The Chief Periods of European History / Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885

by Edward A. Freeman

“Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum,

Hostibus expulsis, ad nos justissimus ordo

Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni

Nos penes est: quemcumque sibi Germania regem

Præficit, hunc dives submisso vertice Roma

Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine Rhenus.”

An older form of the same idea is found in the phrase which spoke of the translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks. Translated to the Franks, the Empire, as concerns the West, assuredly was; and, on the Western theory, it may in a sense be said to be translated from the Greeks. A line of Emperors whose native speech was German succeeded, in Western ideas, a line of Emperors whose native speech was Greek. Yet the phrase will not stand every test. The words “Greek” and “Frank,” as used in the formula, do not exactly answer to one another. A man of the East, if he could have brought himself to allow that the Empire had been translated at all from his own side of Hadria, would have said that the formula should rather speak of a translation of the Empire from the Romans to the Franks. But no one in the West would have thought of saying that the Empire was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. We have just heard the Western Empire called, with national pride, a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But no national pride could have been called up by speaking of the Eastern Empire as a Holy Roman Empire of the Greek nation. For “German” was a national name in which the men of the Western Empire gloried; “Greek” was a name which no man of the Eastern Empire admitted to belong to him. It is perfectly true that the two Empires did in the end become, the one a German, the other a Greek state. But they became German and Greek in different senses and by different processes. We see at once that the Western Empire became German through the election of a German king to its crown. It seems ridiculous to speak, even for the sake of pointing the contrast, of the Eastern Empire becoming Greek by the election of a Greek king to its crown. Something like that might happen in the nineteenth century; it could not possibly happen in the ninth. We may here bring in the analogy and the contrast of which I spoke at the end of our last lecture. The nearest analogy to be found in the East to the Empire of Charles the Frank would have been if Bulgarian Simeon or Servian Stephen had been crowned Emperor of the Romans in Saint Sophia and had from that moment reigned over Bulgaria or Servia in his character of Emperor of the Romans. But the nearest approach to this was when the Tzar Simeon and the Tzar Stephen took an Imperial style without entering the walls of the Tzarigrad. That such was the nearest approach in the East to the event of the year 800 is the most marked point of difference between the positions of the Teuton in the West and the Slave in the East. One main reason why it was the nearest approach lies in the different positions held by the Old and the New Rome in the two Empires. For another main reason we must look a little further.

I said a few minutes back that a man in the East might perhaps have said that the Empire was translated to the Franks from the Romans, but that no man in the West would ever have said that the Empire was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. I said also in my last lecture that one great cause of the different position held by the Teutons in the West and by the Slaves in the East was that the Eastern Empire spoke with two tongues, while the Western Empire spoke with one tongue only. The cause of that difference has to be sought for in far earlier stages of our subject; it is the continuation of the difference which I pointed out long ago between the position of Rome in the East and in the West; the difference that, while in both alike Rome was a ruler, in the West she was also a teacher, while in the East she was herself a learner. In the West Latin displaced the native languages. We may say that no Roman ever learned Celtic or Iberian. If any Roman ever did, it could have been only for some immediate practical purpose. But in the East Latin never displaced Greek; it was not likely to displace, there was no wish that it should displace, a tongue which every educated Roman learned as a matter of course. The tendency was rather the other way. At one stage, as I pointed out in another set of lectures, Greek went far to displace Latin as a literary tongue even in Rome; the later Latin writers, like Ammianus and Claudian, mark in truth a Latin reaction against Greek influences. In the Greek East Greek lived on and flourished; Latin was simply set up by its side for certain purposes. The Roman Empire of course, whether in East or West, knew no official tongue but Latin. Latin therefore remained for ages the tongue of government and warfare in the Roman East, while Greek was the language of ordinary speech, of literature, and of religion. That is to say, the position which belonged to Latin alone in the West was in the East divided between Latin and Greek. It was impossible therefore that either of those tongues should make the same way among other nations which Latin, with its undivided supremacy, made in the West. In those parts of Eastern Europe where Greek had not already established itself, the phænomena of Western Europe showed themselves. In inland Thrace and Mœsia, just as in Gaul and Spain, a Romance speech did spring up, and in the wilder lands of Illyricum, the Skipetar, the modern Albanian, still kept his own speech, like the Basque and the Breton of the West. Thus to the invading Teuton, the culture of the Empire presented itself only in a single shape, a Latin shape, while the invading Slave, if he wished to adopt the culture of the Empire, must have been puzzled by the twofold shape, Greek and Latin, in which it stood before him. It was an almost necessary consequence that neither element ever had the same influence on the Slavonic conquerors of the East which the single Latin element had on the Teutonic conquerors of the West.

