Transcript for Anthony Kaldellis: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Rise & Fall of Empires | Lex Fridman Podcast #498

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #498 with Anthony Kaldellis. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links:

Table of Contents

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Episode highlight

Anthony Kaldellis (00:00:00) We’re talking about a society that was right in the middle of one of the main corridors of empire building and new religions in the world. This is the most dangerous neighborhood that you can possibly live in.
Lex Fridman (00:00:13) 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:00:18) Yes. It’s tremendous instability.
Lex Fridman (00:00:21) Almost all were—of these emperors—were generals, and almost all were murdered by their men. So civil war was the norm, hyperinflation, economic crash, plus there’s a plague. There’s just a lot of chaos.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:00:34) Here’s why I don’t think the Eastern Roman Empire is a military dictatorship. Even though, again, the emperors control the armies and the armies themselves will often have a say in who becomes emperor, like through the civil wars that we mentioned. The reason why I don’t think it’s a military dictatorship is because they almost never, very, very, very rarely use the army as an instrument of social control. Sometimes these eunuchs were extremely competent like Narses, Justinian’s general, who defeated the Goths in Italy in this massive battle. Like, this guy was a total hardass. And he’s this little old man. He was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch, and the Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh.

Introduction

Lex Fridman (00:01:24) The following is a conversation with Anthony Kaldellis, a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Anthony Kaldellis.

The Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire

Lex Fridman (00:01:51) You’ve described that the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire, that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention of historians writing long after the empire has collapsed, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed, that it was, in every legal and cultural sense, the Roman Empire continuing unbroken.
Lex Fridman (00:02:18) So let’s get our terms right in the grand historical context. What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:02:28) So Lex, the burden of proof is on those who would assert that what we’ve been calling the Byzantine Empire is something other- … than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this. And we’ve known about this. We’ve always known about it. It’s almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right? It’s like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it’s not.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:02:47) So the Eastern Roman Empire, this is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East, right? Everybody knows the Western Empire fell in the fifth century. And for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient. Like, that’s when we just called it. The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century. And we kind of, yeah, we kind of know that the eastern half survived, but we don’t want to include that in our cultural genealogy. And so we kind of pretend that it became something else. But in fact, it called itself the Roman Empire. Its subjects were Roman citizens. They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:03:22) So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans wanted to think that the Eastern Empire is something different, and those reasons have created these models where they called it the Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years, then they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons. Now that’s collapsing. So we’re now moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire. We recognize that the history of the Roman state, the Roman polity, is something that lasts an extraordinarily long time. Very unique, almost, in history, from antiquity, like the archaic period, down to the 15th century.
Lex Fridman (00:03:59) I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment at the grand scale of the full Roman state as it lasted for over 2,200 years. So its founding, 753 BC, to let’s say the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. So can we try to give a big picture overview of everything that happened?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:04:25) Okay, so first we have a period of the kings. This is almost legendary, from like the eighth century BC down to around 510 BC. So this is when Rome is ruled by a series of local kings. The kings are expelled, and the republic, or what we call the republic is instituted, and this is a regime that’s governed by mostly an aristocracy, but with cooperation from the people of Rome. In various ways, the arrangements change over the centuries. So that lasts for about five centuries. And then we have the end of the republic in the era of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, when the civil wars lead to the creation of an imperial monarchy-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:05:05) … right, under Augustus. So that’s, we date that roughly either, yeah, 27 BC, something like that. And thereafter, it is an imperial monarchy for the next millennium and a half. Very broadly, we can divide that into two phases, one where the center of power is in Rome, and one where it’s in Constantinople. And, you know, we can debate the dates of when that transition takes place. These big transitions usually take place over long periods of time. They’re not, like, very sudden. So that’s the big picture. Kings, republic, imperial monarchy.
Lex Fridman (00:05:42) The Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:05:46) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:05:46) And then the West and East Roman Empire.

2,200 Years of Roman History

Anthony Kaldellis (00:05:49) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:05:50) And then maybe what are the different terms that we could be using for the Byzantine Empire, including Byzantium? Is it also fair to say the Late Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:06:03) So Late Roman Empire we use for both east and west, starting around the reign of Diocletian maybe, even a bit earlier, so during the third century AD. And that goes down to maybe the early seventh century. So that period we call Late Roman Empire. And if you ask me to define its principal characteristics, it would probably be the tax system and the administration, the bureaucracy— … of the later Roman Empire is that that comes from mostly Diocletian and Constantine’s reforms.
Lex Fridman (00:06:32) And Diocletian was in the 3rd century.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:06:35) Yes, 284 to 305 AD. Yes. A very important reformer.
Lex Fridman (00:06:39) And we’ll talk about it, but let’s just do this whirlwind, and hopefully there’ll be automagical images somewhere overlaid, but—
Anthony Kaldellis (00:06:46) Okay.
Lex Fridman (00:06:46) So in 753 BC, Rome, a small city state, is founded, and in 509 BC, the kings are overthrown, and the Roman Republic is born. 390 BC, the Gauls sack Rome, and this, I believe, among other events throughout its history, is a formative trauma that hardens Rome’s security obsession. It turns out, throughout its history, people want to attack from different directions, and so you have to defend. So there’s two wars, as we’re actually saying off mic. There’s two kinds of military operations. One is wars of conquest and expansion, and one is more defensive. And we’ll talk about how the military changes throughout its history to allocate more effort to one versus the other.
Lex Fridman (00:07:40) In 264 to 146 BC, the Punic Wars and the survival against Hannibal transform Rome into a Mediterranean superpower. Then, like you mentioned, Caesar in 49 to 31 BC, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon to assassination of Caesar to the Battle of Actium, and then the Civil War dismantles the Republic and concentrates power in a single ruler, Octavian, AKA Augustus, the first Roman emperor, let’s say. Then 27 BC, Augustus founds the Principate, really low-key monarchy. And so officially, that ends the Republic, and then that begins 27 BC to 180 AD, the Pax Romana, which is a period of relative peace and stability. And a lot of the emperors we know of, the sexy, popular emperors all come from that period.
Lex Fridman (00:08:36) Marcus Aurelius, who I’m a big fan of, from that period. Then that takes us to 284 AD, the guy we mentioned, Diocletian, who rebuilds the state. Emperors drop the first citizen mask, this perception of the way, and we’ll talk about this, the, the persona that’s presented by the state. 312 AD, Constantine defeats Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge to become the sole ruler of the western half of the empire, and then founds Constantinople in 330 AD. East and West are split in 395 AD. Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The West falls in 476 AD as the last Western emperor is deposed. And then we sort of focus more on the East Roman Empire with 527. In the 6th century, Justinian’s reign. In the 7th century, Heraclius defeats Persia and then loses against the Arabs.
Lex Fridman (00:09:36) There’s the Arab conquest continuing in the 7th century. In the 8th, the Arab siege of Constantinople fails. There’s the Macedonian dynasty that you have an excellent book about. And then the Crusades, and then eventually leading to Constantinople falling in 1453 AD. As a person who understands the full journey of it with a focus on East Roman history, is there obvious glaring holes or incorrect things in what I just said?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:10:14) No, nothing incorrect. I would say if you wanted to produce a sort of very swift timeline of its history, it’s obviously important to focus on the moments when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders, and these are actually three main moments. There’s the Arab conquests in the 630s. This is a decade. In a decade, that war was lost. It is the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s, and that was very swift and partly reversed afterwards, but only partly. And then there’s the Fourth Crusade, 1204, when the armies from mostly France sack, conquer Constantinople, and dismember the empire as much as they could. It didn’t last that long. The Romans managed to regroup and recover, but those are the three main crisis points.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:11:16) They are very swift, but they cause incredible damage. For all the rest of its history, it is a state and society that is generally sort of consolidating, you know, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth, territorial expansion on a small scale, but steady. So we can talk about this. It’s… I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind about the big picture, that the defeats were swift and kind of, you know, terrible but most of its history is one of slow growth.
Lex Fridman (00:12:00) There’s some traumatic events that have a big impact, but a lot of the developments we’ll talk about it might seem or feel like there’s a particular moment when those developments or changes in the way the government or the military is structured arise, but really it’s a gradual process.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:12:18) Exactly.
Lex Fridman (00:12:19) And so that’s the tension we have to be constantly dancing with.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:12:21) Yeah, so as historians, this is a point of method, and it’s very important. There are moments when, like, individuals with a great deal of power make choices that impact everybody else and have, you know, long-term consequences downstream. Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, for example, right? Not something that anybody could have or did predict. Okay. Otherwise, most of the developments that we identify by specific dates, like you mentioned 395, the division of the eastern and the western empires, those are conventional dates that we use to actually capture what is in fact a much longer process. There was no split between the two halves. It was one among many allocations of jurisdiction to, like, one son and another son in the east and the west.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:13:09) The two halves were subsequently reunited, then they kind of divided again among different emperors. It’s just a process, and so we sometimes use fixed dates for what is in fact a process. Or for 476, the fall of the Western Empire, that’s just the last date. It’s actually a very long process that took decades. Right? So that’s just something to keep in mind, that sometimes we’re talking about processes, sometimes we’re talking about very discrete events with long-term consequences. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:13:37) Maybe an impossible question for a Roman state that lasted over 2,200 years, but is there a kind of through line, a thread, a soul that runs through the entire history of the Roman Empire? As you said, it’s a slow transformation and evolution. But if we dare call the whole thing Roman, Rome, the Roman state—
Anthony Kaldellis (00:14:00) Yes
Lex Fridman (00:14:00) … is there some aspect, some characteristics that run through the whole thing?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:14:05) I think so, yes. By the way, you know the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus? Okay. So in case the audience doesn’t know it, this is when there’s a ship, and it’s, you know, at sea, and over time, like, every component of that ship is replaced with some other component, so that by the end of the story, it has none of the original parts. But it’s, like, in a certain sense still that ship because of the story, right? The… Okay. So Roman history is different from, let’s say, Greek history or Christian history, right? Christian history is the story of a religion. It can be in any country, among any ethnic group. It’s here, there, right? It’s everywhere. But you still have histories of Christianity. It’s the same with, say, Greek culture—
Anthony Kaldellis (00:14:48) … or your Greek literature, right? It’s not a function of a particular state. Ancient Greeks were famously never united in a state. But it’s people who culturally accept that tradition as their kind of elite prestige culture and engage with Homer and Philo- and Plato and so forth. And they can be anywhere. Roman history is not like that. Roman history is very specifically the history of a state or a political community. And so this is the community of the Roman people, the Roman citizens. And it is in gradual evolution, but at no point is there a rupture in that history such that its members would ever think that something dramatic had changed, and that they’re no longer part of that story.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:15:33) So in the same way as the, as the ship I just mentioned, in other words, it’s the narrative that you tell about it where the changes that take place to it make sense only when you see them within the context of that story. It’s the same with Roman history. Yes, there are changes. Like, eventually everything changes. But it happens so gradually that it doesn’t seem that way to anyone living in it. And so the narrative of the history of the Roman people is what holds all of this together.
Lex Fridman (00:16:02) How important is it that, so you mentioned Greek culture. So a lot of my friends who are Greek are extremely proud of being Greek. There’s certain cultures that are proud.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:16:12) Sure.
Lex Fridman (00:16:13) And it’s not a momentary ephemeral thing. It feels like a thing that has lasted for many generations. And so that is an engine that propagates through time that carries that culture forward. And so does a similar thing apply for the Roman Empire in a different way? Maybe ’cause you say it’s a political kind of community, that means a set of ideals. And we’ll talk about, because those ideals become even more concretized and explicit, I think, through the East Roman Empire, because one of the things you talk about is that the citizens of the empire are kind of all connected, that they are-
Lex Fridman (00:16:53) … engaged in this whole sort of machinery. Anyway, that’s a complicated way of asking, is, is there some elements that Greek pride, dare I speak, is there some kind of Roman pride that propagates the thing?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:17:06) Oh, there totally is. You can find authors and historical agents who definitely display this or talk about it. But we don’t wanna make that the center of the story or the basis for any analysis because… So what you’re observing in your Greek friends is also the result of modern nation building, is it’s the result of modern systems education, and sort of national identities, and these are fostered and created through all kinds of media and institutions. It’s, it’s just a different situation altogether. What you find in ancient republics or medieval states is more something like a consensus to be ruled, to be, to rule and to be ruled in this particular political community. Now, some members of it may definitely, and in fact did have this kind of pride.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:17:54) I’ll give you an example. So there’s an ambassador in the sixth century, and he’s concluding a deal with the Persians. And you know, the Persians are skeptical ’cause, you know, Romans can’t always be trusted. But this guy says to them, he says, “And let me just tell you, you’re making a deal here with the Romans. The Romans. The name should say it all.” Like, you, okay, and you get a sense that this is, he’s expressing a certain pride in, like, being a bearer of the Roman tradition and speaking for the emperors and the Roman Empire. I mean, that’s, for him, this was something very, very momentous. You find these kinds of examples, so these people exist. But I wouldn’t wanna make that the basis for like an analysis of how the society works as a whole.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:18:34) For the most part, it was something like a consensus where, you know, subjects or citizens, however you wanna call them, they agree to, um- Let’s say be taxed and be ruled by political authorities because of what they get in return, and there’s this kind of understanding of a mutual set of responsibilities. And my concern, among other things, is to try to explain how this society held together for so long. Pride, yes, among some people, definitely. You find it in the sources. But sources are, texts are written by literate, usually elites. So this is a small part of the population. We can’t automatically extend their attitudes to everybody else.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:19:18) So in dealing with everyone else, we have to work with different kinds of materials, different kinds of assumptions. We can’t just posit that they’re just proud of being Roman. They could have been. We don’t know that, though. We can see other sorts of things about them. Like, for example, did they pay their taxes? Did they try to rebel and leave the empire? So those are the kinds of things that, that, that I look for.
Lex Fridman (00:19:37) Pride is one component, but there could be other explanations and factors that explain what motivates a soldier to defend the capital, for example. Like, what motivates a particular person to pay the taxes. And then this is, this is something that we’ll definitely talk about. But just to linger at the big picture, if the Romans from the different periods met, how different would they be from each other? Like, if I, if I brought to you… This is one of those, you know, there’s like- … blind taste tests you can do with food.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:20:15) Pepsi and Coke.
Lex Fridman (00:20:16) Pepsi and Coke. If I brought you a Roman from the kingdom period, the republic period, the early imperial period-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:20:27) I mean, I get asked this in a, in a, in a much more radical form, which is like if you take someone from, like, around 1453 who’s a Roman and a subject of this Roman, and compare, and, and, you know, compare him or have him meet, you know, in your imagination with someone from the ancient republic. Like, how-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:20:42) … could they find any kind of agreement on, on what it means to be Roman and recognize each other as belonging to that polity? This, this is a very difficult thing to… Like, now, I can point to a number of things that they would find eventually. And, you know, if you told them, “Yo, you’re both Romans, you’re both from this long history, now you have to find, you know, what you have in common,” I think they could find things. But before we talk about those, if, if you wanna get into it, let’s just say that the question can even be posed about Romans who live at the same time.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:21:16) I mean, if you take a senator from the age of Cicero and someone from the slums of Rome, who’s maybe the son of a slave who was brought from the East by some general a generation ago, and put them in a room and say, “Now, you discuss. You, you’re both Romans. What do you have in common?” They might have trouble in coming up with something.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:21:38) Right? So let’s not minimize the sheer diversity of experiences and sort of life experiences of Romans who are living at the same time. The important thing is that a change is always happening, and from my standpoint this change is sort of cumulative, so it results in Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian Romans in Constantinople who at first sight might have little to do with Latin-speaking, you know, non-Christians or worshiping the ancient gods, Romans from a republic in Rome. And those are very, very different situations, and no doubt they would, they would look and seem foreign to each other, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:22:20) The question is, why do we assume that someone like Hadrian, right, an emperor from the second century sort of a very cosmopolitan figure who travels around the empire with his Greek lover and, you know, writes poems and is, has a Greek beard and, you know, loves Greek culture and has much to do with someone from the Middle Republic who’s, you know, some warrior who’s chasing down cattle from the Samnites. I mean, and yet the way we understand history is that, oh no, those belong together. Hadrian and this ancient Roman from the fourth century BC. But not Hadrian and someone, you know, an emperor a few centuries later who’s just like him, bilingual in Greek and Latin, who’s-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:23:06) … kinda cosmopolitan, who, you know, reads the same stuff, because we posit this rupture between Roman and Byzantine.
Lex Fridman (00:23:15) One of the ways we can try to analyze this is, for example, looking at a very specific role in society across time. So we can look at soldiers, how they solve violence, for example. That’s one way. So you’re making me realize that we can just take 1,000 different professions and positions in society and really specifically look at what the experience of the world was like. And so one of them is the view on violence across time. And, and then the other is the view on the role of the government- … across time.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:23:57) That’s an excellent way of putting it. So take soldiers, for example. They swear an oath. Right? Now, we don’t have the oath for every given period. We have some approximations of it, some hints of what it contained, but we know that Roman soldiers swore an oath, like, throughout all of the centuries of the empire. Sometimes they might add, like, a Christian formula to it. Sometime before that, not. But they swore basically to protect the republic or depending on what term they used or the empire or the emperor. And this is something that they would have recognized very quickly. Like, if, if they met each other over time and said, “Hey, what was your oath like?” And they recited it, this would have made much sense to them, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:24:41) Or take, for example, a woman who runs a business, right? From any century of the empire. It, it would have been, especially the later you go, the, the more so, that this woman is enabled to do this by virtue of Roman law. Of certain, you know, Roman law of property and inheritance and, and marriage, but also regulations regarding who can do what and what kinds of properties women can handle and under what circumstances. This is something that Roman women had in common that many other cultures did not. So I’ll give you an example. So for example, in the 10th, 11th century, there are Jewish women who live in the Eastern Roman Empire-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:25:26) … who realize that they have more rights in Roman courts than in rabbinical ones, and they take their disputes to the Roman courts. Now, the thing is that for the Romans, these are property matters- … not religious matters. But for the rabbis, these are religious matters. But the Roman courts trump the Jewish courts- … in the empire, right? And so you end up with a situation where Jewish women have more rights- … than Jewish women do elsewhere, because there Roman law is not operative. And there you go. Right? Like, these things matter, right? And that’s a function of imperial law.

