2. The Greek and Roman Background

 

In studying any culture, it is obviously important to understand its predecessors and the background from which it came.  In the case of Byzantium this is especially significant, in part because the Byzantine Empire did not suddenly come into being, but it, rather, developed slowly through the evolution of its "parent" civilizations.  Byzantium was the direct heir of the  civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, and --as such -- it joins the Medieval West and the Islamic World as one of the three "branches" of Western Civilization in the Middle Ages..

 A. Many have said that Byzantium was Greek in its culture, Roman in its government, and Judeo-Christian in its religion.

 B. It is especially important to keep this continuity with the ancient past in mind.

1. The Byzantine Empire is usually considered part of the Middle Ages -- and there are reasons for this.  But at the same time Byzantium emerged directly out of the ancient world and, especially in the early centuries, many of the institutions of the Byzantine Empire were simply continuations of those that had existed previously.

 

2. A striking manifestation of this is that the Byzantines always--for the entire 1100-year history of Byzantium--referred to themselves as "Romans" and to the state as the "Roman empire"!  It may seem strange to us that a state that did not (for most of its history) contain the city of Rome would call itself the "Roman Empire," but that is the case and it is an indication of how strong that sense of continuity was among the Byzantines.  They believed that their society was the culmination (and perfection) of history that went back to ancient Israel, Greece, and interpreted, and imitated the works of the classical (especially Greek) authors—including Rome.

 

C. One can see this connection also clearly in cultural terms.

 

1.  Byzantine culture was built solidly (and almost exclusively) on the traditions from the Greek and Roman past.  

 

2. This meant that the Byzantines had at their disposal the rich artistic and literary traditions of the classical world: they read, many, many works that do not exist anymore today.  

 

3. They read the ancient Greek poets: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, the historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon); the philosophers (Plato, Aristotle), and many others.  

 

4. Naturally, the Byzantines read these works as texts that were already ancient (some of them had been written 1000 years before the time of Constantine!), and they approached this literature through the scholarship and commentaries that had been written about them in the intervening years.  

 

5. A particularly important phenomenon was the appearance of encyclopedias and compendia of texts that were used in schools, so that scholars often made contact with ancient literature, not in the original works, but in published excerpts of texts as used in schools.  The ability to quote passages in literature, often from memory, was often seen as the mark of an educated individual, and education was also thus a powerful tool for social advancement, whereby a person of low social rank might advance to a place equivalent to that of the highest in Byzantine society.

 D. This continuity with the classical tradition was essentially positive, but it did mean that some aspects of Byzantine culture were heavily imitative: they regarded the works of the classical authors as near-perfect paradigms and their primary goal often was to write books and treatises that imitated the style, and even the content, of their predecessors, with only some small changes in detail.  

 

1. Byzantine culture, therefore, was extraordinarily sophisticated, but it can be seen as “traditional” and lacking in originality, especially when compared to the literature that developed in the Medieval West. 

 

2. This judgment, however, is now being revised by many scholars, who point out that our own view of what is original and what is not is biased in favor of more western ideas, and that an evaluation of originality in Byzantine culture requires a broader, non-Western point of view, i.e., an attempt to understand Byzantine culture on its own terms.

 

E. It is also clear that the ideological aspects of the classical tradition had important positive, but also some potentially negative ramifications for Byzantium.  As mentioned above, the Byzantines believed that their society (and its political structure) was the culmination of human history and that there would essentially be no major changes in the future (until the end of the world).  

 

1. With the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, the Byzantines came to see this also in terms of God’s plan for human-kind and they viewed the Empire as the new Israel and Constantinople as the New Jerusalem.  

 

2. These concepts provided the Byzantines with a remarkable sense of continuity, purpose, and confidence, but they also may have discouraged innovation and recognition of new factors on the world scene.  

 

3. For the Byzantinies—as generally in the ancient world—there was no such concept as “progress” and the idea of “innovation” was the equivalent of what we would regard as revolution.  Byzantine society was thus largely conservative in most of its aspects and it regarded change in essentially suspicious or even negative terms.  

 

4. The Empire did, of course, change significantly through its history, but these changes often had to be made in the guise of maintaining the status quo and they were not embraced easily or praised as good in themselves. 

 

5. This attitude toward change, and the essentially timeless attitude within Byzantine culture, is one of the main characteristics of Byzantine civilization.  The paradox is, again, that Byzantium did change over time, while still maintaining the concept of timelessness.

 

F. In political and institutional terms the Byzantine Empire emerged “seamlessly” from the Roman Empire.  

 

1. As indicated above, the Byzantines regarded themselves as Roman and the very terms “Byzantine” and “Byzantine Empire” as essentially modern concepts, devised by historians who wanted to differentiate the medieval Byzantines from the ancient Romans.  

 

2. There is considerable disagreement among modern historians as to when the Byzantine Empire “began,” since its emergence was certainly evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  Some cite the “conversion” of Constantine (in 312) as the defining event, while others look at the founding of Constantinople (in 330) or the end of a united eastern and western regime (395).  All of these point to the fourth century as critical in the transition, but some historians see the defining moment as later, as late as  565 (death of Justinian), 600, 610, or even 717.  All would agree, however, that the change was gradual, and that the political, social, and economic structures of the ancient world continued into at least the early Byzantine period.  

 

3. Thus, some understanding of these phenomena in the Roman empire is necessary for a full appreciation of the situation in early Byzantium.

 

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