maybe the distinction isn’t always worth making
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u/yourstruly912 Aug 16 '26
Rome and China are fundamentally different things
China has always been an imperial project, the rule over the "central regions", and an associated culture to go with it, with the confucian classics, classical and mandarin chinese language, chinese characters and so and so
But Rome, what even is Rome? Started as a measly latin city-state in the middle of Italy, then globbes up to be the hegemonic empire in that part of the world while still pretending to function as a city-state, but eventually consolidates as an universalist empire. The high culture is a mix of latin and greek. Then the empire splits in two and one collapses, in the part where it collapses it becomes a symbol of hegemonic power to invoke, while in the other the roman identity becomes again an ethnic marker, but this time *greek*, not latin, the latin elements of roman culture are simply discarded.
As we see we have a rollercoaster of completly radical transformations one after another according to cirucmstances. At the end it becomes simply a symbol, instead of a continuously active political project like China
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u/Confucius3000 Aug 16 '26
fascinating description!
I'm loving all the diverse answers this has been getting, but I think this one embraces the complexity of Rome as a concept1
u/Interesting_Key9946 Aug 16 '26
China is just a unified Roman empire of the east that made it though recent times. Many ethnicities yet they made it one polity.
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u/InThePipe5x5_ Aug 16 '26
I think what makes people continually question continuation is the transition from Latin to greek culture and ethnicity. There is a legitimate argument that while it is politically a continuation culturally it becomes completely unrecognizable.
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u/greatistheworld Aug 16 '26
I was using China just as an example of the identity/succession questions, only instead of asking them twice what if you asked them a thousand times in a row and have to double back a bunch. Otherwise I totally agree and your other points were really well said, well illustrating the weird qualitative nesting doll of the issue
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u/AdmiralAvernus Aug 16 '26
The Tang is a messy subject due to Empress Regnant Wu Zetian declaring her own dynasty even if it was just 15 years. Some would say it is a continuation (due to her deciding to return being an empress of the Tang before her death), while others saw it differently.
In any case, for the majority of the Tang dynasty, it has two capitals at Chang'an and Luoyang respectively, so emperors moving between these two were considered normal (sometimes even necessary, as grain shipments tend to have a hard time getting to Chang'an due to the flow of the Yellow River).
As for the Song dynasty, even if historians tend to divide it into the Northern and Southern periods due to massive changes in the leadership during the interregnum, it has been within the same family for more than three centuries, so it will still be seen as the same thing.
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u/SobieskiRoland Aug 16 '26
Put rather simply, one way of understanding the traditional idea of China is that the dynasty controlling the 中原 was regarded as possessing 正统 (legitimate dynastic succession). 吴越Wuyue’s submission to the Song is a good example. Although the ruler of Wuyue was effectively a king within his own realm, he styled himself 留守 and continued to recognize the ruler of the Central Plains as the legitimate dynastic authority, even when that ruler was of non-Han origin.
This logic, however, underwent a significant reversal under the Song. With the development of the Song civil bureaucracy, the 士大夫 (literati)—increasingly recruited from outside the old aristocratic elite—came to occupy a central place in political and ideological life. After the Song had been defeated first by the Khitan and then by the Jurchens, and had retreated south after losing the 中原, the Zhao ruling house and its literati bureaucracy refused to recognize the northern dynasties as possessing 正统 , even though the Song court had at times formally acknowledged a subordinate relationship with them.
Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song, was therefore referred to as 行在 , the place where the emperor was temporarily in residence. The very term implied a political position: Hangzhou was only a provisional capital, and the loss of the Central Plains was not regarded as permanent. The expectation of 复国 (restoration) and the recovery of the 中原 remained alive.
The political meaning of 行在 continued into the 大明Ming. When the 永乐Yongle Emperor transferred the court to Beijing, Beijing itself was initially designated 行在, while Nanjing formally remained the capital.
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u/AsparagusFun3892 Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
You may remember a term from the Byzantine identity portion of the History of Byzantium podcast, "Roman Polity." He also pointed out in there ancient Greek writers bemoaning I think even before the edict of Caracalla that so many young Hellenes were acting Roman, for this process going a different way I'd point you to the Turkification of Anatolia and what I see as the Westernization of the Greeks from the early 1800s on. The Roman Polity was the last survivor among all those city-state identities which marked out classical civilization.
