The emperor's persona — projecting tireless, sleepless, responsive, and accountable governance — was a consistent and sincere mechanism for securing the consent of the governed to pay taxes and accept rule.

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(00:07:33) I set up a store to sell shirts, but the engineering behind it, back to the real stuff. (00:07:40) The engineering behind it is the incredible stuff. (00:07:43) From the very top in Tobi to every single engineer, and I've met a bunch of them in Europe, just a great team, building great infrastructure that at scale has to deliver with low latency and make it fund a program. (00:07:58) And now make it fund a program for agents. (00:08:01) You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Lex. (00:08:06) That's all lowercase. (00:08:07) Go to shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. (00:08:13) This is the Lex Friedman podcast. (00:08:15) To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. (00:08:25) And now, dear friends, here's Anthony Caldellas. (00:08:45) 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, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, (00:09:01) and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed, that it was, in every legal and cultural sense, the Roman Empire continuing unbroken. (00:09:11) So let's get our terms right. (00:09:15) in the grand historical context, what is the Byzantine Empire? (00:09:19) Why should we just call it the Roman Empire? (00:09:22) 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. (00:09:32) And we've known about this. (00:09:33) We've always known about it. (00:09:34) It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right? (00:09:36) It's like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it's not. (00:09:40) So (00:09:41) The Eastern Roman Empire, this is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East, right? (00:09:46) Everybody knows the Western Empire fell in the 5th century. (00:09:50) And for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient. (00:09:54) Like that's when we just called it the Roman Empire fell in the 5th century. (00:09:58) And we kind of, yeah, we kind of know that the Eastern half survived, but we don't want to include that in our cultural genealogy. (00:10:04) And so we kind of pretend that it became something else. (00:10:07) But in fact, it called itself the Roman Empire. (00:10:09) Its subjects were Roman citizens. (00:10:11) They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond. (00:10:15) So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans wanted to think that the Eastern Empire is something different. (00:10:22) And those reasons have created these models where they called it Empire of the Greeks for 1000 years, and they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons. (00:10:32) Now that's collapsing. (00:10:34) So we're now moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire. (00:10:37) We 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, the archaic period, down to the 15th century. (00:10:52) I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment at the grand scale of the full Roman state as it lasted for over (00:11:03) 2,200 years. (00:11:05) So it's founding 753 BC to, let's say, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. (00:11:15) So can we try to give a big picture overview of everything that happened? (00:11:19) Okay, so first we have a period of the kings. (00:11:22) This is almost legendary from like the 8th century BC down to around 510 BC. (00:11:27) So this is when Rome is ruled by a series of local kings. (00:11:31) The kings are expelled, and the republic, or what we call the republic, is instituted, and this is a regime that's governed by mostly an aristocracy, but with cooperation from the people of Rome. (00:11:44) In various ways, the arrangements change over the centuries. (00:11:47) So that lasts for about 5 centuries. (00:11:50) And then we have the end of the republic in the era of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, when the civil wars lead to the creation of an imperial monarchy, right, under Augustus. (00:12:01) So that's, we date that roughly either 27 BC, something like that. (00:12:06) And thereafter, it is an imperial monarchy for the next millennium and a half. (00:12:12) Very broadly, we can divide that into two phases, one where the center of power is in Rome, and one where it's in Constantinople. (00:12:20) And we can debate the dates of when that transition takes place. (00:12:24) These big transitions usually take place over long periods of time. (00:12:27) They're not like very sudden. (00:12:29) So that's the big picture. (00:12:32) Kings, republic, imperial monarchy. (00:12:35) The Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire. (00:12:39) Yes. (00:12:40) And then the West and East Roman Empire. (00:12:42) Yes. (00:12:44) And then maybe, what are the different terms that we could be using for the Byzantine Empire, including Byzantium? (00:12:53) Is it also fair to say the late Roman Empire? (00:12:57) So the late Roman Empire we use for both East and West, starting around the reign of Diocletian, maybe, even a bit earlier, so during the 3rd century AD, and that goes down to maybe the early 7th century. (00:13:10) So that period we call late Roman Empire. (00:13:12) And (00:13:13) If you ask me to define its principal characteristics, it would probably be the tax system and the administration of the bureaucracy of the later Roman Empire is that comes from mostly Diocletian and Constantine's reforms. (00:13:26) And Diocletian was in the 3rd century. (00:13:29) Yes, 