 And my guest today is Dr. Matthew Breel. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Jason. It's good to be here. Honored to have you. Today, I wanted to touch upon a topic that is kind of misunderstood. I'm sure more than one or two of us in the audience have taken a Western civilization class. You hear the term, you have the Roman Empire, then you have Byzantium after you get past the sixth, seventh century. So I wanted to touch upon this misconstrued empire that we call Byzantium. Are we being fair calling this entity Byzantium? Do we do a disservice to the people of this time by disregarding their identity? Well, in fact, I would say a couple of things. I mean, if you know it's Byzantium, that's a great step. Because I was applying for a loan, and the mortgage officer said, well, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm a professor, and da, da, da. And so what do you focus on? I said, well, Medieval Greek religion, he said, well, I love Zeus and Hera. So if you know Byzantium, that's a great step. So Byzantium was the city where Constantinople was founded. And so it's this really interesting place. It's about the seventh century. So this is the modern day Istanbul. And the name sort of stuck in 325, I think, somewhere in the early fourth century. Constantine moved the capital from Rome in Italy to the east. For a lot of reasons, one of which was to be closer to where the dangerous borders were. The city's name was New Rome. Shortly afterwards, people started to call it Constantinople. But this New Rome is its official title. So even today, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople is Greek Orthodox patriarch of New Rome or Constantinople. So the name New Rome is actually still there. So the Greeks or the Byzantines, as you said, Jason, called themselves Romans, though. As we were talking about at some point, Edward, given the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so it's a lot of detail in those early centuries. He starts around 200, if I remember correctly, 200 AD. Claims that much of the decline is due to Christianity, which certainly has a point to it. But he follows it all the way up to 1453 when Constantinople fell up to the Turks. But there's this great scholar named Anthony called Delos. And he's in Ohio. And he has a book on just this question. And he's written on it widely. And a lot of people say, look, we've got to call them Romans. So sometimes they call them Eastern Romans, or this, then, the other thing. But no, they were the Romans. And after Italian Rome, the Western Empire fell, this was the emperor, was in Constantinople. That was in the 5th century. And then in the West, there was a new emperor crowned several hundred years later, Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne was crowned emperor, Holy Roman Emperor, in St. Peter's in Rome. So there's this tension. But we're Westerners. Most of us are. We live in this Western culture. It's interesting because the Byzantines had a great historical sense, much better than the medieval Latins did. But starting in the Renaissance, and especially during the Reformation, Westerners developed a very acute historical sense, which we inherit today. The first, let's say, critical historians of the Eastern Roman Empire were actually, it was a German, I'm forgetting his name, in the 16th century. And that's where the term Byzantine started, actually, was a scholarly habit. And it just sort of took off from there. So it was never known as Byzantium. Only rarely would you hear somebody, only if he was from the city. Not if you're from the Eastern Roman Empire, but only if you're from the city would he call himself a Byzantine. And of course, the Byzantine Empire was much bigger. It was half, it was the Greek speaking and Syriac and other languages, Coptic speaking, part of the earlier Roman Empire. So Anthony called Dallas, has convinced me, we need to call them Romans, but nobody understands what you're saying when you say Romans. You know, so it's a sort of quandary rant. I agree with you that it really is a shame that we don't call this group of people what they themselves called and what they were called by others. I think the scholar you were trying to remember was a Heronimus of Wolf, is that it? Yes. What his name was? Yes. Yeah, so we have this term really created in the 16th century. It's kind of a neologism kind of like, when we say neoplatonism or we say Gnosticism, it's kind of like a catch-all universal term. Maybe it was good for simplicity's sake and for getting everybody on the right hermeneutical page, but maybe like you mentioned there, like these people had an identity as Romans, as a continuation of Rome. It's important as well that we acknowledge that. I hate to beat this, but I think it's so important. You know, the Turks were calling them Romans. They were called Romans. A lot of this has to do with old stereotypes. And so these Westerners who were writing largely in Latin, no, were the real Rome. They're not. Some of these stereotypes that are very old. I mean, I was just reading the Aeneid written in