Power, violence, and civil war

Lex Fridman (00:26:02) And this, this would be an interesting actually interplay between the law and religious institutions- … Throughout the East- … Roman Empire. So you argue that even though the personality of the various emperors varied, as we’ll talk about, and as they’re often venerated, celebrated, criticized, talked about, the late Roman Empire was projecting a persona to its citizens that was consistent throughout its history. Can you describe what you mean by this and describe the different detailed characteristics of this persona?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:26:36) Yes. So this persona, it’s what the governments or the emperor, the court, and the spokesman, the bureaucracy want their subjects to think this whole thing is about. Like, how is power being used, why, and for whom, right? And they do so in laws that they promulgate throughout the empire. Sometimes they have these laws read in church, for example, or posted publicly. They’re definitely eager to have them communicated to as many people as possible. But they’re also a function of imperial rhetoric so the way you praise an emperor, the way you talk about an emperor. You find this language in petitions, so this is a hugely important glue for this society, is that anyone could basically petition the authorities for let’s just say just about anything.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:27:30) That’s not technically true, but there’s a lot of petitioning going on. So, you know, if you think something’s wrong or you’ve been treated unjustly, you can petition local officials, even imperial officials. You can petition the emperor, you can… Right? And the expectation is that that petition will be read, addressed, and answered. It might not be answered in the way that you want, but it will be answered. And those responses contain this language also, right? So these are the different media through which the emperors are broadcasting this persona, and that persona is what? Basically, that the authorities are responsive to the needs of their subjects, that they are often accountable.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:28:10) In other words, they understand that they are exercising public power, and that their mandate is to exercise it solely for the benefit of their subjects. They keep saying this. So renouncing any kind of private interest. In other words, “We’re not doing this for our benefit,” say the authorities. “We’re doing this for your benefit.” Also that they’re proactive. So the emperors are constantly saying that, “We’re planning ahead. We, we’re trying to foresee what problems you might have, and we are solving them before you experience them.”
Anthony Kaldellis (00:28:46) And that they are also working very hard. So hardworking. In fact, one of the cliches that they keep using is sleepless. The emperors keep saying that, “I’m losing sleep over this. I’m not sleeping at night because I’m just worrying so much about your problems and how to solve them.” Justinian, for example, was publicly known as the sleepless emperor, and not because he was a demon whose head floated around in the palace on its own, which some people
Lex Fridman (00:29:12) That’s the thing?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:29:12) It was a thing, yes.
Lex Fridman (00:29:14) Okay.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:29:14) That’s a whole thing.
Lex Fridman (00:29:15) But sleepless in terms of worked so hard- … there’s no time to sleep.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:29:19) He was a workaholic. That is conceded by even his enemies. All night he was up just, just hauling officials in at any old hour to talk about whatever, you know, wars and architecture and laws and religion and theology and whatever. So the emperors are projecting this image, right? So that’s what I call the persona. Tireless effort to work on behalf of subjects, to do so responsibly, to be responsive and accountable. In other words, if some of my officials breaks the law or oppresses you, I’m giving you instruments, like legal instruments, by which to hold them to account.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:29:59) So that’s the persona. It’s very consistent and I think it’s part of the mechanism of tying the society together. In other words, if subjects think that their emperors are like this, right, they’re more likely to agree to the consensus of essentially paying taxes.
Lex Fridman (00:30:17) And you draw this distinction between rhetoric and action, what the authorities say and what they actually do. So when you say persona in the modern times, some of that could be reframed as propaganda- … for example. And propaganda implies that the rhetoric, that there’s a big gap between the rhetoric and the action. And one of the things you said you took away from reading Machiavelli is that we should judge people not by what they say, but by what they do. So how much of the Roman Empire’s government of what they espoused was merely rhetoric, and how much was true in how they acted?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:30:56) Yes. This is a key lesson I took from reading Machiavelli, and I found this a very insightful way of thinking about politics, and I would recommend that anybody kind of practice this way of looking at the world, right? People and states and, you know, powerful people can say anything they want to. At the end of the day what matters is what they actually do. And this doesn’t mean that what they say is irrelevant, even if it’s discordant with what they do. But nevertheless in the case of the East Roman state, my research suggests that the emperors and the authorities were generally sincere in what they said. In other words, I have found that they generally did what they said they were going to do overall. Not perfectly, obviously.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:31:48) And of course, these are human beings we’re talking about. The, right, the human societies, there was a lot of, you know, corruption, and you name it. Abuse— … of course. Of course there is. But overall, I think that there was a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors are in fact doing this, and they were actually incentivized to do this. We can talk about how. Because they were also in a pretty vulnerable situation too, so they needed their subjects to be relatively content on this front.
Lex Fridman (00:32:18) Isn’t this surprising to you? So, you know, from the outsider point of view, Roman emperors, even in the East Roman Empire, technically have a lot of power. You can even say in some cases absolute power, and yet they seem to be awfully worried … … To make everybody in the empire happy. What explains that? Like what, what explains the small gap between rhetoric and action in the East Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:32:52) A number of things, but ultimately it is that there is no right to the throne. And this is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here. In other words, so here’s a bit of a paradox. What we call the Roman Republic was the most imperialistic phase of Roman history. Like this is when the Romans did most of their conquering. What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way. That’s much more defensive in its approach, right? And yet our terms are a little mismatched in that way. The empire is more a function of that it has an emperor rather than it is engaged in imperialism. And that emperor emerged out of the republic.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:33:40) But emerged out of the republic in a very strange way. In other words, not as a dynasty that created the state. So for example, if you think of the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, they… The whole thing existed because this dynasty engaged in conquest and- … was successful in creating the state, and so the dynasty was like at the heart of the state. But that’s not at all the case in the Roman Empire. The emperor is a figure who emerged within a republic, and in order to create peace after the civil wars, those emperors had to, for a long time, kind of pretend that they were not what they really were.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:34:19) By basically, you know, continuing to flatter the idea of a republic that is, you know, that has a first citizen maybe. “Oh, no, no, I’m not a king. I’m just, I have this office and that office and that office.” “Whatever the Senate has given me.” Now, we understand that’s a facade, but the fact that they had to create this facade at all is very important.
Lex Fridman (00:34:40) Can we actually just linger on that? I mean, how much of this… ‘Cause you said they had to create this facade. Did Augustus, who started the whole thing, the first emperor of Rome, did he have to act that way? ‘Cause he kept acting like he’s not an absolute- … monarch, and he could have gone hardcore, destroy the Senate, just full hardcore rule, dictatorship.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:35:09) Well, then how, how does he govern then?
Lex Fridman (00:35:11) So, so he wants to be an effective governor, And he also wants to not be overthrown.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:35:16) Exactly. Because, you know, just because you ended one civil war doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be another. You have to create a consensus such that people don’t want to have another civil war. If he did what you said, which he in theory could have done, but that would’ve just led to more wars, right? So the problem is that the emperors, even those who come to power through violence, they can’t prevent other people from trying to come to power through violence because like I said, no one has a right to the throne.
Lex Fridman (00:35:45) We should also say one more thing where, dare I carefully say this, but it seems like riots and civil wars is a feature, not a bug of the system. This is a different thing that we have to the modern day, is because the threat of a civil war, a violent civil war where you overthrow the government and there’s just a lot of- … death and struggle for power is always a threat. That’s another incentive that, I guess the stick, not the carrot, but the stick for the emperor to behave.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:36:22) Yes. It’s the main one. In other words, just take the thousand years that I study. There’s something like 120 civil wars. Now, these are usually very swift. They’re over quickly, and they’re never about ideology. So they’re not like modern civil wars. Right? It’s not about slavery or the rights of kings or whatever. No, no, no. They’re solely about who has the power. All sides have the same ideology. They talk about, you know, the responsibility of government in the same way, right? They’re just competing over who’s the best man to do the job. Right? And so once you have that situation… And it might not be a civil war, it could be a palace coup, it could be a kind of fighting in the capital-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:37:06) … something like that. Once everyone’s taken their side and you have a winner, that’s the emperor and you often overthrow the previous regime. I’ll give you some statistics. Something like 46% of the emperors of Constantinople are overthrown through violence. 46%. And that’s almost half.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:37:25) Right? So that’s a huge, that’s a huge number, which means that every emperor is vulnerable and insecure, and they know it, right? So what they have to do is make sure that that doesn’t happen to them, and the way to do that is not by arresting and executing everybody you think might be a threat or just generally behaving like a, you know, a Caligula or a Nero. That will just get you killed. Like, they know this. So the best way to avoid that fate is to actually do the things that will make people happy so that they don’t support a rebel if a rebel decides to appear. And sometimes rebels would appear. There’s a kind of convention in Constantinople, like if you…
Anthony Kaldellis (00:38:06) Sometimes you think, “Hmm, that emperor’s pretty unpopular and I think I can overthrow him.” What you would do is you would march down the center boulevard- … And, you know, you’d have your people just call the populace of Constantinople out to rally, to you know, maybe go to Hagia Sophia, the church, and just create a big crowd and call for the deposition of the emperor and, you know, maybe that would- And sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, and the rebel or wannabe rebel would sort of proceed down the, the Mese, the boulevard, and people would just gradually just disappear, and then he’d be left alone- … and go up to Hagia Sophia as, as seeking asylum. Right? So that’s a bid.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:38:49) That’s someone making a bid for the throne, and it just goes disastrously bad. Other times, the people come out ’cause they hate the emperor, and they drag the emperor out and cut his nose off or whatever. So emperors are constantly trying to prevent that from happening, and the best way to do that is through goodwill.
Lex Fridman (00:39:07) I’m trying to load in that kind of world ’cause it’s a different world than we live in today.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:39:13) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:39:14) There’s a constant inner workings of policy development inside government.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:39:20) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:39:21) But the check on power is, like, literal, like, “We will murder you.”
Anthony Kaldellis (00:39:27) Yes, it depends on the period. Sometimes murder you, sometimes blind you, sometimes cut your nose off, but there were periods-
Lex Fridman (00:39:33) Thank you for the nuance.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:39:35) … No, there were periods that were more civilized. We’ll just basically, you’ll get retired to a monastery.
Lex Fridman (00:39:39) Right.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:39:40) Okay. You’re right. So here’s what elections do. Elections give a government a mandate for, I don’t know, four or five years, and during that period, you may be unpopular, but you’re legitimate, right, because of the institutions. Whereas in Constantinople, we don’t have those kinds of institutions. We have instead an ongoing referendum. We just call it a perpetual referendum, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:40:07) And in fact, the emperors are, are, they’re conducting opinion polls in a sense because they appear in public. When they appear in public, everyone is expected to cheer and chant acclamations, right, like slogans. Right? So you have 100,000 people in the Hippodrome all chanting, you know, “Worthy” or “Many years for you, Augustus” or something like this. And if that happens, it’s great. But if you appear in the Hippodrome and people are, like, sullen or if the chanting is a bit tepid or if they’re booing, then you know something’s wrong, right? So you gotta find out what’s wrong. It could be something like the grain supply is, is, you know, not working or whatever. And so emperors are desperate to fix those problems.
Lex Fridman (00:40:49) And the Hippodrome is this big gathering place in Constantinople, which I guess a lot of people gathered at and did this kind of cheering or not cheering based on policy and—
Anthony Kaldellis (00:41:01) Yeah
Lex Fridman (00:41:01) … and whether the emperor is popular or not. This was democracy. I apologize to use that term, but-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:41:08) Yeah, yeah
Lex Fridman (00:41:09) … in our conception of what that means, because what do we mean by democracy in the modern day is that the people somehow have a connection to who leads and how they lead, and this is—the Hippodrome was that connection between the people and the leaders.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:41:26) Yes. Now, we can talk about modern democracy if you want. That’s a, I have my own views about- … modern democracy and, you know, how it works and how it doesn’t and, anyway, whether it is democracy, in fact, ’cause there are other models of democracy, like-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:41:41) … ancient Athenian democracy, which is a whole other thing. But you’re right. So it’s not just in the Hippodrome. It’s wherever people assemble in large numbers. So this could be military mustering grounds, right? So the army. The army is also the Roman people in a way, and in some cases, the most decisive part of it, right? So if an army gathers together and they decide they want a different emperor, that’s serious, and that can happen out in the provinces too. That doesn’t necessarily have to happen in Constantinople. There’s also Hagia Sophia, so the people gather in the church, or they gather in public spaces like the Forum of Constantine.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:42:19) So this can happen anywhere where a large number of people can gather, and it’s, I don’t know if you wanna call it a democracy as such, but it is definitely a form of popular, let’s say, consultation and a testing of consensus. I’ll give you another example. So in the 1190s, the emperor—and it’s Alexius III—he’s being threatened by the German emperor. German emperor’s basically, “You, you, you pay me a bunch of money or I’ll invade.” Just straight up extortion. And Alexius decides, “Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna gather this money. I’m gonna impose these taxes.” And he gathers the people in the Hippodrome, and he says, “You know, we’re gonna have the German tax.”
Anthony Kaldellis (00:43:00) He called it the German tax. And there’s such an uproar in the Hippodrome against this that he was like, “Uh, that wasn’t my idea. I don’t know where that came from. No, never mind. We’re not gonna have the German tax.” Fortunately, the German emperor died and, and nothing ever happened, but it gives you a sense of how emperors, like, literally can backtrack when they see that the people are against something in a matter of policy, right— … like tax policy. So yeah, there was this give and take. So institutionally, the emperor might look absolute, as you called him earlier. In practice, no. No. The ones that did that didn’t end well.
Lex Fridman (00:43:40) And we should say, going to Perplexity here, the Hippodrome of Constantinople was the main stadium and social center of the Byzantine capital, used primarily for chariot racing and imperial ceremony, and today survives in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district. And the reason I looked this up, I wanted to see how many people. Shaped as a long U-shaped race course with a central barrier and tiered seating, it may have held from roughly thirty thousand up to a hundred thousand spectators, though exact capacity’s debated because archeological remains are limited. That’s a lot of people.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:44:19) Thirty thousand is definitely a pretty un-underestimate. The Hippodrome is still there. I mean, you can see it from, it’s like satellite photos. The shape of it is still there.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:44:28) And actually some parts of the build, the, the Sphendone, the, the sling around the southern side is still there. You can walk around it. And it’s right next to the palace. In other words, emperors didn’t have to go far. Now, sometimes there are events for replacing an emperor. So say the emperor dies in his sleep, and there’s no heir. This happens in 491, for example. And so the people gather in the Hippodrome in order to have a discussion with the court about whom to appoint. Now, in those kinds of contexts, it’s entirely possible that there are people also in the arena, like not just in the stands. I think some military units might have just been arrayed there rather than in the stands.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:45:10) So you can get more people than what we project might fit in the stands, ’cause they’re not having the races on that day.
Lex Fridman (00:45:16) We should say, so like, I think the thing that was emphasized in the first paragraph is the, the athletic events and the entertainment events, right? Like the imperial ceremony. But there is a, a sort of a political gathering was also popular. The Hippodrome was not just for sport. It was where emperors appeared before the people, where acclamations, public punishments, and political demonstrations took place, and where the rival circus factions, blues, greens, reds, whites, became powerful social and sometimes paramilitary forces. And this goes on and on and on. So this was a place—
Anthony Kaldellis (00:45:51) Oh, it’s a very important place. Yeah
Lex Fridman (00:45:52) … for people to speak to the leader.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:45:55) Yeah. Vent sometimes. Even insult them.
Lex Fridman (00:45:58) Yeah. This is fascinating. I mean, it’s human civilization. It’s converged towards a mechanism that has clearly worked, because for the empire in the East stood for a thousand years. So it’s, it’s fascinating. We as humans, throughout our history, we try to figure out, okay, how do we figure out how to govern large collections of humans in a way that they’re represented, in the way that they don’t riot, they don’t rebel. In the way that we flourish together as a people, all this, all this kind of stuff. So this is a real… The East Roman Empire is a real study of something that seemed to have worked. There’s lessons there even for the modern times, I think. And modern times, again, is very early human civilization.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:46:54) From a certain standpoint, yes, we are still early in—
Lex Fridman (00:46:57) Trying to figure it out
Anthony Kaldellis (00:46:58) … trying to figure it out. Yes. Now, mind you, I’m not advocating for this type of social organization and government. What I’m trying to do as a historian is understand how and why it survived and also to find the ways that it worked, because it did work. We know that much. We have to start from that. It survived. It was resilient. There was a lot of, you know, give and take in the exercise of power, and I want to understand the mechanisms of that.

Edict of Caracalla

Lex Fridman (00:47:27) So if we can, before we go to Emperor Constantine the First and the founding of Constantinople, can we look at some maybe seminal events that led up to some of the topics we’ll be talking about? So one of them, maybe tell me if this is not as interesting as I think it is, but the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD. So this is where you described that starting with Augustus in the early imperial period, government saw itself as a protector of the Roman citizens, which is a minority of the people living in the Roman Empire. It doesn’t consider the provincials. And then you described that the Edict of Caracalla extended full Roman citizenships to basically all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire. So what is it? Why was it done? Why is it important? And how did it change the Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (00:48:30) Right. I agree with you that this is, in fact, a very important… It’s a, it’s a real turning point in a sense, but it also is part of a process. So for various reasons, the Roman polity tended to bestow its metropolitan citizenship, that is, Roman citizenship on its allies, and eventually in time, on many people that it had conquered. And it had various mechanisms for doing so. It could bestow block grants. Sometimes it allowed its generals to bestow citizenship on people they thought would, you know, would be necessary players for controlling local societies. Sometimes they even allowed foreign cities to, like non-Roman cities, to decide who would get Roman citizenship by basically electing them to certain kinds of offices.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:49:23) Like they, they outsourced a lot of this. And so you have over time the steady growth of a Roman community of citizens who are not all in Rome, and who are not all of Roman origin, whatever that means, but they, they were not descended from people who were from Rome. And this proceeds, you know, it expands, it expands, it expands. By Caracalla’s time, so early third century AD, we can estimate that maybe at, at most a third of the free citizens of the empire are Roman citizens. Everyone else has local citizenship, like you’re Alexandrian or Athenian or, or whatever. And with… You’re subject to those laws. This emperor, Caracalla, now that’s his nickname. His reigning name is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. So just like Marcus Aurelius, it’s the same name two generations later.
Lex Fridman (00:50:15) Some badass names for emperors, by the way. I don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg, but just- … some epic names.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:50:22) They’ve been remembered that way, and so we read that back into the name-
Lex Fridman (00:50:25) Yes, that’s true.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:50:25) … and absolutely, yes.
Lex Fridman (00:50:26) But anyway, Caracalla. Yeah.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:50:28) Yeah, so he issues this edict in 212 called the Constitutio Antoniniana, named after him. Some people at the time called it the Divine Decree, which basically extended citizenship to everybody. Now, we don’t know exactly why he did so. We can guess the reasons that he said he did so, and this was for religious reasons. In other words, he wanted people to go to the temples and pray and give thanks to the gods for him, for his survival out of a coup.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:51:01) Which is whatever. And it’s possible that there was some kind of religious motivation here, and he wanted everybody to do so as Roman citizens to honor the Roman gods and something like that. Other historians at the time said he did it for tax reasons. We don’t know exactly. There might even have been a kind of ideology of a unified community across the empire playing in his, if not in his mind, in that of the jurists, that is the legal advisors that he had. So that’s possible. But less interesting than his motivations, more interesting are the consequences of this—
Anthony Kaldellis (00:51:44) … and what it tells us about the Roman community. So imagine a situation where, like, no modern empire has ever done this really, right? When what’s significant about the Roman case is that not only did they extend citizenship to everybody, but they meant it. This is something that had teeth. In other words, it meant that the rights and opportunities that were available to Roman citizens, say, in the Roman Senate at Rome- … are now available to everybody. And within a generation, you have a situation where, like, all of the emperors are provincials, right? All the most powerful people in the empire are from the provinces.
Lex Fridman (00:52:25) This is, like, mind-breaking, mind-blowing. This is incredible. The fact that the Roman Empire was able to do this, and it stuck.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:52:33) They did it, and they meant it.
Lex Fridman (00:52:34) And they meant it.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:52:35) Yes.
Lex Fridman (00:52:35) They implemented it. It was real. That tells you, that’s an important thing that tells you a lot of information about the populace of the Roman Empire. That the fact that it stuck, that the government meant it, that the system encouraged, incentivized the government to mean it. It’s incredible.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:52:54) Yeah, and there’s a law of citizenship, and it, basically it says something like, “Anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman citizen.” And the Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind this had some very interesting ideas about, you know, creating this kind of community. Look, like, imagine if, I mean, it’s almost impossible to, to imagine, but the, the British at the time of the peak of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone, including in India, and, like, suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India, like, including the throne. Like, it’s just unthinkable.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:53:34) And that has to do, you know, with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right? But not in the Roman Empire. So we have a situation where the emperors are all from the provinces. The most powerful officials are all from the provinces. And so a century later, when Constantinople is created, this is, it’s created, right, like, in, in the Bosporus, so, like, where modern Istanbul is, in the Eastern Roman Empire. It’s created within the preexisting Roman context, right? It doesn’t bring Romanness to the East. It’s already there. And so it’s not such a leap to create a center of Roman power in the East because of that.
Lex Fridman (00:54:13) And you’ve helped put together a book on the history of intellectual thought in the East Roman Empire. But this is the interesting thing here, and I can ask that many times, but let me ask it here also, is the great man, the great woman view of history. Were there, like, Thomas Jefferson or those types of characters in the meetings as, as, as they’re executing on the edict or developing the edict? Is that important, or is it more about the system and the culture and just… … Is it, how important was it? ‘Cause this seems like a revolutionary idea, and when we think about the American Revolution and the founding documents, it seems like a few individuals-
Lex Fridman (00:54:55) … were really critical about the wording of things, and then words matter because those words create the reality, and then it propagates through time.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:55:03) Yeah. For the edict, I suspect that yes, there were a few people who were behind it, and quite possibly jurists, that is, Roman legal scholars. And 212 is in an age of very important Roman legal scholars: Ulpian, for example, and others. But we just don’t have those… We have- … minutes of the meetings for the- … American Revolution. Not only do we not know who was in the room, we don’t actually even have the whole edict. We have a papyrus fragment, this is a piece of ancient paper- … that’s mostly torn and mutilated, and we have, like, a bit of a paragraph from it.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:55:39) In Greek, not even the Latin original. And it’s kind of torn, but it actually preserves the key clause. Right? And that’s, that’s all we have of the original. We have contemporary sources that mention it, we have legal documents, but nothing like a, like we can talk about the people involved in it. Or even how it was immediately implemented. Like, suddenly we know everyone in the provinces, like, there’s this explosion in the number of people called Aurelius, because that was his, his Roman family name. And so when you acquired citizenship from that edict, you became an Aurelius. Right? And there are lots of Aurelii suddenly all over the place. Like, we can see it immediately. But we can’t actually see the implementation.
Lex Fridman (00:56:26) But your instinct says that it was very, individuals were very important in the development of that idea and execution of it.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:56:33) Probably, yeah. Yeah. Even though it’s part of a long-term process of expanding Roman citizenship, this was an explosion, not just an expansion.
Lex Fridman (00:56:43) And then you said that one of the important aspects about this edict is that giving equal rights to provincials was one of the things that helped deal with the crisis of the third century, and was the thing that, I think you said, quote, “sapped discontent from the relevant populations,” which then minimized the probability of uprisings.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:57:07) Well, now that’s a very long-term process. Now, the third century is chaos, there’s a crisis, it’s a mess, right? So what follows the edict is quite a few decades of unrest.
Lex Fridman (00:57:20) Okay, let’s put it mildly. Let’s talk about the crisis of the third century, where 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:57:30) Yes. It’s tremendous instability.
Lex Fridman (00:57:33) So there’s civil wars nonstop. Almost all of these emperors were generals, and almost all were murdered by their men. So civil war was the norm, hyperinflation, economic crash, plus there’s a plague- … from 249 to 262 AD, which is a pandemic, possibly smallpox or Ebola. It killed up to 5,000 people a day in Rome alone, devastating the tax base and army recruitment pool. And the empire fractured into three pieces, but then Emperor Aurelian miraculously reconquered them in a period of five years. So just a lot of chaos. It, it deserves the name, the Crisis of the Third Century.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:58:20) Yeah, it’s a perfect storm. Yeah, I mean, you have a crisis of imperial legitimacy. Basically, the army’s proclaiming emperors left and right. In an odd sense, ironically, this is in part because there are now a lot more stakeholders in the Roman tradition, right? There’s all of these provincial armies, and they’re appointing their generals as rival emperors. But you also have a serious uptick in foreign invasions.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:58:47) In the north, you have the creation of the Sasanian Persian or Iranian Empire in the east, and this was very, very bellicose. So lots of foreign defeats. Armies are defeated by, you know, like, quote, “barbarian enemies.” You have eventually inflation, and you have plague. And so under the pressure, right, of all of those forces, it almost fell apart. Now, it didn’t actually. Inevitably, there are also historians who downplay the crisis. Of course, right, like, and legitimately so, right? We must push back against every of these characterizations.
Lex Fridman (00:59:23) 26 emperors died, bro. What do you-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:59:25) That’s just the emperors. That’s just the emperors. We’re… No, we should be l-
Lex Fridman (00:59:29) I’m sorry. In 50 years. Every other year, emperor dead.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:59:33) Yeah, that’s-
Lex Fridman (00:59:34) Civil war
Anthony Kaldellis (00:59:34) … that’s political instability at the top, right? But what-
Lex Fridman (00:59:38) Right, that’s not-
Anthony Kaldellis (00:59:39) … what are the lives of most people? So if you go to Egypt, for example, which is kind of out of the… Right? What’s going on there? How are people living there? And we can see how people are living in Egypt because we have all these papyrus documents from Egypt.
Lex Fridman (00:59:52) That’s true.
Anthony Kaldellis (00:59:53) And for the most part, they don’t seem to be experiencing a crisis.
Lex Fridman (00:59:56) I mean, this is something you talk about. Constantine, as we’ll get to him, is one of the most murderous leaders in all of human history, if you consider his own family. But if you’re living in the provinces, you know there’s… He’s not-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:00:13) Oh, yeah, yeah
Lex Fridman (01:00:14) … he’s not that murderous.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:00:15) No, no, no, he’s perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah.

