Roman or not Roman?

Yeah, threads like these make it pretty easy to spot brainlets. Literally no historian disputes the fact the Byzantine Empire was Roman, at least as Roman as the Roman Empire was when compared to the Republic.
>hurrr they spoke Gre-
Greek was a co-official language of the Roman Empire, and the Romans were effecrively Greekaboos.
>muh Rome
Rome itself became irrelevant long before thr capital was moved to Constantinople. Even when the empire was split the capital didn't go back to Rome, it went to Milan or Ravenna.
>durrrrr Roman ethnicity
No.

No they were not Roman. But out of all candidates they had the most legitimate claim.

>state literally called the Roman Empire
>inhabitants literally referred to themselves as Romans
>was literally the same state as the Roman Empire of antiquity
What more do you want

Byzantium is closer to the Roman Empire than the Roman Empire is to the Roman Republic.

The Byzantine Empire grew out of the Dominate, not the Principate, which is closer to the Roman Republic than it was to the later stages of the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire.

THIS

>BUT ONLY BECAUSE I UNIRONICALLY USE THE WORD "EPIC", GET THE VAST BULK OF MY HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FROM IN-GAME TOTAL WAR UNIT INFORMATION, AND IGNORE MAINSTREAM HISTORIOGRAPHY BECAUSE DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT

That is a nice flag

Not an argument.

Autist

Neither is trotting out Molymeme because I hit the nail right on the head you historically illiterate turbopleb

>It's over, Enrico. I have the high ground

What did he mean by this?

>Greek was a co-official language of the Roman Empire
no, it wasn't
>Rome itself became irrelevant long before thr capital was moved to Constantinople
it did not

Keep clinging to muh "rome" is the only way byzaboos make their shitty empire relevant

Serbian.

Byzantine empire was never feudal.

Ship of Theseus.

The roman empire, especially if you count both The Western and Eastern empires, lasted well over a thousand years. Of course it won't look the same at the end as it did the beginning, It's Roman if people believe its Roman, just as many emperors were made emperors not out of legitimate claim, but simply enough people said they should be the emperor and had the strength of arms to put them on the damn throne.

>It's Roman if people believe its Roman
Hahaha belief makes things real just like in my Terry Pratshit books!

>user, I overheard you saying that I am not Empress of the Romans, but that I am instead a "Greek LARPer".
>Care to explain?

Given that titles like 'Roman' are made up and have no intrinsic meaning then yes. Don't be intentionally dense.

>Roman or not Roman?

Eastern ROMAN empire

hm.......

Greeks

No. "Roman" is an objectively prescribed cultural group made up of Latins that spoke the Latin language as their mothertongue, worshiped the Olympian Pantheon and lived, dressed and acted in a Roman fashion which we can objectively and accurately study through archeological and literary evidence.
The Byzantines belong to a recognisably separate culture that was not Roman.

Source?

Was Constantinople founded by a Latin?

>"Roman" is an objectively prescribed cultural group made up of Latins that spoke the Latin language as their mothertongue, worshiped the Olympian Pantheon and lived, dressed and acted in a Roman fashion
Sorry user, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Say you take a small Italian village in 400 BC and 400 AD. They would speak mutually unintelligible forms of Latin, worship different Gods, and lived, dressed and acted completely differently. According to you, it would only be accurate to describe the people from this village as "Roman" in a certain timeframe, despite the fact that in both timeframes they would be governed by the Roman state.

Which is it?

Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Cato, Suetonius, Caesar and Tacitus.

No, it was founded by Greeks.

By your logic, the Byzantine Empire is Serbian, since Constantinople was born in Niš.

Constantinople was named after Constantine and the preceding city of Byzantium was founded by the Romans, you autist

>Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Ovid, Cicero, Pliny, Cato, Suetonius, Caesar and Tacitus.
I wasn't aware that they travelled forward in time during their careers to become authorities on contemporary archaeology and historiography.

What about Ammianus Marcellinus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Vegetius, Priscian, Claudian and Ruricius? Are they Romans?

greek LARPers
/thread

> According to you, it would only be accurate to describe the people from this village as "Roman" in a certain timeframe, despite the fact that in both timeframes they would be governed by the Roman state.
I don't see the contradiction here. The nature of the Roman state underwent a number of changes, but the "character" of the Roman people we can see preserved in their writings and from the archeological evidence shows remarkable continuity in the time period you're using. It's only afterwards with the growth of Christianity, barbarian migrations and the rise of the Eastern-influenced Byzantine civilisation in the East while the Western Empire declined.
I've never claimed that the Latin language or Roman culture as a whole was an unchanging monolith, just that there's a clear break between Roman and Byzantine culture.

