Sailing on the Ship of Theseus

What can an ancient philosophical problem tell us about modern America?

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

The Byzantine Empire existed for a millennium, at times controlling parts of the Middle East, southeastern Europe, and northern Africa. Its faith, which came to be called Orthodox Christianity, separated from the Christianity that was practiced in Rome, developing its own artistic styles, hierarchy, and practices. Byzantines saw themselves as the cultural heirs of classical Greece; Greek was the official language of the empire, and its scholars wrote in the archaic Greek of ancient Athens.

But the people who lived in what we now call the Byzantine Empire didn’t use that name to describe themselves — the name “Byzantine Empire” was coined by a German historian (who went by the excellent name Hieronymus Wolf) a century after the empire fell in 1453.

What did the Byzantines call themselves? These Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians a thousand years removed from the heyday of Julius Caesar called themselves “Romaioi” — Greek for Romans.

Yes, the Byzantine Empire had once been the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which severed itself into two halves over the course of the 400s CE. But, centuries later, what did this medieval Greek kingdom have to do with the “real” Roman Empire? It existed in a very different world (the empires that most threatened it practiced Islam, a religion that didn’t even exist before the fall of Western Rome), had a very different culture (they practiced Christianity, which hadn’t been invented in the days of Julius Caesar and was illegal in Rome for centuries after its founding), and followed a very different political system.

So who should we believe, Hieronymus Wolf or the Byzantines (ahem, Romans) themselves? Were they Byzantines or Romans?

Wolf used the term “Byzantine” to signify that one historical era ended in 476 when the Western Roman Empire fell, and that the period between that date and 1453 (when Constantinople finally succumbed to the cannons of the Ottoman Empire) was something different. But the Byzantines didn’t want to think of themselves as a separate historical phenomenon from the Roman Empire. To them, there was a clear throughline between the days of the Roman Republic and their empire…