CHAPTER 3 Hellenism

Who owns Byzantium? Is there a Byzantine identity?

Many would answer the last question in terms of its Christian Orthodoxy, others in terms of Hellenism, and therefore Greekness. As I shall argue here, the latter also necessarily engages—positively or negatively—with a persistent idea of Byzantium as a repository of Christianized Hellenism.

In recent years several Byzantinists have put forward the view of the Byzantine empire as a mélange of many peoples and cultures, its composition varying over time with the changing shape of the empire itself (chapters 1 and 2). Others, Cyril Mango among them, stress the Judeo-Christian and popular sides of the Byzantine mentality, in contrast with the traditional emphases on its classical elements and its high literary and intellectual culture.¹ A further group of scholars resists the stress laid in traditional Byzantine studies on continuity with the classical past and on elite culture by focusing on such themes as “daily life,” the secular side of Byzantine life, economic activity and trade, the lower classes, and material culture.

However, the interpretation of Byzantium is especially fraught for Greek scholars. One of the most contentious aspects of this problem is the question of historical continuity, especially as it has been posed in relation to the modern Greek state. This chapter will be concerned in particular with the issue of Hellenism as seen against this context.

The reception of Byzantium in the new Greek state in the nineteenth century was both emotive and contested.2 The liberated Greeks looked back to what they saw as their glorious classical past, and the notorious claim of the historian Jakob Fallmerayer that their past was not Greek but Slav met with heated opposition. The Byzantine phase of the history of Greece, identified by many with its Orthodox religion, resisted assimilation into the new national ideology, which sought to detach itself from the recent Ottoman past and to distinguish Greece as sharply as possible from the surviving Ottoman empire. But again there were opposing views, and this too gave rise to passionate feelings. By the end of the century, however, in the midst of a growing sense of Ottoman decline, Greek nationalism had combined with irredentism. This was to fail dramatically, after the ill-fated Greek landings in Asia Minor in 1919 and the Smyrna disaster of 1922, followed by the enforced exchange of Greek and Turkish populations. With the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the recovery of Constantinople, the greatest prize for the Greeks, was out of reach.

The idea of Constantinople/Istanbul as the capital of a modern Greek state may seem counterintuitive today.³ The “great idea” (as this ambition was termed by the Greeks themselves) also conflates two conceptions of Byzantium: as the seat of Orthodoxy and as an imperial power, a conflation that Peter Mackridge has warned against in a recent paper.4 Yet Byzantium still occupies a privileged place in the consciousness of many Greeks. Nor, given the role of Greek as the language of government and culture throughout the history of Byzantium, the dependence of its educational system on classical Greek literature and rhetoric, and the ambivalence of Byzantine attitudes to ancient Greek philosophy, is it surprising to find that “Hellenism” is as fraught a concept within Byzantine studies as the Byzantine tradition is to Greeks today.

National traditions in Byzantine scholarship are not confined to Greece. With the beginnings of the academic discipline of Byzantine studies in the late nineteenth century, powerful academic traditions came into being in Tsarist Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria—all Orthodox countries, and part of the “commonwealth” discussed in the preceding chapter. The role of Byzantium in these countries and in southeastern Europe generally (often expressed in terms of its “legacy”) is also complex. Byzantine studies also developed in some European centers, notably Paris and Vienna, and in Germany, alongside the editing and publication of Byzantine texts.⁵ This did not happen in the same way in the Anglo-Saxon world, where the rare scholars who did venture into the Byzantine period were usually classicists by origin. In a later generation, Steven Runciman was an exception to this generalization, having studied history at Cambridge. His teacher J. B. Bury, whose only pupil at Cambridge was Runciman, had held chairs of Greek and History simultaneously at Trinity College Dublin, and had published on classical Greek as well as Byzantine history. Younger British Byzantinists complain of this heritage, which has certainly led to some very negative judgments of Byzantium and Byzantine literature when compared with that of classical Greece. A notorious example is the 1963 article on Byzantine literature by Romilly Jenkins, also a classicist, who held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London from 1946 to 1960,6 and was simultaneously Honorary Lecturer in Classical Archaeology in the College. Jenkins warned that Byzantine literature was not a mere offshoot of classical antiquity but “an independent entity, created out of a fusion of Greek, Roman, oriental and native Byzantine elements.”⁷ This was not meant to be complimentary. He went on to complain of its tediousness and to state that it is hardly possible to recall a line from the “reams of iambic verses” produced by Byzantium’s “best” writers and scholars. He also writes of “the total lack of poetic feeling and appreciation at Byzantium during the most cultured epoch of her renaissance.” Jenkins’s grudging conclusion is also worth citing: “Let us be grateful that the mediaeval Byzantine adhered with fidelity to at least some of the traditions handed down from a world more liberally minded and more cultivated than his own.”