284 to 305 AD. (00:13:31) Yes, it's a very important reformer. (00:13:33) And we'll talk about it, but let's just do this whirlwind and hopefully there'll be automagical images somewhere overlaid. (00:13:39) Okay. (00:13:42) 753 BC, Rome, a small city-state, is founded. (00:13:46) And in 509 BC, the kings are overthrown and the Roman Republic is born. (00:13:51) 390 BC, the Gaul sacked Rome. (00:13:54) And this, I believe, among other events throughout its history, is a formative trauma that hardens Rome's security obsession. (00:14:04) It turns out throughout its history, people want (00:14:08) to attack from different directions. (00:14:10) And so you have to defend. (00:14:12) So there's two wars, as we're actually saying off mic, there's two kinds of military operations. (00:14:19) One is wars of conquest and expansion, and one is more defensive. (00:14:26) And we'll talk about how the military changes throughout its history to allocate more effort to one versus the other. (00:14:34) In (00:14:35) 264 to 146 BC, the Punic Wars and the survival against Hannibal transformed Rome into a Mediterranean superpower. (00:14:43) Then, like you mentioned, Caesar in 49 to 31 BC, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon to assassination of Caesar to the Battle of Actium. (00:14:55) And then the Civil War dismantles the Republic and concentrates power in the single ruler, Octavian, aka Augustus. (00:15:04) the first Roman emperor, let's say. (00:15:07) In 27 BC, Augustus founds the Principate, really low-key monarchy. (00:15:13) And so officially that ends the republic, and then that begins 27 BC to 180 AD, the Pax Romana, which is a period of relative peace and stability. (00:15:24) And a lot of the emperors we know of, the sexy popular emperors, come from that period. (00:15:29) Marcus Aurelius, who I'm a big fan of from that period. (00:15:33) Then that takes us to 284 AD, the guy we mentioned, Diocletian, who rebuilds the state. (00:15:39) Emperors drop the first citizen mask. (00:15:42) This perception of the way, and we'll talk about this, the persona that's presented by the state. (00:15:49) 312 AD, Constantine defeats Maxentius. (00:15:53) at the Milvia Bridge to become the sole ruler of the western half of the empire and then found Constantinople in 330 AD. (00:16:02) East and west are split in 395 AD. (00:16:05) Visigoth sacked Rome in 410 AD. (00:16:08) The West Falls at 476 AD. (00:16:12) as the last Western emperor is deposed. (00:16:16) And then we sort of focus more on the East Roman Empire with 527. (00:16:22) In the 6th century, Justinian's reign. (00:16:25) In the 7th century, Heracus defeats Persia and then loses against the Arabs. (00:16:30) There's the Arab conquest continuing in the 7th century. (00:16:34) In the 8th, the Arab siege of Constantinople fails. (00:16:40) There's (00:16:41) the Macedonian dynasty in that you have an excellent book about, and then the Crusades, and then eventually leading to Constantinople falling in 1453 AD. (00:16:56) As a person who understands the full journey of it with a focus on East Roman history, is there obvious glaring holes or incorrect things (00:17:07) in what I just said. (00:17:08) No, nothing incorrect. (00:17:09) I would say if you wanted to produce a sort of very swift timeline of its history, it's obviously important to focus on the moments when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders. (00:17:27) And these are actually 3 main moments. (00:17:31) There's the Arab conquests in the 630s, (00:17:34) This is a decade. (00:17:35) In A decade, that war was lost. (00:17:38) It is the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s. (00:17:46) And that was very swift and partly reversed afterwards, but only partly. (00:17:53) And then there's the Fourth Crusade, 1204, when the armies from mostly France sack, conquer Constantinople, and dismember the empire as much as they could. (00:18:01) It didn't last that long. (00:18:03) The Romans managed to regroup and recover. (00:18:07) But those are the three main crisis points. (00:18:09) They are very swift, but they cause incredible damage. (00:18:15) For all the rest of its history, it is a state and society that is generally (00:18:22) consolidating, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth, territorial expansion, a small scale but steady. (00:18:37) So we can talk about this. (00:18:40) I think it's an important thing to keep in mind about the big picture, that the defeats were swift and kind of, you know, terrible. (00:18:49) But most of its history is one of slow growth. (00:18:54) There's some traumatic events that have a big impact, but a lot of the developments we'll talk about, it might seem or feel like there's a particular moment. (00:19:05) when those developments or changes in the way the government or the military are structured arise, but really it's a gradual process. (00:19:12) Exactly. (00:19:13) That's the tension we have to be constantly dancing with. (00:19:15) Yeah, so as historians, this is a point of method and it's very important. (00:19:19) There are moments when individuals with a great deal of power make choices that impact everybody else and have long-term consequences downstream. (00:19:29) Constantine's conversion to Christianity, for example, right? (00:19:33) Not something that anybody could have or did predict. (00:19:36) Okay. (00:19:38) Otherwise, most of the developments that we identify by specific dates, like you mentioned 395, the division of the Eastern and the Western empires, those are conventional dates that we use to actually capture what is in fact a much longer process. (00:19:52) There was no split