Speaker

Anthony Kaldellis

Anthony Kaldellis

Historian of the Eastern Roman Empire (conventionally called Byzantium) and Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He spent two decades at Ohio State University, including seven years chairing its Classics department, before moving to Chicago in 2022.

Kaldellis is among the field’s most prominent revisionists: his signature argument is that the state historians call ‘Byzantine’ was, in law, citizenship, and self-identity, the same Roman Empire that ran continuously from the ancient republic to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 — a ‘long Roman Empire’ rather than a distinct successor civilisation. He has written or translated more than a dozen books on Byzantine history, culture, and political thought, including the single-volume narrative history The New Roman Empire and Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 AD to the First Crusade. He also hosts the podcast Byzantium and Friends and is a frequent guest on The History of Byzantium (hosted by Robin Pierson).

Core positions

  • Byzantium is Rome, not a successor state. The ‘Byzantine Empire’ label is a historians’ invention, largely serving Western Europe’s wish to disown the Greek-speaking, Christian continuation of Rome. See Long Roman Empire.
  • The monarchic republic. East Roman emperors held real executive power but no hereditary right to it; legitimacy was continuously earned and could be lost, checked by the credible threat of civil war rather than by any modern institution. See [[Monarchic Republic]].
  • Taxation, not religion or coercion, is the load-bearing institution. He argues a functioning, near-universal system of census and taxation — not shared faith, and not military repression — is the single best explanation for how a vast, diverse population stayed politically bound together for over a millennium.
  • Crisis and recovery, not decline and fall. He reframes Byzantine history away from continuous decline toward a pattern of brief external shocks interrupting long, endogenous stretches of consolidation and growth — and argues the field should be defined by the recoveries, not the crises.
  • Judge rulers by what they did, not what they said. Influenced explicitly by Machiavelli, he distinguishes an emperor’s rhetorical ‘persona’ from the historical record of actual conduct, and argues the East Roman state’s persona was, unusually, mostly sincere.

In the wiki