Kaldellis argues the so-called Byzantine Empire was simply the continuing Roman Empire in the East, whose citizens identified as Romans, and that 'Byzantine' is a later historiographical invention driven by Western Europe's reluctance to include it in its cultural genealogy. ✦ AI generated
Anthony Kaldellis · Lex Fridman · 2026-06-30 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:32
“You've described that the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire, that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention of historians writing long after the empire has collapsed... So let's get our terms right in the grand historical context. What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire?”
So Lex, the burden of proof is on those who would assert that what we've been calling the Byzantine Empire is something other than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this. And we've known about this. We've always known about it. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right?
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:32
2:32calling the Byzantine Empire is something other- ... than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this. And we've known about this. We've always known about it. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right? It's like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it's not. So the Eastern Roman Empire, this is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East, right? Everybody knows the Western Empire
2:54fell in the fifth century. And for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient. Like, that's when we just called it. The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century. And we kinda, yeah, we kinda know that the eastern half survived, but we don't wanna include that in our cultural genealogy. And so we kinda pretend that it became something else. But in fact, it called itself the Roman Empire. Its subjects were
3:16Roman citizens. They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond. So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans wanted to think that the Eastern Empire is something different, and those reasons have created these models where They were, they called it Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years, then they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons. Now that's collapsing. So we're now moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire. We,
3:44we recognize that the history of the Roman state, the Roman polity, is something that lasts an extraordinarily long time. Very unique almost in history, from antiquity, like the archaic period, down to the 15th century. - I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment at the grand scale of the, the full Roman state as it lasted for over 2,200 years. - Yeah.
4:11- So its founding, 753 BC, to let's say the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. So can we try to give a big picture overview of everything that happened? - Okay, so first we have a period of the kings. This is almost legendary, from like the eighth century BC down to around 510 BC. So this is when Rome is ruled by a series of local kings. The kings are expelled, and the republic, or what we call the republic,