Caius Maxentius

If there was such a community, I wonder how much drift in their dialect there would have been. How isolated would such a community have been, given that Constantinople was a busy imperial port with Westerners, esp. Italians, stopping in quite a bit?

Many thanks to those who responded to this query. I wrote it in February, and when there was no response after a few months, I stopped checking! It was a pleasant surprise to see these points.

Not sure when we're considering the Byzantine era to start, but here it goes: Contstantine I - founded the city, reformed the army, made Christianity an ascendant religion among the political elite. Justinian - his building projects enhanced the city, his legal Code (and other documents) influenced Byzantine law and law in many other states, he was one of the few emperors to expand the Eastern Empire's frontiers, his religious views set the tone for some time (though it alienated many) Heraclius - officially retired Latin as a language of government, renamed his office "Basilius" (king), won brilliant victories against the Persians and lost critical provinces to the Arabs Leo III the Isaurian - saved Constantinople from the Arab seige and turned the tide of the Arab offensive; started the whole Iconoclasm controversy Constantine Porphyrogenitus - left us lots of useful treatises, histories, manuscripts, etc. Basil II Bulgaroktonos - brilliant military leader, his reign was a high-point for the Empire in the middle of the Middle Ages Alexius I Comnenus - called on the Pope to drum up military support for the Empire from Western Europe, thus playing a key role in the start of the Crusades Manuel I Comnenus - good military leader until the Myriokephalon disaster; enamoured of Western ways and set a very different (Western European) tone in comparison to his predecessors Those are some that stand out most to me.

For the sake of discussion, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Islamicized Arabs and their successors, the Turks, were most directly responsible for the extermination of the Roman Empire. Not the West, of course (what's been said about the German tribes already explains the West's passing), but were it not for the unforseen explosion of Arab military and religious energy, there might still be a Roman state with its capital at Constatinople. The loss of Syria, Egypt and Carthage -- all that wealth, population base and grain -- was certainly a big blow. The fact that these provinces could never be retaken certainly speaks to the threat that the Arabs represented. Even with Western help during the Crusades, military gains against the Arabs and Turks were only fleeting.

O'Donnell addressed this. Theoderic did what any aspirant Roman leader would have done, he says, and the precendents go way back. To compare, Augustus also won his position with war and murder, relegated the Senate to a secondary role in government, confiscated some land. Like Augustus, Theoderic's big "gift" to his country was ruling for a long time without much in the way of wars, famines or mishaps. This means a lot to average subjects.

I just finished reading James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, and it really put Justinian through the meat-grinder. I wonder how people here feel about the history he's written. In the first place, he makes Theoderic, the Ostrogothic ruler of Italy at the turn of the sixth century, appear to have led a stable and even enlightened government for Italy. In his view, Theoderic was pretty much a fully assimilated Roman, and his during his rule, Italy got "back to normal" for a time, living a peaceful Roman life. His long, orderly reign was the most stable period Italy had seen in quite some time. Eastern Emperor Anastasius I also comes off well in this history -- wise, prudent, leaving an Imperial treasury to Justin and Justinian with some 300,000 pounds of gold. Justinian is depicted as a vainglorious, imprudent and under-educated/unintellectual ruler, whose military escapades spread imperial forces too thinly and wasted lots of resources needlessly. The campaign in Italy devestated the city of Rome (it passed between the Eastern Romans and Ostrogothic rulers a few times). It left behind insufficient forces to stop the Lombard invasions, which came shortly after. O'Donnell also thinks Justinian's "my way or the highway" approach to religious orthodoxy was also a major misstep. Justinian insisted that the Empire uniformly embrace the orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon, to which the monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt just wouldn't submit. He suggests that this did much to dislodge the loyalty of subjects there, and may have made Islam (which was much closer to the monophysite/one-nature spirit than Chalcedon's confusing Christology) more appealing when the Arab invasions came. In the end, O'Donnell blames Justinian for ensuring that Italy would not be a united polity again for more than a thousand years, and for wrecking the city of Rome and its surviving institutions. Had Justinian left well enough alone, Italy might remained a viable Roman state for much longer, O'Donnell thinks. I don't know how many here have read the book but what do you think of this way of looking at the Justinianic reconquests?

Why was it a waste? It was a tragedy that it didn't work out, but as Heather suggests, regaining Africa was key to getting the all-important tax revenues and grain flowing again.

Another Nova Scotian here. From Sydney, up on Cape Breton Island.

I'm curious to know how the "i" in Latin (Julius = Iulius = yoo-lius) became the "j" we now say in English. The shift obviously happened in Italy as well, since they have names like "Giuliana." Though it's interesting that they use different letters to get the same phonetic. Did the "j" sound develop in Latin in a certain region or dialect, or start appearing at a certain time? Was it there by late Antiquity?

