It was sometime in the late 1970s that my fascination with the Roman Empire in the East, more-popularly called “Byzantium,” began. I also have the required interests in the predecessor Roman civilizations, but those are less focused than the one based in the Queen of Cities. American history also causes our library shelves to sag, and other areas of history also factor in.
But Byzantium definitely stands out. And as far as our children our concerned, it’s The Dad Thing. They will occasionally try to press my buttons by saying “Bye-zan-tynes,” and I invariably respond with a promise to have an intricate, ironclad will with provisos that require them to physically possess large swaths of my book collection for set periods of time before receiving any financial benefit.
You might be surprised by how well that works.
All of my historical interests have an obvious common source, albeit one diagnosed far later in life:
You see, young people, back in my day, we didn’t have a term for it, much less a treatment. It was just the way my brain worked. I took advantage of the lack of focus by devouring all sorts of knowledge, even if it was entirely unrelated to the task at hand.
So I’m studying for the final exam in Contracts for law school at my old college library. Hey, what’s this? The 1980 Census results with maps?! Cool! Let’s find out where the Welsh are. And then I learned that the largest number of people who list their national origin as “American” live in the old South!
Neat!
I also managed to pass my law school exams.
But that example is just a link in a long chain of similar episodes. Imagine you have a magnet, and you are trying to pull a specific nail out of a pile of screws, tacks and wall anchors.
That’s how it worked for me—I grabbed a lot of other stuff in the process.
And one of those was the medieval Roman Empire. My parents gave me a set of encyclopedias when I was about nine, and in one of the volumes was an entry about Byzantium, with an illustration of Justinian I in all of his finery—cribbed from the mosaic at the top. It read as a brief extension of the Western Empire, but it was intriguing. Then after devouring all of the Western empire I could as an ambitious high schooler, I stumbled upon the rest of the story.
[By the way, the last Western Emperor was Julius Nepos, not the puppet Romulus Augustulus. Not that it matters much, but Julius tried to be an actual emperor over the fragment that answered to him before he was assassinated in AD 480.]
Rome continues? It did, and I gobbled it up. I quickly came to the conclusion that the reign of Justinian the First isn’t really the most interesting part, not really. Reading the whole swath of 1100 years immerses you in one of the epics of human perseverance and fortitude. I wasn’t much of a Christian then, but only a dunce would deny that the Faith was the glue that bonded the civilization together and kept it going despite repeated extinction level events.
Hagia Sophia—the temple, and model for much of the Christian East.
Then there’s the reality that Byzantium kept the heritage of ancient Greece alive (Homer was simply called The Poet by Anna Komnena) while at the same time breathing in the teachings of the Church Fathers and ecumenical councils. And arguing ceaselessly over such.
How bad was it? I checked books out of the local college library and read them in my spare time at high school. Once I brought in a Greek/English copy of Constantine VII’s De Administrando Imperio and convinced a classmate that I could read Greek after showing him only the Greek page and then reading the English translation. After his eyes bugged out in shock, I confessed to the prank.
[I was a fairly benevolent nerd, all things considered. Thankfully, my resentments—imagined and real—did not win out. I was not at all like the monstrous protagonists in Revenge of the Nerds. Man, has that movie aged badly.]
Throw in the larger-than-life people who rise up from the page in every era of the Empire and I was hooked. 160 plus volumes later….
So the fact that I worship in a domed temple and see the ancient double eagle at every Divine Liturgy nearly seven hundred years after the last political vestiges of the Empire were extinguished is something like nerd nirvana to me. No, it’s not the reason I/we attend. But I won’t deny that it’s a heck of a bonus.
“Bye-zan-tynes."
I admit that Anthony Kaldellis's term, "The New Roman Empire" is a more sensible, more appropriate, more accurate one than "Byzantine Empire." But there is a magic, a mystery to conjure with in the old name that I just can't shake off.
If you ever come out to DC, I'm sure you'll make a stop in at Holy Transfiguration in McLean; and if you do, I hope you will give all of your fans and friends out here a heads-up.
Kaldellis has it nailed, but I agree; and at 55, it will be a hard habit to break.
I would love to drop by! Not at all sure when I will be in the vicinity again, but I will make sure to do so when I am.