between the two halves. (00:19:56) It was one among many (00:19:58) allocations of jurisdiction to like one son and another son in the east and the west. (00:20:03) The 2 halves were subsequently reunited, then they kind of divided again among different emperors. (00:20:10) It's just a process. (00:20:11) And so we sometimes use fixed dates for what is in fact a process, or for 76, the fall of the Western Empire. (00:20:18) This is the last date. (00:20:19) It's actually a very long process that took decades. (00:20:22) So that's just something to keep in mind, that sometimes we're talking about processes, sometimes we're talking about very discrete events with long-term consequences. (00:20:30) Yeah. (00:20:31) Maybe an impossible question for a Roman state that lasted over 2,200 years, but is there a kind of through line, a thread, a soul that runs through the entire history of the Roman Empire? (00:20:43) As you said, it's a slow transformation and evolution. (00:20:48) But if we dare call the whole thing Roman, Rome, the Roman state, is there some aspects, some characteristics that run through the whole thing? (00:20:59) I think so, yes. (00:21:00) By the way, the metaphor of the ship of Theseus. (00:21:04) Okay, so in case the audience doesn't know it, this is when there's a ship and it's at sea. (00:21:09) And over time, like every component of that ship is replaced with some other component. (00:21:14) So that by the end of the story, it has none of the (00:21:17) original parts, but it's like in a certain sense still that ship because of the story, right? (00:21:23) Okay, so Roman history is different from, let's say, Greek history or Christian history, right? (00:21:30) Christian history is the story of a religion. (00:21:31) It can be in any country among any ethnic group. (00:21:34) It's here, there, right? (00:21:35) It's everywhere. (00:21:36) But you still have histories of Christianity. (00:21:39) It's the same with like, say, Greek culture or your Greek literature, right? (00:21:44) It's not a function of a particular (00:21:46) state, ancient Greeks were famously never united in a state, but it's people who culturally accept that tradition as their kind of elite prestige culture and engage with Homer and Plato and so forth. (00:22:00) And they can be anywhere. (00:22:02) Roman history is not like that. (00:22:03) Roman history is very specifically the history of a state or a political community. (00:22:09) And so this is the community of the Roman people, the Roman citizens. (00:22:14) And it is in gradual evolution, but at no point is there a rupture in that history such that its members would ever think that something dramatic had changed and that they're no longer part of that story. (00:22:27) So in the same way as the ship I just mentioned, in other words, it's the narrative that you tell about it where the changes that take place to it make sense only when you see them within the context of that story. (00:22:39) It's the same with Roman history. (00:22:41) Yes, there are changes. (00:22:42) Like eventually everything (00:22:43) changes. (00:22:44) But it happens so gradually that it doesn't seem that way to anyone living in it. (00:22:50) And so the narrative of the history of the Roman people is what holds all of this together. (00:22:56) How important is it that, so you mentioned Greek culture, so a lot of my friends who are Greek are extremely proud of being Greek. (00:23:04) There's certain cultures that are proud. (00:23:06) Sure. (00:23:06) And it's not a momentary, ephemeral thing. (00:23:10) It feels like a thing that has lasted for many generations. (00:23:13) Oh, yeah. (00:23:14) And so that is an engine that propagates through time that carries that culture forward. (00:23:20) And so does a similar thing apply for the Roman Empire in a different way? (00:23:25) Maybe because you say it's a political kind of community. (00:23:28) That means a set of ideals. (00:23:30) And we'll talk about because those (00:23:32) Ideals become even more concretized and explicit, I think, through the East Roman Empire, because one of the things you talk about is that the citizens of the Empire kind of all... (00:23:45) connected, that they are engaged in this whole sort of machinery. (00:23:50) Anyway, that's a complicated way of asking. (00:23:52) Is there some elements that Greek pride they speak? (00:23:56) Is there some kind of Roman pride that propagates the thing? (00:24:00) Oh, there totally is. (00:24:02) You can find authors and historical agents who definitely display this or talk about it. (00:24:08) But we don't want to make that the center of the story or the basis for any analysis because (00:24:14) So what you're observing in your Greek friends is also the result of modern nation building, is it's the result of modern systems of education and sort of national identities. (00:24:23) And these are fostered and created through all kinds of media and institutions. (00:24:27) It's just a different situation altogether. (00:24:29) What you find in ancient republics or medieval states is more something like a consensus to be ruled, to rule and to be ruled in this particular political community. (00:24:44) Now, some members of it may definitely, and in fact, did have this kind of pride. (00:24:48) I'll give you an example. (00:24:49) So there's an ambassador in the 6th century, and he's concluding a deal with the Persians. (00:24:54) And you know, the Persians are skeptical, because senior Romans can't always be trusted. (00:24:58) This guy says to them, he says, (00:25:01) And let me just tell you, you're making a deal here with the Romans. (00:25:04) The Romans, the name