Latin, 20 BC or something like that. And the crafty Greeks, right? Odysseus is this crafty Greek. They're not really strong like the Trojans. I mean, of course, Achilles is an exception, but in the later 9th, 10th, 11th century and later we have these Westerners thinking of the Greeks, the Romans, excuse me, I just fell into it myself, the Greeks. The Eastern Romans as effeminate, as backward, as, you know, so it's really a very loaded term and I don't know how to overcome it. I don't know if one could have a favorite stereotype, but the stereotype that I always found very amusing from Greco-Roman literature was the idea that everybody from Thessaly was into witchcraft or a witch into magic in some way. Like you see that in a Leucopy and Clotophon, you know, the Greek novel and other things. You know, it's just like a stereotype, oh, Malite finds out that her slave is from Thessaly. She's like, okay, well, can you make me a love charm? You know, you're in Thessaly, right? Those stereotypes die hard, you know, and the Greeks were no exception to that. If I could just briefly touch upon what's happening with the formation of Constantinople being founded, we have a general before and after. We have Rome basically taking over a huge swathe of land, more than they had before, especially in the third century. And this all comes to a head with what Diocletian was trying to do with his reforms when he created the tetrarchy. So I didn't know if you could touch upon what that meant, what it meant for the emperor in terms of where he is versus where he was stationed before. So the problem was, it's interesting because emperor Imperator in Latin, Stratagos in Greek means general, right? The guy who's in charge. So that's the emperor, which now we understand to be something else, kind of like a king, a king of many lands. The emperor had to be close to where the important things were happening. There were wars far away. And if it takes a month by sea to get from Rome over to Syria or Persia or whatever, wherever these wars are going on, that's a problem because these generals might be sort of careful and I'm not sure what to do. So Diocletian, as you said, split the empire into four. And there's actually this wonderful in St. Mark's, there's this porphyry cornerstone that was stolen from Constantinople of the two Caesars and the two Augustus, right? So it's this wonderful image of that if your viewers want to look that up. But this was to manage things better. So you had two emperors and two Caesars, the Eastern half and the Western half. And this was really to help control things better. It was also, it didn't really work, but it was an attempt also to provide some stability, after all these civil wars. I mean, in many ways, more Romans probably died in civil wars than in battles with foreigners during this time. So there was a movement eastward, Byzantium was perfectly situated as a city in terms of a harbor, natural defenses, water, drinking water, there were planes for growing crops. And so Constantine knew this very well. And so he chose it as the site for the new Rome. It really seems ironic in a way, because of the rise of the Sasanian Empire in the early to mid third century, then you have what Diocletian is trying to do with the tetraarchy towards the end of that period of time. But as a result of this increase in military power, it really changes the power structure from who chooses the emperor to, from the Senate to the military. And that was one of the big consequences of this, wasn't it? Absolutely. You were no longer really raised to be an emperor. These people could be self-made men. And now their children would be imperial, and then the people around them would become sort of aristocratic members of the court. But the emperors themselves often came from very humble beginnings. And it's interesting because race didn't really have much to do with this. You could come from Africa, you could come from the Balkans, you could come from France, you didn't have to be a Roman to become emperor. You didn't have to be particularly educated, but you did have to have skill to rise through the ranks. I mean, physical martial prowess and then real practical intelligence. This is really something that comes to a head when Constantine is effectively crowned emperor by his father's troops. It's very odd and almost terrifying in a way. Emperors are more and more chosen from these ranks. And in Constantine's case, directly from the military, within the military ranks, you have a lot of emphasis on chenotheistic cults at this time, whether it's Sol Invictus or it's... Mythras. Yeah. Mythraism, Christianity. People think, oh, it just happened. It just happened to be something that Constantine chose. I mean, it really makes perfect sense. If you're... I hadn't thought about that. I haven't delved very deeply into that. There's a great Polish poet called Czeslaw Miloś, and he talks about Constantine, the cox comb. But there are all these different gods. Why would you choose this one? But it's interesting. I haven't delved more deeply into that, but