Anthony Kaldellis | |
---|---|
Αντώνιος Καλδέλλης | |
Born | Athens, Greece | November 29, 1971
Education | |
Academic career | |
Discipline | Byzantine studies |
Institutions | |
Website | https://kaldellispublications.weebly.com/ |
Anthony Kaldellis (Greek: Αντώνιος Καλδέλλης; born 29 November 1971) is a Greek-American historian and Byzantinist[1] who is a professor of classics at the University of Chicago.[2] He is a specialist in Greek historiography, Plato, and Byzantine studies.[2]
As the author of monographs on classical antiquity and the Byzantine Empire, Kaldellis has called into question a commonly accepted view of Byzantium as an absolutist world; he considers instead the Byzantine Empire a "bottom-up monarchy", where the common people have a good share in government, since emperors impose laws by acknowledging their customs and demands.[3]
The general impression that I have is that Byzantine art historians see themselves as art historians first who only happen to work on Byzantium, rather than primarily as Byzantinists (which is what I am).
"A bottom-up model of political authority will be presented to temper, even push back against, the top-down one that prevails in the field. Incidentally, this model will help to explain two unique features of the Byzantine political sphere: why it survived for so long as an integrated, coherent moral and political community (longer than any other monarchy) and why the imperial throne sat atop a political realm that was so turbulent and potentially disloyal. Ordinarily, these two facts would be in tension, but in the Byzantine "monarchical republic" they reinforced each other.";" But the republican model authorizes a bottom-up perspective according to which the emperor derived his authority from the Roman people and was answerable to them in both theory and fact.;"This effort will make good on the promise of Chapter 1 to provide a bottom-up model of the Byzantine polity that will act as a counterweight to the top-down one that currently prevails.
© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search