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I would disagree with the point that they're no less Roman than Caesar or Hadrian - you could say they were still Roman but you've got to consider that by the m

I would disagree with the point that they're no less Roman than Caesar or Hadrian - you could say they were still Roman but you've got to consider that by the middle and end stage they had very little in common with their earlier predecessors. For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin, they were Christians instead of pagans, they didn't have control over the city of Rome or any more than a foothold in Italy, they had totally different styles of art and their government and military were run entirely differently. If you asked Caesar or Hadrian they would've considered it a totally foreign country. Sure they might have considered themselves Romans still, but it's like the Ship of Theseus, all those changes add up over time. A lot of civilisations went through smaller changes yet they're still considered entirely different to their predecessors - no one would say that the modern Russians are still Norse.

graemep 3y ago
Any entity changes over that sort of timescale. Modern England is very different from what Æthelstan unified in the 10th century but we call both by the same name.
- joegibbs 3y ago
  Yes but Aethelstan's England at least shares a lot more in common with modern England - you could easily recognise that it comes from the same source (same religion, both have a king, controls almost the same territory, speaks a language that's closer to modern English than any other modern language except Scots). Even some civilisations that control the same territory aren't regarded as the same - for example modern Egypt and ancient Egypt are both called the same thing, yet wouldn't be regarded as the same civilisation due to their lack of commonalities.
  - graemep 3y ago
    Not really: * same religion: most people say they are non-religious (thought some have Christian beliefs), some who say they are Christian really do not know the right term for their actual beliefs (moralistic therapeutic deists), those who are Christian are of different denominations. * both have a king: the western empire of Hadrian's time and the Byzantine both had an emperor. modern England is a constitutional monarchy, an executive drawn from parliament, and parliament is very different from its predecessors that existed at the time. The king is also king of a lot of other countries. * controls almost the same territory: true of England alone, but England is not an independent entity, but part of a larger union, and that union has a lot of overseas territories. * speaks a language that's closer to modern English: we are talking about the same era as Beowulf. That was a very different language, so no more comprehensible than related modern languages which at least have some common vocabulary (including loan words). Does this look recognisably like modern English? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng... I agree with you about Egypt but it has been invaded multiple times, had a complete change of culture, etc. There is no political or cultural continuity (except the copts?) so it is fair to say it is another thing that happens to occupy roughly the same territory.
    - brabel 3y ago
      > Does this look recognisably like modern English? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng... Oh my... I can't even begin to understand that. It looks about as foreign as Old Norse (or modern German for that matter). How things change over just 1,000 years (that's just like what, 40 generations?!). I am no expert, though I think the language changed a lot after the Norman conquest, right? So perhaps just a few hundred years later it would have morphed into something we could more or less recognize as English? Or was it really a more gradual evolution?
      - graemep 3y ago
        Yes, Chaucer from the 14th century is fairly understandable. "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote". Easier if you say it to yourself as the spelling has changed so much
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Unlike England, Eastern Rome had political continuity with the Western Roman Empire, the military language was partially Latin until the end, and the corpus of Law continued from the origin, the people viewed themselves as the same people, and until the last two hundred years hadn’t been conquered or occupied.
  - graemep 3y ago
    English law does have continuity with Anglo Saxon law from even earlier, and there is some continuity of identity and political system, but all those have still changed a lot more than it did in the Eastern Roman Empire so your point holds.
ImJamal 3y ago
>by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin They were speaking Greek the entirety of their time in the Roman Empire though?
- coldtea 3y ago
  The Eastern provinces yes - including places now considered "middle eastern", which back when the Roman conquest happened were run by the Ptolemys and other hairs of Alexander. The emperors however, when Byzantium was established did not, as they came from latin speaking Roman elites (it was after all the eastern part created from the split of the Roman empire into two organizational units). It took a few centuries for the eastern emperors to speak Greek (and basically rise from the local elements).
  - golergka 3y ago
    Thats incorrect. Greek may not have been their main language, but most of educated and especially noble Romans spoke it. It was language of poetry and philosophy, speaking it was a shibollet of belonging to the educated. Mark Aurelius Antoninus, for example, wrote his Meditations in Greek, not Latin.
    - sapphicsnail 3y ago
