Summary

Anthony Kaldellis asserts unequivocally that the Byzantines were Romans — politically, legally, and culturally — for over a millennium, not Greeks pretending to be Romans. They called themselves Romaioi unselfconsciously. “Hellene” was a religious insult denoting paganism, not ethnicity. Hellenism itself meant paideia: shared education and culture, not blood or descent. Anyone could become Greek through learning, while ethnic Greeks could be less “Hellenic” than educated foreigners. Roman identity transcended ethnicity after Caracalla’s citizenship edict. Kaldellis dismantles modern Greek nationalist claims of continuity, showing “Hellenic” national consciousness emerged only late, in moments of imperial crisis, not as ancient inheritance. Byzantium was the nation-state of the Romans.

Anthony Kaldellis, the leading Byzantinist of his generation, doesn’t hedge: “The fact is not in dispute: the Byzantines were Romans.” Not Greeks pretending to be Romans. Not Romans of convenience. Romans full stop — politically, legally, and in their own self-understanding for over a thousand years after Constantine.

” ‘We’ are Romans in most texts written after the late third century, whether by pagans or Christians, in Greek or Latin,” Kaldellis writes. “The equation is unselfconscious.” Romaioi was not a slogan. It was the everyday pronoun by which the people of Constantinople, Anatolia, the Aegean and Greece called themselves — for a millennium.

Kaldellis demolishes the modern Greek-nationalist reading in one sentence: “The Byzantines were Romans who happened to speak Greek and not Greeks who happened to call themselves Romans.” Saying the medieval inhabitants of Constantinople were “really” Greek is, in his analogy, like insisting US presidents are “really” Englishmen.

In 212 AD, Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to every free person in the empire. After that, Kaldellis writes, “Rome was The City, a city made into a world. Ethnicity was irrelevant as community was now defined by consensus, law, and custom.” Romanitas swallowed Hellenism whole. Ethnic Greekness, as a public identity, simply ceased to exist.

“The Byzantines, then, were Romans, not Greeks or Armenians in disguise, or, for that matter, Pisidians or Paphlagonians.” Kaldellis again: Byzantium was not “a multi-ethnic empire” but “the nation-state of the Romans,” with assimilated minorities at its margins. The “Greek nation inside Byzantium” of nationalist textbooks is a 19th-century retrofit.

For most of Byzantine history, “Hellene” was not a compliment. Roman law (Codex Justinianus 1.11.10) refers to “the impious and loathsome Hellenes.” Pseudo-Athanasius decreed: “anyone who says that there are two gods is Hellenizing.” For a thousand years, calling someone a Hellene meant calling them a polytheist — an insult, a heresy, a crime.

Kaldellis catalogues the absurdity: under the Byzantine Christian usage, “Persian Zoroastrians, Arabs who practiced human sacrifice, native north Africans, the early Rus’, and the Chinese were all Hellenes.” Coptic borrowed the word for pagan Egyptians. “Hellene” had become a religious slur covering anyone non-Christian — including the Chinese.

Konstantinos VII Porphyrogennetos — the 10th-century Byzantine emperor and scholar — wrote of pagan Maniots in the Peloponnese who were called “Hellenes” because of their religion. Then he added that they were not the same genos as the surrounding Slavs, because they were “descended from ancient Romans”! Even in pagan Mani, Greek was a religion. Roman was the bloodline.

The 9th-century emperor Leon VI describes how his father Basileios I converted the Slavs in Greece. Kaldellis quotes the verb: “he Graecized them” — graikōsas — i.e., taught them Greek as a language. Note what Leon avoids: he does not say his father “Hellenized” them, because Hellene meant pagan, and the Slavs were now baptized Christians. Greek was a language, not a people.

Isokrates — the Athenian orator at the very heart of the Byzantine school curriculum — set the definition that defined the next millennium: “Athens has made it so that the name of the Greeks designates not a race (genos) but a mindset, and those are called Greeks who share in our culture rather than our common stock (physis).” Hellenism, from Athens onwards, was paideia — education.

Lucian of Samosata — the most successful Greek writer of the 2nd century — was a native Aramaic-speaker from the Euphrates. Kaldellis quotes Lucian’s own line: “I found this man wandering in Ionia when he was a young boy, still speaking in a barbarous manner and all but wearing a caftan in Assyrian fashion… I gave him a proper paideia.” Lucian wasn’t born a Greek. He became one.

By study. Strabon, asked what Hellene actually meant, gave Kaldellis his clearest answer: a Greek is one “who has lawful and civil qualities and is familiar with paideia and the art of speaking.” A code of conduct, an education. Not a tribe. Not a bloodline. Not a homeland. By Strabon’s working definition, every uneducated peasant of Athens was less Greek than a literate Roman senator.

Favorinus of Arelate — a Gaul, born in modern France — became one of the celebrated Greek philosophers of the 2nd century. He summed up his life in three paradoxes: “though a Gaul, he Hellenized; though a eunuch, he was tried for adultery; though he fell out with the emperor, he lived.” Kaldellis: Lucian’s “Celts and Skythians could become indistinguishable from native Athenians through education.”

Hellenism was a school, not a womb. Pausanias, the 2nd-century travel writer, mentions a Hellenistic athlete from Cilicia “who had nothing in common with the Cilicians except the name.” Kaldellis’s point: by then, ethnic labels had decoupled from real ethnicity entirely. You could be a “Greek” Cilician who was no longer culturally Cilician. Or a “Cilician” Greek. Names were fluid; paideia was the dividing line.

Even the emperor Julian “the Apostate” — modern Greek nationalism’s favourite “Hellenic” emperor — was, in his own telling, a Thracian by ethnos, a Roman by political nation, and a Greek by paideia (alongside his “Gallic” friend Saloustios, also a Greek by paideia). Three different identities, one person. Kaldellis: nothing about Julian’s “Hellenism” was ethnic. It was learned.

Michael Psellos, the great 11th-century philosopher of Constantinople — and one of Kaldellis’s central case studies — never described himself as a Hellene in any ethnic sense. He called himself a philorhomaios (a “lover of Romans”) and philopatris (a “lover of his patria”). His revival of Greek philosophy was a revival of paideia, performed unapologetically inside a self-understood ROMAN civilization.

Gregorios Pakourianos, an 11th-century Byzantine general of Armenian or Georgian origin, rose high in the imperial army and founded a monastery — from which all “Romans” were explicitly excluded as “violent and greedy.” Kaldellis uses him to show how layered Byzantine identity was: Pakourianos was a Roman officer who legally and culturally barred Romans from his own foundation. Identity in Byzantium was not blood. It was function.

The first Byzantine emperor to flirt with calling his subjects “Hellenes” in a national sense, says Kaldellis, was Theodoros II Laskaris — in the 1250s, AFTER Constantinople had been sacked by the Latins in 1204. Hellene as a nation-label is a LATE artefact of imperial collapse, not an inheritance from antiquity. Modern Greek-nation continuity runs not 2,500 years but maybe 150.

The fullest “Hellenic nationalism” inside Byzantium came at its very end: Georgios Gemistos Plethon, a 15th-century Platonist at Mistras who tried to refound the empire as an explicitly Hellenic, even neo-pagan, nation centered on the Peloponnese. Kaldellis: it died with him. Until 1453 the empire was, and called itself, Roman. Plethon was an outlier — and his writings were burned by the patriarch.

Reference

Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago), ‘Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition’ (Cambridge, 2007)