Crisis of the Third Century

Lex Fridman (01:00:16) So it’s very important to actually remember about what the actual experience of the average citizen of the empire is like. Fair. Okay, so but how… Maybe there’s more we could say about the crisis. And then, of course, the crisis is in part resolved by Diocletian as he does a hard reset on the structure of the Roman system of government. So maybe you could speak a little bit more to the crisis that’s important for us to understand, and how Diocletian solves the crisis in 284 AD.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:00:48) Right. So again, these are processes rather than specific events. So for example, you mentioned that the empire kind of breaks into pieces.
Lex Fridman (01:00:57) Yes.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:00:57) And we have what’s called sometime the Empire of the Gauls. Gaul are modern France and sort of Britain, for a while are, for a decade and a half or so, are kind of like this little separatist- … empire. So what’s interesting about that is that this was not an attempt to break away from the empire. In other words, it’s not some discontent provincials who are just tired of Roman rule and wanna break away and do their own thing. No. This is actually just a, it’s an attempt by provincial generals to take the throne, and does it to rule the entire empire. It doesn’t work. They get only as far as the provinces that they take. And the only way that they know to set up a state is to make it a Roman state.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:01:43) Right? Like, that’s the total of their political imaginary is like, “Well, we’re just gonna do a Roman thing here.” And maybe we’ll get, you know, we’ll reunite the empire ourselves, or as happened, Aurelian, that is someone from the other side, will reunite the empire. But it’s always a Roman model. Like, there’s, it’s almost like there’s no alternatives by this point. So that’s interesting. What Diocletian does essentially is the, the way I characterize it sometimes is that he turns the problem into its own solution. In other words, the problem is too many emperors or wanna-be emperors. Because there’s just more going on. Like, one emperor can’t deal with all these problems along the frontiers, with all the political problems.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:02:29) So what he does is he deputizes some of his colleagues, people he was on very good terms with from the army. These are all Illyrians. They’re from… By the way, for a few centuries, the emperors are all from this region of the former Yugoslavia that’s the size of Scotland. Like, that’s where they all come from.
Lex Fridman (01:02:44) Well, what explains that?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:02:46) The army. These are military men. Sometimes hard-drinking military men. Very good at their job like Aurelian, you mentioned, right? So there’s a series of Illyrian emperors who restore stability. And the reason why there’s so many Illyrian emperors is ’cause they worked their way up through the ranks of the army. And, you know, the regions of Yugoslavia at that time are sufficiently, you know, economically underdeveloped that there’s a strong incentive for young men to go join the army ’cause, you know, it’s a living.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:03:21) And so Illyrians become, like, kind of the backbone of the Roman army, and they’re described as these, you know, tough Roman conservative types. I mean, these are, you know, these are, these are tough military guys. I say that to draw a contrast between, say, Hadrian, whom I mentioned earlier- … you know, who was a much more sophisticated, artsy, poetic, cosmopolitan emperor. Also a hard-ass. You did not wanna mess with Hadrian. But these guys from the third century are military men through and through. Like, their whole careers are, are in the army. And they have, like, the military stubble. They’ve got these thick necks. They look angry. They’ve got their hands on their swords. Like, they’re not projecting an image of sort of- … calm and sophisticated, you know, bum-bum, you know.
Lex Fridman (01:04:08) So, military men. … Military men from Aurelian.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:04:11) Yep. So Diocletian gets a gang of them together. They, eventually there are four. We call this the Tetrarchy. And he basically allocates them to various… This wasn’t any kind of hard division of the empire. Basically, it was a collaborative project. They each went wherever they were needed.
Lex Fridman (01:04:31) Was it, is it fair to say that there was four administrative zones? He allocated each one to a zone?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:04:38) Broadly. I’d say more military zones. So the administration tends to operate, it kind of humming along in the background wherever these emperors happen to be, right? This is a, we’re talking about a period of big government now. So Diocletian creates a larger government, possibly a larger army, and in order to pay for that, you need more systematic and effective taxation- … which means you need more census, you need more bureaucracy, you need more collect… you know? So it is an era of bigger government.
Lex Fridman (01:05:05) So just to linger on that point- … is it fair to say that Diocletian created the deep state? Quote, “deep state.” So the tax collectors, the, the logistics, the thing that you’ve kinda hinted at, which is the separation of the civil and the military layer of society.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:05:21) So the concept of a deep state, I’ve had discussions about that with experts who work on the idea of the deep state, and I’m not sure that I would characterize the Roman Empire that way, in part because while you do have big government, you do have bureaucracy, you have, you have bureaucrats who are buried in various echelons, and you know, nobody knows exactly what they’re doing and things like that, I have not come across the idea of some sort of sinister elements, you know, who are working within the administrative apparatus to undermine the emperor. Like, from a distance occasionally, you might get glimpses of this kind of thing. Diocletian, for example, once complained that, “Nobody ever tells me anything.” In other words, like, he’s so removed-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:06:07) … in part from the realities of what’s going on on the ground that he felt sometimes he’d lost touch. But I don’t find this kind of idea of undermining imperial power from within the bureaucracy.
Lex Fridman (01:06:21) Yeah, I think the, one of the ways to explain that is because, so, you know, in the modern day, democracy in quotes, there’s a kinda temporary nature to the leader at the top. So it’s incentivized the deep state to form. That, so the deep state thinks of themselves as a thing that propagates long-term periods of time, and then the leader is a very ephemeral short, short-term thing. With a, with an emperor, technically- … you can go for a long time, so it’s best to be integrated deeply. With, the bureaucracy should be integrated with the leader. It makes sense.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:06:55) Yeah. But al-
Lex Fridman (01:06:56) Fair enough.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:06:57) … also in modern social thought or fear is that the deep state might be undermining, say-
Lex Fridman (01:07:04) Undermining, yeah.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:07:05) … the democracy itself rather than, right, rather than… It can cut both ways.
Lex Fridman (01:07:09) But there is a bureaucracy. There is a big government.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:07:13) Absolutely. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:07:14) There’s a big machinery.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:07:15) Yeah, compared to before.
Lex Fridman (01:07:17) Before.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:07:17) Yes. So Diocletian creates these larger bureaucratic structures, and these are the ones that define the society that I study. So as a specialist, I focus on the period after him mostly. But he implemented those to solve a lot of these problems. He was mostly successful. So in terms of generating revenue from a much more troubled and kind of precarious situation in sustaining large armies and putting down these rebellions and usurpations. And he was generally successful at doing that. So he created the model that they kept for the next, well, three centuries or more.
Lex Fridman (01:08:00) But a lot of the elements of that model lasted even beyond that, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:08:04) Yeah, like universal taxation. I’ll give you an example. Up until then, Italy was exempt from taxes. Italy was the land of the conquerors. The conquerors don’t pay taxes to themselves. The conquerors live off the taxes that others pay, right? So Italy was this big tax haven, right? Diocletian, Galerius, you know, his guys, these guys are from Illyria. They’re from the Balkans.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:08:27) Like why is Italy tax-free exactly, you know? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a very, very wealthy, prosperous part of the world, and so, no, they tax Italy. So now, like, not only do all Romans have the same citizenship and the same law, they all have the same tax system, and the Diocletianic tax code, as it were, it’s not a code, it sounds like a flat tax, which for us sounds regressive. But by those standards, by the standards of that time, it’s actually kind of progressive in a way.
Lex Fridman (01:08:56) Right.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:08:57) It means that, like, even— … elites paid, like, the same, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:09:01) So how much of all of this, everything we’ll talk about in the coming centuries, is all about taxation?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:09:08) I think it’s huge. Taxation is the heart of it.
Lex Fridman (01:09:12) So I mean, the functioning, the success, the flourishing of a society, the way the government works, the way the people are represented, all of it has to do, all the civil wars and everything, it feels like taxation is at the core.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:09:25) Yes. Yeah. If you asked me to put my finger on one factor, it would be that.
Lex Fridman (01:09:30) So the taxation system, that feels like the early framework for the East Roman Empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:09:37) It did create a more sort of homogeneous framework, for sure. By the end of the third century, it’s pretty much in place. What Diocletian does is a universal census, and this is continued by his successors. So every taxable asset in the empire is censused. And so you can now start to have a budget.
Lex Fridman (01:09:59) Now, there is some element, and then you push back against that, some element of Diocletian where he legally limited social and class mobility in part for the taxation system, and made it, in many cases, illegal to move and illegal to quit your job. For example, as I read to guarantee the food supply and land tax, farmers were legally forbidden from moving away from the land they worked, so the state always knew who to tax. And then for soldiers, sons of veterans were legally obligated to serve in the army to maintain troop numbers. You argue that these were tax enforcement mechanisms, not a rigid caste system, and so in practice, the empire remained a society of high mobility.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:10:50) This is a complicated matter. So let’s talk, for example, about soldiers. It’s probably the case that most soldiers’ sons were expected to succeed them. Like most professions where you have an apprenticeship, the son will usually succeed, right? There are a number of other professions that were kind of guild-like in nature, like, for example, shipping.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:11:15) Where there were considerable assets involved in order to secure contracts for insurance purposes for the ships and so forth, and it made sense for those assets to be, you know, passed from father to son. In other words, and with them comes the obligation to continue in that line of work. Some of these things are inherently sort of hereditary, and I don’t think most people would have objected to it. The farmers is probably the only case where it might have actually involved some coercion. There was a category of farmers, and we don’t know how many of them, who were, for fiscal purposes, bound to the land. This doesn’t mean they couldn’t leave the land, like physically. No one’s preventing them from leaving.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:12:03) But they were fiscally responsible for providing the taxes or rents or whatever because the, the state wanted to have a secure revenue stream from, say, those lands. And if… Anyway, it’s, it’s one of these complicated situations. This did create some limitations on, on those people. And it’s a topic of current research, these bound farmers, as it were, who are tied to the land. It’s more of a… You know, someone put it that, you know, most of the time it’s people who own the land, and in this arrangement, it’s the land that owns the, that owns the people.
Lex Fridman (01:12:36) But you’re saying the bigger picture thing is that there was mobility.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:12:39) Oh, there’s considerable mobility.
Lex Fridman (01:12:40) So class mobility- … and physical mobility- … meaning people moved… And we’ll see this from the West into the East and Constantinople and all this kind of stuff.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:12:48) Oh, yeah. There’s tons of mobility. No, no, this is not a society where people are bound really to… We, like, we don’t find anybody who’s, who’s like, “Ah, I really don’t wanna be a soldier. But my father was a soldier, and I’m obligated to be one.” Like- … like, we just don’t hear those kinds of complaints- … of people who don’t wanna be a so- Why wouldn’t you wanna be a soldier in the Roman Empire? I mean, it’s got tremendous perks.
Lex Fridman (01:13:12) So can we just linger on the why is it that Diocletian was able to stabilize the empire? It’s like, you know, the crisis of the third century really threatened to tear apart everything. So why did some of these things that we talked about stabilize?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:13:30) Well, Aurelian had already united the empire territorially.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:13:33) So this is right before Diocletian. And what Diocletian did was put in place a system that reduced the number of rebellions. Simply by having four big guys with four armies, they managed to put out all of those fires, or most of them. And once you have stability, and he also beat the Persians, I mean, Galerius did, so starting to beat back foreign invasions, that creates a framework for economic stability. People need to, you know, if they’re going to invest in, like, land reclamation or expand production, they need to know that, you know, foreigners aren’t gonna come rampaging through, marauding through, you know, stealing their cattle and, you know, enslaving them and taking them off to work on agricultural farms in Mesopotamia. Like, they need to know this.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:14:20) And if you provide that context of stability, the economic growth, the demographic growth will return. And Diocletian created that kind of, that context.
Lex Fridman (01:14:30) So that takes us to Constantine, but first a quick bathroom break, if I can.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:14:35) Sure.

Constantine and the new Roman Empire

Lex Fridman (01:14:36) Quick ten-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to our conversation about the Eastern Roman Empire. All right, we’re back, and let’s talk about Constantine and Constantinople. Let’s go to the rise of the East Roman Empire. Who was Constantine? Tell me about his rise to power and the founding of Constantinople in 330 AD.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:15:08) Sure. So Constantine was the son of one of Diocletian’s colleagues, so he comes from within the system. And the system was actually designed to be non-hereditary. In other words, the senior emperors would retire, the junior ones would move up to the senior position, and then they would recruit two new ones. And they tried to skip the dynastic element. So, so it would be kind of, let’s just say, kinda meritocratic, not whose son, you know, you were. Constantine was a son. He was passed over, but the armies liked him. He was actually quite competent.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:15:43) And so there’s a series of civil wars among all of these successors of Diocletian, and Constantine emerges as the winner. There are periods when there are quite a few of them. There are, like, six at a time, but they gradually dwindle down to one. So yeah, it’s as long as you have the quarterfinals, semifinals, and then the, the final war, and Constantine emerges in 324 as the sole ruler of the entire Roman Empire. So that’s who he is. He’s, he’s definitely an insider, very, very competent general at civil war. And he gradually moves eastward. So as he’s conquering his rivals, who are often at times his fathers-in-law or his brothers-in-law, because these people all intermarry, and they have alliances, and they fall out.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:16:29) It’s one of those kinds of situations. He moves eastward, and by the time he defeats his last rival, an emperor called Licinius, in 324 he’s in the East. And Licinius had his headquarters, or one of his headquarters, at this town called Byzantium. Byzantium is a city right where Constantinople was founded.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:16:53) And it is at exactly the point where Europe meets Asia, so on the Bosporus. And it’s a very strategic location. It always had been, right? So whoever controls the straits of the Bosporus, yeah, we don’t need to explain how important that is. And Constantine decides to create a city named after himself, Constantinople, on that spot, Byzantium. So Byzantium essentially ceases to exist as a city and is replaced by Constantinople, AKA New Rome. So it’s pretty clear that right from the beginning, Constantine intended this to be a kind of branch office of Rome in the East, a kind of copy and paste of Rome in the East, and it’s a plan that his successors continued, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:17:37) Now, there are a number of other cities in this, let’s say, in the generation or two before this, that were also treated as sort of quasi-Romes. Basically, there was this historian in the third century who said, “Well, wherever the emperor is, that’s Rome,” right? ‘Cause emperors are now itinerant. They’re no longer staying at Rome. They’re mostly on the frontier, and Constantine is one of these frontier emperors. They will sometimes visit Rome, maybe once or twice, maybe once a decade, you know, something like this. So Rome becomes something that can be sort of copied and pasted in other parts of the empire, and a bunch of other cities get called, you know, a New Rome, an Other Rome, an Alternative Rome, My Rome. And Constantinople is the last and most successful of those.
Lex Fridman (01:18:28) So maybe can you speak geographically the importance of Constantinople? It’s an interesting place ’cause it- … when you’re talking about a land so large as the West and the East, with enemies, with threats from all kinds of different directions, the location where the emperor sits is important.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:18:46) Very. So look at Rome, right? So it’s right in the middle of Italy, right in the middle of the Mediterranean. Very safe location in a way, but it’s very far from the frontiers. And this is a period when emperors need to be with the armies, right? They’re not senatorial emperors who are sitting in Rome having meetings with senators. They are military emperors who are marching along the frontiers mostly with generals rather than civilian administration. So they’re doing their job. Like, this is the hard work. They’re slogging through the mud of winter campaigns, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:19:24) They’re not just sitting in a palace enjoying themselves when they could. But Rome just becomes inconvenient because of that. And if you look at Constantinople, it is kind of halfway between the Danube frontier and the Euphrates frontier. So if you want to prioritize the East or treat it as an equal part of the Roman Empire, as these emperors all did. In fact, almost all emperors who had a choice about whether they would stay in the East or stay in the West chose the East. There’s only one who chooses the West, and that’s Valentinian later in the fourth century. All the others understand that the East is where it’s at. And Constantinople is right between the Danube and the Euphrates. These are two major frontiers. And so it allows emperors to move between the two.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:20:13) And also look at its location: north, south, east, west, right? So north, south, it is the node between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, right? And east, west, it’s precisely where Europe meets Asia, right? And because there’s a break there, so there’s a Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, the Hellespont, the Roman Empire during the civil wars, it would tend to break there.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:20:38) And you would have one emperor on one side in Asia, and you would have another emperor on the other side. And this just kept happening. And Constantinople ultimately functions as a kind of clamp that unifies this whole area, so basically the Balkans and Asia Minor and Syria as a kind of unit, right? And, you know, what is a new Rome? A new Rome is, among other things, a new senate, right? And Constantine and his successors recruit this new senate for the new Rome. So we’re talking about maybe two and a half thousand, 3,000 men, you know, at, at, at its peak, and these are all recruited from all of these areas. You know, some come from Rome, but others come from the Aegean region, from Asia Minor, Eastern Mediterranean.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:21:32) So these are the wealthiest people, usually most well-connected elites from the whole Eastern Mediterranean, and they come together and form a new purpose, common purpose in Constantinople. And the empire never breaks there again. Right? So it, it holds together this part of the world. The breaking point now, interestingly, moves to the Adriatic, right? So when, in 395, we talked about East and West kind of splitting.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:21:57) It breaks at the Adriatic ’cause Constantinople is now holding that whole Eastern world together. ‘Cause all of these elites, they now, they’re invested in it. They’re literally investing in it. They have to invest in it in order to be senators in Constantinople. So that’s kind of one of the functions that it, that it performs, a strategic function. There’s a political function. There’s also a cultural one, but you know, we can talk about that, too. But that’s what you see there on that map, the northwest, east, south.
Lex Fridman (01:22:24) So just to linger on it, so you, you do a podcast, Byzantium and Friends, but you’re also a guest on podcasts, and I should mention you being a guest multiple times on the excellent The History of Byzantium podcast hosted by Robin Pierson. I highly recommend people listen to it, to all of your appearances. You have a lot of really fascinating ones. But the reason I bring all that up is, one of the episodes, you do the fun thing of selecting the top 10 emperors of Byzantium, and spoiler alert, everybody should go listen to the full list ’cause you justify all the different options. But Constantine ends up in the number one spot. And so can you just add a little bit more depth why he would be in your number one spot- … now that we’re talking about him?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:23:17) Yes. It’s not because I sort of like him as a person, right? I mean- … as you said, he was pretty murderous. Right? All those wars, so clearly ambitious, murderous, ruthless, basically.
Lex Fridman (01:23:30) Can you actually speak to the murderous aspect? He seemed to have murdered a lot of people in his family.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:23:36) Yes, that’s because what we call his family were also alliances of convenience that he made on the way to the top. And when those alliances or, you know, those, you know, those wives or those fathers-in-law were no longer convenient or, or turned against him, he had no hesitation in removing them. But he’s also, you know, he gets a, a little extra bonus because he also murdered his own son, Crispus, who was- … apparently a very competent and popular kind of general, and we don’t know why. He executes Crispus soon after defeating Licinius, and then follows it up with the murder of his wife-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:24:18) … not Crispus’ mother, and we don’t know why. The funny thing is that when emperors do this sort of thing, if there’s any kind of remotely, like, a good reason, they’ll blast it through all of the media, right? Like, “Crispus was rebelling against me,” or whatever. There’s nothing. He doesn’t even try to justify it, which means it must have been something unjustifiable. Like, I don’t know. I can’t process it.
Lex Fridman (01:24:41) And also, I read that the historians of the time would just ignore that that happened.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:24:47) Yes. Well, sort of. So when Crispus is alive, it’s all, like, praising Crispus as, “Oh, Constantine, you great emperor, and your wonderful son who will…” whatever. And then Crispus is executed, and he just disappears from the, like- … they never talk about him.
Lex Fridman (01:25:02) Yeah. Actually, as another side to a side, I think you mentioned whether it’s on your podcast or elsewhere, that if you had to have a beer with any of the emperors, you probably wouldn’t. So it’s not like some of the most impactful, some of the most influential and great emperors that we talk about, they might not be very pleasant people.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:25:27) Right. So let’s set aside whether you’d like to have a beer with these people. The reason I put Constantine at the top of the list is because the decisions that he made were so consequential, just important, and for the most part, not bad decisions. So I couldn’t not put him at the top of the list. The, you know, creating Constantinople and converting to Christianity and setting the empire on a path to conversion, these are major, like, world history level decisions.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:26:02) Right? Now, not many emperors do that. In fact, Constantine is in, like, his own league when it comes to those kinds of decisions. My other criteria for top emperors were basically those who did the job well, right? Not making, you know, these kinds of earth, you know, shattering decisions or, you know, world history changing decisions, but just who performed the role competently with results that impacted the lives of their subjects for the better. So those are the other criteria that I used. It’s difficult to juggle these different criteria, right, in order to create a systematic list. And by the way, we, historians, generally don’t do these kinds of things. But you said it’s fun.
Lex Fridman (01:26:44) It’s fun.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:26:44) It is fun.
Lex Fridman (01:26:45) It was fun. It was fun.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:26:45) And it allows you to talk about certain things that you might not otherwise do. So yeah, that’s why Constantine was at the top.