I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah, there might be something there. It's just something that I've kind of looked at throughout my studies. Another thing about the emphasis on staying in the East in these Syrian provinces, is that you really see the differences between how somebody who was maybe raised in a Western Latin Roman culture views the emperor versus people in the East who are used to having an autocriter, somebody who's all seem divinely inspired, and it seems like the emperors at this time really emphasize that. I forget this in Shakespeare with Julius Caesar, but we know this is Julius Caesar, that he kind of wanted to be king, but he knew he couldn't call himself that, right? There are these times where he would secretly say to people, offer me the crown and let's see how it goes. But he never could pull it off because there was this allergic reaction to kings in Rome. And so the first real emperor, his adopted son, Octavian Augustus, called himself the first citizens, right? Princeps, right, the first, what we call prince. And in the East, of course, as you say, there was a long tradition of worshiping your king as a god. Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, all those, they really laid into that. And I think that, you know, it just seems to be almost an indirect consequence of moving so much of the infrastructure East, because that seems to kind of radiate back from the East to the rest of Rome in a way. And also laid more emphasis on, you know, Greek is the lingua franca. So everything is being transcribed and everything's being preserved, primarily in the Greek language in the East, you know, and Byzantium and in Constantinople. So I was wondering if you could kind of go into the kind of book culture that they had. The official language of law in the military remained Latin. Now, Greek's vocabulary is 10 times the size of Latin. So there's just a bigger vocabulary to work with. There's more precise language, both philosophically for describing nature in literature, emotions. It's just much more precise and frankly, many would say beautiful. The Greeks also, you know, I'm gonna be prejudiced here rightly, were very kind of arrogant about their language and their literature. They're much older, their literature, you know, went back to 750 at least BCE. Romans might have gone back to 200 BCE. So 550 years. The Romans had an inferiority complex with the Greeks, right? When they had Homer, the Greeks did, the Romans were, you know, running about naked with paint on their faces. You know what I mean? Like they were not riding in a deck, till a hexameter. So the Greeks always had this sort of sense, but it was slowly being translated. The elite Romans always knew Greek up until the fifth century or so. You know, Augustine from North Africa was very well-educated Latin, but he was one of the first ones who could be very well-educated without really mastering Greek. So that tide was turning in the fourth and fifth century, but you know, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Octavian, Salas, all these people knew Greek. Marcus Rilius, of course, this great Roman emperor wrote in Greek. And Greek was the, as he said, lingua franca of the Eastern half the emperor from Alexander the Great. As he said, he conquered all of this and established Greek culture, Greek amnesia, the Greek language. So yeah, but it's interesting the official language did still stay Latin as the centuries progressed. So their coins actually up until seventh century have Latin in the Byzantine coins. You know, by the time Justinians there about 200 years after Constantine, there were law codes issued in both Latin and Greek. So the Greeks never learned Latin as well as the Latins learned Greek, right? Because they sort of scorned us. Justinians, I wanna return to, but if we could just touch upon briefly what was the consequence of Constantine his successors, you know, his sons, favoring and increasing Christian aristocracy for the offices in the city of Constantine, up along throughout Rome. What does this do for things like education and the administrative aspect of the Empire? So I'll just make some general observations. Constantine created a new Senate, right? All the money for Roman citizens, I mean, you know, you have this money handed down from generation to generation. You have these expanding farms run by thousands of slaves that give you these massive fortunes. So the senators, you know, by Constantine's age had people who were the equivalent of our president or king, the consul, right? There were two consuls over a year, the leader of the Senate and of the state. From 200 BC, right? You know, so this is 500 years even longer of just enormous wealth. So Constantine wants to create a new capital over in Byzantios. And first of all, he has to get Romans to go over their senators, right? Who used to rule the Republic. And so he sort of makes them rich, but they're not as rich as the ones in old Rome. But there's sort of nouveau rich, he gives them houses. You know, there's kind of a gauche quality to these new senators, right? They