Do you know what "founded" means?

>historians don't distinguish between Roman and Byzantine culture

They stand in the borderland between a distinguishable Roman and a distinguishable Byzantine culture.

So because Roman culture evolves, that makes them not Roman?

ofc Roman, because greek culture was the basis of roman culture. Everything: art, pantheon of gods, literature, early latin military and early laws/government system was copied by the latins from highly developed greek colonies on appenine peninsula. Even higher greek influence become in III-II centuries after spread of hellenic culture and roman conquest of greece. Greek language becomes language of art and elite, especially in East parts of Empire. Actually in the antiquity almost no viable difference between roman and hellenic culture besides language. So when west of Empire become barbaric, Eastern part still was successor of greek-roman culture, military and government tradition. Also Constantine adopted highly hellenic version of christianity.

Biological evolution is a poor analogy. Byzantine culture was a mixture of Greek, Roman and Eastern (Semitic religion through a Greek lens, Parthian sports etc.) culture. It's not like with birds and dinosaurs or primates and hominoids.

Except Roman culture was already HEAVILY influenced by Greece since before Rome was more than a piss poor backwater.

So? Disregarding the obvious differences between Greek and Roman values, ways of life, adoptions to wildly different geographical circumstances, means of government etc etc etc, just because the Romans were influenced by the Greeks doesn't make the Romans Greek, just as the fact that the Byzantines were influenced by the Romans doesn't make the Byzantines Roman.

Arrogance, the Latins will be avenged impostor!.

Were the values really that different during the time of the foundation of Rome? No. Greek culture was dominant. The Etruscans, who owned Rome for many years were Greek influenced, and Magna Graecia was basically new Greece.

You heard me witch, now feel Venetian steel.

>The Classical Romans like Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Augustus and many others of that group would not consider the Byzantine Empire Roman at all, at least not past 600 AD.
That's an extremely imbecillic argument.
I could just as easily refute the romaness of the people you mentioned by comparing them to the Rome of the kingdom era.
Culture is fluid and so is subject to change. Arguing that people from an earlier time wouldn't recognise themselves in a later one is completely meaningless as it's true in most cases.
Arguing that the byzantines weren't roman because they didnt possess Rome is also daft. Rome had long before its fall ceased to be the capital of the roman state(s) and being a roman refered to a specific way of life/culture. It wasn't an ethnic description. In fact it was a citizenship.
In other words: Would you consider England to not be England? After all no 12th century aristocrat would recognise themselves in the present realm and it doesn't even possess Normandy.

But you could say the same thing about Romans over time

Someone living in Rome in the 5th century AD and someone living in Constantinople in the 8th century AD would be far more similar to each other in terms of culture, values, fashion, way of life, government, diet, etc. than either would be to someone living in Rome in the 5th century BC.

Being roman was not an ethnicity.
You could be an ethnic greek roman just aswell as you could be an ethnic latin roman.
No one is arguing that the byzantines were latins.

I would argue that proper Roman values didn't properly develop until at least the 5th Century BCE.

>In other words: Would you consider England to not be England? After all no 12th century aristocrat would recognise themselves in the present realm and it doesn't even possess Normandy.
Modern English culture was developed in the 16th Century.

That isn't an argument for continuity.

>I would argue that proper Roman values didn't properly develop

So you're saying it's objective, and fluid?

I've stated both of those things at the very beginning of my argument, but it's ridiculous to claim that because individual cultures are fluid that there's no clear and objective divides between them.

So from your point of view were the people who literally lived in Rome when it was under Byzantine control "Romans"?

Sure there's a divide, but Byzantine is just a subset of the broader Roman culture.

No. Living in the city of Rome doesn't make you a cultural Roman.

That doesn't make it Roman, it just makes it one of the many cultures that have been influenced by Roman culture.

You call Person A an X
You call Person B an X
You call Person C a Y

Person B and Person C are almost identical
Person A is massively different from both of them
But you still call both Person A and Person B X

Why

Nice strawman, buddy.
We're not discussing culture but whether or not the Byzantine Empire can be called the Roman Empire.
The answer to that is yes. The answer to if it was culturally latin is no.

Besides language of the common folk, how close was the Byzantine empire to Greek culture? Somehow more similar than Roman?

>No. Living in the city of Rome doesn't make you a cultural Roman.
But the culture of someone living in Rome in the 6th century would be more or less identical to the culture of someone living in Rome in the 5th century.

