How can Byzantium become compelling and relevant to broader audiences of readers interested in history, albeit without pandering to past stereotypes about its spirituality, mysticism, decadence, and decline? How can non-experts be persuaded to look its way more often? How might it be ensconced in broader debates about premodern history?

Byzantinists reasonably complain about these stereotypes and about the absence of Byzantium from broader public debates. Yet complaint might still be premature. Compared to classicists and medievalists, the field of Byzantine Studies has invested little in studying its own origins and ideologies, the history of western perceptions of Byzantium, and the politics of the stereotypes against which we are now protesting. Doing so would provide greater clarity and focus to our strategies of rehabilitation, and would also reveal how we remain complicit in perpetuating some problems, for instance the cognitive dissonance that is Roman denialism, or the trading on “mysticism” to sell tickets to a bourgeoisie eager to consume the Other.

Moreover, when it comes to the relative absence of Byzantium from the public consciousness, complaining about it is not enough. What positive reasons can we offer for its inclusion? Why should the general reading public or history enthusiasts care more about Byzantium and turn to it when thinking about the past and present? The insistence that all historical eras and cultures deserve attention won't fly even within academia, and is dead in the water outside it. Attention has to be earned. Some popularizing books do highlight the many achievements of Byzantium. This is necessary, but usually presupposes that one already finds the topic interesting. And many of these books treat Byzantium as important primarily for its services to the West (for example, blocking the Arabs from Europe and preserving classical Greek literature), or its services to Orthodox countries (e.g., for converting some Slavs), rather than for its own sake.

For a civilization that did relatively little harm, prized humility and compassion, preserved its existence and integrity against overwhelming odds, and contributed in captivating ways to the diversity of human culture, Byzantium is oddly one of the most maligned and misunderstood civilizations of the past. Its greatness and true nature were buried under so many layers of western prejudice, polemic, and deceit that for centuries only an invidious caricature was visible from outside. Westerners who actually visited it were just as likely to come away amazed by it as to have their prior prejudices confirmed, and even after its fall one could see through some of the distortions, at least with the benefits of scholarly training. But over time more coats of prejudice were added on rather than stripped away. As late as the mid-twentieth century, Byzantium was encased like an onion in multiple layers of hardened distortion, each dating from a different period of western imagination, fantasy, and politics. Only in the previous generation has a systematic effort been mounted to peel these stereotypes away, though the effort has been partial, is often uninspiring, and has sometimes added to the problem.

It is unnecessary and even hard to get personally worked up about this injustice. Arguably no one is directly harmed by it today, and there are too many pressing problems in the world that deserve our outrage, including lethal racism, neo-feudal economic inequality, the erosion of free society, and the fact that we are wrecking our only habitat in the universe. Nevertheless, you, the reader, would not be starting this book unless you were interested in Byzantium and what it means to us.

“Medieval” has both a specific and a generic sense. The specific sense refers to the history of western Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance or early modernity. Its geography is broadly coterminous with the use of Latin as a learned language and with the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome. The huge majority of practising “medievalists” study England, France, northern Italy, and to a slightly lesser extent the German lands, and there is now a significant interest in Scandinavia. Slavic cultures and Byzantium are considered separate fields. Southern Spain and southern Italy fall into an almost different field, or quasi-field, the “medieval Mediterranean,” entry into which virtually requires that one work on “contacts” across religious communities. This specific sense of the medieval world accounts for the vast majority of papers given at medieval conferences, the articles published in medieval journals, and the areas of expertise of those hired as medievalists. These areas include English peasants, French queens, and German nuns, but rarely Slavic chiefs, Byzantine tax systems, or Islamic thought.

If language is a unifying thread of this field, it is Latin. Medievalists are not normally trained in Slavonic, Greek, or Arabic. If religion is another thread, it is the Catholic Church.

Why should classicists care about Byzantium? The problem is not that they should care more about it than they do. It is far worse. The problem is that they already are Byzantinists but don't know it, which makes them bad Byzantinists. They are like scholars working in an archive without knowing why that archive was created, or by whom, or when, or why some documents were included in it and some not. Brilliant scholarship can result even with these limitations, but the latter also create huge blind spots, especially about the overall context of this scholarly activity and its cultural genealogy.

By classicists I mean scholars who study ancient thought and literature and use texts to reconstruct ancient history and society. My focus is primarily on the Greek side of the classical tradition. Byzantium did play a huge role in shaping one part of the Latin tradition—Roman law—but apart from that its contribution to Latin studies was small. It did, by contrast, play a much larger role in shaping our knowledge of ancient Roman history. Whereas modern historians of classical Greece rarely have to use Latin texts, historians of any period of Roman history rely heavily on Greek texts, and sometimes primarily on them. This is because the Byzantines, as Romans, were naturally interested in Roman history but had to access all of it through Greek texts. Virtually all Greek texts, whether they were about ancient Rome or not, had to pass through Byzantium in order to reach us. Byzantium was thus more than just a bottleneck in their transmission: it actively determined what made it through and what not, and did so for its own reasons, not to make our study of antiquity easier.

The first part of this book has focussed on the complex process of adaptation and reinterpretation of the classical tradition of free speech between the third and seventh century AD. As I hope to have demonstrated, Christian interpretations of parrhesia were diverse, and not all of these interpretations were exclusively spiritual. In Christian conceptualisation(s), parrhesia kept many of the moral and political aspects that had been part of its pre-Christian tradition. In analogy with Roman citizens drawing their licence to speak from their free status within the Roman Empire, Christians laid a claim to freedom of speech because they regarded themselves as free citizens in the kingdom of Christ. Christians conceived of their parrhesia as a tool to spread the gospel, to state their Christian identity, to combat heresy or to imagine the relationship between man and God.