      There's also a lot of republican authors that compare Latin infavorably to Greek. This was during the "Golden Age" of Latin literature. Part of why the Aeneid was such a huge deal is that a lot Roman's didn't think you could write a good epic in Latin.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Thats incorrect. Greek may not have been their main language, but most of educated and especially noble Romans spoke it I wrote:"The Eastern provinces yes [did speak Greek]. The emperors however, when Byzantium was established did not" The official language of the emperors and the state was latin, until Heraclius, 3 centuries after Constatinople was established. Emperors spoke Latin regardless of whether they knew Greek as part of their cultural education. And some only had a more basic grasp, or were versed in ancient Greek (to read the relevant literature) more than colloquial late antiquity Greek. Constantine for example had a basic command of Greek, but still needed translators for anything official.
coldtea 3y ago
The above are exactly right. Insisisting on the Byzantine Empire being Roman is however Kaldellis whole shtick.
skybrian 3y ago
It so happens I’m reading The New Roman Empire by the first historian in the article, so I can talk about this a bit: If we compare with the Roman Republic, not being centered on Rome is a big change. However, many emperors spent little time in Rome, and when there was a civil war it was apparently common to declare some other city a “New Rome,” so that idea was going around. Roman citizenship was considerably more flexible than other ancient empires, including people of many ethnicities, and was eventually extended to every free inhabitant in the empire. They didn’t just call themselves Roman, they legally were citizens, despite not living in and never going to Rome. We could instead focus on the similarities, like not having a monarchy. Anyone could be chosen emperor if they were in the right place at the right time. (Originally by being a popular and effective general, but later acclaimed by the crowds in Constantinople after political maneuvering.) So I agree that there’s a “Ship of Theseus” aspect to it, but it seems like a consequence of Roman flexibility, allowing the empire to evolve into something rather different over the centuries. (Apparently Christianity resulted in far more religious strife, though, compared to polytheism. As a state religion, it seems like it was a turn for the worse, and the history of the many schisms over nonsense is rather tedious.)
- cam_l 3y ago
  So, in your game of philosophical roshambo, no-true-Scotsman beats Ship-of-Theseus?
  - labster 3y ago
    Yes, and argumentam ad hominem beats a true Scotsman, but loses to a Ship of Theseus.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  > the history of the many schisms over nonsense is rather tedious You might be missing something from the early Christian Church (after Nicea). The Church design is hierarchical, with one presiding Bishop with legal jurisdiction over all the activity in their bishopric; hence, fighting over authority. The tedious philosophical differences are the vestige now because the books and writing remain while the people are long gone. At the time, there was much more at stake. Secondly, Church creed was carefully and thoroughly unified at Nicea in a formal process. Heresy was well-identified and definitely resolved, but sometimes through in-fights or at worst excommunications.
kragen 3y ago
hopefully we can agree that tarquin was roman? caesar had control over a very different territory than tarquin, very different styles of art, and a very different government and military than tarquin, and although he spoke tarquin's language, his subjects mostly didn't speak sabine and etruscan like tarquin's subjects did. i think you can make a case that basileios's government was a lot more similar to caesar's than caesar's was to gaius marcius rutilus's; certainly the justification caesar's assassins gave for killing him was that his government was uniquely un-roman so sure, ship of theseus, but that didn't start with caesar. caesar was already five centuries of radical changes past tarquin (who also barely had a foothold in italy) and seven centuries after the mythological romulus
- acjohnson55 3y ago
  Weren't the Tarquins Etruscans?
  - kragen 3y ago
    originally, yeah
    - acjohnson55 3y ago
      Right, so even pre-Republic, the Roman purity test is kind of problematic.
      - kragen 3y ago
        agreed
- mcmoor 3y ago
  I guess it can already be argued that Roman Kingdom != Roman Republic != Roman Empire. And if we continue this logic even further, they are all != Eastern Roman Empire. But the name itself is a source of pride and everyone after still wants to claim that they're continuation of it, so much that we have more than one ship of Theseus by the end.
quanto 3y ago
It seems that your definition of being Roman is being Western Roman. Of course, tautologically by that definition, Eastern Romans would not be (Western) Roman. The article, and the scholarly consensus, is that Eastern Romans are Romans, and they should be part of what defines Romans; and definitions like yours are motivated by historical prejudice (a term used in the article). Given that Roman elites, including the very emperors you mentioned, spoke Greek, worshiped (Latin-translated) Greek Gods, and versed in Greek philosophy and literature, one could argue that Western Rome is actually less Roman than the Eastern. Hadrian in particular was very Greek in his intellectual bents. As for the city itself, Rome was not even the capital by the time of Sack of Rome (AD 410). Contrary to your argument, the Eastern Roman empire recaptures the entirety of modern day Italy by 555 AD during the reign of Justinian.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  There's a sense in which the roman empire in the eastern mediterranean was only ever a thin layer of administration over the broader hellenistic culture that remained from Alexander's conquests.
  - acjohnson55 3y ago
    Thin by modern standards, but it's my understanding that the Roman administrative system set it quite apart from many of the other polities it interacted with. Certainly the post-Roman West.
  - thworp 3y ago
    Thin layer? No, the core reason for Rome's success was the efficiency and adaptability of this administration. It could always generate much more taxes, soldiers, loyalty and diplomatic influence than other states that had the similar amounts of land and people. Then, when something had to change, the elites or even the people just deposed the emperor and got someone in power that did what was necessary.