Byzantium has been caught between the hostile, or at least prejudiced, assumptions of some classically trained scholars and the national and the religious agendas of Greek and other Orthodox writers. To Mackridge again, “Classical Athens has been nationalized in modern Greece … Byzantium has been similarly nationalized,” the latter representing the medieval phase of Hellenism.8 At the heart of this view of Byzantium is the vexed question of the continuity (or lack of it) of Greek civilization (figure 5). This is a problem only too well recognized among Greek Byzantinists, and even if Greek scholarship in the past has tended to assume continuity, opinions vary much more than these quotations suggest.⁹ The awkward relation of the modern Greek state with the monasteries of Mount Athos, with their very diverse monastic population, is a further indicator of the emotion that still surrounds the issue.

“Hellenism” (a term whose uses I will discuss further later) also goes far beyond the nation state of modern Greece. The Byzantine state was never coterminous with Greece, even in the Palaeologan period, when there were minor statelets in Epirus and the Morea and an enclave at Mistra.¹⁰ The contested period of Slav settlement characterized the late sixth and seventh centuries in Greece, and despite the establishment of a “theme” (military and administrative organization) of “Hellas,” Byzantine control was uncertain and insecure before the successful imperial initiatives of the late ninth and tenth centuries.¹¹ It was not only the “missions to the Slavs” that extended Byzantium’s reach far beyond Greece and Asia Minor.¹² In addition to the countries of the “Byzantine commonwealth,” Hellenism also left a continuing imprint on the Middle East, even after the rise of Islam. We read constantly of the transmission of Greek culture to Baghdad from Alexandria. But Greek language and culture were rooted in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, and this was not the only route by which they passed into Arabic. The language of government and culture in the eastern Roman empire had long been Greek, and Greek language and culture long continued to be important in the east despite an active Greek into Syriac translation movement in late antiquity.¹³ In the early seventh century Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who according to tradition handed over the city to the caliph Umar, had received a classical training in Damascus. At the same time an astonishing amount of classicizing iconography continued to be displayed in the mosaics that continued to be laid in churches in what is now Jordan even in the late Umayyad period, long after Byzantine rule in the region had ended.¹⁴

Figure 5. The Parthenon in Athens, used as a church of the Virgin in the medieval period (its traces were later removed). ■ Image © Ivan Bastien / shutterstock.com

How useful, then, is the concept of Hellenism in trying to understand Byzantine identity?

As has often been pointed out, the Byzantines thought of themselves as Romans, and their empire as the Roman empire. In the earlier Christian centuries the term “Hellene” or “Hellenic” had been appropriated in Greek by Christian writers to refer to pagans, and thus acquired a very negative connotation.15 Many generations of churchmen accordingly condemned Hellenic philosophy, and when the philosopher John Italus (“the Italian,” because he came from Calabria in southern Italy) was condemned as a heretic under the emperor Alexius I Comnenus in 1082, the charges included his alleged resort to Hellenic ideas, and the claim that he “believed” in the doctrines of Plato rather than simply reading his works as literature. Only in the period of the enforced engagement with the west that came with the Crusades (which also began during the reign of Alexius), the assertiveness of the papacy, and the theological debates with the Latins, when “Rome” seemed to have taken on a new meaning, did the Byzantines begin to use the term “Hellenes” to refer to themselves; we also encounter the term Graikos, used by Latins but also applied to the Orthodox (or Byzantine) spokesman in some Greek texts of these theological debates, and adopted even in official contexts.¹⁶

