Sailing on the Ship of Theseus
What can an ancient philosophical problem tell us about modern America?
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…