    - ithkuil 3y ago
      I think the "thin" qualifier here was to mean that it wasn't a deeply cultural and nationalistic embedding of a nation as what we think of national today. It was more akin to modern colonialism where a certain degree of exploitation be the colonial powers was what roman authorities cared about but the degree of cultural influence depended much on the leeway allowed by the strength of the pre-existing culture of the conquered place
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thaumasiotes 3y ago
> For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin That isn't a difference. There was never a time when they were speaking Latin. The Romans, over in Italy, spoke Latin, but the Anatolians, in Turkey, never did. They spoke Greek before any contact with the Romans and they continued to speak Greek long after the Romans were gone. > it's like the Ship of Theseus, all those changes add up over time. The Ship of Theseus is more about changes that don't add up over time. If I repair a hole in the ship, it's still the same in pretty much all useful senses of "being the same", and the question is whether a set of changes like that which end up covering the entire ship still leave the whole ship "the same". If I repair a hole in the ship by replacing it with part of an 18th-century ironclad, and as damage to the wood accrues I just build an ironclad over where the ship used to be, no one is going to think I'm posing some kind of deep question when I ask whether, at the end of the process, I still have the same ship.
- whelp_24 3y ago
  You don't really understand the ship of Theseus if you think that. Replacing with different things not just identical pieces is part of the question.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    That is the opposite of the statement of the Ship of Theseus: > The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus , but this isn't exactly obscure material. ) The entire project is to replace a failing part of the ship with an identical, but not yet failing, part.
    - gilleain 3y ago
      edit: Never mind, I re-read your original comment. Yes I agree that making major changes is less of a paradox. Never mind. I'm surprised also by your take on the paradox. I've always understood that the difficulty lay with the use of identical materials to replace the old ones. It might be clearer to consider the similar formulation of 'Trigger's Broom' from the show Only Fools and Horses on UK tv. Trigger has the 'same' broom for years, despite having replaced the head several times, and the handle several times. Clearly the same materials are used here. I would say that replacing the wooden planks with metals ones is less of a paradox - that is more clearly a different ship! Replacing the decayed planks with other decayed planks makes no sense, so I don't understand your perspective on this ...
paganel 3y ago
To say nothing of the fact the Iconoclasm (which started in the 700s) was heavily influenced by nearby Islam and the contact the Byzantines had with Islam. Granted, many of today's Byzantine-focused historians here in Eastern Europe treat that period as an "aberration", but you cannot call a historical aberration something that lasted for about a century, give or take, it's clear that there was some very heavy internal support inside of the Byzantine society for Iconoclasm. There's also not enough mentions made of the fact that after the reign of Manuel I Komnenos the "elites" of the empire (including its intellectuals) had started to become more and more "latinised"/Westernised, in fact I would say that 1204 happened because said elites had already succumbed to the pull of the "West" (the fact that Byzantium didn't have a proper fleet by that point is a very good indication of that, of the empire just succumbing to the West via the Genoese and the Venetians). From that point on the real "Greekness"/the real Byzantium spirit escaped to and managed to survive at monastic institutions like Mount Athos, with Gregory Palamas and the associated hesychasm being the best example for that. But because today's history is written mostly from an Western perspective, the focus is more on people like Bessarion and Demetrios Chalkokondyles, humanists that "demonstrate" that Byzantium wasn't just a backwater barbarian place, but a real precursor to the Western Renaissance. It does not matter that Bessarion was basically a traitor to the Christian Orthodox faith and to Greekness as a whole at Florence in 1439, what it does matter is to gain "institutional" points today by making said period of history relevant to Western audiences. And that's why the history of hesychasm is almost totally ignored in much of the Western world, and that's why Ukrainian monks like Paisius Velichkovsky [1] "bringing" hesychasm to Russian lands in the late 1700s might as well be science-fiction for said Western audiences, they don't know anything about any of that. That's why it's easier for today's Western-influenced historians to write down stuff like: > or that Putin lays claim to Byzantium and its history. as that would be a thing that Putin had done after a millennium of no cultural and religious active contacts between Moscow and the Greek lands. Without hesychasm you don't have Paisius Velichkovsky, you don't have staretsdom, you don't have Dostoevsky, you don't have much of the Russian culture of the late 19th century going to today, so saying that there's nothing connecting Byzantium to modern Russia would be a big lie. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisius_Velichkovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisius_Velichkovsky
- 3y ago
KoftaBob 3y ago
> For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin As far as I understand it, the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire never “changed” to Greek, it was always Greek in the first place. “During the earlier Pax Romana period, the western parts of the empire became increasingly Latinised, while the eastern parts largely retained their preexisting Hellenistic culture, creating a dichotomy between the Greek East and Latin West.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