In Roumeli, his book about northern Greece, the travel-writer Patrick Leigh Fermor writes of the “Helleno-Romaic dilemma.” He even drew up a list of the supposedly contrasting characteristics that he claimed existed within every Greek (some admittedly “purposely slight and frivolous,” but included for better illustrative effect).17 This should not be dismissed as merely a literary construction; indeed another recent article talks of “two Greeces.” The problem, however, lies with understanding what is meant by “Greek” and still more by “Hellenic.”

A major difficulty lies with the slippery nature of the very term “Hellenism,” a word that carries heavy baggage. Leaving aside here the use of concepts such as “Hellenic” and “barbarian” in the classical period, references to “Hellenism” have been central in discussions of early Christianity in terms of a supposed opposition between Jewish origins and Greek philosophical thought. The famous lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg in 2006 was titled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” and was in fact a justification of this understanding of Hellenism as a basic feature of Christianity.¹⁸ Although Rowan Williams once wrote that “There is no possibility of de-Hellenizing Christian dogma, because that would be a refusal to accept what history means,” this perceived opposition was an issue with which many early Christian writers also struggled.¹⁹ It has given rise to a huge secondary literature on early Christian and Jewish identity and a sophisticated theoretical approach to the issue, in which Hellenism is viewed by some scholars as a process, or even a theoretical “toolbox” for historians trying to understand the cultural and religious changes taking place in the Roman empire and in late antiquity.²⁰

“Hellenism” is also used to denote the intellectual and cultural tradition of Greek literature and philosophy in the Roman empire. In particular, the emperor Julian’s attempt to reverse the hold of Christianity in the empire during his brief reign (361–63) is commonly couched in terms of Hellenism.21 The term is also commonly used instead of “classical” in discussions of the education and culture of Christian patristic writers such as Gregory of Nazianzus: Christian intellectuals and writers had a schizophrenic relation to classical culture and aspired to and sought to appropriate and exploit Greek paideia while at the same time condemning it.²² A genealogical theory of Christian origins also developed, in which Christians were constructed as “the third race,” and indeed, in what may now strike the reader as strange, the late-fourthcentury heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis lists Hellenism alongside Barbarism, Scythism, and Judaism as one of the original sects from which all other heresies have sprung. Epiphanius was elaborating on the four categories mentioned at Colossians 3:11 and Galatians 3:28 (and he was not the first to do so). But as we have also seen, “Hellenism” can also be applied in a more general way to mythological and other classicizing themes in the art and literature of late antiquity. Indeed, given the influence exerted on Byzantine literature by the Greek writers of the Second Sophistic movement of the second and third centuries, and the value placed by intellectuals in Byzantium on the imitation of the classical and later Greek authors (chapter 1), Hellenism in this sense was inscribed in Byzantine elite culture itself.

None of these usages carries the sense of national, ethnic, or territorial continuity with classical Greece. But a recent book by Anthony Kaldellis demonstrates the dilemmas faced by Greek historians in writing about Byzantium.23 Kaldellis, a Greek himself, explicitly distances himself from modern Greek and Greek-American scholarship on Byzantium, with what he calls its “casual equation of Greeks and Byzantines,”²⁴ by constructing the Byzantines as “Romans” in a way that might have surprised them had they heard it. This move allows him to detach the concept of Hellenism from the generally assumed Orthodox identity of Byzantium, despite the fact that educated Byzantines themselves wrote in highly literary Greek and hardly knew Latin writings until Augustine was translated along with Aquinas, as described in chapter 1. (Kaldellis ends his book at 1261, when the Byzantines returned to Constantinople.) After emphasising that the Byzantines called themselves Romans, and arguing that Byzantium was not a multiethnic empire but “the nation state of the Romans,” he discusses three phases of “Hellenism”: late antiquity, the age of Michael Psellus (eleventh century), and the Comnenian period (late eleventh and twelfth centuries). Between the first and second, from about 400 to 1040, comes a period he calls “Hellenism in limbo,” when, he claims, Hellenic culture went into abeyance.