should say it all. (00:25:07) Okay, and you get a sense that this is expressing a certain pride in being a bearer of the Roman tradition and speaking for the emperors and the Roman Empire. (00:25:15) I mean, for him, this was something very, very momentous. (00:25:18) You find these kinds of examples. (00:25:19) So these people exist, but I wouldn't want to make that the basis for an analysis of how the society works (00:25:27) as a whole. (00:25:28) For the most part, it was something like a consensus where subjects or citizens, however you want to call them, they agree to, let's say, be taxed and be ruled by political authorities because of what they get in return. (00:25:43) And there's this kind of understanding of a mutual set of responsibilities. (00:25:48) And my concern, among other things, is to try to explain how this society held together for so long. (00:25:56) Pride, yes, among some people, definitely. (00:25:59) You find it in the sources. (00:26:00) But sources are texts that are written by literate, you know, usually elites. (00:26:06) So this is a small part of the population. (00:26:08) We can't automatically extend their attitudes to everybody else. (00:26:12) So in dealing with everyone else, we have to work with different kinds of (00:26:15) of materials, different kinds of assumptions. (00:26:17) We can't just posit that they're just proud of being Roman. (00:26:20) They could have been. (00:26:21) We don't know that, though. (00:26:23) We can see other sorts of things about them. (00:26:24) Like, for example, did they pay their taxes? (00:26:26) Did they try to rebel and leave the empire? (00:26:29) So those are the kinds of things that I look for. (00:26:31) Pride is 1 component, but there could be other explanations and factors that explain what motivates a soldier to defend the capital, for example. (00:26:42) Yeah. (00:26:44) what motivates a particular person to pay the taxes? (00:26:48) And then this is something that we'll definitely talk about. (00:26:51) But just to linger at the big picture, if the Romans from the different periods met, how different would they be from each other? (00:27:03) if I brought to you, this is one of those, there's like a blind taste test you can do with food. (00:27:08) Yes. (00:27:09) Pepsi and Coke. (00:27:10) Pepsi and Coke. (00:27:11) Yes. (00:27:11) If I brought you a Roman from the kingdom, period, the republic, period. (00:27:17) the early imperial period. (00:27:20) I mean, I get asked this in a much more radical form, which is like if you take someone from around 1453 who's a Roman and a subject of this Roman and compare and compare him or have him meet in your imagination with someone from the ancient republic, like how could they find any kind of agreement on what it means to be Roman and recognize each other as belonging to that polity? (00:27:43) This is a very difficult thing to think now. (00:27:47) I can point to a number of things that they would find eventually. (00:27:51) And if you told them, you're both Romans, you're both from this long history, now you have to find what you have in common. (00:27:58) I think they could find things. (00:27:59) But before we talk about those, if you want to get into it, let's just say that the question can even be posed about Romans who live at the same time. (00:28:10) I mean, if you take a senator from the age of Cicero and someone from the slums of Rome, (00:28:16) who's maybe the son of a slave who was brought from the East by some general a generation ago, and put them in a room and say, now you can discuss, you're both Romans, what do you have in common? (00:28:29) They might have trouble in coming up with something, right? (00:28:33) So let's not minimize the sheer diversity of experiences and sort of life experiences of Romans who are living at the same time. (00:28:43) The important thing is that change is always happening. (00:28:46) And from my standpoint, this change is cumulative, so it results in a Greek-speaking, Orthodox, Christian, Romans in Constantinople, who at first sight might have little to do with... (00:29:00) Latin-speaking, non-Christians are worshiping the ancient gods, Romans from a republic in Rome. (00:29:07) And those are very, very different situations. (00:29:09) And no doubt they would look and seem foreign to each other, right? (00:29:13) The question is, why do we assume that someone like Hadrian, right, an emperor from the 2nd century, sort of a very cosmopolitan figure who travels around the empire with his Greek lover and (00:29:27) writes poems and has a Greek beard and loves Greek culture and has much to do with someone from the middle republic who's some warrior who's chasing down cattle from the Samnites. (00:29:42) And yet, the way we understand history is that, oh no, those belong together, Hadrian and this ancient Roman from the 4th century BC. (00:29:51) But not Hadrian and someone, an emperor a few centuries later, who's just like him, bilingual in Greek and Latin, who's kind of cosmopolitan, who reads the same stuff, because we posit this rupture between Roman and Byzantine. (00:30:08) One of the ways we can try to analyze this is, for example, looking at a very specific role in society across time. (00:30:17) So we can look at soldiers. (00:30:20) how they saw violence, for example. (00:30:22) That's one way. (00:30:23) So you're making me realize that we can just take 1000 different professions and positions in society and really specifically look at what the experience of the world was like. (00:30:35) And so one of them is the view on violence across time. (00:30:43) And then the other is the view on the role of the government. (00:30:49) across