graemep 3y ago

Any entity changes over that sort of timescale. Modern England is very different from what Æthelstan unified in the 10th century but we call both by the same name.

joegibbs 3y ago
Yes but Aethelstan's England at least shares a lot more in common with modern England - you could easily recognise that it comes from the same source (same religion, both have a king, controls almost the same territory, speaks a language that's closer to modern English than any other modern language except Scots). Even some civilisations that control the same territory aren't regarded as the same - for example modern Egypt and ancient Egypt are both called the same thing, yet wouldn't be regarded as the same civilisation due to their lack of commonalities.
- graemep 3y ago
  Not really: * same religion: most people say they are non-religious (thought some have Christian beliefs), some who say they are Christian really do not know the right term for their actual beliefs (moralistic therapeutic deists), those who are Christian are of different denominations. * both have a king: the western empire of Hadrian's time and the Byzantine both had an emperor. modern England is a constitutional monarchy, an executive drawn from parliament, and parliament is very different from its predecessors that existed at the time. The king is also king of a lot of other countries. * controls almost the same territory: true of England alone, but England is not an independent entity, but part of a larger union, and that union has a lot of overseas territories. * speaks a language that's closer to modern English: we are talking about the same era as Beowulf. That was a very different language, so no more comprehensible than related modern languages which at least have some common vocabulary (including loan words). Does this look recognisably like modern English? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng... I agree with you about Egypt but it has been invaded multiple times, had a complete change of culture, etc. There is no political or cultural continuity (except the copts?) so it is fair to say it is another thing that happens to occupy roughly the same territory.
  - brabel 3y ago
    > Does this look recognisably like modern English? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng... Oh my... I can't even begin to understand that. It looks about as foreign as Old Norse (or modern German for that matter). How things change over just 1,000 years (that's just like what, 40 generations?!). I am no expert, though I think the language changed a lot after the Norman conquest, right? So perhaps just a few hundred years later it would have morphed into something we could more or less recognize as English? Or was it really a more gradual evolution?
    - graemep 3y ago
      Yes, Chaucer from the 14th century is fairly understandable. "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote". Easier if you say it to yourself as the spelling has changed so much
BirAdam 3y ago
Unlike England, Eastern Rome had political continuity with the Western Roman Empire, the military language was partially Latin until the end, and the corpus of Law continued from the origin, the people viewed themselves as the same people, and until the last two hundred years hadn’t been conquered or occupied.
- graemep 3y ago
  English law does have continuity with Anglo Saxon law from even earlier, and there is some continuity of identity and political system, but all those have still changed a lot more than it did in the Eastern Roman Empire so your point holds.