Christianity in the Roman Empire

Lex Fridman (01:26:53) So you mentioned Christianity. That was one other big component of his rule. What was the role of Christianity in Constantine’s life, in the lives of the citizens of the new Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:27:08) At this stage, Christianity doesn’t have a role. It actually took the emperors… When the emperors took it on board, that is, they made it a part of the imperial system, then it began to acquire a role within the system. Previously, it had imagined itself as having its own history, like not necessarily part of the empire or affiliated with imperial power. But after Constantine, it does acquire a role.
Lex Fridman (01:27:34) And so actually, one way to ask that question, which is fascinating, ’cause you said that there’s like, there’s Rome, and then there’s like cultures or traditions like Christianity or being Greek, that kind of thing. So one of the ways to ask this question is: does Christianity triumph over Rome, or did Rome capture Christianity?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:27:58) Right. Yes. That’s a—
Lex Fridman (01:28:00) Which is the mechanism?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:28:04) I would lean more toward the second. In other words, that the religion was co-opted by the imperial system. Now, there are many areas in which that’s not the case and where the opposite happens, so I’m not gonna be absolute about it, but I think it’s very important to recognize that because Christianity generates this narrative of triumph— … right, which modern historians perpetuate, and it’s framed in very particular ways. In other words, that Christianity triumphs over the ancient religions.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:28:31) Right? So displacing Zeus and Apollo and all of that, and animal sacrifice is gone, and like, that’s because Christianity triumphs, and that’s a very narrow way of looking at it. In other words, you pick your enemy, and then you can defeat that enemy, right? But if you look in the other direction, there’s, like, the Roman imperial state, and you cannot say that Christianity either triumphed over it or even tamed it or anything. It actually became part of it.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:28:56) In many ways that, you know, determined its history for centuries and, in fact, down to today. So this is very different, for example, from the history of Islam. So Islam comes into existence without a preexisting state to receive it and take it on board. It creates its own state, right? So the Muslim armies, they conquer this empire, and then they have to sort of govern it. They think according to whatever Islamic principles. The Quran doesn’t say anything about running an empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:29:29) So that creates a completely different society, right, where, like, Islam is really a primary kind of identity and, like, drives a lot of developments. But Christianity comes into existence within a very well-developed society and political system. Now, here’s the thing. We don’t know exactly how many Christians existed in the time of Constantine. Well, we speculate maybe 10% of the empire. That might be very high, right? But even if it’s 10%, it’s not a lot, and these are not, like, elites for the most part. Maybe middle, you know, what we loosely call middle class, a few elites, a few slaves, like this kind of thing. Mostly urban, and keeping in mind, most of the population is rural.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:30:14) Right? So pockets of concentrated, you know, Christian groups in cities. That’s what we’re talking about. Not terribly politically powerful.
Lex Fridman (01:30:22) So Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and moving the empire towards Christianity is not something where it’s a gigantic majority of the people— … or it’s a political convenience because it’s the elites. It’s something else. I mean, it’s a pretty revolutionary decision, I would say.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:30:38) Exactly. Now, there used to be theories that Constantine did this for, like, pragmatic, cynical reasons, that he, like, wasn’t a true Christian or anything, but there was some kind of political gain to be had here. But I have never read a convincing account of what exactly that political gain is. We now know that there are fewer Christians. They were not that influential. You can make an argument that bishops are a kind of convenient social influencers, you might say. Like, you can use those. They’re not a threat to your position.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:31:08) Right? So a bishop is not gonna try to take the throne. So they’re not dangerous political operatives in that way. But they do have some influence over sectors of society, and so that might be a… Okay, I see that, but I don’t quite see the argument for, like, going full Christian just to get the support of some bishops, who actually pretty quickly turn out to be, some of them, more trouble than they’re worth. Anyway, so I have not yet seen a convincing political argument for Constantine’s decision, which means that you then fall back on a personal explanation that he did this because he was a believing Christian, right? And he came out, you know, in support of the religion that he held, and that’s kind of where most scholars are today.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:31:53) Though, I gotta tell you, historians are very uncomfortable about personal choice, like explaining history in terms of these kinds of personal choices. Because Constantine’s conversion is like, it’s massive. It opens the door. It incentivizes so many people to also convert.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:32:11) ‘Cause Romans will generally do what their, you know, rulers will tell them. If we’ve mentioned Hadrian a few times, Hadrian had this lover, Antinous, Greek boy from Bithynia, who died in an accident in Egypt, whatever, and Hadrian said basically that Antinous should be regarded as a god throughout the empire. And he was. We have, like, more statues and busts of Antinous from all of these temples all over the empire than I think of anyone else except Hadrian. So yeah, if the emperor says, like, “This is a person who’s a god now, you know, put statues of him everywhere,” they will. And when Constantine comes out in favor of Christianity, you know, suddenly people discover that, oh, this is an interesting rite. It’s got the support of the emperor.
Lex Fridman (01:32:53) So one of the things here, going to the Perplexity, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity is usually dated to 312 AD linked to a visionary experience before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Do you believe that vision, that he had this religious experience before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge? Here it says, “But historians debate both its nature and its sincerity.”
Anthony Kaldellis (01:33:18) Well—
Lex Fridman (01:33:18) Do you believe the sincerity of that experience?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:33:20) Before we even get to the sincerity— … is the problem of the sources. This is reported by authors writing later in the aftermath of a victory when the emperor… Like, one of them had a dinner conversation with the emperor a few decades later, and he said, “Well, let me tell you about the Milvian Bridge.” And it’s like, okay, I’m not gonna believe that. I’m not gonna take that at face value, rather. It’s a much more complicated… You know, this is how the emperor wants things to be remembered.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:33:43) That’s different. Also, Constantine tended to have a lot of religious visions. He had had religious visions of Apollo before Christ, and we have sources that talk about that, too, that he went to this temple in Gaul, and Apollo appeared to him in the form of light. Okay, Constantine has a religious vision every time he kind of wants to shift policies and his, like, profile. Like, when he wanted to break away from his other emperors who used to go for the—like, they went for this kind of Jupiter/Hercules model. And he shifted to an Apollo model. This is a branding. This is emperors doing branding.
Lex Fridman (01:34:15) So we should say that, as you’ve described, Constantine is a pragmatist. He’s very pragmatic. But you’re saying it’s fair to believe, based on the evidence, that he actually converged towards being a Christian believer.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:34:32) Yeah. It’s very possible, in fact plausible, that he thought the Christian God had helped him in battle. And, you know, for someone like him, that’s as good a reason as any to support that god.
Lex Fridman (01:34:44) But he was not, like, a hardcore Christian all the way through. He was a kind of a spiritual, religious kind of person. He thought about religions more generally and just converged towards Christianity as a good religion. He also had ideas about what a good religion is— … and what a bad religion is, that kind of stuff. So he’s thinking in this space.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:35:08) He’s tending not to be too explicit. Depending on the audience. So Constantine remains a pragmatist in the sense that he doesn’t want to alienate too many of his subjects, right? And so he’s sometimes a bit coy or elusive about what he’s getting at. When he’s talking to Christians, he will talk about Christ. He will mention Christ. When he’s talking to everybody else in, like, a general law, he’ll just refer to good religion. And it’s like you, like, you, maybe you know what I mean, right? But he’s not gonna, like, you know, come to Jesus. Right?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:35:44) So even at the time when he’s, like, supporting the church, like, basically institutionalizing the church as an part—of the imperial system, but he’s also putting up statues of himself that look like Apollo in Constantinople, right? So the focal point of Constantine’s Constantinople is the Forum of Constantine. And in the middle is this very tall column, and it has a colossal statue of Constantine on top, gilded, enormous thing. I don’t know, like, eight meters tall or whatever. But it’s a repurposed Apollo. It’s even, it, like, visibly so. It’s naked. It has the rays coming out of the-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:36:22) … head, right? Right. And everybody knew it was an Apollo. So that’s Constantine in the guise of his old patron god, Apollo. Still, but he’s still Christian Constantine, so he’s sending all of these different messages.
Lex Fridman (01:36:34) I mean, he likes being the god-like figure. I mean, that whole statue just is like, “I am the god.”
Anthony Kaldellis (01:36:41) Yeah. It’s assimilating yourself to… Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:36:43) And I mean, a lot of the Romans, is it fair to say, kinda saw the emperor a little bit in that light?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:36:48) No, yeah. Oh, yeah. They called him divine and— yeah. That, there’s not a hard theology there, right? Like, if you pressed them on the actual theology, they wouldn’t— … they wouldn’t say the emperor is a god. No. This is mushy. This gets very, very mushy.
Lex Fridman (01:37:01) But I mean, a lot of the Christians have a kinda humility before God. I think when you have an emperor that’s god-like, it gets a little weird-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:37:11) Yes. Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:37:13) … in the way you talk about God.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:37:15) It depends on the context. Like, there are contexts in which you are an emperor and you’re proclaiming your majesty, and then there are more personal contexts where you might be more humble because, I don’t know, you’re being baptized or something. Like, those are different contexts.
Lex Fridman (01:37:29) So can you speak to the whole process of the conversion to Christianity, of the- … propagation of Christianity throughout the empire and Constantine’s role in that?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:37:38) Constantine, or his successors as well, because this was a gradual process, and it takes a very long time. So let’s let’s put it into perspective. We probably can’t talk about a majority Christian society until maybe the 5th century, or early 5th— … mid-5th. We, we don’t have data, obviously. And we can’t talk about, like, a solidly Christian society until early 6th century. And by solidly, I mean maybe where the non-Christians are 10, 15%, right? So that’s a long time. That’s, like, five centuries after Jesus. That’s half a millennium. So we’re talking about a half-millennial process here. It’s, it’s very long.
Lex Fridman (01:38:25) But it’s only a couple of centuries after Constantine.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:38:28) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:38:28) So it takes- … about two centuries to really make the Roman Empire Christian
Anthony Kaldellis (01:38:34) Yes. So very slow conversion, maybe, maybe up to 10% tops under Constantine. Then obviously larger and larger groups join the church, even if only nominally, right? Until you get to the sixth century when you’re clearly talking about a, you know, mostly or overwhelmingly Christian society. A lot of this is just done through incentives and disincentives, right? So bishops are given funds with which to distribute, like, charity and help to communities in distress. They have lists of widows and whatever they support. Land is given to the church by the emperors or in wills so that they can engage in this kind of social policy. And then there are disincentives. So emperors pass laws that increasingly restrict the exercise of traditional religion.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:39:25) Like, you can’t perform animal sacrifices, then you can’t start doing these like tying ribbons to make wishes or, like, all of these things, like going out to sacred trees and doing this or that, because they say, “Oh, this is kind of nefarious business,” or, like, magic or whatever it is. And then they just gradually start outlawing it more and more, putting restrictions on, like, if you’re not a Christian, you can’t hold these high offices or you can’t… Your… There’s problems with your wills. So they gradually do it like that. And this is how you… Yeah, this is… And it works. It works.
Lex Fridman (01:39:58) What explains the success of Christianity after Constantine? Why, why was it, as a technology, so successful at spreading throughout the empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:40:08) Christianity developed in a number of ways. So it acquired a certain number of forms that were capable of appealing to different constituencies. In other words, there was an intellectual side to it, the sort of theology, the almost quasi-philosophical or engagement with philosophical schools that could draw in, let’s say, intellectuals. There is a public ceremony and ritual aspect where you can organize communities and cities to have processions or, like, have all these festivals that take the place of the ancient ones. You have a kind of, it’s not secretive, but it’s kind of this initiatory aspect where there’s this baptism and you learn a sort of creed, and you’re initiated into the religion with the prospect of a personal afterlife, right? And that appeals to other kinds of people.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:41:12) There’s also ways in which it integrated itself into the court and the language of power. Also in the army, right? Soldiers now swear an oath to the Trinity, right? So it takes all of these different forms that enable it to position itself, you know, here and there and, you know, in the streets, in the court, in the armies, in the churches, in texts, in books. And so it has this kind of manifold diversity, right, that makes it very adaptable.
Lex Fridman (01:41:44) So one of the things you mentioned that Constantine did not anticipate, did not realize, is that Christianity creates divisions between various groups.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:41:53) So in part, this is, happens when you have religions that make exclusive claims, right? Like, my beliefs are true- … and yours are by definition false. Not, not just wrong, but false and even kind of evil. Like maybe— … Satan put them in your mind to- … lead you astray, right? And this is inherently divisive. Like, it is. So there’s this paradox where Christianity, in contrast to, say, the ancient religions, is both far more polarizing but also far more powerful as a unifying force at the same time, right? So ancient religions tended not to produce this kind of conflict or identities, right, or wars or these kinds of things. And they could under certain circumstances, but for the most part, they were not drivers of history in this kind of way.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:42:47) But when you have exclusive claims, then suddenly these very communities that are sort of consolidated and have this very strong identity, but you also alienate other groups— … that you then are in conflict with. So this is why I, for one, can’t come down on whether, you know, Christianity is more of a unifying force or a divisive force in the history of the Eastern Empire, because it’s both.
Lex Fridman (01:43:14) And also trying to figure out whether the unifying or the divisive aspects are a feature or a bug.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:43:21) Right.
Lex Fridman (01:43:21) Maybe some of the divisive elements is a way for society internally to try to, much like the civil wars, to try to figure itself out.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:43:31) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:43:31) So sometimes tension and conflict is a good mechanism for figuring out what do the people want.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:43:36) Or what’s the truth, right?
Lex Fridman (01:43:38) Or what’s the truth.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:43:39) Yeah. So the story that it likes to tell itself is that there’s this, like, this one original truth, and the hardcore of true believers is defending that truth at every moment against all of these evil heretics who are coming in-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:43:52) … and trying to corrupt it. In reality, what happens is that this truth is something that’s evolving in the course of the controversies. And, like, often they don’t know that they believed that until in retrospect, once they’ve had the fight and the winner has this position, oh, now that turns out to have been the position we always held, right? And this happens again and again and again. You know, a lot of the time, these Christian theologians who get into so much trouble and get branded as heretics and sometimes get sent into exile, they didn’t mean any harm. They often just were stating what they thought everybody believed.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:44:31) And then when they blurt it out, someone off in Alexandria is like, “What? That’s heresy.” And then now you’re, now you’re in trouble. Now you’re getting into this fight, and you might win, you might lose. But, like, a lot of them were kind of sort of well-intentioned in that way, or they had no intention of starting a fight. But there’s always someone who wants to start a fight.
Lex Fridman (01:44:49) Yeah, I mean, sometimes the fights are extremely intense over things that I could see on the surface or, like, iconography. It’s like, it seems like a very subtle- … debate, like almost academic. And then a large number of people don’t see it as academic. They, they do see it like “the devil put ideas in your head that are—” … completely wrong, and it’s, it’s fascinating how that kind of division can emerge. I mean, the impossible question, and I apologize for asking it, but maybe just worthwhile to try to think about it is, on the grand scale of centuries of the East Roman Empire, is religion a constructive or a destructive force for the empire? Did it help it flourish, or did it hold it back?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:45:41) This society identified itself increasingly with what it saw as orthodoxy. Orthodoxy just means correct belief. I mean-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:45:49) … like every religion ultimately thinks it’s orthodox, right? That’s– But that’s the conventional name, right? Orthodoxy today might be called Greek Orthodoxy. And I mean, it’s such an essential part of the culture. It really is. I can’t think of the two of them inde… I mean, I try to because, as a historian, I have to test the models, you know, and try to see these things as independent of each other. But ultimately, it’s very difficult to disentangle them, and I would say that to the degree that this is a successful society historically, that its religion definitely contributed to that and played a role in it. Not without cost, right? It mattered to them. They valued it, but things that matter to you have a cost.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:46:38) And, and they, they paid that price. They were willing to pay that price for it. For example, at the very end, they had to choose between Catholicism, Western rule, where they essentially have to compromise on their faith, or rule by Muslims, the Turks, where they would not have to compromise their faith. And some of them were explicit that they were preferring option B, because the Turks will at least respect our identity. Like, that’s a cost.
Lex Fridman (01:47:09) Yeah. But there’s other layers, like taxation and- … the, the, the functions of government- … that are connected to religion to the degree it interacts with the, the tax system. But it feels like that’s the engine of the society and, and religion is more like the cultural layer.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:47:27) Yeah. So this is why I said that I try in thinking of the models that we use to understand the society, not to assume that religion is everywhere and for everything. Now, I have colleagues who do that, and I would disagree with them about this, but you’re exactly right. There are elements of this society that I like to see as their own thing.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:47:50) Like the Roman identity, for example. It’s not the same as Orthodoxy. But also the operations of the state. Those are very pragmatic things, and you see them intersect with religion in, largely in areas of terminology or the vocabulary that they use or, you know, like at the top, but not at their actual functioning. So in my field, I’m a historian who’s tried to promote other aspects of the culture as having a kind of integrity of their own and not to subsume them all within Orthodoxy.
Lex Fridman (01:48:28) So, I mean, again, an impossible way of asking the same question. If you asked a Roman, a million Romans across a thousand years, “Are you a Roman or a Christian?” what would be the answer for that?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:48:45) Oh, both. Oh, absolutely.
Lex Fridman (01:48:47) No, you don’t get to say both. You’re not allowed to do that.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:48:49) Why not? It’s the-
Lex Fridman (01:48:50) Well, you’re-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:48:50) It’s the true answer.
Lex Fridman (01:48:52) Okay. So you’re saying they’re really tied together.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:48:55) Well, they overlap. But if you were to… And this might be a somewhat more subtle conversation than most of them would want to have, but if you were to say, “Is Roman and Christian the same thing to you?” If they thought about it for a little while, they’d quickly be able to say no. Because there were, I mean, just logically, there were Christians who were not Romans.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:49:20) The Bulgarians or the Rus or, you know, whoever. There were lots of Christians who were not Roman, and they did not regard them as Roman just because they were Christian. Conversely, they knew perfectly well that there had been Romans who were not Christians, and they knew this how? Because in the churches like almost every week, they celebrated martyrs who had been killed by the Roman emperors in the past. And so it was, like, the performance of violence by Roman emperors against Christians was, like, something they remembered. They knew perfectly well. So those two things did not overlap perfectly.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:49:55) And there were some contexts in which you would be more Roman, and there were some contexts in which you would be more Christian. And you find characters who, and I love to do this. I find characters who as some sources say didn’t pay too much attention to Christian things. Like, they were just politicians. They were just doing their work. And then you find characters who, like, devote themselves. They go all in on Orthodoxy and, like, monasticism. They just don’t care about the Roman stuff at all.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:50:25) And that is, in fact, part of the reason why I like this society, is because it has these kinds of options for people to choose. And there’s another one. There’s the Greek stuff, too, because their language is Greek, their literature is Greek, and so there are people in the society who go all in on the Greek stuff. Right? And I see this society as this kind of laboratory of these three elements coexisting in these fascinating combinations. Usually it’s combinations, right? But sometimes you’ll find people who are like, kinda try to be purists in one way or another. And it’s the only society in history in which you can do this, ’cause it’s the only society that’s Roman and Christian and Greek. But in different ways, right?
Lex Fridman (01:51:06) Yeah, unfortunately, I think it’s tempting, but it’s probably impossible to say if we remove the taxation system, would the, would the Roman Empire be more or less successful? If we removed religion, would it be more or less successful? If we removed Greek and kept it Latin all the way through, would it be more or less successful? It’s probably impossible to do this kind of analysis ’cause they’re all so deeply integrated.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:51:33) And fundamentally, it also wouldn’t be what it was. It would be something different.
Lex Fridman (01:51:39) But there is a big temptation, and this is at the core of your work, to understand why did the East Roman Empire last as long as it did. And why did the broader Roman Empire last as long as it did? Because it is one of, if not the most successful empires in terms of duration and stability in a very dense part of the world.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:52:02) That’s actually like my next project. I’m starting to write a book trying to explain, just kind of from an analytical standpoint, why.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Lex Fridman (01:52:11) How did it last so long? A lot of your work kinda hints at it. It’s here and there. But you’re trying to do more systematic. So, and we’ll keep hinting at it. But to put a bow tie on Constantinople, it went from a very low population of maybe 25,000 people to 500,000 people in just two centuries. So can you explain how that happened?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:52:37) Well, it didn’t happen through just demographic growth and reproduction in the city itself. That rate of growth is impossible for an ancient city. So when I say 20,000, 25,000, that’s possibly what the ancient city of Byzantium had-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:52:53) … when Constantine decided to found Constantinople, and it grew to a city of a half a million in two centuries. That can only have been done in one way, and that is immigration from the provinces. So people must have been moving there in large numbers, which is a movement that we can’t see very clearly in the sources, but we have to infer it and then try to explain it. So also there’s another factor, which is that ancient cities we now know or suspect are what some historians call death traps. In other words, the density of disease is such that ancient cities probably are losing something like 1, 2, possibly 3% of their population per year. So just in order to stay with a stable population, they have to import people.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:53:49) Right? Now, they’re not like 17th century London. They’re not that bad.
Lex Fridman (01:53:53) Do diseases and plagues seem to be prevalent?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:53:56) Oh, yeah. Now, you know, Roman cities have some corrections for these sorts of things, like the way they distribute the water through the city. Anyway, they, they weren’t as bad as they could’ve been, but there’s that. So not only to keep the population steady, but to expand it so dramatically means that a lot of people are coming in from the provinces, mostly the Greek-speaking provinces. So, you know, Greece, Asia Minor, and some of the major cities in the East that are Greek-speaking. And I start to wonder, like, well, how did this happen? Like, who are these people, for one thing? And then I did some simple calculations. So I mentioned earlier that we have something like two and a half thousand senators-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:54:40) … Who are required initially to reside in Constantinople. Well, senators don’t live in bachelor pads. Senators have manors. They have household staff, right? In Rome at the time, there’s a calculation that a senatorial household was something like 100 people, right? Just servants, slaves, dancing girls, cooks, barbers, whatever, right? So let’s assume sort of conservatively that in Constantinople it’s only 30 people, which might be low, right? So if you do the math, you’re starting to get something like, I mean, closer to 100,000 people, right? And that’s just by bringing in senators.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:55:22) Right? They come with people. So I think this was the nucleus of the population. Now then Constantine also makes provision for possibly up to like 200,000 people to receive the, the grain dole, the bread. So that would’ve incentivized even more people to travel there because there are-
Lex Fridman (01:55:46) So you get free bread.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:55:47) Yes. And you can’t live on that alone, but it is, it’s something.
Lex Fridman (01:55:51) Incentive. Is it true that he diverted resources from Rome to Constantinople?
Anthony Kaldellis (01:55:55) Absolutely. Oh, yeah. That grain, that’s coming from Egypt. So New Rome is literally stealing food from the mouth of Old Rome. Now, Old Rome doesn’t starve because they, they divert other… Like from North Africa and Sicily, you can feed Rome, right?
Lex Fridman (01:56:11) But it sends a strong signal to the people living in Old Rome that long term we should probably move.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:56:18) Some people do move. So we know of some senators who move from Rome. It sends a signal about the priorities of the state, like they’re investing much more in the East. And that the East would be regarded as an equal parallel Roman, you know, world. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:56:33) As we talk about diverting resources, slowly the West declines and collapses in 476 AD. So the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD, and in 476 AD, the last Western emperor is deposed, marking the end of the Western Roman Empire. High-level question: What is the reason for that decline and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire? So nonstop civil wars, as we’ve talked about, weak emperors. There’s an economic money crisis, so shrinking tax base, rising army costs. There was a loss of key provinces, especially in North Africa. Reliance on contracted barbarian troops as they immigrated more and more into- … The Western Roman Empire. Cascading invasions, migrations amplified by Hun pressure, and then the East-West split. The richer East survives, the West can’t stabilize under- … that split.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:57:48) Yeah. The crux of the matter is that barbarian armies, so armies from outside the empire, put increasing pressure on it during the fifth century. And for whatever reason, when the Roman state failed to sort of suppress one of them and, say, settled them here or allowed them to have here or couldn’t stop them and they took over a province like the Vandals did in North Africa- … this created this kind of vicious cycle because then the Roman state lost access to the resources from those provinces, that is the taxes, and without those resources, they couldn’t, you know, maintain, mobilize, pay for their armies.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:58:28) Then they had fewer armies to handle the next wave of barbarians that came in. The previous barbarians who settled kind of declared their kind of independence. They also could not be put down, and so this created a vicious cycle that just continued in that way. It’s not rocket science, actually. I mean, you can see it playing out. Yeah. Now, who these groups are, where they came from, why did they cross, that, that, those are different questions, right? But from the Roman standpoint, that’s how it was experienced. These are armies that can defeat a Roman field army-
Anthony Kaldellis (01:59:03) … right, in battle. And sometimes they do. And they then settle and take over territories, and then you lose the revenues, and so you can’t recruit your own armies. And so, anyway, that, that’s the kind of cycle. The East tried to help. Occasionally, they would send forces, but they were also subject to some of the same pressures. ‘Cause remember, the Goths cross the Danube for the first time in a major way in 376. Then you have the Battle of Adrianople a couple years later, where, like, one and a half field armies is just annihilated, and the Emperor Valens dies, and the Goths are just, like, kind of loose in the Balkans. And there was then a long war with them, four years.
Anthony Kaldellis (01:59:44) It results in a kind of truce where neither side wins, and the Romans, for the first time, accept the presence of this quasi-independent Gothic army in the territory of the empire. This is unprecedented, as I said, and it creates a lot of tensions and dysfunctions. Okay, so why does the East survive and the West does not, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:00:08) There’s… And so… Lots of reasons that we can give here, but one of them is the geography that we were talking about earlier. In other words, without a fleet, which they don’t have, the Goths can’t cross over from Thrace or the western Balkans to Asia Minor and go plunder some of the more prosperous provinces. So they’re stuck in the Balkans. They’re gradually pushed kind of in toward the western Balkans, which is, like, the worst part, you know, at the time, like, you wanna be in. And eventually, they just decide, “Well, you know, it’s kinda nicer in Naples.” And so they go to Italy, right? Just because there’s just a lot more resources there for them. And that’s one way that the East just kind of manages to…
Anthony Kaldellis (02:00:54) It doesn’t do this deliberately, but the geography kind of pushes these invaders to the West.
Lex Fridman (02:01:00) So that’s one. So geography is some of it’s sort of the luck of geography and- … both of the invaders and the geography of the empire. But, you know, the, the East had a lot of invaders since- … and was able to still barely at times- … survive the invaders, so… And some of that could be luck. Some of it could be about the nature of the invaders and the effectiveness of their military, all that kind of stuff.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:01:30) By the way, it worked in the other direction, too. So if you have, like, Persians or Arabs coming into Asia Minor from the East, they usually can’t cross over into your Balkan provinces. So you can fall back on one side or the other side. They… If you fortified Constantinople so that it’s an impregnable bunker, which it was, right? So you, you’re holding your command center in Constantinople. You can alternate between your European or your Asian provinces, depending on where the trouble is. You can call in reinforcements from either side. So the East does have that kind of advantage. This is not the reason why it survives for as long as it does, though it is a reason. You know, also, they acquire flamethrowers at some point, which- … those help, too.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:02:12) Right? Ultimately, I think it’s the decision made by local communities to stick with the Roman state, like, ultimately. Like, they’re not going to actively side with invaders. And when the trouble passes, they restore communities with Constantinople immediately. Like, this is their natural political home. And, and that’s the question that I’m really trying to answer, like, why does that happen?
Lex Fridman (02:02:36) You know, we should say, just, just like we’ve articulated multiple times, that it, the Roman Empire survives- so it’s not like the Roman Empire collapsed and another Byzantine Empire was born. Really, there is a shift that happens, and part of that shift is because of Constantine, right? It’s not just about where the capital is, but I’m sure that there’s just a general move towards that direction from the West to the East. And, and that in many ways, you know, weak emperors and, and the West, the weak leaders, the structure of government, all these kinds of elements put together- … maybe demographic shifts and declines that have to do with the fact that the center of the empire has moved. And so ultimately-
Lex Fridman (02:03:27) … it’s not that the West Roman Empire collapsed, it is that the center of the Roman Empire shifted. And because of that, the historic West collapsed.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:03:38) It’s quite striking. So for example, already by, like in the 430s, Constantinople is basically codifying Roman law for the West. So Roman law in Latin is codified in Constantinople, and then sent to the West as, “Oh, here’s your law code.” And this is in the 430s, so after the alleged division between the two, which like I said, is kind of loose. It’s not hard and fast. In the 6th century, it is the East that reconquers part of the West under Justinian.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:04:10) And not only that, he also recodifies Roman law on a much bigger scale, and then that law becomes Western law. So in a certain sense, Roman law as we know it comes from Constantinople. It doesn’t come from ancient Rome. I mean, ultimately it comes from ancient Rome, but we don’t have those versions of it. We have the East Roman versions of it. It is East Rome that reconquers Rome. This is a funny inversion, you know, because Constantinople is situated in a province, Thrace, which always was sort of considered backwards, right? In the time of, like, the early Caesars, if you were in Rome and you thought, you know, Thrace, it was like, “Ugh.” It’s like, you know, some sort of, yeah, armpit of the Roman Empire or something, you know?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:04:54) But by Justinian’s time, it’s complete inversion. Like, the capital of the Roman world, the heart of it is there, and Rome is this kind of backwater provincial city in Italy, you know, that you’ve just liberated from the Goths, and it’s kind of in ruins. There are wolves roaming the streets of the Forum. So this is a complete overhaul of the centers of power. It’s turned inside out almost.