time. (00:30:51) That's an excellent way of putting it. (00:30:52) So take soldiers, for example, they swear an oath. (00:30:55) Right now, we don't have the oath for every given period. (00:30:59) We have some approximations of it, some hints of what it contained. (00:31:02) But we know that Roman soldiers swore an oath, like throughout all of the centuries of the empire. (00:31:08) Sometimes they might add like a Christian formula to it. (00:31:12) sometime before that not, but they swore basically to protect the republic, or depending on what term they used, or the empire or the emperor. (00:31:23) And this is something that they would have recognized very quickly, like if they met each other over time and said, hey, what was your oath like? (00:31:31) And they recited it, this would have made much sense to them, right? (00:31:35) Or take, for example, a woman who runs a business, right? (00:31:39) From any century of the empire, (00:31:42) It would have been, especially the later you go, the more so, that this woman is enabled to do this by virtue of Roman law. (00:31:52) Certain Roman law of property and inheritance and marriage, but also regulations regarding who can do what and what kinds of properties women can handle and under what circumstances. (00:32:05) This is something that Roman women had in common that many other cultures did not. (00:32:11) So I'll give you an example. (00:32:12) So for example, in the 10th, 11th century, there are Jewish women who live in the Eastern Roman Empire who realize that they have more rights in Roman courts than in rabbinical ones. (00:32:27) And they take their disputes to the Roman courts. (00:32:30) Now, the thing is that for the Romans, these are property matters, not religious matters. (00:32:35) But for the rabbis, these are religious matters. (00:32:37) But the Roman courts trump the Jewish courts in the empire, right? (00:32:42) And so you end up with a situation where Jewish women have more rights than Jewish women do elsewhere, because Roman law is not operative. (00:32:50) And there you go. (00:32:52) These things matter, right? (00:32:54) And that's a function of imperial law. (00:32:56) And this would be an interesting actually interplay between the law (00:33:00) and religious institutions throughout the East Roman Empire. (00:33:07) So you argue that even though the personality of the various emperors varied, as we'll talk about, and as they're often venerated, celebrated, criticized, talked about, the late Roman Empire was projecting a persona to its citizens that was consistent throughout its history. (00:33:25) Can you describe what you mean by this and describe the different detailed characteristics of this persona? (00:33:30) Yes. (00:33:32) So this persona, it's what the governments or the emperor, the court, and the spokesman, the bureaucracy want their subjects to think this whole thing is about. (00:33:44) Like how is power being used, why and for whom, right? (00:33:49) And they do so in laws, (00:33:53) that they promulgate throughout the empire. (00:33:55) Sometimes they have these laws read in church, for example, or posted publicly. (00:34:00) They're definitely eager to have them communicated to as many people as possible. (00:34:05) But they're also a function of imperial rhetoric. (00:34:08) So the way you praise an emperor, the way you talk about an emperor, you find this language in petitions. (00:34:14) So this is a hugely important glue for this society, is that anyone (00:34:19) could basically petition the authorities for, let's just say just about anything. (00:34:23) That's not technically true, but there's a lot of petitioning going on. (00:34:28) So if you think something's wrong or you've been treated unjustly, you can petition local officials, even imperial officials. (00:34:35) You can petition the emperor, right? (00:34:37) And the expectation is that petition will be read, addressed, and answered. (00:34:42) It might not be answered in the way that you want, but it will be answered. (00:34:46) And those responses contain this language also, right? (00:34:50) So these are the different media through which the emperors are broadcasting this persona. (00:34:54) And that persona is what? (00:34:56) Basically, that the authorities are responsive to the needs of their subjects, that they are often accountable. (00:35:04) In other words, they understand that they are exercising public power and that their mandate is to exercise it solely for the benefit of their subjects. (00:35:14) They keep saying this. (00:35:17) So renouncing any kind of private interest. (00:35:20) In other words, we're not doing this for our benefit, say the authorities. (00:35:24) We're doing this for your benefit. (00:35:26) Also that they're proactive. (00:35:29) So the emperors are constantly saying that we're planning ahead (00:35:34) We're trying to foresee what problems you might have, and we are solving them before you experience them. (00:35:40) And that they are also working very hard. (00:35:42) So hardworking, in fact, one of the cliches that they keep using is sleepless. (00:35:48) The emperors keep saying that I'm losing sleep over this. (00:35:51) I'm not sleeping at night because I'm just worrying so much about your problems and how to solve them. (00:35:56) Justinian, for example, was publicly known as the sleepless emperor. (00:36:00) And not because he was a demon whose head floated around in the palace on its own, which some people... (00:36:05) That's the thing? (00:36:06) It was a thing. (00:36:08) That's a whole thing. (00:36:08) But sleep was in terms of work so hard that it's no time to sleep. (00:36:13) He