Which book are you reading now? Volume XI

[Takhisis]

The competent one and the backstabbing one were one and the same, believe it or not.

Also, it's called ‘Roman Empire’. They just moved the capital East.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Y'all have odd ways of spelling Venice.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Actually it was called "Rhomania," and they continued to identify as a republic/res publica/politeia rather than switch to calling themselves an empire after the reign of Augustus. They would sometimes use the term imperium for everything under their control, but that was the norm during the era we call Rome a Republic too. The Greek speakers in the east would call the emperor's imprium a Basileia, but they had done that since the time of Augustus too.

Later Romans were actually fairly democratic, as their emperors would not often dare execute major initiatives without first announcing the idea in the hippodrome and receiving applause. If the crowd instead voiced its displeasure, the emperor would tend to present it as someone else's idea that he too opposed. Once power had retreated behind the walls of Constantinople, the emperors had much more to fear from the locals rioting than from any external enemies.

There were actually quite a few bloodless coups. Rebellions were almost just elections, with armed rebel leaders parading towards the palace just hoping to inspire the mob to side with them and demonstrate that the will of the people and thus of God as to who should rule them had changed.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Also, it's called ‘Roman Empire’. They just moved the capital East.

That was a fact I appreciated most about a book I read a week or so ago, The War of the Three Gods: Rome, Persia, and the Rise of Islam. I don't think the author ever once used the word Byzantine, though the Rome in question was the 'new' one. Brownsworth is only using it because he's writing to completely oblivious audiences who think "Rome" fell in the mid-fifth century. I purchased it because Brownsworth's podcast re-ignited my interest in eastern Rome a couple of years ago, and it seemed like paying a due.

 

[Takhisis]

I'll try to find that book.

 

[Dachs]

Actually it was called "Rhomania," and they continued to identify as a republic/res publica/politeia rather than switch to calling themselves an empire after the reign of Augustus.

Ῥωμανία can be transliterated as "Romania" or "Rhomania". "Rhomania" is less common.

Arguing about whether the Roman Empire called itself an 'empire' is kind of nonsensical. They called it an imperium, or a basileia, fairly regularly, but neither of those terms was intrinsically non-republican; various republican officials held imperium as well. I don't think that any academic seriously contests that the Empire from Augustus onward was a military dictatorship and a monarchy, and that this was a meaningful change that fundamentally altered the levers of power in the state. Sure, it retained some of the institutions of a Republic, in altered forms, but so did men like Jiang Jieshi. Republicanism was a talisman for a long time with meaningful symbology, true, but so what? The existence of Saddam Husayn's Republican Guard didn't make Iraq anything other than a dictatorship.

Later Romans were actually fairly democratic, as their emperors would not often dare execute major initiatives without first announcing the idea in the hippodrome and receiving applause. If the crowd instead voiced its displeasure, the emperor would tend to present it as someone else's idea that he too opposed. Once power had retreated behind the walls of Constantinople, the emperors had much more to fear from the locals rioting than from any external enemies.

There were actually quite a few bloodless coups. Rebellions were almost just elections, with armed rebel leaders parading towards the palace just hoping to inspire the mob to side with them and demonstrate that the will of the people and thus of God as to who should rule them had changed.

Not...really. Acclamation, when it was sought, could usually be orchestrated in advance. To go back to the Saddam example, it was worth about as much as those 99% favorable ballots. Or, to use a more contemporary example, it's like how most Hellenistic monarchs, when going to "allied" poleis, would be "voted" various honors by the bouleutai, when everybody knew that the guy with the army gets the honors whether they wanted him to get them or not. There's no meaningful element of democracy there.

Coups were only bloodless when the victim was unwilling to fight them, or unable; while the mood of the Constantinopolitan populace might be turned in favor of one side or another, that had basically nothing to do with an election. You might as well say that tsarist Russia was democratic because Nikolai II abdicated without a fight in 1917. And there were an awful lot of coups that were not bloodless, and certainly not decided by the people of Constantinople, or any other city for that matter. What was democratic about the civil wars of the 980s, or the so-called "Seven Revolutions" at the dawn of the eighth century?

That was a fact I appreciated most about a book I read a week or so ago, The War of the Three Gods: Rome, Persia, and the Rise of Islam. I don't think the author ever once used the word Byzantine, though the Rome in question was the 'new' one. Brownsworth is only using it because he's writing to completely oblivious audiences who think "Rome" fell in the mid-fifth century. I purchased it because Brownsworth's podcast re-ignited my interest in eastern Rome a couple of years ago, and it seemed like paying a due.