Eunuchs, Taxes, and Power

Lex Fridman (02:05:18) And I think it’s fair to say that the reason the East… Part of the reason the East lasted as long as it did is the topic that we’ve mentioned, which is the structure of government. So can we just zoom out once again and explain the key ways the government functioned in the East Roman Empire, and how it evolved over the lifetime of the empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:05:38) Very broadly speaking, there’s civilian and military, right? And you might actually add the church. It’s entirely plausible to treat the church as a kind of government institution at this time. But let’s just stick with military and civilian. The military is pretty straightforward, would be recognizable to any student of military history. This is how you recruit, organize, equip, pay, and lead soldiers. And the East Roman state tends to have a larger military, at least paper strength. Active is a different matter. Like, how many soldiers you take on a campaign is a different matter, but how many soldiers you maintain, like, in the provinces generally, right, is a… It tends to be on the large side for a medieval society, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:06:30) So it compares favorably to, say, the Caliphate later on, which is a much more massive territorial entity. So the military is that. It can have anywhere between 100,000 at a minimum, at a low point, up to maybe about 250,000 at a high point, depending on the period. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of men. Factor in their families, right? These are also, like, part of the whole, you know, military economic complex, if you will.
Lex Fridman (02:07:05) And they’re career military, so, like, this is their job.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:07:08) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:07:09) And is the military for most of the history of the East Roman Empire defensive military?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:07:16) Mostly, but not always.
Lex Fridman (02:07:18) And we’ll talk about Justinian.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:07:21) And so then you have the civilian administration. Civilian administration does a number of things. Principally, it is to find the funds to pay for this army, which is the single largest expense on the state budget, right? And so in order to find those funds, it has to have a census of the assets, and it has to be able to tax them, and there are lots of different ways of doing that. So the civilian administration has a number of tax bureaus, record-keeping, this sort of thing, also a legal branch for resolving disputes with the imperial fisc. Okay. But the civilian administration does a number of other things, too.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:08:00) For example, the whole legal regulation of the empire: the courts, judges, courts of appeal, or also issuing laws, keeping records, all of this. And those are the main bureaus that have to do with the subjects of the empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:08:21) The emperors obviously maintain bureaus that are for things like diplomacy, right, or running the palace staff because the palace is a huge institution, right? And then there are a number of endowments that, you know, major churches, Hagia Sophia, for example, has hundreds of staff, clergy to, you know, readers to whatever, and so they need to be paid, and so you need endowments. The imperial household, it has expenses, so it needs endowments, right? So there’s a lot of land that’s earmarked for these kinds of expenses, that requires administration. So this multiplies, right? I mean, go on and on and on and on.
Lex Fridman (02:08:58) And I’m sure the tax code is not a simple flat tax. It’s- … probably incredibly complicated. So it’s just like in the United States, it feels like the majority of the United States is basically lawyers and the IRS. That’s maybe 98%, I think, is lawyers.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:09:18) Lawyers.
Lex Fridman (02:09:18) I’m not sure it’s scientifically-
Anthony Kaldellis (02:09:20) I thought they shrunk the IRS down now to a size that it can’t, like, actually do anything.
Lex Fridman (02:09:24) They shrunk it down-
Anthony Kaldellis (02:09:25) I thought it was just-
Lex Fridman (02:09:26) … to just 90% now.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:09:27) 90, just 90.
Lex Fridman (02:09:29) No. I think there is something—this is another conversation about human nature and about the nature of governments, but there’s something about, like, I think it’s impossible to have an IRS-type organization that doesn’t grow. I think maybe with good intentions because you can’t—you have to, like— … everybody always comes to you, “Well, I don’t… Here’s my special case. I want my tax to be lower.” And they kind of add another line. “All right, if you have— … purple hair, you—”
Anthony Kaldellis (02:10:06) Right, right.
Lex Fridman (02:10:06) … the tax decrease. And so you keep adding, and then of course, the more you add, the more opaque the thing becomes. Therefore, corruption seeps in or, you know, maybe not like official corruption, but— … corruption light, and then that tax code grows, and then all of a sudden you have these big institutions that then—
Anthony Kaldellis (02:10:26) Yes
Lex Fridman (02:10:26) … encourage corruption, and then there’s a bureaucracy, and there’s a momentum, and this is just how humans are.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:10:32) Yes. So this happens in East Roman society too. I’ll give you some examples. So there’s not a tax code as such, but what you— The way it operates is through basically exemptions. So you petition for an exemption. You might be a monastery, you might be a wealthy— You might be someone well-connected to the court. You might be a struggling provincial village, and you petition the emperor or some official, and you say, “Hey, we know we had a bad season,” or, “The barbarians came through and they took all of our… We can’t pay the taxes. Could we have an exemption?” And emperors often are granting these exemptions for very specific things, like maybe for this year or for that tax or whatever.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:11:15) The problem is that the emperors are discovering every once in a while that their officials are granting these exemptions sort of on their own. So every once in a while, the emperors have to, like, clear house when they have to, like, cancel all of these exemptions and start the whole process again. But later on, once we start to have documentation, like maybe in the 11th century, we see that every little—well, not every, but we have all these monasteries, these little villages, these high officials, and they all have these documents that give them exemption from this or that or the other thing, and it gets so complicated, and that’s how it works.
Lex Fridman (02:11:49) But it is the engine of society that makes the whole thing work, ’cause you have to fund—I mean, there’s infrastructure projects, but you have to also fund the army, and the army’s necessary to defend against all the military incursions.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:12:02) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:12:03) A good fraction of the bureaucracy seemed to have been eunuchs, which are castrated men. Can you explain why this was a prominent thing?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:12:11) The eunuchs are part of the household staff of the emperor. So that would be like—what would it be? The West Wing of the White House or something like this. So they are the people who handle the imperial person, the bedchamber, the organization of palace life—things like banquets, you know, these kinds of things—the wardrobe. And why are they important? So for, for starters, if you’re, like, physically with the emperor all day, right? Like, you’re handling the meetings, you’re… Right? People can come to you and say, “Hey, I need you to put in a good word for whatever,” right? So they can get things done. So you, you bribe them, they get things done. So they’re very useful in this way. They’re also kind of hated for that reason.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:12:57) Right? But they’re also kind of there to be hated. In other words, they soak up a lot of the frustration that people sometimes feel when they’re not getting, you know, what they want from the court. Okay. That’s one thing. Here’s the other thing that’s more interesting. How do you as an emperor make sure that your bureaucracy doesn’t displace you? Like, if the bureaucracy is handling all the matters of running the empire, what do we need you for? Right? Like, the bureaucracy can develop rules of its own-
Anthony Kaldellis (02:13:29) … for solving all the problems, for dealing with petitions and exemptions and whatever. Like, they can do it. So where’s your power exactly? So what the emperors did not want is to be displaced or overshadowed by these kinds of more impersonal institutions. And so they would often set up parallel tracks of power. So this could be a bit confusing. So eunuchs were perfect for this reason because often their origin was from outside the empire, or they were former slaves. They weren’t connected to, like, networks of powerful families.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:14:04) So you knew that they would generally be loyal to you because they depended entirely on you, the emperor, for their position and their power. And what you would sometimes do is you’d say, “Okay, I’m putting you in charge of, like, this army.” Literally, like putting you in charge of an army, just so that you can counterbalance the kind of networks of established generals, and you’ll have, like, no, a eunuch from my wardrobe. You know, I’m putting him in charge. And so this kind of shook things up a little bit so that people who were part of a system or a network could never fully count that that could get them all the power that they wanted. They now they have to answer to this eunuch from the wardrobe who’s, like, outside of their system.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:14:45) And sometimes these eunuchs were extremely competent, like Narses, Justinian’s general, who defeated the Goths in Italy in this massive battle. Like, this guy was a total hardass. And he was this little old man. He was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch, and the Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh, right?
Lex Fridman (02:15:04) Is there some component to them being eunuchs, so they can’t propagate the bloodline?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:15:09) Yeah. They can’t have their own family, so they can’t be, like, looking out for their own offspring. They’re kind of, um, isolated individuals who depend entirely on your favor.
Lex Fridman (02:15:21) Is it known whether the castration is almost always by force?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:15:26) There are eunuchs in society generally. They’re often bishops. They’re appointed Patriarch of Constantinople sometimes. They’re- … they’re in all kinds of positions. Many of them are children who are enslaved and castrated against their will. Sometimes, however, they are castrated very much according to the will of their families. In some parts of, like in Caucasia, there were some regions that were famous for producing eunuchs, also in, in Persia and so forth. But also, we are pretty sure that this happened within the empire, because there were some families that, like, really wanted to place a eunuch at the court. So from Paphlagonia, there were a number of… This is in northern Asia Minor. And so they would… It was almost like a family strategy.
Lex Fridman (02:16:15) I mean, it’s fascinating. It’s fascinating that they had so much representation in the inner circles— … of the emperor, and therefore had real influence.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:16:28) Oh, yeah. But this was the case always, even in Rome, like in the Julio-Claudians under- … you know, the first Caesars. There are all these powerful eunuchs, and the senatorial class always hates them. I mean, it’s just the same dynamic.
Lex Fridman (02:16:42) One of the interesting things you’ve said as an aside in one of the many podcasts that I listened with you is you said that there were no isolated people, you know, people that are disconnected- … from the empire maybe who, for example, don’t know about the taxes or just don’t feel integrated into the system. I mean, that’s really interesting to me, that there’s so much connectivity, there’s so much cohesion- … as an entire peoples.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:17:12) These people do not exist, these isolated peasants. This is a myth that I, one day I’m gonna write a chapter about this because it’s this idea that you occasionally encounter, well, actually quite often in the scholarship, that there are these sort of rural communities out there somewhere that don’t know what’s going on in Constantinople. They might not know, even know who the emperor is. They’re cut off. Maybe a tax official will show up every once in a while, maybe not, and they just live their lives on their own, unaffected by the, say, state, because the medieval state, we suspect, is, you know, always powerless and can’t, you know, affect people’s lives. There’s no proof for these communities at all.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:17:57) At most, you might try to find some, like, actual hermits, like, actual Christian ascetic hermits who try to go out and find this situation, and sometimes they’re described in the text as, like, oh, so-and-so went so far out into the mountains that, like, not even the tax census people showed up there, which, which tells you how they think about what it means to be isolated, right? So this is not a… This is a state in which every arable piece of land has been censused for centuries. It’s not like you can hide a village, right? And the taxation process is not like, what, they visit once a year, give us some coin, and we’ll leave. It’s actually more like three times a year.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:18:41) And the taxes are not just coin and maybe a payment in kind or something, but it’s, it’s a whole bunch of things like services and recruits and all… You’re right. And once you start adding all of these things up, it creates a very dense institutional matrix in which all communities are enmeshed.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:19:02) They can’t get out of it. Also, they, they have a church, don’t they? And if they have a church, they have the calendar. And of course they have the calendar because… So, like, how do they organize time and space and boundaries and all of these things? No, this is all state institut- How do they pay for anything? They have coins. Coins are everywhere. So I think that these institutions structured the way that everyone, even in village communities, even in the most isolated ones, supposedly, how they thought about things like time and space and value and relations and power and kinship and so forth.
Lex Fridman (02:19:39) So what you’re saying is taxation is the thing that brings the empire together.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:19:44) It is, principally, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:19:46) I mean, it’s- … it’s true, right? This is, like, this is how you know.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:19:50) Yeah. But on top of that is layered things like the economy, coins, right? But also there’s the church.
Lex Fridman (02:19:56) Yeah, and the church is important, just like you said. And there’s churches throughout the empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:20:01) Yes, and they have sermons, and they pray for the emperor after this service. No, there are no isolated communities.
Lex Fridman (02:20:09) So one of the things I briefly mentioned just would be nice to elaborate on is this term of monarchic republic. So we’ve been throwing around words like kingdom and republic and empire and monarchy. So what is the actual… What’s a good applicable term to what this thing is- … the East Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:20:35) That’s an excellent question, and I’m glad you flagged that because we call it conventionally Byzantine Empire, and it’s neither of those things really. We talked about Byzantine. Now, empire’s a bit of a problem because first of all there’s no term in Greek, in the Greek that they use at this period, that corresponds to our notion of empire. It’s not part of the official terms. It’s not even… They didn’t even have a term for it. You could have… There’s some terms that might mean something like state, arche maybe or kratos. But for the most part, it’s either basileia, which we might translate as monarchy, or politeia, which is polity. And politeia in Greek, polity, is a Greek translation of Latin res publica.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:21:24) Res publica doesn’t mean republic the way we mean it for the Romans, like a non-monarchical regime, right? That’s how we mean, like, the American Republic or, you know. That’s a usage that came in later, like during the Enlightenment. In Latin, a res publica is the common affairs, the common interest of a people who are constituted as a political community, regardless of the type of regime that they have. Like even Cicero could imagine the Roman res publica governed by a king or by a senate or by a democracy. And they continue to use that term. We don’t use it according to Roman norms. We use it according to modern norms, the term republic. So they continue to call it a res publica or a polity under the emperors as well, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:22:09) And it was understood that the role of the emperor, whether he’s Caesar or basileus or whatever, whatever language, was to serve the polity. They keep saying this. So the terms that occur in the sources most commonly are basileia of the Romans, polity of the Romans, or Romania, which is the proper name of this state. Not empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:22:33) Now, empire. Empire in modern English commonly, an empire is a state that’s created when one group conquers a bunch of others and rules them. It could be an ethnic group. It could be an ethnoreligious group. It could be a political group, whatever. But there’s an act of conquest, and results in a state where one group is ruling over others. That’s not how Romania is actually constituted. We’ve talked about this. It’s, for the most part, all Roman citizens ruling themselves—like Roman subjects ruling themselves through their own government. So it’s not an empire strictly speaking. Now, occasionally, they will conquer other people, right? We talked about the warfare. Sometimes it’s not just defensive. Sometimes it’s offensive, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:23:17) In that case, you do establish an imperial relationship. Like we, the Romans, are ruling over this other group. Could be Slavs, it could be Bulgarians for a while, it could be whatever. Or even some Muslims in northern Syria for a while in the 11th century who—and you are not Romans. And that’s an imperial relationship. The question is, how many of these imperial relationships do you need to decide that, well, we’ve reached a tipping point, and now we’re just gonna call the whole thing an empire? Personally, I don’t think we ever reach that point. I mean, all states, even today, have like minorities. Some of them are part of that state because they were conquered once upon a time. But we don’t call those states empires necessarily. Even though…
Anthony Kaldellis (02:24:05) Like, look at the United Kingdom. Well, Wales was conquered. And, you know, the Welsh have their own identity, their own language. I don’t know that you would call that now an imperial relationship. Maybe. I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:24:22) I think there’s also a synonymous use of the word empire that refers to the power that the state has- … in the global context geopolitically. So sometimes empire is used synonymously with superpower, meaning it’s one of the primary- … nations in the world, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the imperial nature of its history.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:24:47) That’s true.
Lex Fridman (02:24:47) Hence the sort of American empire, US empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:24:50) Yes. Though you would never characterize the American political regime as an imperial one insofar as it does not have an emperor, for example. But anyway, yes. The problem is that in my field, we use the term empire conventionally, even when what you just described is clearly not happening, like even toward the end. It’s not a major world power. It, like, has a few islands in the Peloponnese, but we call it empire and the emperor, and it’s like, it’s completely ridiculous. There’s not even a term in their language for that sort of thing. Anyway, we can call things whatever we want, just so we understand what the reality is- … and what we are using those terms to mean. I think that’s the important thing. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:25:35) So then let’s look at words which are both fascinating, monarchic republic.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:25:41) Right.
Lex Fridman (02:25:42) Why is that a good term for the East Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:25:46) Because they understood it very much to be a polity in the Roman sense of a res publica that was governed by a regime that was monarchical.
Lex Fridman (02:25:55) So those two elements, there’s an emperor dude at the top, and it functioned politically like a republic.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:26:04) Also, the emperor was expected to be working for the republic. Like, they keep saying this. So, like, this was their conception. You don’t find it, for example, in other kinds of dynastic empires, the ones that don’t emerge from within the context of an ancient republic. So this is another reason why I find this civilization so fascinating, right? I mean, we mentioned the Greek and the Roman and the Christian elements that are kind of jostling together. This is fascinating to me in part because it’s this weird combination of monarchical power, like in terms of executive institutions- … and a republican kind of baseline ideology on which it operates. Yeah, and they, they sometimes come to a head.
Lex Fridman (02:26:50) Is there at all a degree to which it’s a military dictatorship? Because especially when it’s the general in the emperor’s seat, yes, there’s a republic, yes, there’s political discussion, but the army has a lot of power. So to what degree is it a military dictatorship, as is sometimes talked about when you talk about the Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:27:12) Yeah, so Augustus’ position, for example, and that of his successors is talked about as a military dictatorship. In other words, when push comes to shove- … and the basis of political power is the army, then I suppose it’s legitimate for historians to talk about a military dictatorship. But here’s why I don’t think the Eastern Roman Empire is a military dictatorship. Even though, again, the emperors control the armies and the armies themselves will often have a say in who becomes emperor, like through the civil wars that we mentioned. Okay. The reason why I don’t think it’s a military dictatorship is because they almost never, very, very, very rarely use the army as an instrument of social control.
Lex Fridman (02:28:03) Isn’t that strange to you? Because you see that being done through so much of human history.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:28:09) Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:28:10) And the fact they don’t resort to that, I mean, they, for 1,000 years, that’s just not a thing.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:28:18) As a way of keeping down the population, you just don’t see it. And part of the reason for that is I don’t think the population needs to be kept down. Like, this gets back to the consensus that we were talking about. The understanding is that the army is there to protect the Roman people. And is often recruited among them. And for most of the period that I study, lives among them. So when the emperors have to call up the army, they’re literally calling up soldiers from local villages.
Lex Fridman (02:28:47) It’s just incredible that this worked. I guess the civil war thing is, as a mechanism, is effective. ‘Cause you just, throughout human history, I mean, you look at even recent history, it’s just a very common thing for an authoritarian figure to use the army to suppress people.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:29:05) Yeah, but isn’t that dangerous, though? Look at how many modern regimes tried to use their own armies against their people who are in a moment of rising up.
Lex Fridman (02:29:14) It doesn’t last.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:29:15) Well, it’s a risk. Like the Arab Spring. Especially in Egypt. And you could, you could tell for those three weeks that Mubarak was trying to decide whether he could actually count on the army to suppress the protesters or not, because you never know what they’re going to do if you ask them to fire on a civilian population. It can backfire on you badly. So I think that is a very dangerous force to use, and even in the context of modern regimes, can result in a regime change.
Lex Fridman (02:29:53) Absolutely, and there’s huge wisdom behind that, but, you know, leaders are not always wise, often not wise. And often maybe they start out wise, but power corrupts them over time, and so the fact that this does not happen just over and over and over and over- … in the East Roman Empire is, is, there’s just signal there that’s fascinating. And I mean, this goes to the book that you want to be working on— … About why the thing lasts. So…
Anthony Kaldellis (02:30:19) There’s one emperor who does do that, and that’s Justinian.