was a workaholic. (00:36:14) That is conceded by you and his enemies. (00:36:17) All night he was up just hauling officials in at any old hour to talk about whatever, you know, wars and architecture and laws and religion and theology and whatever. (00:36:27) So the emperors are projecting this image, right? (00:36:29) So that's what I call the persona. (00:36:31) Tireless effort to work on behalf of subjects, to do so responsibly, to be responsive and accountable. (00:36:41) In other words, if some of my officials breaks the law or oppresses you, I'm giving you instruments, like legal instruments, by which to hold them to account. (00:36:53) So that's the persona. (00:36:55) It's very consistent. (00:36:57) And I think it's part of the mechanism of tying the society together. (00:37:01) In other words, if subjects think that their emperors are like this, right, they're more likely to agree to the consensus of essentially paying taxes. (00:37:11) And you draw this distinction between rhetoric and action, what the authorities say and what they actually do. (00:37:17) So when you say persona in the modern times, some of that could be reframed as propaganda, for example. (00:37:26) And propaganda implies that the rhetoric, that there's a big gap between the rhetoric and the action. (00:37:34) And one of the things you said you took away from reading Machiavelli is that we should judge people not by what they say, but by what they do. (00:37:42) 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? (00:37:50) Yes. (00:37:51) This is a key lesson I took from reading Machiavelli. (00:37:53) And (00:37:54) I found this a very insightful way of thinking about politics, and I would recommend that anybody kind of practice this way of looking at the world, right? (00:38:03) People and states and powerful people can say anything they want to. (00:38:08) At the end of the day, what matters is what they actually do. (00:38:12) And this doesn't mean that what they say is irrelevant, even if it's discordant with what they do. (00:38:19) But nevertheless, (00:38:22) 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. (00:38:32) In other words, I have found that they generally did what they said they were going to do overall. (00:38:40) Not perfectly, obviously. (00:38:41) And of course, these are human beings we're talking about. (00:38:44) They're human societies. (00:38:45) There was a lot of (00:38:47) corruption and you name it, abuse, of course, of course there is. (00:38:51) But overall, I think that there was a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors are in fact doing this. (00:38:59) And they were actually incentivized to do this. (00:39:02) We can talk about how, because they were also in a pretty vulnerable situation too. (00:39:07) So they needed (00:39:09) their subjects to be relatively content on this front. (00:39:12) Isn't this surprising to you? (00:39:14) So, from the outsider point of view, Roman emperors, even in the East Roman Empire, technically have a lot of power. (00:39:26) You can even say, in some cases, absolute power. (00:39:29) And yet, they seem to be awfully worried (00:39:34) to make everybody in the empire happy. (00:39:38) What explains that? (00:39:39) Like what explains the small gap between rhetoric and action in the East Roman Empire? (00:39:45) A number of things, but ultimately it is that there is no right to the throne. (00:39:51) And this is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here, in other words. (00:39:58) So here's a bit of a paradox. (00:40:00) What we call the Roman Republic was the most imperialistic phase of Roman history. (00:40:05) This is when the Romans did most of their conquering. (00:40:08) What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way. (00:40:12) That's much more defensive in its approach, right? (00:40:15) And yet our terms are a little mismatched in that way. (00:40:20) The empire is more a function of the (00:40:24) that it has an emperor rather than it is engaged in imperialism. (00:40:29) And that emperor emerged out of the republic, but emerged out of the republic in a very strange way. (00:40:36) In other words, not as a dynasty that created the state. (00:40:42) So for example, if you think of the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, (00:40:46) the whole thing existed because this dynasty engaged in conquest and was successful in creating the state. (00:40:53) And so the dynasty was like at the heart of the state. (00:40:56) But it's not at all the case in the Roman Empire. (00:40:59) The emperor is a figure who emerged within a republic. (00:41:04) And in order to create peace after the civil wars, those emperors had to, for a long time, kind of pretend that they were not what they really were. (00:41:14) By (00:41:15) basically, continuing to flatter the idea of a republic that is, that has a first citizen, maybe. (00:41:22) Oh, no, I'm not a king. (00:41:24) I'm just, I have this office and that office and that office, whatever the Senate has given me. (00:41:28) Now, we understand that's a facade, but the fact that they had to create this facade at all is very important. (00:41:34) Can we actually just linger on that? (00:41:35) I mean, how much of this, because you said they had to create this facade. (00:41:38) Yeah. (00:41:40) Did Augustus, (00:41:42) who started the whole thing, the first emperor of Rome, did he have to act that way? (00:41:48) Because he kept acting like he's not an absolute monarch. (00:41:54) And he could have gone hardcore, destroy the Senate, just full hardcore rule, dictatorship. (00:42:03) How does he govern then? (00:42:05) So he wants to be an