In other publications dealing with the historians Procopius and Agathias and their contemporary John Lydus, and with Michael Psellus, Kaldellis has also argued for Neoplatonic and “Hellenic” agendas.²⁵ If with Kaldellis we understand Hellenism in Byzantium not merely as referring to high literary culture but also as carrying overtones of rationalism and secret opposition, and if Byzantium itself is constructed as a Roman state, rather than an Orthodox empire, the notion of Orthodoxy as the defining characteristic of Byzantium is deconstructed, and Byzantium can be reclaimed for the cause of rationalism and dissent. Not surprisingly, Kaldellis includes among his targets the notion of a Byzantine commonwealth underpinned by a concept of universalism with Orthodoxy as one of the main features holding it together.

Kaldellis’s book vividly reveals the dilemmas that present themselves to scholars of Greek origin when writing about Byzantium. The agenda of an underlying—and supposedly continuous—strand of oppositional rationalism (defined as Hellenism) has been taken considerably further by another Greek scholar, Niketas Siniossoglou, in a recent book about George Gemistus Plethon,26 to which I will return shortly. Last, a distaste for Orthodox Byzantium, combined with, or rather, arising from, a high valuation of late antique Neoplatonism, can also be detected in recent publications by Polymnia Athanassiadi (chapter 2).²⁷

According to Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium, as in late antiquity, was constructed and changing. This is an approach with which we can agree. But here again we meet the problem for Byzantinists highlighted in chapter 1 and posed by the huge changes that have taken place in the study of late antiquity in the last generation. The view of a Byzantine historian looking back on the earlier centuries from the later perspective is different from that of a late antique scholar who is doing just the opposite—pushing his or her subject ever further forward chronologically and more to the east geographically. In general, historians of late antiquity also display a much more developed theoretical approach to cultural and religious change than is as yet apparent in the field of Byzantine studies.28 The difficult subject of Greek identity in Byzantium, whether or not to be identified with Hellenism, immediately raises questions of periodization and geographical coverage—when did “Byzantium” begin, and how distinct was it from “late antiquity”? If the “long” Byzantium is adopted, there has to be engagement with the vast scholarship on late antiquity in its present form, including its discussion of Hellenism. To expose and react to the dilemmas in existing Greek scholarship on Byzantium will not be sufficient.²⁹

It perhaps does not matter much whether Byzantium is deemed to have begun with Constantine or only later, except that Byzantine historians have to deal with the fact that the roots of many (admittedly of course not all) features of later Byzantine culture and society lie in an earlier period. In that period, which in current scholarship is often called late antiquity rather than early Byzantium,³⁰ intense and sometimes exciting cultural and religious change went alongside momentous political and military developments. Christianity, in whatever form, did become dominant in the empire run from Constantinople, but a new world religion—namely, Islam—was also born in the context of the “Byzantine” or late antique eastern Mediterranean. “Greek” or “Hellenic” identities were negotiated not only in relation to Roman but also to eastern ones; the emergence of “Arab” identities is one of the most debated issues in current scholarship. The Roman law school in Beirut used Latin for its teaching, but the Christian rhetors of late antique Gaza wrote in high-style Greek, and Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem mentioned earlier, constructed Hellenism as the deceptive antithesis of the power of the saints in his collection of miracle stories associated with the shrine of saints Cyrus and John in Egypt, even while composing Greek classicizing anacreontic poems on contemporary events.31

