Kaldellis highlights that the Constitutio Antoniniana was not symbolic — it gave provincials real access to power, producing provincial emperors and elites within a single generation, something no other empire (e.g., Britain with India) ever matched. ✦ AI generated
Anthony Kaldellis · Lex Fridman · 2026-06-30 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 52:02
“So what is it? Why was it done? Why is it important? And how did it change the Roman Empire?”
So imagine a situation where, like, no modern empire has ever done this really, right? When what's significant about the Roman case is that not only did they extend citizenship to everybody, but they meant it. This is something that had teeth... And within a generation, you have a situation where, like, all of the emperors are provincials, right?
verbatim transcript · starts at 52:02
52:02other words, it meant that the rights and opportunities that were available to Roman citizens, say, in the Roman Senate at Rome— ... are now available to everybody. And within a generation, you have a situation where, like, all of the emperors are provincials, right? All the most powerful people in the empire are from the provinces. - This is, like, mind-breaking, mind-blowing. This is incredible. The fact that the Roman Empire was able to do this, and it stuck.
52:33- They did it, and they meant it. - And they meant it. They implemented it. It was real. That's, that tells you, that's an important thing that tells you a lot of information about the populace of the Roman Empire. That the, the fact that it stuck, that the government meant it, that the system encouraged, incentivized the government to mean it. It's incredible. - Yeah, and there's a law of citizenship, and it, basically it says something like,
52:58"Anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman citizen." And the Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind, This had some very interesting ideas about, you know, creating this kind of community. Look, like, imagine if, I mean, it's almost impossible to, to imagine, but the, the British at the time of the peak of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone, including in India, and, like, suddenly made positions of power in London available to
53:29people from India, like, including the throne. Like, it's just unthinkable. And that has to do, you know, with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right? But not in the Roman Empire. So we have a situation where the emperors are all from the provinces. The most powerful officials are all from the provinces. And so a century later, when Constantinople is created, this is, it's created, right, like, in, in the Bosporus, so, like, where modern Istanbul is,
53:58in the Eastern Roman Empire. It's created within the preexisting Roman context, right? It doesn't bring Romanness to the East. It's already there. And so it's not such a leap to create a center of Roman power in the East because of that. - And you've helped put together a book on the history of intellectual thought in the East Roman Empire. But this is the interesting thing here, and I can ask that many