effective governor, and he also wants to not be overthrown. (00:42:09) Exactly. (00:42:10) Because, you know, (00:42:12) Just because you ended one civil war doesn't mean that there's not going to be another. (00:42:15) You have to create a consensus such that people don't want to have another civil war. (00:42:19) If he did what you said, which he in theory could have done, but that would have just led to more wars, right? (00:42:26) So the problem is that the emperors, even those who come to power through violence, they can't prevent other people from trying to come to power through violence because, like I said, no one has a right to the throne. (00:42:38) We should also say one more thing where (00:42:43) Dare I carefully say this, but it seems like riots and civil wars is a feature, not a bug of the system. (00:42:52) Yes. (00:42:53) This is a different thing that we have to the modern day. (00:42:57) It's because the threat of a civil war, a violent civil war where you overthrow the government and there's just a lot of death and struggle for power is always a threat. (00:43:09) That's another incentive, I guess the stick, not the carrot, but the stick for the emperor to behave. (00:43:15) Yes, it's the main one. (00:43:17) In other words, just take the 1000 years that I study. (00:43:22) There's something like 120 civil wars. (00:43:25) Now, these are usually very swift. (00:43:27) They're over quickly, and they're never about ideology. (00:43:31) So they're not like modern civil wars. (00:43:34) right? (00:43:34) It's about slavery or the rights of kings or whatever. (00:43:36) No, They're solely about who has the power. (00:43:41) All sides have the same ideology. (00:43:42) They talk about the responsibility of government in the same way, right? (00:43:47) They're just competing over who's the best man to do the job, right? (00:43:51) And so once you have that situation, and it might not be a civil war, it could be a palace coup, it could be a kind of fighting in the capital, something like that. (00:44:01) Once everyone's taken their side and you have a winner, that's the emperor, and you often overthrow the previous regime, I'll give you some statistics. (00:44:10) Something like 46% of the emperors of Constantinople are overthrown through violence. (00:44:16) 46%. (00:44:16) That's almost half. (00:44:19) So that's a huge number, which means that every emperor is vulnerable and insecure, and they know it. (00:44:26) So what they have to do is make sure that doesn't happen to them. (00:44:30) And the way to do that is not by arresting and executing everybody you think might be a threat or just generally behaving like a Caligula or Nero. (00:44:41) That will just get you killed. (00:44:42) Like they know this. (00:44:43) So the best way to avoid that fate is to actually do the things that will make people happy so that they don't support a rebel if a rebel decides to appear. (00:44:54) And sometimes rebels would appear (00:44:57) There's a kind of convention in Constantinople. (00:44:58) Like if you, sometimes you think, that emperor is pretty unpopular and I think I can overthrow him. (00:45:04) What you would do is you would march down the center boulevard and you know, you'd have your people just call the populace of Constantinople out to rally, you know, maybe go to Hagia Sophia, the church, and just create a big crowd and call for the deposition of the emperor and, you know, (00:45:23) maybe that would happen. (00:45:24) And sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't. (00:45:26) And the rebel, or wannabe rebel, would sort of proceed down the messy, the boulevard, and people would just gradually just disappear, and then he'd be left alone and go up to Aya Sophia as seeking asylum. (00:45:40) Right? (00:45:41) So that's a bid. (00:45:42) That's someone making a bid for the throne, and it just goes disastrously bad. (00:45:46) Other times, the people come out because they hate the emperor, and they drag the emperor out and cut his nose off or whatever. (00:45:52) So (00:45:53) Emperors are constantly trying to prevent that from happening and the best way to do that is for goodwill. (00:46:01) I'm trying to load in that kind of world because it's a different world than we live in today. (00:46:07) Yes. (00:46:07) There's a constant inner workings of policy development inside government. (00:46:14) Yes. (00:46:15) But the check on power is like literal, like we will murder you. (00:46:20) Yes, it depends on the period. (00:46:22) Sometimes murder you, sometimes blind you, sometimes cut your nose off. (00:46:25) But there were periods... (00:46:27) Thank you for the nuance. (00:46:28) No, there were periods that were more civilized. (00:46:30) We'll just basically, you get retired to a monastery. (00:46:33) Right. (00:46:33) Okay. (00:46:35) You're right. (00:46:36) So here's what elections do. (00:46:37) Elections give a government a mandate for, I don't know, four or five years. (00:46:42) And during that period, you may be unpopular, but you're legitimate, right? (00:46:47) Because of the institutions. (00:46:49) Whereas in Constantinople, we don't have those kinds of institutions. (00:46:54) We have instead an ongoing referendum. (00:46:58) We just call it a perpetual referendum, right? (00:47:01) And in fact, the emperors are, they're conducting opinion polls in a sense because they appear in public. (00:47:06) They appear in public, everyone is expected to cheer and chant acclamations, right? (00:47:12) Like, (00:47:13) slogans, right? (00:47:15) So you have 100,000 people in the hippodrome all chanting, worthy or many years for you, Augustus or something like this. (00:47:22) If