ImJamal 3y ago

>by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin They were speaking Greek the entirety of their time in the Roman Empire though?

coldtea 3y ago
The Eastern provinces yes - including places now considered "middle eastern", which back when the Roman conquest happened were run by the Ptolemys and other hairs of Alexander. The emperors however, when Byzantium was established did not, as they came from latin speaking Roman elites (it was after all the eastern part created from the split of the Roman empire into two organizational units). It took a few centuries for the eastern emperors to speak Greek (and basically rise from the local elements).
- golergka 3y ago
  Thats incorrect. Greek may not have been their main language, but most of educated and especially noble Romans spoke it. It was language of poetry and philosophy, speaking it was a shibollet of belonging to the educated. Mark Aurelius Antoninus, for example, wrote his Meditations in Greek, not Latin.
  - sapphicsnail 3y ago
    There's also a lot of republican authors that compare Latin infavorably to Greek. This was during the "Golden Age" of Latin literature. Part of why the Aeneid was such a huge deal is that a lot Roman's didn't think you could write a good epic in Latin.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Thats incorrect. Greek may not have been their main language, but most of educated and especially noble Romans spoke it I wrote:"The Eastern provinces yes [did speak Greek]. The emperors however, when Byzantium was established did not" The official language of the emperors and the state was latin, until Heraclius, 3 centuries after Constatinople was established. Emperors spoke Latin regardless of whether they knew Greek as part of their cultural education. And some only had a more basic grasp, or were versed in ancient Greek (to read the relevant literature) more than colloquial late antiquity Greek. Constantine for example had a basic command of Greek, but still needed translators for anything official.

coldtea 3y ago

The above are exactly right. Insisisting on the Byzantine Empire being Roman is however Kaldellis whole shtick.

skybrian 3y ago

It so happens I’m reading The New Roman Empire by the first historian in the article, so I can talk about this a bit: If we compare with the Roman Republic, not being centered on Rome is a big change. However, many emperors spent little time in Rome, and when there was a civil war it was apparently common to declare some other city a “New Rome,” so that idea was going around. Roman citizenship was considerably more flexible than other ancient empires, including people of many ethnicities, and was eventually extended to every free inhabitant in the empire. They didn’t just call themselves Roman, they legally were citizens, despite not living in and never going to Rome. We could instead focus on the similarities, like not having a monarchy. Anyone could be chosen emperor if they were in the right place at the right time. (Originally by being a popular and effective general, but later acclaimed by the crowds in Constantinople after political maneuvering.) So I agree that there’s a “Ship of Theseus” aspect to it, but it seems like a consequence of Roman flexibility, allowing the empire to evolve into something rather different over the centuries. (Apparently Christianity resulted in far more religious strife, though, compared to polytheism. As a state religion, it seems like it was a turn for the worse, and the history of the many schisms over nonsense is rather tedious.)