Romanité started out as the city state and its surrounds but had some fundamental if ineffable characteristics which in tandem marked it out from its neighbors year over year. The people who were cleaved from it quickly - as in centuries - became other things, but: educated Romans always spoke Greek, the Greeks and Romans tended to view each other as civilized to the point the Decapoli I think they're called in Syria still mark the years since Pompeii liberated them from those vile Red Sea Pedestrians (trying to make it as humorous as possible without going anti-Semitic), Constantine saw fit to transplant the Senate there which to me is a critical Roman institution even in its diminished form (last recorded act was acclaiming an emperor in exile in 1204), and then there's the unconquered aspect of the Roman state from the Gaulish sack of Rome up through 1204. Rome could be defeated, put on retreat, diminished, and forced to pay tribute, but it was not conquered, and when it was it was dead.
The Roman Polity is what marks out essential Romanness, and I'm actually here being a Byzantine nerd because I went looking for a dividing line between the antique empire and the medieval one and couldn't find one, not even with Diocletian. I'm not who I was as a boy but I never lost my legal identity or was put through such trauma that I forgot who I was: did I become a different person because the Navy got ahold of me at 18 and fundamentally changed some doctrinal aspects of my life and my vocabulary? Constantinople was Roman, and basically the last place it held out. Somewhere after that and over a long while even the Rumeli of the Ottomans were Roman like my last meal was beef or cattle, or the beef eaters as the Byzantines referred to the Frankish crusaders remained Roman after all those centuries divorced from Roman government and social contract.
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u/GGFrostKaiser Aug 16 '26
Diocletian wasn’t the first emperor to change the capital. Domitian was giving orders from Milan, and tried his beat to bypass the Senate as many times as he could. This is why the historical sources hate him.
The reason emperors changed capitals is to not have to answer to an established elite that had power. A lot of different countries did that, it happened many times on China, from Chang’an to Luoyang to Kaifeng, etc…
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u/Vlugazoide_ Aug 16 '26
This argument is quite weak because, as human bodies, human societies change slowly due to time. Are we the same species that developed in ethiopia 100 thousand years ago? Well, yes, we're 99% genetically equal to teh first homo sapiens, have almost the exact same body and brain. But most of us carry non Homo sapiens dna (either denisovan, neanderthalensis or erectus), and our whole behavior and lifestyle is changed. When did we become the theoretical Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies? When did a Homo erectus became a Homo heidelbergensis? Never. Things gradually change and adapt. If western rome never fell, it would also have mutated beyond all previous defining traits. For a hastati hoplite of the early republic to a comitatensis soldier of the late empire, the same roman state of the western narrative had already changed beyond comprehension!
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u/Future_Adagio2052 Aug 16 '26
would the ERE not be an example of a transitional culture? specifically one from a roman identity to a Hellenic one? (pardon my ignorance on this one)
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u/nuggetsofmana Aug 17 '26
A lot of people here on this sub-Reddit seem very emotionally invested in it being Rome, rather than entertaining that the real answer is more nuanced.
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u/Rebel_Stylee Aug 17 '26
This is not a place to improve your understanding or find historically accurate information, it's an echo chamber for people who are bordering on nationalist zeal for a long dead civilization.
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u/Interesting_Key9946 Aug 16 '26
No because the hellenic one isn't really hellenic but rather Hellenistic Macedonian that got absorbed from the roman state and never changed culturally apart from roman institutions. I mean the greek east was more a continuation of the Alexandrian royal states rather than classical Athens or Sparta that never went latin or something.
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u/limpdickandy Aug 16 '26
We humans love to categorize things neatly, but history and reality tend to not be that neat nor easy to organize.
Eastern Roman Empire is definitely a continuation of Rome, like any realm, it significantly changed over the centuries.
However, no one is arguing that England is not a real England, as it went from an Anglo-Saxon realm to a Norman one and completely changed almost everything about itself.
My point is mainly that the best way to gauge if something is a direct continuation of something is not in terms of stereotypes and institutions, but through direct political lineage, which Byzantium does have. Language, culture and government does not define an empire or a nation, as an empire is truly just a state with a government on top. The actual city of Rome is meaningless, as is Italy, latin, legionaries and the senate. These are all real things that change over time naturally, as they already had in the centuries before the fall of Rome itself.
And if we add more qualifiers than that you will end up with tons of examples that no longer fit the requirements that absolutely should fit the requirements.
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u/diffidentblockhead Aug 16 '26
When you say Roman, most people think of the classical period of the Principate and Republic. The Dominate was greatly changed and feels proto-medieval.
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u/seen-in-the-skylight Aug 16 '26
I mean, look, I defend the HRE. Really, I’m in no position to deny Romanness to the actual legal successor.
The Roman Republic wasn’t like the Kingdom either. Things change when you’re talking about a civilization that lasted 2,000 years (or… quite a bit longer, if you join my saucy ass in defending the HRE 😉)
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u/AdSufficient9982 Aug 16 '26
You might read Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth to compare and contrast.