I have said that the Roman Empire of the West became by degrees a German power, and that the Roman Empire of the East became by degrees a Greek power. But I have said also that they became so in different ways. We have seen that the Western Empire became German by the process of choosing German kings to its Emperors, and by extending the name of Roman Empire over their German dominions. The Eastern Empire became Greek in quite another way. There was no transfer of Roman power to Greek princes, no extension of the Roman name over Greek lands. Either process might have happened with Slavonic princes and Slavonic lands; neither could happen with Greek princes or Greek lands, for the simple reason that Greek princes and lands, as distinguished from Roman, were not in being. In the Romania of the East, in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, Greek and Roman meant the same thing. We have spoken of an artificial Greek nation and of an artificial Roman nation; in the Eastern Romania they were the same thing. Of the two tongues of the East-Roman world, the tongue which was native to the soil proved the stronger. Latin gradually died out even in its own range; it died out, that is, as a separate speech, though not till it had poured a vast infusion of Latin words into the official Greek vocabulary. Greek became the one language of the Roman Empire of the East; as in the West the Romance languages grew up, while Latin long abode beside them as an official, a literary, and a religious speech, so in the East men spoke a more modern form of the Greek tongue, while its older shape went on as the official, the literary, and the religious speech. But down to the coming of the Ottoman, nay down to the movement of our own century which in some lands has thrown off his yoke, the Roman name lived on. What name in short should supplant it? The name of Hellên had passed away; it had become synonymous with pagan. The Greek name had never been used in the Hellenic lands; it was the name by which the Hellênes were known in the West, exactly as the Deutschen and the Cymry are known among other nations by other names than those by which they call themselves. In truth the people whom the Latins called Græci called themselves at one stage Ἕλληνες and at another Ῥωμαῖοι. The Roman name lived on, and well it might; there was nothing to change it. While the Western part of the Empire was first united to the Eastern and then separated from it, while it was separated from it to pass to one who was first Patrician of the Romans and then Emperor of the Romans, but who would hardly have called himself personally a Roman, the Eastern lands of Rome were ruled in unbroken succession by princes following one another in the same Imperial seat, any one of whom would have been amazed indeed if his right to the Roman name had been disputed. Prince and people alike clave to that name and knew no other; and Romans they were, not in the same sense as the first settlers on the Palatine, not even in the same sense as the Volscian Cicero and the Spaniard Trajan; but in the sense in which their forefathers had become Romans by the edict of Antoninus. They were Romans by the same right as Theodosius when he came as a second Trajan from Spain, as Jovius himself when he came from the land that should be Tzernagora. It would have been hard to find a Roman pedigree for Justinian; but neither would it have been easy to find one for Aurelian. The Greek—not the pure Hellên of old but the Greek of the artificial nation formed by Macedonian conquest—had the same right to the Roman name which the Gaul had; so to be sure had the Syrian and the Egyptian. But then the Syrian and the Egyptian could hardly be said to accept the gift; under the guise of national creeds, creeds that were deemed heretical by the orthodoxy of either Rome, they clave to an elder national being which was neither Greek nor Roman, and they fell away from their Roman allegiance to become not wholly unwilling subjects of the Saracen. The very losses of the Empire, the cutting off of its Eastern provinces, helped, not indeed to make the Empire more Roman, but to make Roman and Greek more thoroughly words of the same meaning within its Eastern provinces. In the course of the seventh century, the Oriental lands of Syria and Egypt, the Latin lands of Spain and Africa, were finally torn away from the Empire. Part of Latin Italy had already passed to the Lombard; the rest now followed it to form the kernel of the new Roman Empire of the West. The result of all this was that, from Sicily to Tauros, the subjects left to the Empire, the Romans of the East, were almost wholly men of Greek speech and of what we have called artificial Greek nationality. Within the Eastern Empire the artificial Greek nation and the artificial Roman nation seemed to have become the same thing. Every Greek was a Roman; it seemed as if every Roman was a Greek. It was not wholly so; even within the Eastern peninsula the Albanian and the Rouman nationalities were still to show themselves. But to all appearance the Roman lands of the East were as purely Greek-speaking lands as the Roman lands of the West were Latin-speaking lands. If the Western Empire became German, it was by choosing a German king and in some sort adopting his German subjects. If the Eastern Empire became Greek, it was because the un-Greek parts were lopped off from it. To this process the finishing stroke was put by the event of 800. Latin Italy then parted, even in name, from its allegiance to the Eastern Rome. The prince who reigned at Constantinople was by the truest political succession Emperor of the Romans; but the Romans who were left for him to rule over were well nigh wholly Greek.