Emperor Justinian and wars of conquest

Lex Fridman (02:30:22) Mm-hmm. Yeah, he gets wild. So let’s talk about Justinian. We have to. We have to talk about Justinian. One of the most impactful Roman emperors in history started as a peasant, and rose in power to become emperor. He fought wars of conquest and was very consequential and impactful. So who was he?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:30:44) All right. So Justinian was the emperor from 527 to 565, so quite a long reign. He was the nephew of the previous emperor, Justin I, who was an older man, ruled for just under a decade before Justinian. And both of them came from small, poor agricultural communities in the western Balkans.
Lex Fridman (02:31:06) We should say that Justin I ended up in your worst 10 emperors list.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:31:11) Yeah, for one decision. He’s not the worst of the worst, but he made a very, very bad call when it came to church policy, tore the church apart. He shouldn’t have done that, in my view. But by the way, Justinian’s an immensely complicated figure. I found it impossible to decide, first of all, whether to put him on the best emperors or the worst emperors.
Lex Fridman (02:31:30) Yeah, you—I mean, you’re being spicy, yeah.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:31:31) Yeah, yeah. You have to be provocative about these things. And I thought omitting those two would be that, and it was. So, and here we are talking about it.
Lex Fridman (02:31:39) Yeah, yeah, exactly. The controversy.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:31:42) And through all the systems of social mobility that we’ve been talking about, Justin ended up emperor. Because of his military background, he just rose through the ranks. He was in the right place at the right time, became emperor, and then he gradually positioned his nephew, Justinian, whose background we do not know. Literally, we do not know anything that Justinian did before the age of something like 38 when he appears on the historical record. Same background. We know where he came from, but we don’t know what he was doing, although, like, was he an active soldier for decades? We don’t know. Probably not. He comes equipped with, like, a knowledge of something like Roman law and some Christian theology. That seems to be, like, what he knew.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:32:26) And then Justin positions him to become his successor eventually, kind of reluctantly, but he does. Justinian also marries Theodora, who’s a woman who’s a former sex worker, which is a controversial choice. By this point, he’s a senator and is holding all of these top generalships, and then he becomes emperor.
Lex Fridman (02:32:47) She was also very influential, yes?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:32:50) Very powerful, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:32:51) Very powerful.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:32:51) Under his, yeah, during his reign. So the interesting thing about Justinian’s choice of, let’s say, associates, and that includes his wife, is that he seems to have just gone for people he thought were talented- … or that would be good for him as a ruler, rather than their social class or prestige. And so he accumulates around him quite a motley group of odd, sometimes like these kinds of disreputable people. But they did what he wanted them to, and they were—they—with lasting consequences for world history. So he has an eye for talent, and he doesn’t hesitate to pick people that others might look down on if he thought they could get the job done.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:33:39) And these are some of the attributes that enable him to be as successful as he was. So that’s his background. He’s a Latin speaker primarily, but he knows Greek, too.
Lex Fridman (02:33:51) So here he is, and he, but he had, so like I mentioned, the wars of conquests. He also overhauled the Roman law.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:33:58) He appoints a committee- … as one does— … to just take the whole of Roman law and condense it into what today we call the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is the body of Roman civil law. And this was a massive work of codification, and it is our main source for Roman law. Like overwhelmingly, what we call Roman law is what Justinian’s committee, and specifically this character called Tribonian, who was a very accomplished jurist, said it was.
Lex Fridman (02:34:31) Mm-hmm. And that, did that persist through time? Did that last?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:34:34) Yes, still to this day. When you study Roman law, you’re studying Tribonian’s committee.
Lex Fridman (02:34:40) And so in terms of our modern society, how much of impact did that have, this codification, this stable law that ran the East Roman Empire?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:34:51) Well, I mean, Roman legal concepts pervade everything from philosophy to political thought to actual Roman legal practice. I mean, depends on what country you’re in. So in many of the countries of Europe, it is the, you know, current law. And it is to some degree. I mean, I’m exaggerating. But legal scholars have to study Roman law. Even law students have to do that. Not so much in countries like the United States or Britain, which have the so-called common law system. But ideas in Roman law about, for example, property, right, ownership, things like this, these were hugely important in formulating ideas, for example, about sovereignty in political thought. Yeah, it’s one of the most important and influential acts of committee work ever done in Constantinople.
Lex Fridman (02:35:41) So going to Perplexity here and looking at some aspects of the Justinian’s laws, they include a systematic structure of private law, persons, things, actions, strong protection of property and contracts, detailed family and inheritance rules, and a hierarchical status-based view of persons. These elements became the template for later civil law systems. And some overall structures, tripartite schema, law organized around personae, legal subjects, things, and procedural actions. Essentially who, what, and how of- … private law. And it goes on. I mean, a lot of the things I’m reading here really sounds like what we think of as law. Marriage.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:36:31) Look, most of it’s about property.
Lex Fridman (02:36:35) Marriage is a legal status. Lawful matrimony required conformity to rules about age, citizenship, and cognatum or prohibited degrees, incest rules, adoption relations, et cetera. All that kind of stuff.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:36:49) Oh, yes. Who you can marry, who not.
Lex Fridman (02:36:52) What was their view of homosexuality?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:36:54) Well, I mean, Justinian thought it caused earthquakes.
Lex Fridman (02:36:58) Oh, did it?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:36:58) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:36:59) Did it?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:37:00) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:37:00) Wow. That’s fascinating.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:37:01) No, for him, no, for… So for Christian emperors or Christian authorities, this is a reprehensible, immoral act. Depending, it could be punished. Justinian did try to punish it pretty brutally. I mean, ultimately lethally. However, this gets really tricky here because what counts as a homosexual act is not clear to everybody, right? And in addition to which, there… This is a society that generally will not go after let’s say scandals or deviance or however you wanna call it, like systematically. This is not like some– There’s no inquisition.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:37:56) There’s no social police. If there’s some sort of scandal and this comes out, then it’s a problem. But they’re not actively going to track down, hunt down, monitor, survey, interrogate people about their sex lives. I mean, it is in a way, despite having views that we may not agree with about sexuality, it was generally humane in the way of just kind of leaving people alone.
Lex Fridman (02:38:28) I mean, that said, there’s some… I’m just on Perplexity, looked up Justinian Roman law view of sexuality. They’re pretty harsh on, like, adultery and just getting freaky with it.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:38:43) No, Justinian was more zealous in this matter, definitely.
Lex Fridman (02:38:48) Even though he married a sex worker.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:38:53) Well, sex work wasn’t illegal.
Lex Fridman (02:38:56) Right, but it’s a bit spicy.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:38:58) Yes. And in fact, it was illegal for a senator to marry someone from such a disreputable profession. And he got his uncle to pass a law changing that rule … so that he could.
Lex Fridman (02:39:11) Well. Love knows no bounds.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:39:14) Actually, Justinian kind of says that in one of his laws.
Lex Fridman (02:39:17) Oh, wow.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:39:18) No, he clearly loved her. There’s no question.
Lex Fridman (02:39:20) This is actual love. I mean, this, you have to like this guy. Starts as a peasant, surrounded himself by all kinds of weirdos just because they were good at what they did, and it doesn’t really matter, class or not.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:39:31) Yes, but there’s a lot to be said against him, too. I like so much.
Lex Fridman (02:39:37) Let’s get into it. So he did launch wars of conquest. What was his view of war and conquest, and maybe what are the things we should mention in terms of expansionary wars?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:39:50) He thought he was authorized by God to reconquer the lost provinces of the Western Roman Empire, and when he did so, that was proof that God favored him. And he was generally opportunistic about it and for the most part, kind of successful in that he intervened in the most critical moments of the histories of these barbarian, you know, kingdoms in the West, and exploited their weaknesses and took them over. Now, in the process, many of these provinces were ravaged by war—Italy for decades. He overstretched his resources, leaving his successors with a much more dangerous situation to defend. And he disbanded certain armies that were meant to protect Constantinople, sent them to Italy, for example. This weakened the home front.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:40:41) So he left a very difficult legacy for his successors in that way. Plus, some of the provinces that he conquered were so—like Italy, I don’t think it could even pay for itself after a certain point. So I’m not sure that some of those decisions were the best ones. North Africa, yeah, probably that paid off. Italy and southern Spain, not so sure.
Lex Fridman (02:41:02) So that’s one of the big criticisms is even though there was conquest, it was overextended, and- … those lands were not economically stable.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:41:13) Yeah, and-
Lex Fridman (02:41:14) Broke. AKA.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:41:15) Conquest is not just good, you know, in itself. I mean, this is… I know that some rulers in history are called the Great simply because they conquered something. But that’s, no, that’s not enough. I mean, I know that rulers do this, but if we’re to compare them to each other, we should at least expect that they have a plan or that it works out well in the end, let’s say, and I don’t think that many of these did.
Lex Fridman (02:41:40) I should say that as far as historians go, I think you don’t give too many points on the conquest front.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:41:49) Personally, I?
Lex Fridman (02:41:50) Yeah, yeah.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:41:50) No, I don’t.
Lex Fridman (02:41:51) Yeah, so your value comes from is a leader implementing lasting change, like a stable-
Anthony Kaldellis (02:42:00) Was he good for his subjects? Were they living better because of him than otherwise?
Lex Fridman (02:42:05) And also, like, longer, like, the long-term nature of it, not just- … not just, like, a temporary thing.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:42:13) Right. Are you strengthening institutions that benefit your subjects? That. And some he did, some not. So look, in order to send those armies west to make the conquests, he stripped the east of armies, so the Persians could just march in and, like, destroyed Antioch. Like, that’s a major strategic failure, and I don’t think you get a pass for conquering North Africa by surrendering Syria.
Lex Fridman (02:42:39) He did rebuild Constantinople and reconstructed the Hagia Sophia.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:42:44) Yes, after he and his soldiers set fire to it. Yes. In the Nika insurrection. So this is when the people of the capital rise up against him, and there’s, like, about 10 days of street fighting, and he brings in some armies, and eventually he orders his armies to slaughter the protesters, leaving more than 30,000 dead. Like, this is an enormous number. And a lot of Constantinople burned in the process, and yeah, he rebuilt it. So his building is considered one of his great points. He built Hagia Sophia, for example, which is a magnificent church, like, hands down. It’s just a fascinating monument to study, too. And yeah, that was, that was him, too.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:43:26) I’m trying to give you a sense here that the good and the bad are mixed in such equal measure that, like Buridan’s ass, I can’t decide which- … which bale of hay to put him on.
Lex Fridman (02:43:35) But there’s a grand scale to the good and the bad.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:43:37) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:43:38) For many people, that’s what makes for a, uh-
Anthony Kaldellis (02:43:41) Exactly
Lex Fridman (02:43:42) … top 10 emperor list. What about the plague?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:43:46) Well, he wasn’t responsible for that at least.
Lex Fridman (02:43:50) The plague of Justinian- … AKA 541 AD. So some historians claim that it killed half the population and ruined the empire. You are skeptical on this view.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:44:02) Yes. So this is a bubonic plague. Which lasts more or less for two centuries. It comes and it goes, and it’s kind of endemic to large parts of the world. 541 is when it starts to break out in the empire, in Constantinople and other cities, and it spreads. There’s been a lot of debate about this recently because now we’ve actually isolated the pathogen. It’s Yersinia pestis. Like, we know this. Just as of, like, a generation ago, this was just guesswork. But now there’s all of this new, like, laboratory science work that’s come in to fill in some of the gaps in history.
Lex Fridman (02:44:40) That’s so cool.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:44:40) It is. It is. There are lots of discussions about that. And so the study of diseases and virology have just become much more important lately. It still doesn’t tell you, however, like mortality rates and historical impact. Like, for that, you still need standard old-fashioned non-laboratory historical work. And there’s a debate about the impact of this plague. It’s ongoing, I should say that. And some scholars argue for a kind of maximalist position of 50%. I think that would have brought this society to a halt. Just logistically speaking. And so I believe in a much more moderate impact.
Lex Fridman (02:45:22) And the real impact is what? The tax base shrinks?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:45:25) Oh. Oh, yeah. The tax base would shrink instantly. You wouldn’t be able to recruit armies. You know, there would be massive social dislocation. Like what happens in the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century. Like, we have very good records for what happened to those societies, and basically everything that they were doing stopped for a few years until they sort of tried to put things back together again. This does not happen in the 6th century. In fact, Justinian is at that time waging war on something like four or five different fronts. If you read the narratives of those wars, there’s no pause. There’s no impact from the plague on the conduct of those wars. They just continue on.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:46:09) Taxation continues. The courts continue. Like, you just don’t see it in the narrative, and so I think that there’s a much less impact than, certainly than 50%, yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:46:19) So this sets the stage for a tumultuous 7th century.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:46:25) Yeah, you could call it that. Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:46:27) So what is the legacy of Justinian in terms of how he left the empire leading into the 7th century?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:46:38) Well, he left it overextended, so his successors had to deal with many more problems along many more fronts with fewer military forces concentrated in what we might call the homeland of the Eastern Roman Empire. And so that made the center vulnerable too, and so you start to get raids into the Balkans and, you know, it enters a kind of vicious cycle again. Now, not all of this was Justinian’s fault. I mean, the plague definitely had some impact. But I wouldn’t blame everything on his successors, as is sometimes done, like they mishandled the situation. He… Yeah, he left them a very difficult situation to deal with.