don't have the old traditions in these deep family, the Scipios, for instance, you know, that go back that are in the history books. These are new men who are very, might not be very good at war, but are very good with numbers and public speaking, good bureaucrats. That's another thing that's starting to change under Constantine is the court system, which you had tied into the sort of king, the Basileos system in the Greeks, the Greek speaking kingdoms, the Ptolemies you brought up, but it's combined with a huge administration. You know, so you have all these secretaries and these people climbing the ladders, bribes working to climb these ladders. So Constantine favors Christians for sure. It's interesting because the wealthiest, the most powerful senators hold off. They sort of resist Christianity. You know, what is this new dirty thing that Jews and slaves like, right? So it's a very slow process and it isn't until, you know, even at the end, 75 years after Constantine, some of the most powerful senators are still pagan. So it's a slow process and New York should be the capital of America, right? It sort of is, but they made Washington DC. So, you know, there's Washington DC, which is the administrative center, the political center, but I mean, the cultural center, the financial center, you know, what's really going on in America? Where's the power? In many ways, it's in New York. So I think there's a similar dynamic going on between old Rome and new Rome or Constantinople. I think it's interesting that you mentioned just the influence of New York versus the influence of Constantinople and these nouveau rich types at the time. I was talking to Dr. Ed Watts about his book, The Final Pagan Generation and he was talking about how these people were born at a certain time, you know, before the tetraarchy, but they were still alive when all these changes happening under Constantine and his successors, his sons, like Constantius II. So he was saying, I mean, we have not only, you know, squares filled with the divine. We have a paideia that is steeped in pagan mythology. Whether you're Christian or pagan, you're using, you're going through the same kind of paideia and this is a social glue that bound pagan and Christian aristocracy together, regardless of your belief. I think what we see is even in a place like Athens, you know, wherever, however far you could get away from Constantinople or Athens, right? You know, you see the influence of these changes slowly, but surely. Constantine kind of leaves it alone, you know, but then you start seeing like Constantius II favoring, in the instance he used, he talked about this teacher named Pro Hieracius and Pro Hieracius was a Christian, right, teacher, but he was still using the pagan classics and all this. And then you have Julian who's kind of like throwing a wrench in those plans that Constantine said in motion for, you know, a little while there and- That struck a nerve Julian did. I mean, the number of speeches against Julian for 50 years, I mean, I think Cyril of Alexandria who died in 444 was writing against Julian. Yes, if Julian died, three, that's, you know, 80 years. Julian, honestly, if you look at him, he's only in power for maybe a total of a year and a half, right? Total power, he had some for a year and a half, right, yeah. Yeah, and just his influence, how much he's scared that Christian aristocracy and those people, I mean, ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Christians were new, you know, and they were very proud of their achievements and they were very smart and all that. And Julian just says, look, you guys did none of this. You know, if this is all pagan achievements, you know, it's sort of insecurity complex. Julian is really, I mean, in my estimation, he's kind of like the, I mean, don't get me wrong. He saw Constantine and his successors do awful things to his family. He has every right to rail against that, but I think Julian is also still a product of his time, of his Christian upbringing, because he views paganism in this kind of organized way that he saw Christian ecclesiastical tradition going and he wants to kind of remake it in that sense. Absolutely. I found that very interesting, you know, he's railing against it, but he's using the same kind of building blocks of the culture at the time. He wanted his priests to be more committed to the poor, right? I mean, he had all these sort of ways of imitating the taking care of the poor, hospitals. Yeah, that's interesting. I wanted to touch upon a figure you mentioned briefly before. He's one of the more important figures that we learn about when we first start studying Byzantium. That is the figure of Justinian. I wanted to see if you could briefly touch upon who he was, why he's important, why should we care about, you know, Justinian in 2023? Justinian was an interesting guy. His uncle, if I remember correctly, they came from a pretty simple background. His uncle climbed and was made eventually emperor. I think his uncle's name was Justin. Justinian got a great education. Justinian ended up falling in