BOOK I
THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE EAST
INTRODUCTION
THE SCOPE, THE SOURCES, AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF LATER ROMAN HISTORY IN THE EAST
The period upon which we are now entering presents peculiar difficulties for the historian. The body politic under consideration is in some respects unique. Historians are not even agreed as to the name by which it should properly be designated. It is an empire having its capital at Constantinople; an empire not come suddenly into being in the year 395, at which point, for the sake of convenience, we are now taking up this history; but which is in reality nothing more or less than the continuation of that Roman Empire in the East, the affairs of which we left with the death of Theodosius. That emperor, as we have seen, held sway over an undivided Roman commonwealth. On his death the power that he had wielded passed to his two sons, one of whom nominally held sway in the East, the other in the West. The affairs of the Western division of the empire under Honorius and his successors have claimed our attention up to the time of the final overthrow of Rome in the year 476. We are now returning to follow the fortunes of Arcadius, the other heir of Theodosius, and his successors.
But whether this Eastern principality should properly be spoken of as the Later Roman Empire, or as the Eastern, Byzantine, or Greek Empire, is, as has been suggested, a moot point among historians. The difficulty is perhaps met to the best advantage if we disregard the controversial aspects of the question and make free use of each and all of these names; indeed, in so doing, convenience joins hands with logicality. The empire of Arcadius and his immediate successors was certainly entitled to be called the Roman Empire quite as fully as, for example, were the dominions of Diocletian and Constantine. There was no sudden breach of continuity, no thought of entrance upon a new epoch with the accession of Arcadius. It was no new thing that power was divided, and that there should be two capitals, one in the East and one in the West. On the contrary, as we have seen, there had been not merely a twofold but a fourfold division of power most of the time since the day of Diocletian. No contemporary could have predicted that after the death of Theodosius the Roman dominions in the East and in the West would never again be firmly united under a single head. Nor indeed is it quite true that the division was complete and permanent; for, as we shall see, there were to be rulers like Justinian and Zeno who had a dominating influence over the Western territories, and who regarded themselves as masters of the entire Roman domain. And even when the division became complete and permanent, as it scarcely did before the time of Charlemagne, it could still be fairly held that the Roman Empire continued to exist with its sole capital at Constantinople, whither Constantine had transferred the seat of power, regardless of the fact that the Western dominion had been severed from the empire. The fact that this Western dominion included the city of Rome itself, which had given its name to the empire, and hence seemed indissoluble from it, is the chief reason for the seeming incongruity of applying the term Later Roman Empire to the dominion of the East.
It must not be overlooked, however, that there were other reasons for withholding the unqualified title of Roman Empire from the Eastern dominions. The chief of these is that the court of Constantinople departed very radically from the traditions of the West, taking on oriental manners and customs, and, what is most remarkable, gradually relinquishing the Latin speech and substituting for it the language of Greece. We have seen in our studies of earlier Roman history the marked tendency to the Hellenisation of Rome through the introduction of Greek culture from the time when the Roman Republic effected the final overthrow of Greece. It will be recalled that some of the most important histories of Rome, notably those of Polybius and Appian and Dionysius and Dion Cassius, were written in Greek. The emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in the same language. But this merely represented the tendency of the learned world. There was no propensity to substitute Greek for Latin as the language of everyday life so long as the seat of empire remained in the West. Now, however, as has been intimated, this strange substitution was effected; the writers of this Later Roman Empire in the East looked exclusively to classical Greece for their models, and in due course the language of court and of common people alike came to be Greek also, somewhat modified from the ancient idiom with the sweep of time, but in its essentials the same language which was spoken at Athens in the time of Pericles. Obviously there is a certain propriety in this use of the term Greek Empire as applied to a principality whose territory included the ancient realms of Athens, and whose customs and habits and speech thus preserved the traditions of ancient Hellas.
The use of the terms Eastern Empire and Byzantine Empire requires no elucidation, having an obvious propriety. As has been said, we shall find it convenient here to employ one or another of the four terms indiscriminately; giving preference perhaps, if a choice must be made, to the simplest and most non-committal form, Eastern Empire.
By whatever name designated, the principality whose fortunes we are to follow will hold our interest throughout a period of more than a thousand years, from the death of Theodosius in 395 to the final overthrow of Constantinople in 1456. This period is almost exactly coincident with the epoch pretty generally designated by historians as the Middle Ages, and usually estimated as a time of intellectual decadence.
As a general proposition this estimate is doubtless just. It must be born in mind, however, that the characterisation applies with far less force to the conditions of the Eastern Empire than to the conditions of Western Europe. The age of Justinian was certainly not a dark age in any proper acceptance of that term. If no subsequent period quite equalled this in brilliancy, yet there were epochs when the Eastern Empire showed something of its old-time vitality. Indeed, there was an almost incessant intellectual output which served at least to sustain reminiscences of ancient culture, though it could not hope to rival the golden ages of the past. In point of fact, the chief defect of the literature of the time was that it did attempt to rival the classical literature. We have just pointed out that the later Byzantine Empire was essentially Greek in language and thought. Unfortunately the writers of the time failed to realise that in a thousand years of normal development the language—always a plastic, mobile thing, never a fixed structure—changes, grows, evolves.
Instead of contenting themselves with the use of the language with which they were familiar in everyday speech as the medium of their written thoughts, they insisted on harking back to the earlier classical period, consciously modelling their phraseology and style upon authors who had lived and died a thousand years earlier. No great art was ever produced by such conscious imitation. Great art is essentially spontaneous, never consciously imitative; the epoch-making works are done in the vernacular by artists whose first thought is to give expression to their spontaneous feelings and emotions, unhampered by tradition. It was thus that Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Aristophanes wrote; and if Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and Tacitus were more conscious craftsmen, somewhat in the same measure were they less great as artists.
But the Byzantine writers were rather to be compared with the Alexandrians of the age of the Ptolemies. They were far more scientific than their predecessors and proportionately less artistic. As grammarians they analysed and criticised the language, insisting on the retention of those chance forms of speech which the masters of the earlier day had used spontaneously. The critical spirit of the grammarian found its counterpart everywhere in the prevalence of the analytical rather than the synthetic cast of thought. As the masters of the past were the models, so were their stores of knowledge the chief sources on which to draw. What Aristotle had said must be considered the last word as regards physical knowledge. What the classical poets and historians had written must needs be copied, analysed, and praised as the final expression of human thought. Men who under different auspices and in a different atmosphere might perhaps have produced original works of some significance, contented themselves with elaborating anthologies, compiling dictionaries and encyclopædias, and epitomising chronicles of world history from the ancient sources. It is equally characteristic of the time that writers who did attempt creative work found prose romance the most congenial medium for the expression of their ideals. Even this measure of creative enthusiasm chiefly marked the earliest period of the Byzantine era and was stifled by the conservatism of the later epoch.