Discussion of “Hellenism,” or of Greek identity in early Byzantium, cannot be confined to Constantinople and its heartlands, or indeed to Greece itself. Neoplatonic philosophy continued to be practiced in the Academy at Athens until the emperor Justinian’s measures against it in AD 529, and Alexandria remained a center of philosophical teaching thereafter, while the Athenian philosophers themselves found ways of carrying on their writing. North Africa, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean were still governed by Constantinople until the Persian and Arab invasions, and the impact of Byzantine practices continued. In Italy, too, the Greek influence in Rome, as well as in Sicily and southern Italy, received new and important impetus in the seventh and eighth centuries, presenting further issues of identity.

Scholarship on late antiquity in the last generation has refined and applied theoretical models for the discussion of identity formation in an impressive way to subjects including late antique Judaism, religious identities in Antioch, the uses of Greek and Syriac in ecclesiastical contexts, and the emergence of Arab identity.32 This builds on an equally extensive literature on identity and ethnicity in the classical period, and on revisionist approaches on such older themes as “Romanization” in the imperial period. Concepts such as “hybridity,” borrowed from postcolonialist criticism, and of identities as shifting, constructed, and often multiple, which lie behind this work, have barely as yet been applied to Byzantium.³³

The discursive construction of identity (and of “Hellenism”) needs to be brought into much greater prominence with regard to Byzantium. This is not easy when, as suggested in chapter 1, so much still needs to be done. The analysis of Byzantine literature, the key carrier of the classical Greek tradition in Byzantium, is central to issues of identity and Hellenism. That the method of New Historicism, the product of the 1980s, is only now being applied by some as a tool for the study of Byzantine literature tells us something itself about this time lag, and while Byzantine texts certainly do call for the kind of contextual approach found in the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Byzantine historians would also do well to look more to discourse analysis and to language and writing as mechanisms of identity and power. I will reserve until chapter 5 remarks on Byzantine theological writing, which perhaps poses the greatest challenge to historians and indeed to literary scholars who are not themselves theologians, but which is central to the issues discussed in this chapter.

But neither Hellenism nor identity are simply a matter of texts. Archaeologists and art historians of other periods have been much exercised about the degree of emphasis that should be given to the active influence of material culture in forming cultural consciousness.34 At the same time evidence from archaeology and material culture has become central to scholarship on late antiquity, including discussions of identity and cultural differentiation. The same needs to happen with the history of Byzantium.³⁵

As I mentioned earlier, Anthony Kaldellis himself puts forward the view that Hellenic identity is discursively constructed; similarly, “‘Hellenism and Christianity’ was a constructed opposition, constantly negotiated and variously represented.”³⁶ But the field of negotiation he envisages for the early Byzantine or late antique period is limited, focusing on high culture, the field of Greek paideia: “The majority of Byzantines did not worry about Hellenism one way or the other.”³⁷ But texts are not innocent, especially in matters of identity. Byzantine discourse was powerfully prescriptive, creating identity and proscribing difference. Nowhere is this more apparent than in theological and religious discourse, but it also applies in other fields, and provides a continuing context for the competitive literary and intellectual engagement by which elite Byzantines furthered their life chances. Naturally we also see it in political and public discourse, and a rhetorical analysis of Byzantine imperial pronouncements, for example, would be one of the best ways of countering the positivist readings that prevail even now in Byzantine scholarship.