The Arab conquests

Lex Fridman (02:47:27) So speaking of which, let’s talk about Heraclius. He didn’t make, he didn’t make your list either, which is a shocker for a lot of people. Perhaps you can describe the nuance of that, but he took over the Roman Empire on the verge of extinction. Persians at the gates, treasury empty. So maybe first tell the full saga of the Roman-Persian War that threatened the empire’s existence.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:47:53) Sure. Well, he wasn’t entirely, you know, free of blame for the situation that he inherited. He was, he was in part responsible for it. So he doesn’t get a pass on that. So Heraclius is basically a rebel and a usurper. So for various reasons Rome and Persia are at war starting around 602. And the Persian shah at this time, Khosrow II, has basically decided on a policy of conquest, not just raiding. Like, I’m gonna go in and take your people, some cattle, and some statues, and take them to, you know, Mesopotamia. He starts what… I mean, I think there’s some evolution in his thinking and his planning about this, but pretty soon during the 600 and the aughts, he realizes that there’s potential for actual permanent territorial gain here, and his armies start moving in.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:48:50) And the Roman Emperor is this guy called Phocas, who is himself a usurper, a military background, and he now faces a rebellion by Heraclius, whose base is in North Africa at this time, like around Carthage. And they have a civil war for three years, 608 to 610.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:49:10) That civil war that Heraclius initiates causes a diversion of Roman armies to the civil war away from the Persian front. So it’s a massive gift to the Persians. Plus, a lot of the fighting takes place in Egypt, and Egypt was a province that had up until that point not really been harmed by war. Now it is, right? So Heraclius’s forces, he’s not in Egypt, but his backers are fighting a civil war in Egypt, so that province is now, you know, ravaged in part. The Persians make tremendous gains in the east. Heraclius heads straight for Constantinople during all of this, and to make a long story short, he manages to take Constantinople, execute Phocas, and become emperor, right? But now he’s facing a problem that’s much worse than it was before he started the rebellion.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:50:03) The reason why Heraclius is sort of lionized in some… Well, actually, there’s a very long tradition of doing this, which goes back to the Middle Ages. In the Western Middle Ages, Heraclius was sometimes considered, like, the first crusader.
Lex Fridman (02:50:16) Oh, interesting.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:50:17) Yeah, yeah. So there’s all this medieval literature about Heraclius as being a proto-crusader type and all that for reconquering, like, Jerusalem from the Persians and restoring the True Cross and all that. So he had this kind of aura, and I think his modern admirers are basically just continuing… I mean, they might not know it, but they’re kind of continuing this very, very long tradition of treating Heraclius as this heroic holy warrior. Anyway, from my standpoint, it’s a complete wash. In other words, yes, he does beat the Persians and he gets, like, in my view, full credit for that, though he did it with, I think, the help of some Turkish allies from Central Asia. These were, I think, the major component of his success at the very end.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:51:09) But no, no. So he held the Persians off and ultimately defeated them, yes. And then he loses everything to the Arabs.
Lex Fridman (02:51:16) So the Arab conquests are 630s and 640s, but the Persian War is 602 to 628.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:51:23) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:51:24) So what can be said about this what seems to be a pretty costly war, I guess, for the Persians?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:51:32) So the war was costly initially only for the Romans. The eastern provinces were conquered by Persia. That means Syria, Palestine, Egypt. So that’s a loss. You lose all that revenue, and then they start raiding into Asia Minor.
Lex Fridman (02:51:48) Yes.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:51:49) By the way, this is exactly what the Arabs would do, you know, just a couple decades later. They would conquer Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and they would start raiding into Asia Minor. So almost like this phase of East Roman history begins already during the Persian invasion. It’s just a kind of a prelude. It was, in fact, the Arabs that would do that for the next few centuries. So Heraclius, it takes him a very long time to get organized, in fact, something like 15 years, and it’s not entirely clear, like, what he’s doing all this time. But he ultimately manages to defeat the Persians by waging these really spectacular, weird campaigns in the East. He decides to strike into the Persian heartland, as it were. Well, first in the Caucasus region, and then he goes into Mesopotamia.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:52:42) So not to try to defeat their armies that are rampaging around Asia Minor or even besieging his capital in 626. The Persians and the Avars, this people from… This nomadic warrior group that settled in roughly modern Hungary, they’re besieging Constantinople. Heraclius doesn’t even go. And he’s just kind of preparing his armies in the East, and he strikes the Persians right where it hurts, and this now begins to degrade the Persian heartland and their infrastructure because remember, both of these empires are gonna be in shambles by the time the Arabs come along, and this is what enables the Arabs to conquer them so quickly. I mean, they’ve destroyed each other in these wars.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:53:22) And eventually Heraclius calls in his Turkish allies, and they go on a field trip through Mesopotamia, and this causes a coup in Persia, and Khosrow is killed.
Lex Fridman (02:53:34) Is there something to be said, a little bit of texture to the motivations of the different empires and the different groups involved? So the East Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Islamic Caliphates, were they after conquering? Were they after expansion? Were they after more like raiding for financial benefits? What was the motivation?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:53:56) So in the past, the Persian Shahs basically were interested in raiding, and they also had an interest in manpower. So all of those Mesopotamian agricultural estates won’t till themselves. So they were kind of insatiable for agricultural workforces and specialized craftsmen and people like that. So they would go into the empire and get them. But in this phase, it seems that Khosrow II is taking really to heart the idea that the Persian Empire should really extend to the Mediterranean as it did in, like, Achaemenid times, right, in, in ancient history, the empire that Alexander conquered.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:54:31) So it seems that the, the Sassanians, this is this dynasty, this Iranian dynasty that’s ruling the Persian Empire, of course, they were aware of the Achaemenids, but sometimes they would have these claims to reviving the former greatness of the Iranian Empire. So, you know, bathing in the Mediterranean Sea is something that many Near Eastern monarchs, you know, they, they did this as a sign of, of success. Anyway, for the Romans, it was sheer survival, just desperate survival, ’cause they knew that this was a war that could end the Roman state.
Lex Fridman (02:55:06) I mean, they’re already on the verge of being ended. And here, they’re defensive wars of survival.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:55:15) Yeah. So it’s pretty clear that initially the, the goal of Arab Muslim warfare is to unify Arabia. That is, that all Arabs should be Muslim and should be unified into this religious kind of state, whatever, that the prophet and his successors had created. Now, then they start striking out into Rome and into Iran. It’s not entirely clear, like, why. Now, there are obvious reasons. Like, I mean, we don’t– It’s not, like, a huge historical mystery why a, you know, recently formed successful army will decide to take on two very weak opponents– … who are on their doorstep. Like– … this is not, you know, complicated.
Lex Fridman (02:56:04) Yeah, they’re pretty effective at military– … conquest.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:56:08) Yeah. But they’re striking both empires from a direction that those empires had never prepared to defend from. Arabia was just not, “Oh, you might get some occasional raiders, but you’re never gonna get an army that’s coming out that can potentially conquer you.” So the defensive orientations are all wrong. And these two empires have gone through this massive war that has destabilized them. They’re low on manpower, low on resources. The outcome is almost kind of inevitable. I don’t think there’s a great mystery.
Lex Fridman (02:56:40) And the effect of that is they stripped away the richest provinces of the Roman Empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:56:47) Yes, Egypt in particular. That means now you can’t feed Constantinople. Like we talked about the grain from Egypt, right, that came to Constantinople. You don’t have that now. And so that means that the population of Constantinople will decline dramatically over the next few decades.
Lex Fridman (02:57:03) So how does the empire rebuild itself, you know, restabilize? Because it’s not, it doesn’t collapse there, right?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:57:11) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:57:12) It stays, it survives. There’s interesting low points for the empire where it still survives.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:57:18) This is one of them.
Lex Fridman (02:57:20) And that is as interesting as the survival at the top, and the flourishing survival at the bottom is also super interesting. So how do– What happens? How does it kind of stabilize?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:57:32) Very slowly. This is a painful process, and it takes them centuries, you could say. First you gotta stop the bleeding, just try to hold the line. It takes them decades to just to hold a line. Like, they get pummeled by the Arabs for decades in the seventh century until finally by the 660s, 670, they finally begin to beat them. Beat them on land and hold the line on the sea. And so we now have an investment in fleets. Eventually, you get the Greek fire, which is the flamethrowers. And when the Arabs try to take Constantinople, these attempts are defeated, like, twice, and that ensures the survival of the Roman state in some form.
Lex Fridman (02:58:27) How were the flamethrowers used?
Anthony Kaldellis (02:58:29) Yes, this is an interesting question. We’re still kind of debating that.
Lex Fridman (02:58:33) Oh, it’s not fully understood.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:58:34) Well, it’s a state secret. They didn’t want this getting out, so they kept it pretty well. The fact that we’re debating it will tell you that they were pretty good at keeping secrets. So possibly through a, a pressure valve. Right? So you have this flammable compound whose preparation and components is also a state secret. So there’s specialized– There’s a corps of engineers that prepares this and deploys it. And it’s possibly through a heated pressurized container with a spigot, let’s say, that unleashes this thing through a nozzle, and it’s lit and basically spews flaming napalm on other ships, and it will continue to burn even when it’s on the water.
Anthony Kaldellis (02:59:29) Right? On the top. So, like, you can’t, like, swim away or anything. So it’s this very, very destructive weapon. Terrifying. They used it against Vikings too. This is much later. So once the Vikings show up- … Like, when they would raid attacked Constantinople in the 940s, then again in the 1040s- … Yeah, the Romans used Greek fire fleets to just incinerate the… And that’ll teach Vikings. Yes. If you’re in that situation, you’d rather serve under the emperors than attack them.
Lex Fridman (03:00:06) And so this is, this is a kind of nuclear weapon level state secret.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:00:10) They even had it in hand grenade form.
Lex Fridman (03:00:14) This is a real thing?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:00:15) Oh, yes.
Lex Fridman (03:00:16) Hand grenade form.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:00:17) Yes. So it’s a, it’s like a clay container with the compound, and it has like some sort of fuse that you light on the outside and you throw it. Now, you throw it… You can throw it against people, but it’s not gonna be that effective. Maybe you burn a person, whatever. You just wasted a hand grenade for, you know, one person. It’s most effective against things like, siege engines. So you, you throw that on a wooden frame and, you know, yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:00:45) This is incredible. So this is one of the things that finally stabilized, stopped the bleeding from a military perspective.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:00:52) Yeah, eventually. Now, now remember, they’ve pulled the armies back into Asia Minor, so they’re, they’re beginning to defend and fortify Asia Minor. Now you have to find ways to pay and support and feed all of these soldiers, and this is a whole administrative—it’s a wrenching administrative readjustment. But they go through it. It takes them a long time. Eventually, they emerge with a different kind of strategic logistical system.
Lex Fridman (03:01:15) Just a smaller, harder- … core- … of the empire.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:01:20) That’s right. Very militarized.
Lex Fridman (03:01:22) Very militarized. And then in the eighth century, the second Arab siege of Constantinople, that somehow fails.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:01:31) In the early eighth century, yes, that was the second siege.
Lex Fridman (03:01:34) Yeah, the early eighth century. So why, why did it fail? Can you tell the story of that siege? That was really the empire hanging by a thread.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:01:43) Yes, but it happened to have a very competent man in charge. This is Leo III, and he’s an emperor who has—he’s a usurper. He’s just seized power. They knew that this massive Arab attack was coming, and so it’s quite possible that the Roman elites, you know, preferred to put someone capable in power at that moment. The city was very well prepared. I encourage people in the audience to go and read the sources that we have for that. You can find many accounts of it online. It was just very, very well done. He also had Bulgar allies.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:02:18) So these are the Bulgars who had just, you know, crossed the Danube just like just a few years earlier actually and settled south of the Danube, you know, where eventually, you know, Bulgaria emerged. So he had Bulgar allies, and he used the Greek fire very, very strategically. He used his own fleet. He contained the Arabs to certain places where they kind of starved and wore them down. Yeah, it’s just very well done.
Lex Fridman (03:02:42) From a military perspective.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:02:44) From a military perspective.
Lex Fridman (03:02:45) Well, was there, was it the walls, the navy, the weather, the diplomacy, or just good luck that helped Constantinople hold?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:02:58) I don’t see much role for good luck there. I mean, I think he had it all pretty planned out. It was all of the elements that you mentioned. And yeah, he just deployed them very, very astutely and went on to rule after that for another 20-some years, and his son continued. They formed a dynasty. We call it the Isaurian dynasty, though they were not from Isauria.
Lex Fridman (03:03:19) And then from that, the fascinating thing that we mentioned about religion, there was a whole stretch of time marked by intense internal religious conflicts over iconoclasm. Maybe you can clarify this, but so iconoclasm, of course, is whether sacred images, icons, should be venerated or destroyed. This had major political and theological stakes. The seemingly smallest things can have the biggest of conflicts.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:03:48) Yeah. You’ve been in an Orthodox church. Have you seen all the icons and the just painting everywhere? Every, every space that you can imagine is covered in either icons or images or iconography of saints.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:04:01) All right. That’s a result of this. No, that’s not what Christian churches used to be like, at least not in Constantinople. But his dynasty basically tried to limit or remove images from churches, and ultimately that policy failed. And the other side that wanted images or liked images, or let me put it differently, thought that images were not only appropriate but helpful in the context of Christian worship prevailed. And so gradually the churches began to fill up with icons, lots of icons. They’re almost like, you know, like a, a catch word for Orthodox, you know, devotion. I have icons at home. You have a little corner in the house and you have little iconography. Anyway, I mean, as a secular Orthodox person, but I… even I can’t get away from them.
Lex Fridman (03:04:55) But that has serious consequences. I mean, that was-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:04:57) It does, yes,
Lex Fridman (03:04:57) … serious. It was an extremely serious internal religious conflict.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:05:01) Well, okay, so one asterisk on that. In my research, I did not find a popular interest in this matter. Like-
Lex Fridman (03:05:12) Oh, interesting
Anthony Kaldellis (03:05:12) … yeah, I don’t-
Lex Fridman (03:05:14) So this is an overblown-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:05:15) Yes. Yes, socially completely overblown.
Lex Fridman (03:05:18) Oh, this is one of those things where religious folks will write the story of history.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:05:23) That’s it. Got it.
Lex Fridman (03:05:24) Ah.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:05:25) You got it. I could not find… There were, like, a few emperors, and there’s some bishops and abbots and monks. Like, I don’t know, maybe 100, 200 people are, like, seriously invested in this, and they’re going at it. But these are the people who write the texts. But they never mention, for example, that, oh, you know, the, the people of Constantinople, they rose up, and they demanded icons or not icons or anything like that. Nah, never. So in my view, this is one of those controversies that’s only a few people really, really cared- … about it, and unfortunately, they’re the ones who wrote the sources.
Lex Fridman (03:06:04) So you always have to be very careful to consider the sources when you’re reading about anything involving religious events.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:06:14) Or any kind of events.
Lex Fridman (03:06:15) But certain things are more intensely, people are more intensely passionate about- … and therefore they’re going, that bias is going to- … bleed into the way you report the history.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:06:28) Yeah. And not only that, when emperors changed their policy, almost everyone fell into line. They switched positions. It’s like, “No, yeah, whatever. Put the images, take the images,” like, whatever. I mean, like this isn’t, they did not see this as central. Some people did, and they got very worked up about it. Anyway, but in the end, the pro-icon position won, and their view just began to fill up the space. Like, like it literally was filling up the churches, and it still does. Yeah.

Why the Roman empire survived so long

Lex Fridman (03:07:02) The thing is, we somehow took on the impossible task of talking about a thousand-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:07:10) It’ll defeat you, man. It’ll defeat you every time.
Lex Fridman (03:07:12) I mean, there’s a reason why you really wanna do a thousand-hour podcast on this, right? As you do, as there’s so many incredible conversations about every single emperor, every single nuanced detail of the emperors. It really is a thriving civilization. It’s a thriving empire which in it contains so many lessons for even the modern times. But anyway, you have written one of the books is Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 AD to the First Crusade. So this period has… We talked about survival and some low points. This is a period where, once again, there’s some flourishing. So by the 10th century in the Macedonian era, the empire is back. It’s wealthy, it’s culturally confident, and under emperors like Basil II who I think is in your top 10 list.
Lex Fridman (03:08:11) It is expanding again, and this is a period that you describe in part in your book, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood. So how did Byzantium go from surviving to expanding again?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:08:23) So I wrote that book in part in order to test myself and see if I could write narrative. So I hadn’t written a history narrative book up until that point. Everything I wrote was sort of analytical, right? And it was successful enough that a few years later, my editor asked me to write the big history, the new Roman Empire-
Lex Fridman (03:08:44) Yeah
Anthony Kaldellis (03:08:45) … the thousand page—
Lex Fridman (03:08:46) Of the whole thing
Anthony Kaldellis (03:08:46) … of the whole thing. And so I set for myself the task of explaining in this book, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood, a very particular period that was marked by a sudden turn to conquest again after a long period of more or less defensive war. 955, a new military leadership is appointed, and the Romans go conquering again, especially in Cilicia, northern Syria, and Cyprus, and the Caucasus, and then eventually also Bulgaria. And then right afterwards, they have this generation plus period of stability and prosperity, and then they’re hit by a triple whammy. These are three new attackers. So it’s primarily the Seljuk Turks coming in from the east, some Pechenegs coming down from the north over the Danube, and the Normans in southern Italy.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:09:47) And under the pressure of this three-part attack, the, you know, this expansionist—what had become a more imperial state—buckles. And enters another one of these crises, just like the one we described for the seventh century. You know, survives it by the skin of its teeth. And goes on again to rebuild and become prosperous, wealthy, and powerful again, as it does throughout its history. It’s these cycles. So I just wanted to describe that iteration of that- … that process, and that’s what I do in that book.
Lex Fridman (03:10:25) So I think the traditional view in this perfect storm of the 11th century is that it was more to do with the internal sort of moral decay and civilian emperors neglecting the army, this internal stuff. And you make the case that it’s the external stuff, the three-prong attack, like you said, Normans in the west, the Turkic steppe people in the north, and in Central Asia, the Turks in the east. Can you describe that—the three forces—and the case that that was the main reason why it hit a low?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:11:05) Well, this is also a methodological problem, right? In other words, when you’re looking at a society that suddenly faces a bunch of problems, and you could, you know, reasonably make the case for a kind of decline or a crisis, is your instinct, it’s your first instinct to suppose that there must be something wrong in the internal mechanisms of that society that, you know, led it to fail, which is what my field has done traditionally. In part because of the decline and fall model, right, of this society, we’re kind of primed to think that there was something wrong with it.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:11:40) It’s a long story. Or is it reasonable to say that a society that does not seem to have any, like, particularly serious structural flaws is hit by external, you know, challenges that it couldn’t realistically have foreseen or prepared for such that, you know, it couldn’t cope with them and, as I said, buckled. And I think that’s what happened. I think that’s the main narrative. Not that there weren’t problems. There were. But no state can, I mean, medieval or ancient, can realistically survive the simultaneous attack of three very different kinds of enemies, the Normans or, like, these knights, like a new type of Western warfare that is just all about, you know, grinding the enemy to bits. But who are also terrorists. Like, they’re straight up terrorists.
Lex Fridman (03:12:40) Normans are fascinating because, I mean, there’s-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:12:41) Yeah
Lex Fridman (03:12:41) … there’s a Viking component too- … with the Normans. That’s a whole… So they have, they have three different kinds of enemies.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:12:50) Yes. The Pechenegs, who, you know, a totally different type of, you know, probably mostly nomadic horsemen. And then the Seljuk Turks who are also mostly nomadic horsemen, but who are coming in from Central Asia with vast reserves of manpower behind them. In fact, either intending to or, as it happens, effecting a demographic change in not just demographic, but ecological too, because they basically, when they move into Asia Minor, they’re transforming or terraforming agricultural land into pasturage. And they’re just backed by reserves of manpower that no other enemy of the empire has had yet.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:13:38) So yeah, how do you, how do you cope with these situations? I mean, they’re, it’s very, very difficult, and it’s a wonder that they survived it at all. Now, they also have internal problems, and I’m not gonna sort of try to sweep these under the rug, right? In particular, we’re seeing the end of the Macedonian dynasty. This is a dynasty that had lasted for about two centuries, and this has a kind of politically destabilizing effect. New emperors, and there are a lot of, like, childless old men in this period, are relatively insecure.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:14:10) They don’t have this sort of a dynastic glitz behind them, and so they’re tending to, to buy a lot of political support, like hand out these exemptions, give cash, you know, titles to anyone who will support them, and this, of course, causes a budget problem. Like, they don’t have enough money after a while. And then they have to start raising all of these armies to deal with all of these problems, and that just increases the pressure on the budget, and so there is an internal problem as well, yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:14:36) So you mentioned this loop of thriving and then having to survive, surviving, that happens a few times- … throughout the history of the Roman Empire. It seems that societies in general oscillate in that way. Is there something particular you could say about the oscillations, the loops that the Roman Empire goes through?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:14:59) Yes. Now, I don’t think this is an oscillation. At least that’s not how I think of it in my own mind. So as I explained, the crises that this em- this polity, this state, this society that it undergoes are dis- there are a discrete number of them. I can, I can tell you what they are, and we’ve, we’ve talked about most of them so far.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:15:21) They don’t last very long, and they are all sudden challenges that appear from the outside. In other words, they’re exogenous shocks that they can’t really have prepared for. These shocks cause massive territorial loss, which requires adjustment, right? But they don’t last that long. In other words, the Romans almost always, at some point, figure out how to hold a line, how to consolidate their position, regroup, and put their economy and their society back on a trajectory of revival, regrowth, and eventual reconquest. Always. Every single time, except the last time, right? And for me, this poses the following kind of dilemma which I can answer.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:16:17) And the dilemma is, should we define the society by these brief crises of exogenous shocks, or should we define it by the centuries-long, sometimes, periods of regrowth, consolidation, and stabilization which are endogenous. Nobody came from the outside to help them rebuild. And my answer is unequivocally the latter. So I see this as a society whose internal organization primes it to stabilize and embark on steady growth. Slow and gradual, but steady. And, and that’s what I would like my field to explain more, and I’m gonna try to do so in the book I mentioned that I’m writing on, like, the longevity or the resilience of this society.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:17:10) And not try to center the crises, which I see as being from the outside. Like, these aren’t… Of course, they’re part of its story, but they’re not coming from it. What’s coming from it is the stability, and I think that’s the more interesting part of this society.
Lex Fridman (03:17:26) Yeah, so the, you know, these peak-to-peak histories, as you can think of them, they miss the machinery in the valleys. Institutions, incentives, daily life, all of these things. The politics, the religion. You have a bunch of revisionist history ideas in your work. You’re challenging the field.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:17:45) Yes. You could say that.
Lex Fridman (03:17:47) In the best possible way. So just to linger on it, what are, what are some of the things that historians miss? So this is a big one, right, that you’re speaking to, which is, like, focusing too much on specific moments versus on the broad structural underpinnings of, of an empire, of our society.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:18:08) Right. So what you alluded to there is a critique of what we might call short histories of Byzantium, which is a kind of genre of a book. Right? This isn’t necessarily, like, what my other revisionist ideas are about. The more important ones are things like the monarchical republic that we talked about. In other words, that there’s actually a broader spectrum of political participation. That emperors are having to look over their shoulders all the time. That there is a deeper matrix of Roman Republican thought there. Like, that’s one revisionist idea. Another one is about Roman identity, just like who are these people?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:18:45) And no, they are Romans, and in fact, it’s kind of an ethnic identity after a certain point. Like, those kinds of ideas. The criticism of the peak-to-peak kinds of books. So if you’re trying to condense 1,200 years into 120 pages or even, you know, even 200 pages, there’s no way to do so realistically and give a sense of the whole terrain. In other words, what these books do is they go, they jump from highlight to highlight, and these highlights are sometimes things like, you know, everything Justinian did because it’s so extravagant, to the crises.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:19:22) The crises are, of course, dramatic moments that you can’t skip. And you can’t get a sense from these books as to how all of this is interconnected in the valleys, right? In the crags, down there. Like, what, what are the mechanisms that are connecting these peaks together? And that’s how I tried to write the big history, The New Roman Empire. Is to tell the story by casting light in those darker places. That is, to show how especially institutions and ideologies sort of tie, you know, people’s lives together. That is, tie people to institutions and to the broader history that surrounds them.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:20:02) So that the reader can get a sense when I’m, when I’m recounting specific events or either of, you know, greatness or of a success or a failure, that they can understand roughly why these things are happening, right? Look, there’s no perfect answer. A short book will just not tell you these things. A long book, well, is a long book.
Lex Fridman (03:20:26) Well, in some sense, I mean, this, in this, even in this very conversation, I think we did a pretty good job of looking at the valleys, at the structure, at the institutions. And that gives you a sense of the whole underpinnings. And so it’s, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful way to see history, especially for societies that have lasted as long as- … as the, as the East Roman Empire has.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:20:44) But it did take us a few hours.
Lex Fridman (03:20:46) Yes.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:20:46) Yes. You’re right. But it requires that you actually spend some time to look in there, yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:20:53) What’s a few hours among friends?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:20:55) No, no, no, that’s… I agree.
Lex Fridman (03:20:58) So zooming out and asking once again, the old—we’re getting a little close to last call at a bar, I’m gonna ask you the big question. We asked it before about the collapse of the West Roman Empire. When did the decline of the East Roman Empire begin for you? Throughout these loops, when, if you were to predict, would you be able to say where this is gonna be over? And what led to that decline and the collapse? So of course, the collapse is finally in 1453 AD.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:21:44) Right. That’s actually a very good question. In other words, not looking at all of the previous crises that caused loss of territory, like, you know, you lose Egypt, you lose Syria, you lose Palestine, you lose Eastern Asia Minor, you lo- right? But at what point could you say there’s no coming back from this?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:22:04) Right? I would say early 14th century. Somewhere between 1300 and 1350, the sources of resilience begin to dry up, and you have a number of setbacks. They lose Asia Minor to the Turks by 1300, roughly, which means that you can now no longer draw upon the two wings, as it were, the European side and the Asian side, which they could always do. They’re confined to Europe. And then you have a series of civil wars, you have the Serbian expansion and you have the Black Death, and they never recover from that. In 1300, you think of this, you look at it and you think, “That’s a tiny little Balkan state.”
Anthony Kaldellis (03:22:54) Okay, it goes from Constantinople to the Adriatic in this just sort of ribbon, right, this corridor that just stretches across the Balkans. And yet, it’s not that much smaller than England and has about as much, if not more, revenue, because they’re still able to raise cash, because taxes. Right? So the emperor’s still able to pull in a lot of gold. And his territory is not, you know, completely insignificant. It’s not what, you know, the Roman Empire used to be. But I don’t think that it’s completely lost. Then they have some civil wars. Then one emper- a rebel makes a deal with the Serbs, surrenders half that territory. Okay, after that, game over. What’s surprising is it takes the Turks that long. 1453, that’s another century.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:23:44) Right? It didn’t need to be. It looks like they might have had it wrapped up like 50 years aft-, you know, like by 1400. But then accidental events happened. This is Timur, Tamerlane comes- … from Central Asia, trounces the Turks, breaks up their empire. So they go into a cycle of, you know, rebuilding, and so that’s why it takes another 50 years. Anyway, but I’d say by the 1340s, game over.
Lex Fridman (03:24:12) And so why did it collapse? What are the things in the ground, when you zoom out, the thing that ate away at the, I like this term, sources of resilience?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:24:26) Oh, foreign invasions. There’s no question. It’s just-
Lex Fridman (03:24:28) It’s just invasions.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:24:29) …it’s foreign invasions, those which they could not cope with. They coped with lots of them. But, you know, it, all it takes is to lose to one, and you lose some part of your territory. And if you keep losing enough, you won’t have anything to fall back on, and that’s what happens.
Lex Fridman (03:24:49) So really, you know, if there’s no significant external invasions, the East Roman Empire, the fundamentals, the taxation system, the way the policies were developed, the way the politics was done, the way the representation was done, all of that, this empire could have lasted for another thousand years.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:25:14) Absolutely. I’m absolutely convinced of this because you never see movements to split away. That is, there’s no separatist movements, at least not on the part of any Roman provincials. There’s one separatist movement, which is Bulgaria. We mentioned Bulgaria was conquered, right, in 1018. It, there’s a couple of independentist movements, rebellions. Eventually one succeeds in 1185, so just under two centuries. So Bulgaria is the only part of this empire that actively seeks to break away and does so. But for the rest of the 1,200 years, you don’t find provincials wanting to leave this system. However much they complain about the taxes, they don’t want to leave, and they make no move to do so.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:26:01) You also never have a moment when the center loses its ability to tax its territories, right? You don’t have, like, widespread peasant uprisings or agricultural rebellions or these kinds of things which happens in every other one of these empires. They also never decide to partition it. The Franks partition theirs, right, like after Charlemagne. No. There are no, like, Roman warlords that try to carve out a piece of the territory for themselves and rule it independent. Nope, that doesn’t happen either. So if you’re looking at the kinds of factors that cause states to fail, fragment, you know, become ungovernable, these never happen.
Lex Fridman (03:26:47) This is so incredible. This is truly incredible. In the history of human civilization, just an incredible study of what human societies can form. So, what are the whys? Why? Why? Why was it so stable?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:27:04) Well, now look, there are other stable… Like, for example the, the British monarchy.
Lex Fridman (03:27:10) Sure.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:27:10) That’s been around for quite a while.
Lex Fridman (03:27:11) Yeah, that’s true.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:27:12) Right? States like Portugal, Japan, they have one thing in common. They’re all tucked away at the edges. Like, they’re off, they’re little islands or whatever. They’re not like, right? We’re talking about a society that was right in the-
Lex Fridman (03:27:27) In the, yeah
Anthony Kaldellis (03:27:28) … middle of one of the main corridors of empire building and new religions in the world. This is the most dangerous neighborhood, right, that you can possibly live in. So no wonder it didn’t survive. Like it would’ve been extraordinary if it had. But absent those forces, I don’t see any forces of internal decomposition that would have imperiled it, you know, significantly.
Lex Fridman (03:27:56) So what, I mean we’ve talked about a lot of it, but what, just to, like, return to it, why was there no internal sources of decomposition? Like why, why did it work so well? Why did the people feel represented? Yes, they… By the way, you talked about how they complain about the taxes, which is one of the signs of a healthy society, that we… It’s like complaining about the weather. The fact that you complain about the taxes actually means that you’re happy with the taxes, kind of counterintuitively, or it’s not too bad. You’re just complaining as part of the system. Anyway, but why? Why, why did it work so well? Why did everybody get along-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:28:33) Oh, no, they
Lex Fridman (03:28:33) … feel represented? No, not get along. Not in a, in a silly way. I mean, sufficiently to where they wouldn’t… Warlords wouldn’t rise and break apart the system and- … or if there was those kinds of forces, they would come back together. Like, why is this such a great self-healing system?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:28:51) So you’re exactly right. So sufficient is the key word. We don’t want to idealize this, right? These aren’t, like, they’re not just dancing in the streets, holding hands and then direct… It’s so– Even when it comes to the tax system, they are complaining all the time. Of course, they’re doing so because they know that complaining gets you things.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:29:08) There’s no disincentive to complaining. You might not get what you want, or you might get it, but you know, no harm will come to you. So they’re complaining all the time. They have all of these civil wars. They’re like, “Okay.” So I think I would give you a two-part answer, so really quickly, as to why this held together so well. First is that an extraordinary effort was made by the authorities to persuade their subjects that they were ruling on their behalf, and I think, for the most part, actually tended to do so. And the second is that it had a very tightly unified identity as Roman and as Orthodox. In other words, for the most, most time, they knew that they were surrounded by enemies who were not those things.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:29:58) And they did not want to live under the power of non-Romans and non-Christian people. And so those two factors combined, I think, gave everybody reason to hold it together. The alternatives were worse.
Lex Fridman (03:30:13) Yeah. I mean, that’s a really brilliant summary, and I think we should mention that both the rhetoric and the action are important. I think you’ve articulated that rhetoric is really powerful, like stating over and over and over- … that you represent the people, that you’re acting on behalf of the people and doing the action. But it’s not enough to actually do the action. You would think that’s all Machiavelli says, that’s the only thing that matters. But no.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:30:37) No.
Lex Fridman (03:30:37) It’s the rhetoric actually has a lot of power- … because it is a uniting idea- … an ideal that propagates through time, and it pacifies you. It makes you, it puts you at peace. Rhetoric is important.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:30:50) I’ll give you an example. As an academic administrator, right? I mean, I was chair of department for years and years. There’s a difference between a dean who says, “Sorry, bad budget situation. We’re just gonna have to cut your programs,” on the one hand, and a dean who says, “I am fully on board with what you’re trying to accomplish with these programs. I am a defender of the humanities. Unfortunately, we have this budget situation, and we’re gonna have to cut some of the programs. But I assure you, the moment I’m in this with you together- … the moment we find the funds, we will restore them.” Those two just rhetorical strategies, they’re aiming at the same practical outcome, will produce very different levels of compliance- … right, and consensus.
Lex Fridman (03:31:47) And I should say that there’s subtlety there. The best rhetoric in that context, and maybe in the East Roman Empire, is you also have to believe it.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:31:57) Yes. It has to be credible. You can’t just say it and then not do it.
Lex Fridman (03:32:00) But one of the things I’ve learned about humans, just having doing this little podcast, is that… People could– Like, the best way to say a thing, a powerful thing, is to really believe it. And so, like, this is clearly one of the things that made the Roman Empire work, is doing the action is the best way to make the rhetoric powerful and effective.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:32:26) Yeah. This is sort of what Aristotle says about tyrants. In The Politics, Aristotle’s giving essentially advice to tyrants on how to protect themselves because tyrants are usually hated and are killed in coups, right? And he says, “Well, how are– You know, essentially, how do you manage to secure yourself when you’re a tyrant?” Well, you know, you can start by maybe, you know, obeying the laws or making sure that your subjects obey the laws and, you know, maybe work for the interests of yourself. Essentially, he’s telling them to kind of become benevolent kings. And the best way to persuade your subjects that you’re legitimate benevolent kings is to be that.

