#498 – Anthony Kaldellis: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Rise & Fall of Empires
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Anthony Caldellis, a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description at lexfreedman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Upwork for hiring quality freelancers, Fin for customer service AI agents, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, and our old friend Perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And if I may call you as such, my fe
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. 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 h
Mhmm.
Very unique almost in history from antiquity, like the archaic period, down to the fifteenth century.
I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment at the grand scale of the the full Roman state as it lasted for over twenty two hundred years. Yeah. So it's founding July to, let's say, the fall of Constantinople in fourteen fifty three AD. So can we try to give a big picture overview of everything that happened? Okay. So first, we have a period of
the kings. This is almost legendary from, like, the eighth century BC down to around May. Mhmm. 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 that 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 m
The Roman kingdom, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire. Yes. And then the West and East Roman Empire. Yes. 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?
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. And Diocletian was in the third
century.
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