that happens, it's great. (00:47:23) But if you appear in the hippodrome and people are like sullen, if the chanting is a bit tepid, or if they're booing, then you know something's wrong, right? (00:47:32) So you got to find out what's wrong. (00:47:34) It could be something like the grain supply is, you know, not working or whatever. (00:47:40) And so emperors are desperate to fix those problems. (00:47:43) And the Hippodrome is this big gathering place in Constantinople, which I guess a lot of people gathered at and did this kind of cheering or not, cheering based on policy and whether the emperor is popular or not. (00:47:58) This was democracy. (00:48:01) I apologize to use that term, but in our conception of what that means, because what do we mean by democracy in the modern day is that the people somehow have a connection (00:48:11) to who leads and how they lead. (00:48:14) And this is the Hippodrome was that connection between the people and the leaders. (00:48:20) Yes. (00:48:21) Now we can talk about modern democracy if you want. (00:48:23) That's a that's a I have my own views about modern democracy and you know how it works and how it doesn't. (00:48:30) And anyway, whether it is democracy, in fact, because there are other models of democracy, like ancient Athenian democracy, which is a whole other thing. (00:48:37) But you're right. (00:48:39) There's not just in the Hippodrome. (00:48:40) It's wherever people assemble in large numbers. (00:48:43) So this could be military mustering grounds, right? (00:48:47) So the army, the army is also the Roman people in a way, and in some cases the most decisive part of it, right? (00:48:54) So if an army gathers together and they decide they want a different emperor, that's serious. (00:49:00) And that can happen out in the provinces too. (00:49:01) That doesn't necessarily have to happen in Constantinople. (00:49:05) There's also (00:49:06) Yes, Sophia. (00:49:07) So the people gather in the church or they gather in public spaces like the form of Constantine. (00:49:12) So this can happen anywhere where a large number of people can gather. (00:49:17) And it's, I don't know if you want to call it a democracy as such, but it is definitely a form of popular, let's say, consultation and a testing of consensus. (00:49:29) I'll give you another example. (00:49:32) So in the 1190s, the emperor, Alexius III, (00:49:36) He's being threatened by the German emperor. (00:49:38) German emperor is basically, you pay me a bunch of money or I'll invade. (00:49:42) Just straight up extortion. (00:49:44) And Alexios decides, okay, I'm going to gather this money. (00:49:47) I'm going to impose these taxes. (00:49:49) And he gathers the people in the Hippodrome. (00:49:51) And he says, you know, we're going to have the German tax. (00:49:54) He called it the German tax. (00:49:56) And there's such an uproar in the Hippodrome against this. (00:50:01) that he was like, that wasn't my idea. (00:50:03) I don't know where that came from. (00:50:04) No, never mind. (00:50:05) We're not going to have the German tax. (00:50:07) Unfortunately, the German emperor died and nothing ever happened. (00:50:10) But it gives you a sense of how emperors like literally can backtrack when they see that the people are against something in a matter of policy, right? (00:50:16) Like tax policy. (00:50:18) So yeah, there was this give and take. (00:50:21) So institutionally, the emperor might look absolute as you called him earlier. (00:50:27) In practice, no. (00:50:30) No, the ones that did that didn't end well. (00:50:34) And we should say, going to perplexity here, the hippodrome of Constantinople was the main stadium and social center of the Byzantine capital, used primarily for chariot racing and imperial ceremony, and today survives in Istanbul's Sultanamhat district. (00:50:51) And the reason I looked this up, I wanted to see how many people, shaped as a long U-shaped (00:50:56) race course with a central barrier and tiered seating, it may have held from roughly 30,000 up to 100,000 spectators, though exact capacity is debated because archaeological remains are limited. (00:51:11) That's a lot of people. (00:51:13) 30,000 is definitely a pretty underestimate. (00:51:16) The hippodrome is still there. (00:51:17) I mean, you can see it from satellite photos. (00:51:19) The shape of it is still there. (00:51:21) And actually some parts of the built, the Svendoni, the sling around the southern side (00:51:27) is still there, you can walk around it. (00:51:29) And it's right next to the palace. (00:51:31) In other words, emperors didn't have to go far. (00:51:33) Now, sometimes there are events for replacing an emperor. (00:51:37) So say the emperor dies in his sleep and there's no heir. (00:51:41) This happens in 491, for example. (00:51:44) And so the people gather in the hippodrome in order to have a discussion with the court about whom to appoint. (00:51:51) Now, in those kinds of contexts, it's entirely possible that there are people also in the arena. (00:51:57) not just in the stands. (00:51:59) I think some military units might have just been arrayed there rather than in the stands. (00:52:04) So you can get more people than what we project might fit in the stands, because they're not having the races on that day. (00:52:10) We should say, so like, I think the thing that was emphasized in the first paragraph is the athletic events and the entertainment events, right? (00:52:17) Like the imperial ceremony, but there is a sort of a political gathering (00:52:22) was also popular. (00:52:23) The hippodrome was not just for sport. (00:52:26) It was where emperors appeared.