In his book Radical Platonism, Niketas Siniossoglou takes the late Byzantine Hellenism of Gemistos Plethon as the starting point for an interpretation of Hellenism in Byzantium in which he adopts a very different approach. One of the leading Byzantine intellectuals of the early fifteenth century, and a member of the court at Mistra in the Peloponnese (figure 6), Plethon was a prolific writer whose Platonizing views, expressed especially in his Laws, attracted the condemnation of George Gennadius Scholarius and have long intrigued modern scholars.³⁸ For Siniossoglou, Plethon’s work represents the clearest manifestation of a Platonizing paganism that he sees as a constant thread running throughout Byzantine history. Siniossoglou is an advocate of a philosophical essentialism based on Weberian ideal-types, the very opposite of the discursive anti-essentialism discussed earlier. He is interested in “the modalities and tropes through which a Platonist worldview antagonistic to Christianity was preserved, appropriated, re-calibrated and continuously juxtaposed to Christian monastic and clerical hegemony.”³⁹ In this formulation, Plethon’s views were a direct challenge to the idea of Roman and Orthodox identity in Byzantium, and for Siniossoglou this was no mere aberration, but the logical culmination of a continuous previous tradition.

Figure 6. The ruins of Mistra in the Peloponnese, seat of a Byzantine court and intense intellectual life in the late Byzantine period, especially associated with George Gemistos Plethon, to whose circle the future Cardinal Bessarion also belonged. ■ Image © Roger Wood / CORBIS

The ground for this interpretation was prepared in an earlier book by the same author on the fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus, where Siniossoglou argues for Hellenism and Christianity as different in essence, “separate intellectual entities,” “neither artificial nor socially constructed.”40 The common idea of “Christian Hellenism”—that is, the genuine appropriation of Hellenic concepts within a Christian and Orthodox worldview, over and above mere terminology, is for him an impossibility. Like Kaldellis, Siniossoglou detaches Hellenism from Christianity, and in particular from Orthodoxy. He addresses the question of continuity (“the essential continuity between the Hellenes and us”) directly, and denies the idea of a Greek continuity through “Christian Hellenism” and Byzantine Orthodoxy.⁴¹ His deliberate preference for the term “Roman Orthodoxy” makes the point even clearer.

Writing on Plethon, at the end of the Byzantine period, Siniossoglou argues for an “awakening” of philosophical Hellenism on the eve of the Turkish conquest that can be read as the key to Spinoza and to modernity.42 Plethon wrote in a context of deep anxiety and division about the present and future of Greek culture in the face of competing pressure exerted by Italy on the one hand and the Ottomans on the other. Within Byzantium itself an intense debate about the respective importance of Plato and Aristotle also served as the context for Plethon’s position, as well as a partial surrogate for the anxieties surrounding Greek and Orthodox identity.⁴³ He himself had given lectures in Florence in 1439 on the differences between Plato and Aristotle,⁴⁴ attacking the latter; they were followed by a reply from Scholarius and a further justification from Plethon himself.

Some difficulties have to be overcome in order to present Plethon’s revived Platonic philosophy in this way. Prominent among them is the awkward fact that not only was he himself included in the large Byzantine delegation that supported the emperor John VIII Palaeologus at the Council of Ferrara/Florence in 1438–39 but he also composed a treatise against Latin theology. At least one contemporary regarded him as a sincere defender of the Orthodox position.⁴⁵ Not surprisingly, this has puzzled many scholars. Either it was necessary for him to dissemble, as Siniossoglou believes, or his Hellenism was not as radical as it might appear. According to C. M. Woodhouse it was Plethon’s drafting skills rather than his Orthodox credentials that were needed at the council; Woodhouse further argued that like Psellus and Italus, Plethon valued philosophy over theology. There were also many tempting opportunities in Italy for Byzantine intellectuals conscious of the dire situation of Constantinople.46 Nor was Plethon the only contemporary for whom in the last days of Byzantium the question of Hellenic identity presented itself in an acute form.⁴⁷

Plethon died at a great age soon after the fall of Constantinople, a highly controversial figure in his own time.⁴⁸ Scholarius obtained a copy of Plethon’s treatise modeled on Plato’s Laws from the Despina Theodora of the Morea and ordered it to be burned along with any other remaining copies. It is hard to know where the truth lies about Plethon’s allegiances, but it is clear enough that Siniossoglou’s hypothesis of a continuous Platonizing opposition as the carrier of Hellenic identity within Byzantium has a clear Greek and anti-Orthodox agenda, and depends, as we saw, on a strongly essentialist way of looking at identity.⁴⁹

