The Eastern Roman Empire was not a military dictatorship, because although emperors controlled the armies and armies influenced succession through civil wars, the state almost never used the army as an instrument of social control against its own population.

147:25then I suppose it's legitimate for historians to talk about a military dictatorship. But here's why I don't think the Eastern Roman Empire is a military dictatorship. Even though, again, the emperors control the armies, and the armies themselves will often have a say in who becomes emperor, like through the civil wars that we mentioned. Okay. The reason why I don't think it's a military dictatorship is because they almost never, very, very, very rarely use the army as an instrument of social

148:01control. - Is that, isn't that strange to you? Because you see that being done through so much of human history. And the fact they don't resort to that, I mean, they, for 1,000 years, that's just not a thing. - As a way of keeping down the population, you just don't see it. And part of the reason for that is I don't think the population needs to be kept down.

148:26Like, this gets back to the consensus that we were talking about. The understanding is that the army is there to protect the Roman people. And is often recruited among them. And for most of the period that I study, is like lives among them. So when the emperors have to call up the army, they're literally calling up soldiers from local villages. - It's just incredible that this worked. I guess the civil war thing

148:52is, as a mechanism, is effective. 'Cause you just, throughout human history, I mean, you look at even recent history, it's just a very common thing for a authoritarian figure to use the army to suppress people. - Yeah, but isn't that dangerous, though? Look at how many modern regimes tried to use their own armies against their people who are in a moment of rising up. - It doesn't last.

149:15- Well, it's a risk. Like the Arab Spring. Especially in Egypt. And you could, you could tell for those three weeks that Mubarak was trying to decide whether he could actually count on the army to suppress the protesters or not, because you never know what they're going to do if you ask them to fire on a civilian population. It can backfire on you badly. So I think that is a very dangerous force to use, and