Lessons from history

Lex Fridman (03:33:08) So what, from all of this, from this 2,200-year history of the Roman Empire, what lessons can we draw for modern times? Now we’re sitting in America, this young empire. I know we’re not calling it an empire, but, you know.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:33:26) Lots of people are calling it an empire. I thought it was sort of taboo. Yeah, in the 20th century, it was like, “Is America an empire now?” But like, I think since the Iraq War, like since 2003, I’ve seen at least very casual uses of America and empire in the same sentence without any kind of hand-wringing.
Lex Fridman (03:33:46) Is it ever called that in an academic setting?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:33:49) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:33:49) I mean, it’s technically, I guess you could say- … given, given the expanse of the military bases and the military might and the way that represents itself in the geopolitical context.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:34:02) There are books published all the time that unironically discuss America as an empire in various ways. Yeah, no.
Lex Fridman (03:34:09) By the way, both positive and negative. So when you’re saying a positive thing about America, calling it an empire, and when you’re saying it to criticize America, you call it an empire. Yeah, you’re right.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:34:18) Yeah. I mean, most academic books aren’t trying to do, like, either. They’re just trying to analyze a situation.
Lex Fridman (03:34:24) What lessons about representing the people, about flourishing, about stability can we draw?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:34:34) I will say that, just drawing on what we were talking about a moment ago, that investing in institutions that work for the majority of your subjects, even if indirectly—like they have to pay a cost for them, but you have to explain to them why they’re paying that cost—is to the benefit of the ruling classes as well. Because you’re, you’re– ideally, you’re thinking about long-term success and not just your own short-term, you know, gain. And I think that’s what this society tends to do well. You know, the Romans generally, you know how they built roads for the centuries and the millennia. They built institutions too. You know, one of the institutions they built was, like, the Christian Church. Like, they build things to last.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:35:22) And I think that’s a, that’s a good lesson beyond even the roads. I think institutions that explain, you know, to people why they exist is… Yeah, I think we could we could use some of that.
Lex Fridman (03:35:37) And also the first point you made about the East Roman Empire. I think you’ve said that US foreign policy sometimes has a, quite a large gap between the rhetoric and, in modern times, the rhetoric and the action.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:35:50) Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:35:51) And so that’s to the Machiavelli’s point that we want to maybe narrow that gap for a successful empire, for a successful nation. The rhetoric has to match the action.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:36:03) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:36:03) And it doesn’t quite, for some of the foreign policy engagements in the world.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:36:10) So in the context of the society I study, let’s say the army is the single largest expense, is doing pretty much what the emperors say that it’s doing, which is protecting its subjects. That’s actually what it’s doing most of the time. Not all the time. So, for example, emperors will sometimes take the armies out on a raid or an expedition, you know, crack some skulls, gather some plunder, come back, and this is done to glorify the emperor. Like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, this does happen. But for the most part, they’re doing that, not much else. And actually, in pre-modern context, it’s very difficult to operate like, you know, shadow foreign policies and things like this. Like, it’s just not part of the-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:36:53) … It’s not, not, not in the cards. But America in particular has such a history of proclaiming the loftiest goals. It’s just, sometimes just, you know, breathtakingly implausible.
Lex Fridman (03:37:11) Plus the incredible engineering behind the military industrial complex, so America’s very good at creating- … to the flamethrowers.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:37:19) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:37:20) The, the technologies- … of war, and so the lofty goals combined with just a lot of profit that could be made on- … the technologies of war creates a very difficult situation to navigate, where the gap naturally widens.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:37:34) Yeah. I don’t think most of the world even believes, you know, what American leaders say their goals are, especially when it comes to, like, war. Like spreading democracy? No, really? I remember when they were trying to convince me, us, that the invasion of Afghanistan was a feminist war.
Lex Fridman (03:37:57) Oh, that was a thing, huh?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:37:58) Oh, yes. They were to liberate the women from the burqas or whatever, and, like, the news was just flooded with, like, how terrible women have it in Afghanistan. It’s like, you’re really trying to persuade me that that’s why you’re sending armed for- like… Anyway.
Lex Fridman (03:38:13) I think there’s a lot, a lot of wake-up calls about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, where people realized that there is that gap between the rhetoric and the action. And I mean, that’s how, because of a lot of people waking up to that, they create pressure on the government to close that gap. And that’s- … how we kind of navigate this- … complicated world, but it’s a costly one. I mean, these, these were extremely costly wars- … on every front, on every measure.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:38:42) Yep, but the same lesson was learned in, like, the Vietnam War, and that was such a disaster that essentially they had to switch to– to abandon the conscript army, switch to a professional army. And, like, it took them so long to be able to, like, wage, you know, these empire wars again because of the sheer damage that the Vietnam War did to the credibility of the military leadership in the country, right? This never happens in, like, this doesn’t happen in, in Constantinople. I can lose a– You can be criticized for losing a war. That’s, that’s one thing, right? But that you’re using the army to do some, like… You know. No.
Lex Fridman (03:39:23) Some of this does have to do with the functioning of how democracy works, the temporary nature of the leaderships, and that they’re very- … short-sighted because of the nature of the elected position or the executive.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:39:39) Executive.
Lex Fridman (03:39:40) I mean, that’s what we’re trying to figure out as a human civilization, how to do this for, in this particular case, the democracy thing.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:39:47) There’s no right answer, and by the way, I don’t wanna be ruled by kings or monarchs or emperors either. So it’s like I wouldn’t necessarily support that. I’m, I’m, I’m not advocating here for anything. I’m just trying to explain. But you’re exactly right. You know, we, we want democracy. We want leaders whom we can eject every four or five years- … which includes sometimes their, their, you know, teams of experts and policy designers and whatever, and that comes at a cost too.
Lex Fridman (03:40:14) So you, you said that, you know, the Roman Empire, maybe ancient Greece, maybe the societies before that, and now societies after that, the society we live in are very different. And so applying the lessons of history, you have to be careful doing so. But are there things that are the same with us humans? So of everything you’ve studied across hundreds of years and centuries, are there aspects of human nature that kind of persist?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:40:46) So look, intellectually, I have gone through periods when, like when I was a grad student, this was kind of when postmodernism, what we might call loosely, was kind of alive and well and— had not yet been kicked in the pants.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:41:05) It was very common to find colleagues who did not believe that there was such a thing as, let’s say, human nature. In other words, that, let’s say, the parameters of human psychology are, you know, yes, there’s considerable variation, but they’re within a certain set of norms. Like it’s not— we’re, we’re not gonna behave like different species. And they did not believe that there was such a thing. In other words, that all of human history is essentially a series of incommensurate slices of difference, right? That you just couldn’t go from one to the next. And I think it’s a very problematic view for all kinds of reasons, like how small do you slice these slices? I mean, it… And no, I’m with Thucydides on this one—
Anthony Kaldellis (03:41:53) … who says that, you know, more or less human beings are gonna, more or less, they’re going to act— right? They love, and they hate, and they have ambitions, and they’re incompetent, and, you know, you find the whole range of, you know, the whole gamut of diversity— … Pretty much in every, in any group of about 20 or 30 people, you’re gonna find the same kinds of types. Now, culture then comes in and, you know, tweaks things in all kinds of weird ways, and that’s, as a historian, what I like to study. I like just how the culture will modify, will set the dials, right? But that the dials go from one to 10, most people— … it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so.
Lex Fridman (03:42:31) But every once in a while, there’ll be a few folks who come along, whether it’s Steve Jobs with a turtleneck or some guy with a weird mustache or with a funny hat, and those can turn the tides of history.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:42:47) I think so. Occasionally, yes.
Lex Fridman (03:42:49) But they’re just ultra skilled at the right time— … at the right moment.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:42:54) Oh, I believe that too. Oh, yeah. In other words, I don’t– I also don’t think that cultural systems or ideologies are so effectively totalitarian that they sort of colonize the mind of every person. And so everyone in a culture is just like a clone. No, you, you encounter this sometimes in, in historical scholarship. And, no, I think people can sometimes just think for themselves, or they can think outside the box, and they can do all kinds of things. And I always wanna keep my mind open to that possibility when I’m encountering historical agents. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:43:26) So just because you’ve seen this grand history, I apologize for the ridiculous question, but if we look at the entirety of Earth, and we fast-forward a million years from now—
Anthony Kaldellis (03:43:39) Oof
Lex Fridman (03:43:40) … and the, and the history of life on Earth is written, do you think we’re at the very beginning of human history? Or are we in the middle, or are we close to the end?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:43:54) A million years from now. I mean, I can’t project or predict anything like a year from now. And I’ve become actually increasingly skeptical that I can do so at least. However, so I don’t know about beginning, middle, and end. It’s easier to think in terms of like, like numbered phases. Like significantly different phases of human history. And I would say we’re probably in the third. I think there’ve only been three phases. The first one being sort of hunter-gatherer period, which- … that lasted for the majority of human history so far. Right? Then there’s the agricultural revolution, basically. And this is when you start to produce surpluses that create more complex societies. And we’re now living through a technological– first industrial, now, you know-
Lex Fridman (03:44:47) Yeah. You can throw it all in the same bucket
Anthony Kaldellis (03:44:48) … all kinds of tech-
Lex Fridman (03:44:48) Industrial, technological.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:44:49) Yeah. Industrial, technological. Which is modifying the parameters of what it is that human beings can do and possibly be. And who knows where this will go. But I see these as very distinct in many ways. It’s all human beings-
Lex Fridman (03:45:04) Yeah, it’s all humans.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:45:05) … but, but very different contexts.
Lex Fridman (03:45:06) But they’re almost modifying themselves. So the question is, is there a fourth? Is there going to be a f-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:45:13) Yeah, I’m pretty sure there will be.
Lex Fridman (03:45:14) And what does that look like, and is it– When they look back at the third, would they still see us as the same as them, or would it be something completely different?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:45:28) Oh, no. I mean, we look back at the, you know, Romans or the Greeks or, like, any period in history, and we’re like, “Yeah, no, I see what you’re doing there. You’re doing it with the, you know, the technological capabilities that you had at that time. You’re doing it with the materials that you had. But I see what you’re doing. Yeah.” You’ve got, you’ve got families, and you’ve got armies, and you’ve got, you know, you bury your dead, and you, you know…
Lex Fridman (03:45:50) Mm-hmm. But now we’re increasingly actually having the tools and technology to modify, to, like, deeply modify what it means to be human. Genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces. As we understand the brain more, we can modify things, expand completely. Plus artificial intelligence can expand the knowledge base and the intelligence of the human mind. Unless we figure out the human mind is actually incredibly special to the degree where it’s- At least with the tools we have this century, we cannot accomplish, we cannot achieve the level-
Lex Fridman (03:46:30) … of intelligence that– general intelligence that humans have. Or one of the things we might figure out in stage four of this long history is that the thing that makes humans special is not intelligence. It’s not any of the things we kind of value each other by. It’s actually consciousness, and consciousness is the thing that is very difficult to engineer. And so that’s the common thing from the hunter-gatherers to before the Industrial Revolution and after, is we’re still the same. We still feel like something to be alive, and that’s maybe an important component of what makes us fall in love with each other or fear each other or suffer and all the full range of the human condition, the human experience.
Lex Fridman (03:47:16) Maybe even technology cannot, cannot replicate that, cannot modify that. Maybe that’s what we learn. Or very possibly we destroy this whole thing. ‘Cause now for the first time in human history, we have the tools-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:47:32) Yeah, yeah, we have-
Lex Fridman (03:47:32) … unfortunately, to destroy everything.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:47:35) This is all very eloquent. I mean, after so many hours of my rambling about the medieval Roman Empire, you’re– Yeah. I’m impressed.
Lex Fridman (03:47:44) Okay. What gives you hope about this whole thing, about the future of human civilization?
Anthony Kaldellis (03:47:51) Look, there are a lot of challenges, right, that we face and we talk about them a lot. As a historian, I see other periods that were far, far more difficult when people could have far more easily have given up hope, and sometimes did. But I don’t think we’re in one of those… Like, there are some major issues like the uncertain future of technologies, what they might do, exactly what you were talking about. I think they’re solvable problems to a certain degree. Like, if we can rein in some elites, a lot of these problems can be fixed, and that’s not like a super difficult… I mean, it’s difficult, but it’s not, like, impossible.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:48:37) Look, so I, I grew up during the Cold War. Let’s just take the ’80s, for example. And in the ’80s, like, there was a pervasive sense that nuclear war could happen at any time and just annihilate everything, and we lived under that. If you look at the popular culture of the ’80s, it’s, like, all, like, upbeat and cheerful and naive and- … like, there was just no correlation. And then you move into the ’90s, and the Cold War is over, and everyone’s all depressed. The music gets all, like, whiny, and it’s like, “What happened?” There’s just no correlation. Anyway, I just think that the, the, it’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness or, you know-
Anthony Kaldellis (03:49:16) … Despair doesn’t always match with, like, if you look at the situation objectively. I mean, yeah, it can be pretty bad. But there’s so much that’s happening that is good- … all the time, so.
Lex Fridman (03:49:32) I think this period of human history will be– ’cause we’ve talked about the ups and downs of the Roman Empire. I think unquestionably, this period in history, the 20th, the, the late 20th century and the 21st century will be seen as the flourishing of humans. So if we actually just wake up- … it’s like what everything around us, by most measures of human flourishing- … we’re doing pretty well.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:50:01) The amount of, like, sheer misery is probably objectively decreasing every year. Now, you know, we’re also creating problems, yes, that will cause misery down the road. Yes. But overall, I don’t see a reason to despair and not have hope.
Lex Fridman (03:50:19) Yeah. We’re doing okay.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:50:21) We can do better. Let’s do better. But yeah.
Lex Fridman (03:50:24) That’s the… Let’s do better. Well, Anthony, this was an incredible conversation. Thank you for all the amazing work you do and for the whirlwind journey through such a fascinating part of human history. This was fun. Thank you for talking today.
Anthony Kaldellis (03:50:43) It was a pleasure to be here, and thank you for, not just for inviting me, I mean, this is probably the largest audience, you know, I’ve ever spoken to but also just for giving my field and this civilization that I study the opportunity to be seen and heard from more people. I think that’s very important. You’ve done a real service here, so I wanna thank you for that.
Lex Fridman (03:51:05) Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Anthony Kaldellis. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Benjamin Franklin. “A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.