However, identity is also a matter of self-representation. While the Byzantines who defined themselves as “Christian” or “Orthodox” were adopting a religious marker, this was not the only way in which they distinguished themselves; further, as we shall see in chapter 5, the term “Orthodox” also caused deep internal divisions. Sustained challenge and redefinition constitute a more promising model for Byzantine identity than either successful appropriation on the one hand or existential opposition on the other. From the perspective of Christianity, Hellenism remained a difficult concept: “cette Grèce problématique que l’on ne peut jamais totalement s’approprier.”50 Some memories of ancient Greek wisdom passed into the realm of legend,⁵¹ and for all the classical manuscripts and editing of classical texts with which Palaeologan intellectuals were engaged, and the genuine depth of classical learning in later Byzantium, the Greece so eagerly rediscovered by the west during the Renaissance had a novelty and freshness that were by definition unknown to Byzantium.

In a well-known essay of 1975, the eminent Greek Byzantinist Hélène Ahrweiler suggested that the universalism that Byzantium had inherited from the Roman empire in its early period gave way from the eighth century onward to an aggressive nationalism based on Greek and Orthodox patriotism. More recently, and in a different context, she discussed the difficult question of Hellenism and Greek continuity, with full awareness of the complications of the Byzantine period, now cautiously suggesting that “Helleno-centric Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy” did indeed represent the continuance of ancient Greek humanism, and emphasizing the fact that classical Greece extended beyond the territorial base of Greece itself.⁵² But again, during most of their history the Byzantines did not self-identify as Hellenes; again, it could be argued, in contrast, that one of the very strengths of Byzantium was its flexibility and the capacity of its people to look in several directions.

Kaldellis’s view is rather different: for him Byzantium represents the “nation-state of the Romans,” rather than of the Greeks. But the concept of an emerging nation state is not helpful in this case; nor were the “Byzantines” a new people who underwent the process of ethnogenesis posited for the peoples of the early medieval west.53 They continued to call themselves Romans because the origins of Byzantium lay in the eastern Roman empire; their majority as well as their high-style literary and administrative language was Greek, because that was also the language of the eastern part of the late Roman empire.⁵⁴ Their educational system was overwhelmingly based on Greek models, Greek rhetorical handbooks, and, for some, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, but this too was a direct inheritance from the eastern Roman empire, where Greek language and culture already flourished under the framework of Roman rule long before the foundation of Constantinople. The “Second Sophistic,” whose authors were so important in the Byzantine literary tradition, was itself a movement born in the Roman imperial period.⁵⁵ Moreover, the Fathers to whom Byzantine theologians constantly appealed were themselves the Greek theologians who wrote in the context of the Roman empire; few if any Latin theological writers were commonly cited in theological literature until late in Byzantium’s history. In order to make sense of Byzantine identity, or Hellenism in Byzantium, we need to start not merely from late antiquity, but from this earlier period of the Roman empire and Roman imperial rule in the east.

Nor, whatever identity might be claimed for Byzantium, was it based on ethnicity. Even if Byzantium was not quite the multiethnic empire that some would like it to have been, the population of its core provinces was thoroughly mixed. Cyril Mango’s robust characterization of the situation in the late eighth century conveys the idea very vividly: “We find a population that had been so thoroughly churned up that it is difficult to tell what ethnic groups were living where and in what numbers.”56 We see vividly illustrated in the tenth-century De administrando imperio of the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus that Byzantium was surrounded by emerging peoples with evolving identities. Hybridity was built into the very nature of Byzantium and so were the multiple identities so familiar to its varying population and the different phases of its history. Byzantine identity was not only Greek: Byzantium is for all. “Hellenism” was important, but it is not enough.