cam_l 3y ago
So, in your game of philosophical roshambo, no-true-Scotsman beats Ship-of-Theseus?
- labster 3y ago
  Yes, and argumentam ad hominem beats a true Scotsman, but loses to a Ship of Theseus.
mistrial9 3y ago
> the history of the many schisms over nonsense is rather tedious You might be missing something from the early Christian Church (after Nicea). The Church design is hierarchical, with one presiding Bishop with legal jurisdiction over all the activity in their bishopric; hence, fighting over authority. The tedious philosophical differences are the vestige now because the books and writing remain while the people are long gone. At the time, there was much more at stake. Secondly, Church creed was carefully and thoroughly unified at Nicea in a formal process. Heresy was well-identified and definitely resolved, but sometimes through in-fights or at worst excommunications.

kragen 3y ago

hopefully we can agree that tarquin was roman? caesar had control over a very different territory than tarquin, very different styles of art, and a very different government and military than tarquin, and although he spoke tarquin's language, his subjects mostly didn't speak sabine and etruscan like tarquin's subjects did. i think you can make a case that basileios's government was a lot more similar to caesar's than caesar's was to gaius marcius rutilus's; certainly the justification caesar's assassins gave for killing him was that his government was uniquely un-roman so sure, ship of theseus, but that didn't start with caesar. caesar was already five centuries of radical changes past tarquin (who also barely had a foothold in italy) and seven centuries after the mythological romulus

acjohnson55 3y ago
Weren't the Tarquins Etruscans?
- kragen 3y ago
  originally, yeah
  - acjohnson55 3y ago
    Right, so even pre-Republic, the Roman purity test is kind of problematic.
    - kragen 3y ago
      agreed
mcmoor 3y ago
I guess it can already be argued that Roman Kingdom != Roman Republic != Roman Empire. And if we continue this logic even further, they are all != Eastern Roman Empire. But the name itself is a source of pride and everyone after still wants to claim that they're continuation of it, so much that we have more than one ship of Theseus by the end.

quanto 3y ago

It seems that your definition of being Roman is being Western Roman. Of course, tautologically by that definition, Eastern Romans would not be (Western) Roman. The article, and the scholarly consensus, is that Eastern Romans are Romans, and they should be part of what defines Romans; and definitions like yours are motivated by historical prejudice (a term used in the article). Given that Roman elites, including the very emperors you mentioned, spoke Greek, worshiped (Latin-translated) Greek Gods, and versed in Greek philosophy and literature, one could argue that Western Rome is actually less Roman than the Eastern. Hadrian in particular was very Greek in his intellectual bents. As for the city itself, Rome was not even the capital by the time of Sack of Rome (AD 410). Contrary to your argument, the Eastern Roman empire recaptures the entirety of modern day Italy by 555 AD during the reign of Justinian.

empath-nirvana 3y ago
There's a sense in which the roman empire in the eastern mediterranean was only ever a thin layer of administration over the broader hellenistic culture that remained from Alexander's conquests.
- acjohnson55 3y ago
  Thin by modern standards, but it's my understanding that the Roman administrative system set it quite apart from many of the other polities it interacted with. Certainly the post-Roman West.
- thworp 3y ago
  Thin layer? No, the core reason for Rome's success was the efficiency and adaptability of this administration. It could always generate much more taxes, soldiers, loyalty and diplomatic influence than other states that had the similar amounts of land and people. Then, when something had to change, the elites or even the people just deposed the emperor and got someone in power that did what was necessary.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    I think the "thin" qualifier here was to mean that it wasn't a deeply cultural and nationalistic embedding of a nation as what we think of national today. It was more akin to modern colonialism where a certain degree of exploitation be the colonial powers was what roman authorities cared about but the degree of cultural influence depended much on the leeway allowed by the strength of the pre-existing culture of the conquered place