The previous chapters showed how Christians assimilated the classical tradition of free speech and turned it into a Christian practice. This chapter explores the other end of the spectrum of the Christian reception of classical free speech, and investigates the doubts and reservations against frank speech that were expressed in some Christian communities, especially in ascetic milieus, from the fifth to the seventh centuries. It questions Foucault’s thesis that the rise of monasticism smothered classical ideals of free speech. As this chapter shows, authors of ascetic literature did indeed emphasise the beneficial effects of silence versus the dangerous power of the tongue and maintained that unrestrained freedom of speech and free behaviour of monks amongst each other impeded spiritual growth. However, it also shows that ascetic ideals of self-control and silence did not replace, but rather reframed the traditional discourse of free speech.

This chapter describes how, over the course of the fourth century, Christians took over the role that was traditionally ascribed to the pagan court philosopher, who was defined (at least in the public imagination) by his freedom of speech, disregard for wealth and social conventions, equanimity, and an uncompromising attitude towards political authority. It discusses biographies and histories from the fourth and fifth centuries AD, which recount the lives and deeds of pagan philosophers and Christian holy men. It also analyses one ceremonial speech delivered by the court philosopher Themistius to Emperor Constantius II, showing that a speech of praise could also be a vehicle for advice and criticism. The chapter focuses on the cultural construction, performance and narrative representation of two varieties of political parrhesia, to wit, ‘bold speech’ and ‘privileged access’, that were relevant to the pagan philosopher and later to the free-speaking bishop who followed in his footsteps.

This chapter investigates narrative representations of free speech in early Christian martyr acts written between c. 150 and the end of persecution in 313. It discusses both pagan and Christian models that inspired authors of early Christian martyr acts to represent the speech and behaviour of martyrs in a certain manner. One of the issues the authors addressed was how a Christian should behave when he or she stood trial before secular authorities, and what measure of frank speech was appropriate in this situation. Early Christian martyrs are often presented as respectful, polite and reticent towards authorities during interrogation. We also see a clear preference for plain speech over studied rhetoric. The chapter addresses the question of whether new interpretations of parrhesia that we find in these martyrdom narratives should be seen as indicative of a growing reluctance among Christians to criticise those in power, or as part of a process of acculturation.

This chapter looks into the profile of the court adviser in the age of ecclesiastical reform and cultural renewal between c. 790 and c. 840. It explores the rise of the persona of the wise adviser, who spoke up for justice and orthodoxy and who used his familiarity with the ruler to mediate on behalf of others. Who were these counsellors who advocated and embodied frank speech and straightforward advice as agents of social and political change? What were the qualities and credentials that qualified them as competent advisers? And to what extent were advisers at liberty to express their admonitions, criticism and advice openly and directly? To answer these questions, this chapter investigates the advice literature of the late eighth and first half of the ninth century: that is, hortatory letters and mirrors for princes, written in response to, or as part of, attempts to create a well-organised, orthodox and just Christian society by educating its rulers.

This chapter is a case study on the letters of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who borrowed the symbolic capital of the free-spoken court philosopher to create a public persona of an independent bishop speaking truth to power. It discusses the rhetoric of Ambrose’s letters to Emperor Theodosius against the background of the story of their confrontation in the porch of the church of Milan, as it was recounted in later narratives. The chapter analyses the rhetorical strategies that Ambrose employed in his letters to Theodosius to see how these strategies were related to the classical rhetorical tradition of free speech. It shows how Ambrose added Christian elements to the traditional repertoire and associated the duty of the priest to warn rulers from sin with Roman freedom of speech (libertas). Thus, Ambrose firmly connected Christian and classical free speech and offered a model to later generations of free-speaking bishops.

This chapter studies the letters of Bishop Agobard of Lyon (d. 840), who was dismissed from the court of Louis the Pious in 822, after having delivered what appears to have been an inappropriate speech. It explores the ways in which Agobard adopted different voices of admonition and speaker positions to advise and criticise his emperor. This chapter mainly focusses on Agobard’s letters of admonition addressed to the emperor and his courtiers in the years during which he was shunned by the court. It addresses the question of whether Agobard was really an outsider, or merely styled himself as such in his letters to get his message across more effectively. A second question is the one that has informed every chapter of this book: that of the extent to which these letters can be situated in the framework of the rhetorical tradition of free speech.

This final chapter discusses a letter, attributed to Pope Gregory IV (d.844), to the bishops of Francia. In 833, Pope Gregory IV made the journey across the Alps to mediate in the conflict between Emperor Louis the Pious and his sons. The chapter addresses the issue of the identity of the author who composed the letter. It discusses both the content of the letter and the details of its transmission, because this text is highly relevant to the reception of classical ideas on free speech. The unidentified author draws upon the late antique tradition of free speech in an attempt to persuade the bishops of Francia to speak out to the emperor. An analysis of this letter shows that the classical vocabulary of free speech, which disappeared in letters and literature of the Latin West after the sixth century, was reintroduced in political discourse. The chapter shows how within the ninth-century movement to bolster spiritual authority, the old vocabulary of free speech found a new place.