What are you currently reading?

[Ken B]

I beg to differ. Especially in the case of an Empire, the linguistic mark is more often than not misleading.
 

This is a fact, but its relevance is somehow offset by a number of other facts

1. Greek had been the second language of the educated Romans, and Greek preceptors were the most sought-after, long before the Empire was established. With the possible exception of some soldier-emperors who lacked a thorough education, in all probability all other Roman emperors, starting with Octavian Augustus and including Justinian himself, spoke and wrote Greek fluently, and some of them even used Greek for writing their works, the most famous example being Marcus Aurelius.

2. Justinian was preceded by several emperors whose mother tongue was not Latin and who weren't even ethnically Latin (he had himself Illyrian / Thracian blood in his veins and was born in present-day Macedonia), the most famous being Diocletian (born Diokles --- a Greek name --- in Dalmatia, present-day Croatia, probably of Illyrian descent), Galerius (of certain Thracian / Dacian origin, born in present-day Sofia) and Constantine the Great (born in present-day Serbia of Illyrian / Dacian - Greek descent).

3. Latin proper had been the language of only a fraction of the entire population of the Roman Empire, and even of the city of Rome proper, long before the administrative split of Diocletian.

There was hardly any town of importance in the West in which the Greek tongue was not in everyday use. In Rome, North Africa, and Gaul, the use of Greek was prevalent up to the third century.

Ironically, it is arguably only after Constantinople was founded and the Eastern Empire established and the Germanic tribes began to settle on Roman soil that Rome became a purely Latin-speaking city due to the Greek-speaking population massively going eastward and the Germanic peoples being gradualy "Romanized".

With the progressive "Romanization" and conversion of the races of the West, the influence of the Greek culture is gradually dethroned. According to H. Lietzmann, J. Jungmann, T. Klauser, "Greek lasted up until the middle of the third century, when the Roman Christians had made Latin their popular language and readily adopted it into the Roman culture."23 During the ensuing years, the gulf between the language of the Liturgy and the language of the people widened. Nevertheless in due consideration of the many problems involved, Greek in the Liturgy ceded definitely to Latin in the fourth century because Latin was then the common language of the people. (This evolution was accomplished in the course of two centuries—from the beginning of the third to the end of the fourth century.) The transition of the liturgical language took place in Rome, and the initiative for the change is attributed to Pope Damasus.


One more proof for #3 above.

But that is the whole point of contention: the Eastern Roman Empire was not the successor of a preceding Roman Empire, nor was a preceding Roman Empire succeeded by the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman / "Byzantine" Empire had always been simply the Roman Empire, period. And after the Western Empire disintegrated, it became THE Roman Empire.

As for "significantly different in organization and culture", the formula applies to the Roman Empire during Nero and during Diocletian before his move to administratively split it. Should we therefore say that they were two different empires?

As to the last (good) question: AD 381. The Empire really did begin to change its culture and raison d'être after it became officially Christian. That was a process not an event but 381 is a good marker.

[Florestan]

The Western Empire, which includes the little known town called Rome, indubitably did fall.

I don't deny that, but as you correctly point out, it was a process, not an event. What I do deny is that the Roman Empire as an official, continuous entity fell at any other date than May 29, 1453.

[Crudblud]

Don DeLillo - Libra

DeLillo's psychological and blackly satirical take on the events leading up to the assassination of JFK. Split between an almost comical look at a group of CIA agents who are trying to plot a failed attempt on the President's life as a pretext for full blown war with Cuba, and the meticulously researched and convincingly dramatised biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, the plot alternates as the two stories converge, in a similar but not quite the same structure as DeLillo contemporary Thomas Pynchon's V.. Jack Ruby, who is the main character of a few sections, is also richly fleshed out. There is also a third story, arguably a frame narrative of sorts, though it first appears a good way into the novel rather than at the beginning, in which a CIA archivist is piecing together the events surrounding the assassination.

DeLillo's writing style, as usual, jumps deftly between poignant psychological insights, colloquial banter, and deadpan absurdism that can be both hilarious and depressing at the same time. His "biography" of Oswald shows off his rich characterisation abilities, and delivers a very complex character, neither a monster or a hero, a weird and insecure guy who doesn't really know what he's doing, but finds himself at odds with American society because of his communist political leanings. As he is drawn into an unfolding plot, the designers of which find him to be a near perfect match for their projected shooter/patsy, his ability to balance family and politics, which are ever in conflict, is steadily demolished. I won't go into detail about the book's depiction of the Oswald family, but the way DeLillo eschews sensationalist conspiracy theory fiction in favour of keenly observed domestic scenes to build the foundations of Oswald's character, his tether to the real world, is well worth mentioning as one of the book's strongest elements.

The book weaves its themes together convincingly. These are dense and multi-layered, but the idea of Libra, scales, balance between opposing forces, a mediating influence between them, is applied to almost everything. The book makes a great deal of coincidence, personal agency, and the ineluctable modality* of history. Oswald himself is presented as someone who is trying to escape history but is at the same time drawn to the romanticism of fate. He is taken in by the manic David Ferrie, who is obsessed with fate and astrology, and claims to find Oswald intriguing because of his star sign, Libra. It is never clear how much of Ferrie's interest in Oswald is guided by the personal vs. his involvement with the Kennedy plot, but this sort of ambiguity of motive is the book's bread and butter. It is a highly engaging and thoughtful book that is beautifully constructed, and I recommend it muchly.

*just started my second attempt at James Joyce's Ulysses

[Christo]

The Empire really did begin to change its culture and raison d'être after it became officially Christian. That was a process not an event but 381 is a good marker.

Which simply means that 'Roman' became the equivalent of 'Christian' for over a thousand years; and that's the meaning that stuck, in many languages, even til the present day.

[Jo498]

Because this fits:
I am roughly in the middle of Vidal's novel "Julian" about Julianus Apostata. I did not check with independent sources but at that time (350s) there was already a marked linguistic gap. Julian speaks "soldier's Latin" so he might have been technically bilingual but he does not really feel at home in the language and reads older Roman authors (like Cicero) in Greek translation. And it is frequently mentioned that the (partly pagan, partly christian) Greek rhetoric professors and philosophers in the Eastern part despise Latin as "barbaric language". On the other hand "Asian" and "Greekling" are derogative names Julian is called in the West.

About a generation later, St. Augustine knew some Greek but apparently not very well. And later in the "Latin" middle ages there was the phrase "Graeca non leguntur" because Greek quotations were basically skipped in the lectures and only some specialists read and translated Greek authors, despite the high status of Plato and especially Aristotle; cf. The name of the Rose where as far as I recall only about two of the learned monks read Greek (that's why the mysterious book is both hard/easy to identify).

I really find it interesting that whereas the later Western middle ages were basically bilingual (Latin + local vernacular) and from the 16th century humanism on, "educated" persons were usually supposed to read Greek as well, the actual antiquity that caused the cultural importance of these languages was in practice mostly monolingual, Greek dominated until the first century AD (the classical Greeks basically ignored "barbaric tongues"), then somewhat bilingual for two or three centuries (with Greek being still more common as lingua franca, probably also because most of the commercial an intellectual centers were in the East: Athens, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria etc.) and divided into a Western Latin and an Eastern Greek half afterwards.

[Florestan]

Peter Charanis (1908 - 1985), former Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, born on the island of Lemnos under Ottoman rule, recalled this extremely telling anecdote from his childhood.

When the island was occupied by the Greek navy [during the First Balkan War in 1912], Greek soldiers were sent to the villages and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the children ran to see what these Greek soldiers, these Hellenes, looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked. "At Hellenes," we replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves," he retorted. "No, we are Romans".

(as quoted in Anthony Kaldellis: Hellenism in Byzantium, The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition)

This is absolutely amazing: 459 years after the Fall of Constantinople, Roman identity still persisted in the minds of Greek speaking children.

[Christo]

This is absolutely amazing: 459 years after the Fall of Constantinople, Roman identity still persisted in the minds of Greek speaking children.

Even today, Greek minorities in the Middle East are locally known as Romans, in Arabic, Turkish, and no doubt in Georgian and other languages as well. "Hellenes" is the nomer nationalists opted for, but it always had a strong connotation of "pagans". Even in the TV news I occasionally hear and see "Romans" being translated as Greeks, and correctly so.