The only difference is that in the 5th century they were governed by a political entity called the Roman Empire, historiographically referred to as the Western Roman Empire, and in the 6th century they were governed by a political entity called the Roman Empire, historiographically referred to as the Byzantine Empire.

I don't understand how you can consider one Roman and the other not Roman when they're identical in every way, even down to the state they're governed by.

>Actually in the antiquity almost no viable difference between roman and hellenic culture besides language.

I do not fucking understand how you people still don't understand the distinction between political continuity and culture.

The Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire because there was unbroken political continuity between them. It was the same state, the same polity, the only change being that they moved the capital, under the orders of the Empire's legitimate ruler. There is absolutely no reasonable way to argue that the ERE was not the same political entity as the WRE.

Were they the cultural successors of the Roman Empire? Now THAT is up for debate, but when people say "The Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire" THAT'S NOT WHAT THEY'RE FUCKING TALKING ABOUT.

We're not talking about culture. We're talking about the nature of the state.

On a lighter note, check out this nifty drawing

>there is an objective and accurately measurable break between Rome and Byzantium which despite being measurable archaologically and in literature and apparently being objective (which presumably would mean near everybody but fringe lunatics would agree), I still can't name anybody remotely relevant to my claims that wasn't dead before the period in question
How utterly fucking compelling.

I'm not referring to Ancient Greek influences beyond Christianity, but to the strains in modern Greek culture that are derived from Byzantine as opposed to Turkish rule.

I'm taking the shifting of the discussion towards political continuity instead of cultural continuity as a concession towards my point of view.
Even then, the idea that the Byzantine state could be called Roman any time after (and this is being generous) the 8th Century CE is baseless.
I would personally argue that the end of the Principate ended the "true" Roman Empire and replaced it with a despotic military monarchy that was for a time Roman.

>I would personally argue that the end of the Principate ended the "true" Roman Empire
But is that up to you, or is it up to the people who lived there for nearly 1500 years and continuously called themselves Romans and described the political entity which they inhabited as the Roman Empire?

I don't see why people who evidently didn't understand what the Romans were actually like should have any say in assessing their own "Romanness"

Will Durant called it Greek Empire in his book "Age of Faith"

That makes a lot of sense. You have actually changed my mind on this topic

Pagans HATE them see how this small christian empire returned EUROPE back into the stone age

>That shield

Plz no

So what were the Romans, if according to you the Romans weren't Roman?

I'm afraid so user

fucking revisionist dude

>I would personally argue that the end of the Principate ended the "true" Roman Empire and replaced it with a despotic military monarchy that was for a time Roman.
By the same reasoning I'd argue that there never was a roman empire at all since the "true" roman state ceased to exists with the disposal of the kings. In its place was created an oligarchical republic that that was for a time roman.

I mean those actually look like small pavises, while what Bordudopoulos the Pronoia is holding looks like a mini scutum. Then again the guy on the left on your pic does seem to be carrying one of those.

Still, never seen anything like mini scutums before today.

...

I'm touched that folks are running with my pasta.

>Constantinople was born in Niš.
hmmm

>France is not france because it isn't a monarchy and they don't wear powedered wigs and tight trousers anymore

this fucking retard, kill yourself

Yes, it did. The last capital of WRE was Ravenna, before that was Milano.

As for Greek, it's always the main language of eastern part of the empire.

They were referred to as Greeks

Constantine, obv.

Ooh, nice backpedaling

>>Everyone called them Roman
Which countries or historical documents actually referred to them as Romans?
Genuine question.

Kievan Rus's records (as few of them as there are) refer to them as Greeks.

That's his point

>Everything: art, pantheon of gods, literature, early latin military and early laws/government system was copied by the latins from highly developed greek colonies on appenine peninsula.
Wrong

Literally only a few butthurt papists ever called them that before the end of the Empire.

Culturally Christian
Ethnically Greek
Politically Roman

not roman, but awesome in their own right

It's like being trans, not even fucking baiting. Genetically, you're not a fucking woman. But if we accept that gender is an imposed social construct (the way political entities are imposed and constructed) then yeah, you're a woman.

Modern historians view trends of continuity with the Byzantines, modern historians are pro-trans. Older historians saw the fall of Rome as an rupture, older historians hated trannies.

Byzantium is trans-Roman, I'm dead serious.

So did the norse.

However the arabs and turks called them romans.

Except it's fucking not.
See and Culture is not how states are defined and identified.

Geoffrey of Villehardouin who was around in the 12th century refers to the Byzantine Empire as "Romania" (Rome) but calls the inhabitants and the various emperors Greek in his memoirs.