Podcast episode

October 23, 2024

Episode 196: One Empire, Many Names: Reading “Byzantium” with Anthony Kaldellis

Anthony Kaldellis is one of the foremost ‘Byzantinists’ of the current generation – that is, he is a scholar of the polity and culture known in western-European scholarship, for some reason, as ‘Byzantium’, but known to its close friends and mortal enemies simply as ‘the Roman Empire’. We are delighted to tap into his well of knowledge about the most important empire that scholarship on western esotericism almost never mentions.

We discuss, among other topics:

• The notion of ‘Byzantine studies’: why do we call it ‘Byzantine’, what kind of time-frame do Byzantinists look at (roughly the fifth century to the fifteenth), and how does the notion help or hinder historical work?
• The evolution of the Greek language in our period, wherein we see a highly-conservative, Atticising literary Greek continue to flourish throughout the period, while the spoken language evolved radically, a process already well underway in the period studied by Classicists,
• The thorny issues lying behind the seemingly-innocent spelling-conventions whereby Πρόκλος become ‘Proclus’, and so on ad infinitum (or ad nauseam, if you are Anthony Kaldellis — but wait, shouldn’t that be “Antonios”?),
• The importance of East Rome for the transmission of pretty much all of the antique Greek materials of western esotericism,
• The uneasy coexistence of East Roman astrology with orthodoxy, as illuminated by the parallel case of the Hippodrome,
• Prolegomena to the study of East Roman magic and divination, and
• The question of the Constantinopolitan ‘Hellenic underground’.

Interview Bio:

Anthony Kaldellis is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago.  He has written extensively on the history, culture, and more of the East Roman world. He is also the host of the killer podcast Byzantium and Friends.

Works Cited in this Episode:

Matteo Martelli’s AlchemEast project.

The ninth-century ‘Philosophical Collection’ mentioned in the interview is discussed in this article (see n. 65): Fabio Acerbi and Michele Trizio. Uprooting Byzantium. Ninth-Century Byzantine Books and the Græco-Arabic Translation Movement. Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 8:105-54, 2023.

Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Strahan & Cadell, London, 17761789.

Anthony Kaldellis. Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2007.

Idem. A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.

Idem. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. The University Press, Oxford, 2024.

Konstantinos N. Sathas. Documents inédits relatifs à l’histoire de la Grèce au Moyen-Âge. Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris, 1888.

Niketas Siniossoglou. Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon. The University Press, Cambridge, 2011.

Recommended Reading:

The Fondazione BEIC – Biblioteca Europea di Informazione e Cultura publishes a curated ‘Byzantine studies’ bibliography organised thematically. You can download it here.

Also be sure to have a browse through Dumbarton Oaks’ Resources for Byzantinists page.

Themes

Alchemy, Astrology, East Rome, Esoteric Hellenism, Georgios Gemistos Plethon, Hellenism, Jews, Julian, Justinian, Late Platonism, Magic, Michael Psellos, Orthodoxy, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysios, Stephanos of Alexandria, Synesios