love with a circus actress. His uncle had to bend the law so that he could marry her. He and his wife, Theodora, if I'm remembering correctly, were Christians. And Justinian really thought himself theologian, which he sort of was. The Roman Empire, much of the West had been lost. And so Justinian inherited an empire with a great, a treasury full of gold. And so he wanted to do all kinds of things. He wanted to build a great church, which we is called Saint Sophia Hagia Sophia today, still in Istanbul, was for a thousand years, the largest church in the world, one of the largest buildings in the world. He wanted to organize the law because Roman law was very complicated. Like today, with American law, you have all these judgments of the Supreme court and precedence. And in Rome, you had rulings of emperors and all sorts of things. So he came up and he hired Trebonius, I think was his name, to put together a law book, the institutes and there's a digest as well that covers everything. And it's now a Christian law book. And this is done in both Greek and Latin. So this is one of his major cultural achievements. The other is he sent his general out West to reconquer Africa, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Italy, because they had been invaded by barbarians. So they conquered Italy, but none of this really was gonna last, was the sort of tragedy of Justinian. St. Sophia did, the law did, the law codes, but the empire was shortly lost after this. But he wanted to bring Rome back to its glory and he had a long reign. He also emptied the coffers, right? The treasury, I think was full of cobwebs when he died. One of the things, I'm a theologian, I studied Christian ideas and culture and he was very concerned about right Christian thinking, Christian philosophy, Christian theology, doctrine, dogma. And so he called a council to help clarify the nature of Jesus Christ. Is he God? Is he the same way that the father is God? Can you really do that? And then there was this great thinker from the early church who died around 254, I think. His name was Origen and he had, he was maybe the most powerful intellect in Christian history, one of the top four, I'd say. Absolutely, Origen is up there with Clement of Alexandria for sure. It's hard, you can't really compare geniuses. Each genius is his or her own type. But in terms of the power, Augustine was genius and a great powerful intellect, but Origen knew a lot more. Origen had read everything in Greek and of course, there was a lot more than we've lost so much since then. But he had these, especially when he was younger, he had these odd ideas, you can go up to heaven but then if you get bored, you can fall down again. So it's this odd idea of reincarnation and some other kind of funky ideas that hadn't really been clearly defined. And this had an influence on certain figures later and Justinian cracked down on this. Origen was condemned at the council. I think it was Constantinople in 553. So yeah, great achievements, theologically, law, cultural expansion of the empire, but at a cost, at a cost of pushing some out of the Orthodox church. Yeah, it has an effect not only on the church, it has an effect on the remnants of the philosophical schools, right? This is the closing of the final shuddering of the academy, right? And these guys get so flustered by this that they start to view the Sassanian empire as like maybe that's the place we need to be. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and they came back but it was just very interesting. Lots of things happened under Justinian and I think that, yeah, he does a lot of great things but I also think that in a way he's the last of the emperors who had the kind of resources to have that impact. Oh, absolutely. Well, not too much longer. I forget when Justinian died, 560, something like that. He was alive in the 550s, but not too much longer. So I mean, Justinian was in some ways genius to accomplish all this, but once you have Islam, I mean, you know, they take over so much. Islam is going to come to help the Byzantine empire define itself in a way, you know, because you have so much going on there in terms of like them losing their land and then, you know, Constantinople is kind of like considered after a while after they lose the literal Jerusalem. Constantinople is considered the new Jerusalem. So that reinforces that kind of Christian identity. One of the things about Constantinople is they brought so many relics there, right? So body parts of Christian saints, largely martyrs. There's this wonderful collection of books which of course I owned and lost once. It's published by Dumbarton Oaks in the 80s. It's old church, Slavonic texts. There's great translation to English, wonderful notes of visitors from Russia in the 14th and 15th century and just how amazed they were praying at these relics, which, you know, Latin stole most of them and then the Turks destroyed. Yeah, it's such a shame. Yeah, it's a tragic history, so many things lost. I don't really glamorize the past too much, but I think if I could spend like a day anywhere