[bwv 1080]

Fascinating look at the transformation of economic life since 1870. 

the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave
Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of "headwinds": rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more...

It's a shocking prediction for a society whose self-image, arguably its very identity, is bound up with the expectation of constant progress. And you have to wonder about the social and political consequences of another generation of stagnation or decline in working-class incomes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-that-were.html?mcubz=0

[Jaakko Keskinen]

So far King John has been great. I wonder why this is one of his lesser-known plays apart from the famous "Gild the lily" quote, which is a misquote anyway. In actual play, it doesn't go like that. I think I should nominate this one of his most underrated plays, among with Timon of Athens and Two Gentlemen of Verona. I am always on edge whether or not add The Winter's Tale in the list. It is a great play for sure in my opinion, but I cannot figure out what the general consensus about the play is.

Maybe it's a bit premature of me to add King John in the underrated plays-list before I've read it all the way through. But I'm almost done and I have hard time believing that a genius like Shakespeare could mess up that bad during almost the last moments of the work.

I never stated my opinion about Julius Caesar. I liked it but the last two acts were not nearly as good as the first three. My edition of Julius Caesar had an absolutely wonderful preface by Jotaarkka Pennanen which greatly influenced my reading of the actual play.

[Todd]

Fascinating look at the transformation of economic life since 1870. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-powers-that-were.html?mcubz=0

How is it overall?  The main thesis has gotten attention in a number of outlets, and the few times I've read Gordon outside of old textbooks has been enlightening. 

(Part of his thesis was driven home in the last couple years when I was reading on DACs and learned that some of the theoretical work that is relied on in today's digital electronics stretches back to at least WWI.)

[bwv 1080]

How is it overall?  The main thesis has gotten attention in a number of outlets, and the few times I've read Gordon outside of old textbooks has been enlightening. 

(Part of his thesis was driven home in the last couple years when I was reading on DACs and learned that some of the theoretical work that is relied on in today's digital electronics stretches back to at least WWI.)

So far, its a great read.  Well-written and its (at least for me) fascinating to read about the trans formative nature of things we take for granted like chain grocery stores.  When A&P and Kroger started in the late 19th century people whined about them putting small family-owned stores out of businesses just like people complain about Wal-Mart today.  Nevermind that working class people saw their food prices drop by more than 20%, a huge improvement for people who spent 40%+ of their income on food.  As to the thesis, I agree that it is hard to imagine anything new that could make a comparable improvement in my standard of living as having electricity, plumbing, vaccines and antibiotics

[Todd]

As to the thesis, I agree that it is hard to imagine anything new that could make a comparable improvement in my standard of living as having electricity, plumbing, vaccines and antibiotics

When I first read book reviews, I have to admit that I was struck by how profound it was not only in terms of implications for economics, but in everyday terms.  I also thought of my paternal grandmother.  She was born in 1910 in the Canadian plains and she literally lived in a dwelling carved into a hill with no running water, no electricity, no paved roads, etc.  She passed way in 2005, in the age of the internet.  While there have certainly been technological advances and social changes in my lifetime, there will be nothing like the changes she experienced in one long lifetime.  Oh, who am I kidding, I had it rough when all I had for entertainment was a black and white TV and crappy transistor radios while I ate my popsicles.

I think I'll have to get the book.

[bwv 1080]

When I first read book reviews, I have to admit that I was struck by how profound it was not only in terms of implications for economics, but in everyday terms.  I also thought of my paternal grandmother.  She was born in 1910 in the Canadian plains and she literally lived in a dwelling carved into a hill with no running water, no electricity, no paved roads, etc.  She passed way in 2005, in the age of the internet.  While there have certainly been technological advances and social changes in my lifetime, there will be nothing like the changes she experienced in one long lifetime.  Oh, who am I kidding, I had it rough when all I had for entertainment was a black and white TV and crappy transistor radios while I ate my popsicles.

I think I'll have to get the book.

Yes, and what took 95 years for your grandmother has happened in a generation many Asian countries (and from a much lower starting point, 19th century American peasants were much better off than 20th century Chinese, Japanese or Korean ones)

[kishnevi]

Because this fits:
I am roughly in the middle of Vidal's novel "Julian" about Julianus Apostata. I did not check with independent sources but at that time (350s) there was already a marked linguistic gap. Julian speaks "soldier's Latin" so he might have been technically bilingual but he does not really feel at home in the language and reads older Roman authors (like Cicero) in Greek translation. And it is frequently mentioned that the (partly pagan, partly christian) Greek rhetoric professors and philosophers in the Eastern part despise Latin as "barbaric language". On the other hand "Asian" and "Greekling" are derogative names Julian is called in the West.

About a generation later, St. Augustine knew some Greek but apparently not very well. And later in the "Latin" middle ages there was the phrase "Graeca non leguntur" because Greek quotations were basically skipped in the lectures and only some specialists read and translated Greek authors, despite the high status of Plato and especially Aristotle; cf. The name of the Rose where as far as I recall only about two of the learned monks read Greek (that's why the mysterious book is both hard/easy to identify).

I really find it interesting that whereas the later Western middle ages were basically bilingual (Latin + local vernacular) and from the 16th century humanism on, "educated" persons were usually supposed to read Greek as well, the actual antiquity that caused the cultural importance of these languages was in practice mostly monolingual, Greek dominated until the first century AD (the classical Greeks basically ignored "barbaric tongues"), then somewhat bilingual for two or three centuries (with Greek being still more common as lingua franca, probably also because most of the commercial an intellectual centers were in the East: Athens, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria etc.) and divided into a Western Latin and an Eastern Greek half afterwards.

Warning about Vidal: he did sometimes play fast and loose with the sources, and some of the theories he accepted as fact are now known to be false.  Some of them were known to be false at the time he used them for his books.  A good illustration of this is his novel "Creation" which is premised on dating the life of Zoraoster to a period we know to be much too late (and which was known to be too late even when Vidal wrote the book).  Of course, this does not keep "Creation" from being one of the best historical novels ever written.  If you've never read it, put it on your to-do list.


Also, the earlier Empire could be thought of as trilingual.  Theoretically an upper class resident of Galilee, Samaria, Phoenicia and Syria would need three languages:  the local Aramaic dialect to speak with his neighbors, Greek to speak with residents of urban areas and trading partners from Greek speaking areas,  and Latin to communicate with the local agents of Rome when Greek would not work.   Similar usage of a local vernacular used in parallel with Greek and Latin probably occurred to throughout the eastern half of the Empire (Egypt, for example), but we know more about Aramaic because it was used over a large area that spread into the Persian/Parthian empire, and because of its importance in Christian history as the mother tongue of Jesus and the apostles.

[Florestan]

Also, the earlier Empire could be thought of as trilingual.  Theoretically an upper class resident of Galilee, Samaria, Phoenicia and Syria would need three languages:  the local Aramaic dialect to speak with his neighbors, Greek to speak with residents of urban areas and trading partners from Greek speaking areas,  and Latin to communicate with the local agents of Rome when Greek would not work.   Similar usage of a local vernacular used in parallel with Greek and Latin probably occurred to throughout the eastern half of the Empire (Egypt, for example), but we know more about Aramaic because it was used over a large area that spread into the Persian/Parthian empire, and because of its importance in Christian history as the mother tongue of Jesus and the apostles.

Precisely the reason why the linguistic marker is particularly misleading when it comes to define an Empire.

Think of the "Holy Roman Empire" (which was actually neither Holy, nor Roman): it began as a Germanic-ruled entity, whose official language --- as in state documents --- was Latin but which incorporated a wide range of every-day-spoken languages, from various Germanic dialects to various Romance dialects to various Slavic dialects, out of which there eventually evolved, among others, the literary German and Italian and Czech. In its later days, when the Habsburg / Austrian (ie, Germanic) domination was firmly established and acknowledged, only a fraction of the population spoke German while the lingua franca of educated classes was French and in the realm of opera --- which back then was THE most popular and "democratic"form of art --- Italian reigned supreme.