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thaumasiotes 3y ago

> For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin That isn't a difference. There was never a time when they were speaking Latin. The Romans, over in Italy, spoke Latin, but the Anatolians, in Turkey, never did. They spoke Greek before any contact with the Romans and they continued to speak Greek long after the Romans were gone. > it's like the Ship of Theseus, all those changes add up over time. The Ship of Theseus is more about changes that don't add up over time. If I repair a hole in the ship, it's still the same in pretty much all useful senses of "being the same", and the question is whether a set of changes like that which end up covering the entire ship still leave the whole ship "the same". If I repair a hole in the ship by replacing it with part of an 18th-century ironclad, and as damage to the wood accrues I just build an ironclad over where the ship used to be, no one is going to think I'm posing some kind of deep question when I ask whether, at the end of the process, I still have the same ship.

whelp_24 3y ago
You don't really understand the ship of Theseus if you think that. Replacing with different things not just identical pieces is part of the question.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  That is the opposite of the statement of the Ship of Theseus: > The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus , but this isn't exactly obscure material. ) The entire project is to replace a failing part of the ship with an identical, but not yet failing, part.
  - gilleain 3y ago
    edit: Never mind, I re-read your original comment. Yes I agree that making major changes is less of a paradox. Never mind. I'm surprised also by your take on the paradox. I've always understood that the difficulty lay with the use of identical materials to replace the old ones. It might be clearer to consider the similar formulation of 'Trigger's Broom' from the show Only Fools and Horses on UK tv. Trigger has the 'same' broom for years, despite having replaced the head several times, and the handle several times. Clearly the same materials are used here. I would say that replacing the wooden planks with metals ones is less of a paradox - that is more clearly a different ship! Replacing the decayed planks with other decayed planks makes no sense, so I don't understand your perspective on this ...

paganel 3y ago

To say nothing of the fact the Iconoclasm (which started in the 700s) was heavily influenced by nearby Islam and the contact the Byzantines had with Islam. Granted, many of today's Byzantine-focused historians here in Eastern Europe treat that period as an "aberration", but you cannot call a historical aberration something that lasted for about a century, give or take, it's clear that there was some very heavy internal support inside of the Byzantine society for Iconoclasm. There's also not enough mentions made of the fact that after the reign of Manuel I Komnenos the "elites" of the empire (including its intellectuals) had started to become more and more "latinised"/Westernised, in fact I would say that 1204 happened because said elites had already succumbed to the pull of the "West" (the fact that Byzantium didn't have a proper fleet by that point is a very good indication of that, of the empire just succumbing to the West via the Genoese and the Venetians). From that point on the real "Greekness"/the real Byzantium spirit escaped to and managed to survive at monastic institutions like Mount Athos, with Gregory Palamas and the associated hesychasm being the best example for that. But because today's history is written mostly from an Western perspective, the focus is more on people like Bessarion and Demetrios Chalkokondyles, humanists that "demonstrate" that Byzantium wasn't just a backwater barbarian place, but a real precursor to the Western Renaissance. It does not matter that Bessarion was basically a traitor to the Christian Orthodox faith and to Greekness as a whole at Florence in 1439, what it does matter is to gain "institutional" points today by making said period of history relevant to Western audiences. And that's why the history of hesychasm is almost totally ignored in much of the Western world, and that's why Ukrainian monks like Paisius Velichkovsky [1] "bringing" hesychasm to Russian lands in the late 1700s might as well be science-fiction for said Western audiences, they don't know anything about any of that. That's why it's easier for today's Western-influenced historians to write down stuff like: > or that Putin lays claim to Byzantium and its history. as that would be a thing that Putin had done after a millennium of no cultural and religious active contacts between Moscow and the Greek lands. Without hesychasm you don't have Paisius Velichkovsky, you don't have staretsdom, you don't have Dostoevsky, you don't have much of the Russian culture of the late 19th century going to today, so saying that there's nothing connecting Byzantium to modern Russia would be a big lie. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisius_Velichkovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisius_Velichkovsky

3y ago

KoftaBob 3y ago

> For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin As far as I understand it, the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire never “changed” to Greek, it was always Greek in the first place. “During the earlier Pax Romana period, the western parts of the empire became increasingly Latinised, while the eastern parts largely retained their preexisting Hellenistic culture, creating a dichotomy between the Greek East and Latin West.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire