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This Day in History:

VII IDVS SEP<TEM>BRES Q POSTVMIVS ROGAVIT A ATTIVM PEDICARIM

On September 7th Quintus Postumius asked Aulus Attius if I could fuck him (in the ass).

CIL IV.8805

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Show idea: magical girl group but each girl is based on one of the seven heavenly virtues

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Wildbow likes the word copacetic, which is not one I'm very familiar with. While the core meaning is easy to work out from context, I got the connotations wrong; my brain mentally categorised it as “probably Latinate” and therefore slightly formal, which doesn't seem to be the case at all.

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(guy reading through slanderous propaganda from political rivals) whats so inspirational is that every great leader and emperor in history was gay

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Wildbow likes the word copacetic, which is not one I'm very familiar with. While the core meaning is easy to work out from context, I got the connotations wrong; my brain mentally categorised it as “probably Latinate” and therefore slightly formal, which doesn't seem to be the case at all.

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A remastered edition of this to be released in 2025!

Thinking about making a board game about the Roman Third Century Crisis. Main mechanic being one player serving as the emperor and the others as generals, with at least one player needed to move units, but a general player can make a bid to become emperor at any time with the troops he has. Also all the invasions and economic collapse at the same time

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Yeah I think giving them a random new generalship could work. The penalty to being eliminated would be that the player loses all the victory points (and/or other resources) accumulated by their original character and have to start over as a different character (with presumably default starting resources and zero VP).

I would imagine that an elimination would make it very hard for that player to win, but at least they get to keep playing instead of twiddling their thumbs while the rest of the group finishes the game.

Thinking about making a board game about the Roman Third Century Crisis. Main mechanic being one player serving as the emperor and the others as generals, with at least one player needed to move units, but a general player can make a bid to become emperor at any time with the troops he has. Also all the invasions and economic collapse at the same time

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Apparently not everyone knows that cleopatra and Julius Ceasar had sex. Well they did. In an extramarital affair even. They made a boy named Caesarion. He was the actual last pharaoh of Egypt for like ten minutes.

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surely this compromise imposed on the Church by the Emperor will bring peace to the Church...

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Last update 19/02/2025

Oh, so it's not like this because no one has touched it in 25 years. They are keeping it this way on purpose because Stefanie & Andrea are people of culture.

classicists will make the ugliest least functional website in the history of html and it will contain the entire library of fragmentary papyri of the works of aeschylus. for free

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Shinji, get on the cross!

trying to imagine a roman and an israelite arguing about rei vs asuka as the best waifu for Shinjesus

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yeah it took me somewhere between five and ten posts to pick up on the idea that the Niketas you're always talking about is the Niketas from the CSCU (caesarsaladinn cinematic universe) and not a an obscure but real historical person

time to Gregory Berrycone my OC into history

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i'm about 275 pages in, so i can't comment too much, but this review tracks with everything I have read so far.

it's really funny how much of an anti-Justinian partisan Kaldellis is. It makes sense, of course. Justin fully aligned with the Pope and Justinian continued this, upholding Papal supremacy and inflaming religious tensions to new heights. Kaldellis criticizes Justinian for "social engineering" with language straight out of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. Worst of all, Justinian's bloody suppression of the Nika Riots is the strongest counter-evidence against Kadellis' theory of the "Byzantine republic." (I'm not saying this one episode is sufficient to disprove the theory; it's just that Justinian's behavior is inconsistent with the norms Kaldellis believes governed the political community of Constantinople.) I want to watch Kaldellis and r/Byzantium's biggest Justinian stan fight in a cage match.

2025 Book Review #34 – The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, by Anthony Kaldellis

I have an aspiration to read one work of history or otherwise intellectually virtuous nonfiction every month. I have fallen a bit off of that, entirely and specifically because of this book in particular – at over 900 pages of densely packed texted supported by a couple hundred more of glossaries, tables, photographs, maps and citations, this is more intellectually weighty than anything else I’ve read all year. Possibly combined.

Anthony Kaldellis is a leading academic historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, who is both horrifyingly productive writing journal articles and monographs and (how I know him) runs his own and appears on many, many other podcasts. This is a project he was talking about for some time, a comprehensive introductory survey of the history of the Eastern Roman Empire, from the Constantine founding his New Rome on the Bosporus to the Ottoman Conquest a millennium later. The narrative is largely political, but whenever the surviving sources permit it snapshots of social and economic relationships and digressions into cultural history appear as well. As that survey, it is wholly successful – obviously there are limits to how much depth any particular area can be treated (even with a 4-digit page count, covering a millenium across half the Mediterranean basin requires some harsh prioritization), but everything is at least touched on, and every era is treated with interest and depth. While hardly light reading, the book really doesn’t require any familiarity with the subject or (thankfully) the existing academic discourse around it. I doubt it’s going to be pleasure reading for most people, but it seems ideal as, say, a reference text for an undergraduate course or similar.

The main way that Kaldellis manages to fit the entire history of the Eastern Roman (not Byzantine, he’s very emphatic about this) into a single volume is with a bit of sleight of hand that is also one of his main theses – that for the vast majority of its history, the politics of the Empire and of the city of Constantinople are functionally interchangeable. To understand the pressures and politics of Court and City is to have an excellent model for predicting and deciphering imperial politics, and to understand the laws and policies of the imperial government knowledge the state of things in the City is irreplaceable. Far more than any peer state it ever encounters, the Empire has a centralized, centrally-focused political and military elite, and a coherent and deeply felt popular conception among its subjects that they were Roman and the heart of the state was Constantinople. Kaldellis reiterates again and again that for most of its history, for most of its subjects, it was closer to a modern nation-state than an empire in the traditionally understood sense. There was a Roman identity and a sense of Roman patriotism that left people willing to pay taxes and follow laws in good times and fight and die in bad ways, almost until the very end.