[Jo498]

You are probably right about some regions. On the other hand, hellenized Jews like Philo in Egypt basically only knew Greek, that's why the LXX translation was made. My point was rather that apart from everyday transactions in the Levante the classical Greek *culture* was monolingual. Everything non-Greek was "barbarian" and usually uninteresting. Whereas Roman culture was for several centuries bilingual with the educated upper class using Greek somewhat like the Russian nobles in War and Peace preferring French to their mother tongue. But this bilinguality apparently was never so well established in the Eastern Mediterrean where Greek dominated (although laws and some official documents were in Latin) and it broke down rather quickly around 400 or so. Otherwise it would be really odd that a highly educated rhetorics professor like Augustine of Hippo was weak in Greek. And he was also a (neo)platonist, so one would expect him to have some motivation to study Greek.

[kishnevi]

Precisely the reason why the linguistic marker is particularly misleading when it comes to define an Empire.

Think of the "Holy Roman Empire" (which was actually neither Holy, nor Roman): it began as a Germanic-ruled entity, whose official language --- as in state documents --- was Latin but which incorporated a wide range of every-day-spoken languages, from various Germanic dialects to various Romance dialects to various Slavic dialects, out of which there eventually evolved, among others, the literary German and Italian and Czech. In its later days, when the Habsburg / Austrian (ie, Germanic) domination was firmly established and acknowledged, only a fraction of the population spoke German while the lingua franca of educated classes was French and in the realm of opera --- which back then was THE most popular and "democratic"form of art --- Italian reigned supreme.

All true.  But my original point was regarding use of the new language for official documents.  This seems to have happened gradually, but the process was finished in the early 7th century.  In 200 CE, the Emperor issued decrees which were in Latin, and then translated into Greek for the benefit of his subjects.  In 700 CE, the Emperor issued decrees in Greek.

Did Latin ever stop being used for state documents in the HRE?

An apposite case is England, where Norman French was the language of government from the time of the Conquest up to the middle Plantagenets, and then was purposely switched to the vernacular, except in the courts, where French continued to be used, via a jargon known as 'law French' for several centuries thereafter. 

(I don't recall the precise dates when the changes to English occurred.)

[Florestan]

Even today, Greek minorities in the Middle East are locally known as Romans, in Arabic, Turkish, and no doubt in Georgian and other languages as well. "Hellenes" is the nomer nationalists opted for, but it always had a strong connotation of "pagans". Even in the TV news I occasionally hear and see "Romans" being translated as Greeks, and correctly so.

Actually, even today there is a country called Romania and a people who identify themselves as Romanians. 

I will not go so far as to claim that we are indeed the last remnant of the Roman Empire (although the internationally-celebrated Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga came the closest one could get to making exactly this claim in his 1935  " Byzance après Byzance " (full text available here in the original French: http://www.unibuc.ro/CLASSICA/byzance/cuprins.htm --- even if you will not agree with his claims, it still makes for a fascinating reading) --- I will only say that the awareness of our essential Roman origins and identity has been always preserved in our collective memory and the works of all Romanian chroniclers and historians.

Now, of course the present-day Romanian people, just like any other European people, is a mixture; in our case, the three main ingredients are Romans, Dacians and (later on) Slavs. But the language, despite its irreplaceable Slavic  / Hungarian (although this is debatable, since there are Hungarian scholars who claim the other way around, namely that Hungarians loaned those words from Romanian) / Turkish loan-words (proportionally and functionally speaking, the Slavic ones far surpass the others), still preserves an essentially Latin grammatical structure (including cases long lost in all other Romance language, such as the vocative) and a mostly Latin every-day vocabulary.

Bottom line, we might not be Romans, but we surely are Romanians, which in itself is no small accomplishment, all things considered. 

[Karl Henning]

We're Romaniacs!

[Florestan]

Did Latin ever stop being used for state documents in the HRE?

That I really don't know. Maybe Jo can help.

An apposite case is England, where Norman French was the language of government from the time of the Conquest up to the middle Plantagenets, and then was purposely switched to the vernacular, except in the courts, where French continued to be used, via a jargon known as 'law French' for several centuries thereafter. 

Three comments.

1. England was not an empire (at least for the time frame you considered).

2. Norman French was itself an acculturation phenomenon since the Normans were originally Vikings who did not speak a iota of French.

3. French itself is a curious case: a Romance language which derives its name from a Germanic tribe which originally did not speak a iota of Latin.

The (unbiased and honest) study of the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages is actually the best antidote for nationalism that I am aware of.