in the past in a time machine, I actually, I would go and visit Clement and Origins Library, just see what they had. You know, Justinian had so much of origin burned. Fortunately, a fair amount of it had been translated into Latin. So most of what we have of origin today is actually from a Latin translation. There are some Greek things. I love me some origin, love me some Clement. And those are guys, those are the reason we have Philo to begin with. All in Alexandria, they're all in the great, the center of learning, you know, more than Athens at that point, Alexandria was the center of learning, the library, right? The library of Alexandria. Yeah, Alexandria was certainly the place to be. You had Hepatia there, Clement of Alexandria, Philo, all these, all these, you were talking about geniuses. They're all like amazing intellects, but they're all extremely different from each other and doing really interesting things. But my final question has to do with the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. I really look at it as one of the strongholds of keeping classical culture alive in a very volatile time. Absolutely. Yeah, you see a lot of things that are quote unquote lost in the West, preserved in Byzantium. Anything from the classical world that survives is thanks to Byzantium. We don't have what Aristotle wrote down in the piece of Papyrus. We have copies of copies of copies. The Byzantines, the Eastern Romans preserved these things and it was a part of their education. It's thanks to them. Some things actually the medieval Muslims, Caliphate preserved, some Greek writings were translated into for Syriac, then Arabic, and then into Latin. So some of ancient Greek culture is preserved that way, but no, it's all preserved. You mentioned Paideia, the training, the education of the whole person that they had, but also just scholars interested in these things. There's so many. One of the wonderful things about Byzantium is different religious culture than in the Latin West in some ways. In the Latin West, mostly it was priests who could read occasionally and none or two. There were so many, you know, Photeus, whom I'm writing on now in the ninth century, was a great scholar and interesting. There were lay theologians, non-priests theologians in Byzantium, but there are several people who were just immersed in the Greek classics and they imitated their writing, sometimes in the kind of precious ways. It's a little bit of the top. You know, the first book that Greeks learned in school was not the Bible. It was the Iliad or Byzantines, I should say. Yeah, well, Greeks too, so. Right, Homer, you know, Homer is like, I don't know if it's fair to say he was the Bible of antiquity, but he was certainly close to it. Well, Dr. Breel, did you have anything you wanted to plug before we go tonight? I'm really stuck in the ninth century right now. I shouldn't plug that. I think I wrote a book. I'm not gonna plug the book, but it's the period. It's called the Paleologian period. So this is from 1263 to 1453, 1460 or so. Fascinating period, they're all Greek. They have a lot to do with the West, which is interesting, but there are Greek pagans, there are Greek Christians, the frescoes that we have from them, the manuscripts, the renewal of ancient Greek culture. You know, there was a Renaissance in the West which started with Latin texts and eventually included Greek. At the same time, there was a Greek Renaissance, in fact, a little bit earlier. And so, you know, if nothing else, if you're interested in paganism, I would encourage you to look at pletho or pletho, P-L-E-T-H-O. There's a very good book on him by Woodhouse. It was interesting, it's an amateur. You know, Jason, you call yourself an amateur. This guy wasn't an academic. He wrote the best book there is on pletho in the 80s, Woodhouse. If you're interested in Christian things, if you're interested in the Renaissance, there's a guy named Theodore Mendoquitas. The church he built still exists. And then if you're interested in theology, I guess I'll recommend three people. Not much has been translated. Bessarion, who became a Catholic, some of his things have been translated into English. Scalarius is the guy I wrote on. Mark of Ephesus, who was Scalarius's teacher. So if you're interested in Christian theology, I'd say that. You know, just right there, all the texts that you recommended, it just goes to show, you know, how much the Eastern Roman Empire had an effect on the world at the time. You know, it's not just the Christian classics. It's the pagan classics. We wouldn't have the Corpus Hermeticum or the Orphic Hems without Byzantium. We wouldn't have anything. We wouldn't have Sophocles, Homer, Escalus, nothing. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah, I don't know if I could live in a world without Aristophanes, so. Right, yeah. But Matthew Reel, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I hope to have you again sometime. You have a pleasant evening. Yeah, thanks. Oh yeah, absolutely. All right, take care. We'll have you again soon. Take care. Thank you. Bye.