East Roman emperors were generally sincere in their public rhetoric of ruling for their subjects' benefit — they mostly did what they said they would do, rather than the rhetoric being mere propaganda detached from action.
Applying a Machiavellian standard of judging rulers by deeds rather than words, Kaldellis concludes that the Byzantine emperors' persona of selfless, responsive governance was largely borne out in practice, not just propaganda. ✦ AI generated
Anthony Kaldellis · Lex Fridman · 2026-06-30 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 31:21
“So how much of the Roman Empire's government of what they espoused was merely rhetoric, and how much was true in how they acted?”
In the case of the East Roman state, so my research suggests that the emperors and the authorities were generally sincere in what they said. In other words, I have found that they generally did what they said they were going to do overall. Not perfectly, obviously.
verbatim transcript · starts at 31:21
31:21irrelevant, even if it's discordant with what they do. But nevertheless, In the case of the East Roman state, so my research suggests that the emperors and the authorities were generally sincere in what they said. In other words, I have found that they generally did what they said they were going to do overall. Not perfectly, obviously. And of course, these are human beings we're talking about. The, right, the human societies, there was a lot of, you know,
31:54corruption, and you name it. Abuse- ... of course. Of course there is. But overall, I think that there was a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors are in fact doing this, and they were actually incentivized to do this. We can talk about how. Because they were also in a pretty vulnerable situation too, so they needed their subjects to be relatively content on this front. - Isn't this surprising to you? So, you know, from the
32:22outsider point of view, Roman emperors, even in the East Roman Empire, technically have a lot of power. You can even say in some cases absolute power, and yet they seem to be awfully worried ... to make everybody in the empire happy. What explains that? Like what, what explains the small gap between rhetoric and action in the East Roman Empire? - A number of things, but ultimately it is that there is no right to the throne.
32:57And this is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here. In other words, So here's a bit of a paradox. What we call the Roman Republic was the most imperialistic phase of Roman history. Like this is when the Romans did most of their conquering. What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way. That's much more defensive in its approach, right? And yet our