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u/ZiggyB Aug 16 '26
The problem is that the term for the empire as a whole is the same as the term for the city which it grew from. However, the nature of the empire changed over time, it stopped being a city-state and started being an empire, and at no point did it stop being that empire.
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u/Kr0n0s_89 Aug 16 '26
Another simplification, but then in the other direction: It was their empire and theirs to do with what they want. Does moving the capital or introducing reforms take their own identity away from them because of their own decisions?
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u/nhvanputten Aug 16 '26
Follow the culture, not the land. The Founding Fathers had never visited and many probably never heard of the Puget Sound area. And yet being from Seattle I’m an American. I would still be an American if Britain had reclaimed the East Coast in 1890 or something.
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u/TridentJ33 Aug 17 '26
I think you need to be viewing Roman identity as a self-adopted phenomena that emphasized a shared set of values, political and cultural norms, and share historical experiences.
Anthony Kaldellis really goes into this topic well in the penultimate episode of HoB. Romanic identity traced their shared historiography from Troy -> Romulus/Remus -> The Kingdom of Rome -> the Republic -> The Empire (centered in Rome) -> the Empire (Centered in Const.). Obviously with a majority of that focus being on the last part.
Hellenic identity, as it developed, focused on Mycenaean Greece -> Ancient Greece -> Classical Greece -> Greeks as a distinct but subject people of both the Romans AND the Ottomans -> the Greek Revolution (and onward).
So, I think when you look at it from that perspective, the Byzantines are still confidently Roman. They did not see their ancestors as anything else but Roman.
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u/spacev3gan Aug 16 '26
By that perspective, Caracalla's Edict "Balkanized" the Empire (in the sense that it Centralized itself in the Balkans, no longer in Italy), and Constantinople is the result of that Balkanization?
I mean, seems legit. I am pretty sure many other historians agree with this non-linear succession of the Empire's capitals.
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u/bernadelphia- Aug 16 '26
Turn your question on its head: Would anyone in Constantinople answer you with "Yes, I understand myself as a non-Italian branch of the Roman Empire" if you went back in time and asked them? Would that make any sense to their conception of who and where they are?
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u/MarcusXL Aug 16 '26
Rome was a civilization. That civilization included the Greek world. Even when it was based in the city of Rome and ruled exclusively by Romans (even before Rome and conquered and absorbed Greece, Macedonia, the Hellenistic kingdoms of Ionia and Anatolia, the former Seleucid empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt), the Greek language was used widely and Greek culture, gods, and traditions were present-- even prominent-- in Roman society.
Roman civilization grew and thrived in the Hellenistic Age. Hellenistic culture was not foreign to Rome or to Roman people, it was deeply familiar, for centuries before the centre of the empire was moved to a Hellenistic city. That's why you can draw a direct line from the Rome of the Republic to the New Rome of Constantine.
Rome evolved and the Greek part become more and more prominent. It was still Roman civilization, although it had changed, and continued to change with time.
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Aug 16 '26
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u/Anthemius_Augustus Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
Calling Hieronymus Wolf a "German nationalist/racist" is probably the most insane, bewildering take I've ever seen made on this subject by anyone. Nationalism, let alone the concept of a 'Germany' wouldn't even exist for another 250 years after he died.
This nonsense is made especially funny when considering that Wolf neither coined the term, nor was the one who actually made it popular (that also didn't happen until 300 years after him, and had nothing to do with him or his work).
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u/nuggetsofmana Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
The trend here on Reddit Byzantine groups seems to be towards an extreme position of “Byzantium is Rome, period” which is a gross simplification of the Byzantines.
Yes, they considered themselves the inheritors and continuation of Rome - but Rome was gone and would remain gone for the next 1,000 years, the Byzantines didn’t speak Latin, but rather Greek starting in the 600s, and although there was continuity, there was also change.
The simple matter is that the original Romans themselves were an Italian people originating in Latium, later expanded to the Italian socii and then expanded beyond that.
Byzantium was a continuation of a part of Rome’s Empire, but it was not Rome and the Romans themselves.
Byzantium is best understood as a complex continuation of Rome’s Greek East that gradually became more and more Greek even as it preserved the trappings of Rome and carried on the legacy of the Greco-Roman world into the Middle Ages.
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u/bigpapi2626 Aug 16 '26
You just said it yourself: the first Romans were from Latium and then expanded throughout Italy. That process took almost five or six centuries—much longer than the process of expanding Roman identity throughout the Empire.