Which leads naturally to another of Kaldellis’ main points – that the Eastern Roman Empire was as much or more a republic whose leadership was legitimized by good governance and popular acclaim as it was a monarchy justified by divine sanction or (certainly) any sort of dynastic principle. There was not, at any point in the millennium of Eastern Roman history, ever any sort of settled or generally accepted principles of succession to the throne that lasted for more than one generation – various Emperor’s attempted to secure the throne for their sons, with wildly varying degrees of success, but it all came down to quite ad-hoc negotiations and contests between generals, courtiers, and Constantinople’s mob. That an Emperor worked tirelessly and selflessly for the good of the Roman polity was the main thing to legitimatize them, and arguments that they were failing to do so were often followed by usurpation attempts. Coups and rebellions of various scales were unsurprisingly common, though the fact that the state remained so united and coherent for so long despite this is probably the strong single argument in favour of Kaldellis’ stance on the strength of the shared Roman identity and the degree to which the political elite’s ambitions revolved entirely around Constantinople.

Those two arguments combine to form the book’s main thesis about why exactly the Eastern Roman Empire was able to survive and (mostly) thrive for literally a thousand years after the fall of the West – it was a relatively competent and meritocratic state, deeply entrenched in the lives of its subjects and (on the whole) legitimized itself through filling useful roles in their lives and being responsive to their petitions and demands. Equally important, it was served by a competitive and oft-vicious political elite that was nonetheless both relatively open to talented new members from below and beyond their ranks and which was far more interested in winning honour and glory through the empire (and riches through imperial service and favors) than establishing their own local fiefdoms and breaking apart the state to secure their own local power.

All of which combined is about as important in emphasis and the passion behind the writing as the book’s final main thesis – that the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Empire has been slandered, disrespected and forgotten in the western historical memory from almost the word go, that just about every part of that historical memory is wrong in both the generalities and particulars, and that you the reader should care about and respect the Empire of the Romans more than you do.

...okay, I exaggerate. But that is kind of the reading experience here – this is a deeply, deeply partisan book. There’s a tendency in every serious biography that the author will either at least slightly fall in love with and start apologizing for their subject or (less often) just loathe them beyond all restraint. Kaldellis is the former option but for an imperial polity that dominated the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries. Every individual point is, I’m certain, carefully research and presents the latest scholarship. But as a matter of tone and emphasis, this is clearly a book that is trying to intervene and act as a correction to an existing orientalist understanding of the empire and how it functioned, not present a naive, and even-handed take. Which is mostly a matter of tone and emphasis – the atrocities and injustices visited upon the Roman people by various foreign raiders and invaders are dwelt upon at length, while those they inflicted upon foreigners are only occasionally mentioned, and those inflicted by the government and elite upon the Roman population are pretty actively minimized. The text explains a popular narrative about some event or another and then corrects it on several different occasions, and the corrected version always lionizes the Empire by comparison. The narrative positively drips with contempt and scorn for latin arguments about translatio imperii and the pedigree of the Holy Roman Empire. And so on. As I said, I have no doubts about the care taken with any particular aspect here, but it seems pretty clearly to be intended as an antithesis to an existing understanding of things, no something to be read naively with totally fresh eyes.

Whatever they might lack in academic objectivity, the areas where the book clearly has a strong opinion and can’t help but make its contempt for one party or another in a dispute are pretty reliably the most entertaining to actually read. The narrative’s opinion on the various theological disputes which caused so much discord and civil strife among the Christian church in late antiquity, for example, basically boils down to ‘this was all so much needless bullshit where even the partisans of each side often didn’t understand what they were arguing, and which consumed vastly disproportionate amounts of imperial time and attention and caused real unrest for absolutely no reason at all except personality conflicts and clout-chasing’. All of which is still far kind than it is to the claims of papal supremacy and attempts to establish a universal and centralized church which drove the development of Latin Catholicism (and no small amount of conflict between Catholic Europe and the Empire).

The book tries at certain points, and both the absurdly vast time frame covered and the lack of sources that would really allow thorough answers to the question both militate against it, but I do wish a bit more time had been spent on the actual mechanics of how roman day-to-day government and administration changes over time – the exact blow-by-blow accounts of christological controversies and recitation of seemingly every military campaign ever led by any Emperor could probably have been abridged to make room (though Kaldelllis does win immense points from me for rarely-if-ever devoting significant word count to the particulars of a battle beyond who was involved, the result and their consequences). Just in terms of interest and detail, the book also seemed much more preoccupied with the Empire's eras of imperial splendour and hegemony than periods where events conspired against it (and with the Late Antique and Early Medieval glory days in particular) – though this, again, is most likely just a reaction to the popular memory of the Empire and its own focuses.

I really can’t say I recommend this book, at least not as easy reading or something light to pick for a book club (if you find yourself in need of an actual club, then a thousand pages in hardcover binding will probably work as well as anything, though). But if, like me, you occasionally idly dream of becoming independently wealthy enough to go back to grab school and become an aimless dilettante of a historian, and also spend far too much time making settings for rpg campaigns, this book is about a dozen pounds of catnip for you.

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Recently, my mind was wandering and it crossed my mind that I can't remember the last time I saw any mention of Publius Clodius Pulcher on Tumblr...

If you are one of today's lucky 10,000, go check out Clodius' Wikipedia page! He's such a character!

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fun Youtube channel I just discovered

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