This is a fairly obnoxious trope, of which, admittedly, I've been guilty in the past. Academics in English rarely use the word "Roman" to describe the Byzantine Empire unless it's to emphasize some aspect of continuity with the thing that most people recognize as the Roman Empire. Yes, there were some aspects of political continuity between the OG Roman Empire and the Byzantine one. There were also some very severe discontinuities between them. And it inhibits general understanding when the vast majority of English-language discussion on the Byzantine Empire talks about it as the freakin' Byzantine Empire, not the Roman Empire.

So yes, it is true that the people of the Byzantine Empire mostly called themselves Romans and said that they lived in the Roman Empire. They sometimes also called themselves Greeks, and people outside the Empire at the time would refer to them as Greeks, Romans, and, yes, Byzantines. But march into a Byzantinist's office and start talking about the Romans, and she'll probably roll her eyes.

Which is kind of the point. Brownworth wasn't an academic when he made his podcast or wrote his book, he was a high-school teacher.

 

[caketastydelish]

I read 4 books over the past couple days.

One More thing by B.J. Novak.

His style of humor is too philosophical for me. Which is not say my style is even cheap slapstick or anything. But he's way to the extreme. Half the time he's not even trying to be funny, it seems.

Man Seeking Woman- Simon Rich. Hilarious read. Absolutely hilarious.

Why not me?- Mindy Kaling. Her political views which she spews throughout the book are absolutely terrible. I disagree with her on almost everything and most of her 'humor' is feel good predictable baloney.

Spoiled Brats- Simon Rich. Another excellent read. I can't decide if I like this or the other more.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Has any one read the "Edge" series by Melinda Snodgrass?

 

[Flying Pig]

Not...really. Acclamation, when it was sought, could usually be orchestrated in advance. To go back to the Saddam example, it was worth about as much as those 99% favorable ballots. Or, to use a more contemporary example, it's like how most Hellenistic monarchs, when going to "allied" poleis, would be "voted" various honors by the bouleutai, when everybody knew that the guy with the army gets the honors whether they wanted him to get them or not. There's no meaningful element of democracy there.

It wasn't quite as clear-cut as that, at least not all the time. I was reading the other day about Theodosius II, who responded to some military crisis or other by walking in a religious procession, along with his wife, barefoot and without any imperial finery - which won him a lot of praise and cheers from the crowd for showing humility and acting like an ordinary person. You might say that that's staged, or happens only because people know they have no choice but to applaud, but the western emperor Maurice tried exactly the same thing, and was greeted with derision and thrown stones, and soon had to beat a retreat. Moreover, Theodosius himself once sentenced a bishop to exile for insulting him in public, but had to go back on it after he entered a church to be pelted with tiles by the bishop's supporters. So there certainly was room for the public (if perhaps not bodies like the Senate) to withhold their acclamation, and even express their disapproval quite forcefully at times.

 

[Smellincoffee]

The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson

 

[Cutlass]

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
by David McCullough

 

[Antilogic]

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
by David McCullough

This is on my reading list, love the author.

Let me know what you think of it.

 

[Takhisis]

Is he related to Colleen McCullough?

 

[Cutlass]

Not close enough to matter.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

From Non-Covalent Assemblies to Molecular Machines, edited by Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Pierre Gaspard. Nanomachines, son.

Strategic Technologies for the Military, by Ajay Lele. Nice to have a non-American perspective for military affairs stuff. Looks at near-space technology, military robotics, directed energy weapons, nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive technology, and ambient intelligence. Pretty short book.

 

[sophie]

Rowling, Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz
Rowling, Harry Potter und die Heiligtümer des Todes
Tyerman, God's War: A New History of the Crusades
Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West

Rowling was nice to read after working my way through Schiller's Historische Schriften. I really enjoyed Tyerman and I'm considering using some of it for the writing sample I want to submit for my grad school apps. I hadn't read Halsall in a couple years, and it was nice coming back to it. Helped me remember why I love history so much. Also made me realize how big an impact that book had on how I look at history and the world in general. I'm probably going to use it for the "book review" requirement for Yale's application.

 

[Takhisis]

Have you read Mann's The Magic Mountain in its original German, Owen?

 

[sophie]

Have you read Mann's The Magic Mountain in its original German, Owen?

Noch nicht. I do have a MHG copy of Tristan and Isolde that I've been wanting to crack open and work my way through but I haven't gotten around to yet. Likewise Schiller's Wilhelm Tell.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Author has a knack for writing a story that spans centuries. In almost any other work of fiction, having the next paragraph be set in the next few years would be strange.

 

[Zkribbler]

I just remembered I've had Bernie Sander's book The Speech in my someday-I'll-read-this-book stack for, like, forever. I've just pulled it out and am getting ready to read it.