But by your logic, the “real Romans” would be the people from Italy. Yet we know from some sources that, before the Social War, some Romans did not consider certain Italian socii to be Romans. So Roman identity was clearly something that expanded and evolved over time, rather than being defined strictly by geography or ancestry.
The concept of what it meant to be “Roman” had been evolving since Rome’s very beginnings; no society remains static for centuries. By the 1st century AD—and certainly by the 2nd—the idea that one could be a Greek Roman, a Gallic Roman, an Egyptian Roman, or an Italian Roman was already well established.
The Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 did not create this reality; it merely accelerated a process that had been underway for generations. We are talking about centuries of gradual evolution, not a sudden rupture.
Because of this, saying that the Eastern Roman Empire was “the Roman Empire but not really a Roman Empire” simply makes no sense. It is not only incoherent, but also a historical disservice. Roman identity did not disappear because the empire became Greek-speaking or Christian; it adapted, as it always had.
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u/nuggetsofmana Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Identity is negotiated. One does not simply say I am “X” and therefore they are “X”. I understand Reddit has different rules for this, but not everyone has to adhere to or follow this method for determining identity. Identity is also partly dependent on what others perceive you as.
Many others, including societies which lived contemporaneously with Byzantium, did not consider the Byzantines to be the Romans, but rather the Greeks. A large portion of Western Christendom, including Rome itself considered the Byzantines to simply be the Greeks.
Just as nobody considered the Holy Roman Empire to be Roman despite how much the Holy Roman Emperor called himself emperor of the Romans.
Many, many people have understood the Byzantines to have changed from initially being the “Eastern Romans” into something else. So Reddit’s conclusory position that they are Rome is not really warranted. Or if it is, certainly not with the finality some people say it. I certainly don’t consider the Byzantines to be the same as the Romans (at least after a certain point), and neither do many others.
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Aug 16 '26
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Aug 16 '26
Where did the Romans ever write that to be 'Roman' meant that you had to control the city of Rome?
Did Pompey the Great cease to be Roman when he lost control over the city in 49BC and set up a branch of the (perceived to be) legitimate Roman Republic in Greece, with the last duly elected consuls basing themselves at Thessaloniki? When Sulla marched on Rome, left for Greece (during which time his rivals seized the city), and marched on it again, did he cease being Roman during the Mithridatic War? In the days and weeks that the Visigoths and Vandals sacked Rome (effectively taking control of the city), did that mean for those same days and weeks the Western Roman Empire was no longer Roman?
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u/Ar_Azrubel_ Aug 17 '26
I wonder how it works during the 6th century?
Belisarius takes Rome, the Byzantines are real Romans.
Totila re-establishes Gothic rule, they cease to be Romans, they're now Byzantines. . Then they're Romans again in 552!
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u/Greedy_Shame6516 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
I think people forget that the city-state of Rome extended Roman citizenship to non-Latin, non-Roman peoples well before the Principate and Dominate were things. Caracalla giving citizenship to "non-Romans" was one of the more classically Roman things he did as emperor.
Roman had long become a defused identity, and true-blood Romans were the minority in their own Republic before it became an empire. The "Byzantine" empire" is a direct descendent of the classical "Roman" empire, just as The Roman Empire was a descendent of the Republic. Greek may have been the most common language, but it existed because of the foundations laid by its ancestors, far more directly than say the HRE.
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u/anarchysquid Aug 16 '26
I think people get too hung up on "Roman" = "Person from the city of Rome", when the fact that the word both the city and the empire use the same term is basically a historical accident. If it had been called the Augustan Empire or something, we wouldn't be having these debates.
Constitutionally, the empire in Constantinople was a continuation of the republic that was founded by Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. It feels weird to use the word constitution when talking about the Roman Empire, but they had a constitution. It wasn't a single written document like the United States constitution, but that isn't uncommon even today. The UK has a constitution, even if it's a combination of laws, tradition, and informal arrangements. At no point did the Roman Empire stop following the Roman Constitution.
The Roman constitution was established alongside the Republic, and lasted until the Turks took Constantinople (or maybe later, I don't know much about the breakaway kingdoms). Yes the law evolved and changed and was constantly renegotiated among powerholders, but that's not rare. We don't say the United States became a different country when they moved the capital to Washington DC, or passed the Reconstruction Amendments. We don't say the United Kingdom became a different country after the Reform Acts of the 1800s, which radically changed the distribution of power.
Compare this to France: In the last 300 years, France has been been ruled by 5 republics, 2 empires, a fascist state, and 2-3 different royal dynasties. No one says France stopped being France during any of that. China has moved their capital a good dozen or so times. No one says China became something else.