There's a number of names in the Scottish Highlands that seem to derive from Norse -- Tarskavaig, Tokavaig, and similar "vaig" names. Also the islands Raasay, Skalpay, and others with the "ay" ending. (These are all in or near Skye, where my wife lived for a time). I guess this more like the Norse influence on Gaelic, but these names get spoken more today in an English-language context.

When I started this thread, it was because I was struck by something I read in Peter Heather's Fall of the Roman Empire, about soldiers being brutalized, thereby becoming brutal. Maybe the issue isn't so much regret or PTSD as the psychological effect of constant rough and harsh treatment. I was struck by it because my adolescent perception of Roman soldiers was that of a trained, disciplined force, nobly, honorably and tenaciously doing their thing. Gradually, I've come to think that they must have been (especially as the principate rolled on) men of the lower classes, illiterate, shaped by a life of violence and hardship. That's why I wondered if civilian interaction became difficult; their lives would have been quite different from that of a farmer or potter. Even if death touched people's lives more then, I still imagine the soldiers living in a very different psychological world than civilians. I wonder if civilians cowered when a conterburnium of legionnaries (on or off duty) came along.

There's an ethnic group or region I've seen mentioned called Vlachs, which had some kind of Romance language. It was centred somewhere around where Macedonia or Kosovo is today. Their medieval history is tied more to the Byzantine Empire, but their language suggests a close past with the Western empire. Does anyone know who they were exactly, and what happened to them?

Good point. Death would have touched everyone's lives much more then than it does ours today. What era do the Vindolanda letters come from? I'm guessing the quality of civilian interaction changed between the late Republic and the 4rth Century AD, when a hereditary military class had become entrenched.

I know few ancient texts commented a great deal on rank-and-file men in any detail, but I've often wondered about how the legionnaries coped with the kind of life they had to lead. After Marius, killing became the life's work of a professional soldier, and between the harsh discipline and the kinds of battle experience they had, I wonder how severely post-traumatic stress disorder haunted these men. Or did most of them build thick enough skins to sleep ok at night? I also wonder how they would have interacted socially with civilians during downtime. Was such social contact even commonplace? Has their been any research on legionnaries' psychological lives?

The story of all the ex-farmers going to Rome to become an idle rabble after the Second Punic War is well-known. I'm curious to know more about what these people did afterwards. Was there really hundreds of thousands of people basically on government welfare (bread & circuses)? How long did this situation last? Was this class of people still filling the Colosseum in Constantine's time? Was there much paid labor or "small business" that these people could do in the city to make a living?

Biographies of later emperors like Constantius II or Honorius refer (pejoratively) to their susceptibility to the influence of their wives, courtiers and eunuchs. What information is there on these eunuchs? What role did they play in the Imperial court? How were they chosen for the "procedure," and why was it undertaken? I'm completely in the dark here; when did Imperial eunuchs first appear on the scene?

Aren't we forgetting the greatest of all -- Elagabalus??? Seriously, though, I haven't seen any votes yet for the Optimus Princeps himself, Trajan. He was certainly well-regarded as a soldier, statesman and patron of building. The empire reached its maximum territorial extent under him. A contender?

I've read a lot about the Byzantine Empire becoming increasingly like Western Europe in terms of its social structure, especially after the fall of the Macedonian house and the rise of the Comneni. The military leadership was increasingly paid off with grants of land, some quite large, which became like feudal manors, with tenants working the land. This also reflected a shift in emphasis from classical urban civilization to an agrarian economy. But prior to this shift, what was the system under which Byzantine lands were farmed and administered? Did this shift replace independent farmers? Was there a system like the old slave-farmed latifundia? Something else?

I see ex cathedra, sui generis, sine qua non, mirabile dictu and a priori quite frequently in writing, especially scholarly writing.

Thanks, Faustus, great quote.

The Slavs started to emigrate into the Balkans in the sixth century, but the Byzantines restored the Danube Frontier sometime in the ninth or tenth century. Were these Slavs assimilated into Byzantine society, or did they stay fairly separate culturally? Did Byzantium absorb anything from the Slavs culturally?

It's hard to say whether the Sassanids really were a lethal threat to the empire, but I agree with others that the Romans behaved as if they were. I think the East under Valens may have been able to win decisively against the Goths if he felt empowered to make use of the armies on the Armenian, Syrian and Palestinian borders.

I wonder what the high Roman officers would have looked like in the 5th century. How long were the traditional helmets and breastplates used? Would Aetius still have worn them?

I've read this before, but I don't understand how this person's DNA could be *that* close to the 8000-year-old skeleton. When you trace backwards, everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and sixteen great-great grandparents and so on. Wouldn't a lot of people in Britain be related to this 8000-year-old skeleton?

See also the books by Adrian Goldsworthy, especially _The Complete Roman Army_.