Did the Byzantine Greeks recognize in their own time how different their "Roman Empire" was from the Latin speaking...

Did the Byzantine Greeks recognize in their own time how different their "Roman Empire" was from the Latin speaking pagan empire of a thousand years before? I understand they considered themselves "Roman" and heir to the legacy of the empire but still there has to be some kind of acknowledgement that they were fundamentally different.

>Byzanine Greeks
They wouldn't have called themselves Greeks or Hellenes or anything like that. Until around the 13th century the Hellenic identity still had associations with paganism.

Nobody thought of Rome as being a "pagan empire", after all by this point it had been Christian for far longer than it had been Pagan.

>I understand they considered themselves "Roman" and heir to the legacy of the empire
You don't understand the situation very much at all.

They didn't view themselves as "heir to the legacy of the empire", they WERE the empire. What it meant to be Roman was entirely dependent on the present culture of the Byzantine Empire, because they were Romans.

They never stopped viewing themselves as being in continuity with the Roman Empire of Classical Antiquity. It was the same state, with enduring traditions. Until the very end, they launched military expeditions to reclaim places like Italy and Egypt because they recognised that those places had formerly been part of the Roman Empire.

Some things that might be of interest to you OP are the writings of John Lydus the Suda, both which show that the Roman Empire of the 6th and the 10th century viewed themselves as being the same state as the early Roman Republic.

Not OP but surely you realize that the average Roman of 1200 shared very little with his counterpart a millennia prior? Different capital, different heartland, different language, different religion, different political structure, etc. etc.

There was absolutely continuity and this doesn't invalidate that (William the Conqueror would hardly recognize modern England), but it's interesting to ponder if any Late Medieval Romans actually stopped to notice how different they've become from Ancient Rome.

>original European settlers of America were exclusively Anglo-Saxon Protestants on the East Coast
>1800s bring waves of immigrants past the Mississippi
>minimal ethnic or cultural continuity between the two groups besides being "European"
>we end up considering both groups "Americans" for the purposes of continuity, although obviously the original colonists wouldn't have considered themselves that, they'd think they were British
>and many would still think that 150 years later, despite having zero ties to Britain outside of culture or ethnicity

it's not that difficult to imagine

>Different capital, different heartland, different language, different religion, different political structure
This would also apply to a Roman living in Rome in the 5th century BC and a Roman living in Britain in the 5th century AD, but beyond casual observations from people like Vegetius there isn't much literature that touches on it.

Most educated Byzantines seem to have had a very classical education and regarded themselves as writing within the continuum of Roman literature, they use familiar terms for Roman writers and regard Greek writers as being foreign. That's about all we have to go on, so if they ever did contemplate their differences from the earlier empire we don't know about it.

You think they knew how people 1000 years before them lived?

Look at medieval depictions of historic, biblical and distant events, they are all presented as happening in a contemporary setting.

The only thing the educated ones would know about it is that in the past they spoke latin and even further in the past they were ignorant pagans not yet enlightened by Christ

This somehow manages to be the most retarded post in this thread.

Explain which part of what i said is wrong? I'm waiting.

Well first of all
>Look at medieval depictions of historic, biblical and distant events, they are all presented as happening in a contemporary setting.
This was a deliberate artistic choice. In Late Medieval Italy, for example, there would be depictions of Virgil in both contemporary and typical Roman clothing. The people didn't just suddenly remember that Romans wore different clothing, it had been a deliberate choice to portray historical figures as occupying the same epoch as the artist was living in.

Sources:
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1944)
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, (London: Heinemann, 1980)
Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: George Braziller, 1988)

>The only thing the educated ones would know about it is that in the past they spoke latin and even further in the past they were ignorant pagans not yet enlightened by Christ
This is so retarded. Byzantine education was classical. They were massively informed about the Rome that had come before them. There are many detailed references to the classical world in terms of both general history and the precise details of the lives of specific historical figures, from Cato to Constantine.

Sources:
The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studes, eds. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John F. Haldon, Robin Cormack, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
The Suda, translated by Ada Adler, Eds. I-V, (Leipzig: 1928–1938)
Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic. People and Power in New Rome, (Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, 2015)
Anna Komnene, The Alexiad (Constantinople: 1148)