296 REVIEWS OF BOOKS
researchers, as a stimulus to further study, her
declared aim – to portray the historic and intel-
lectual environment of Thessalonica and its
spiritual heritage in and after the post-Byzantine
period in an unconventional, sometimes qualified
and definitely out-of-the-ordinary way – has been
admirably achieved. And while, like almost every
study of the spiritual production of post-Byzantine
Thessalonica, it has its occasional deficiencies and
omissions (for example, in addition to a few
instances in which the bibliographic information is
incomplete, the author’s failure, in the chapter on
the Akathistos, to mention other recent research
which places the work in a period before that of
Romanos Melodos), it is a fact that Russell’s book
offers the reader a different perspective on inter-
esting aspects of the literal and cultural atmos-
phere of post-Byzantine Thessalonica.
In any case, and despite its – rare, indeed –
weaknesses, this book is an important aid for the
study of the history, literature and spirit of
Thessalonica during the last centuries of the
Byzantine Empire and an important tool for those
interested in the Palaiologan era and Byzantine
studies generally. The historic, literary and proso-
pographical information that it provides and the
methodology of the research that follows are
particularly interesting, in a way that makes the
book a useful aid not only for students and young
researchers, but also for the scientific world in
general.
ILIAS TAXIDIS
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
itaxidis@lit.auth.gr
KALDELLIS (A.) The Byzantine Republic:
People and Power in New Rome. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 290.
£25.95. 9780674365407.
doi:10.1017/S007542691600104X
In this thought-provoking study, Kaldellis takes
issue with dated views of the Byzantine Empire as
a theocracy and argues that this was rather a repub-
lican monarchy. Few would disagree with the
author on Byzantium’s Roman identity and, in
Weberian terms, theocracy is an inadequate
definition for the Empire’s political system.
Moreover, studies by R.-J. Lilie (‘Des Kaisers
Macht und Ohnmacht. Zum Zerfall der
Zentralgewalt in Byzanz vor dem vierten
Kreuzzug’, in R.-J. Lilie and P. Speck (eds), Varia
I (Poikila Byzantina 4), Bonn 1984, 9–120) and J.-
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C. Cheynet (for example, ‘Se révolter
légitimement contre le “Basileus”?’, in P. Depreux
(ed.), Revolte und Sozialstatus von der Spätantike
bis zur Frühen Neuzeit, Munich 2008, 57–73) have
shown that there were practical limitations to the
emperor’s theoretically absolute power in what
functioned as an Akzeptanzsystem according to E.
Flaig’s definition (‘Für eine Konzeptualisierung
der Usurpation im Spätrömischen Reich’, in F.
Paschoud and J. Szidat (eds), Usurpationen in der
Spätantike, Stuttgart 1997, 15–34; this, along with
R.-J. Lillie’s article mentioned above, F.
Winkelmann, Quellenstudien zur herrschenden
Klasse von Byzanz, Berlin 1987 and C. Gizewski,
Zur Normativität und Struktur der
Verfassungsverhältnisse in der späteren römischen
Kaiserzeit, Munich 1988, are important omissions
from the bibliography).
Kaldellis goes beyond all this and asserts that
the autocratic tenet of the Byzantine political
system should be dismissed, since supreme
authority was vested in the people – not the
emperor. He regards the analytical distinction
between Roman Republic and Empire as
misleading because there was an ideological
baseline of republican beliefs that diachronically
determined the operation of both political systems.
In this essentialist approach, a political system’s
dominant ideology need not be reflected in the
political structures and institutions of governance
– it is neither intended to reproduce nor to be
reproduced by them. Moreover, articulated
political ideas and their operative role are not
examined in conjunction with the socio-economic
conditions in which they were embedded. Within
this theoretical framework, the continuity of
republican motifs in Byzantine political discourse
– testified in legal-political treatises and histories
written by emperors and authors of the
Constantinopolitan court elite – is not analysed as
an integral aspect of imperial ideology but as
bottom-up republican beliefs external to the
former.
Elaborating on the thesis of H.-G. Beck (Das
Byzantinische Jahrtausend, Munich 1978),
Kaldellis regards riots, coups d’état and rebellions
of usurpation as evidence of republican political
practice, i.e. as means of a normative extra-legal
political activity of the Roman people (treated as a
reified political agent throughout the book), which
made the emperor answerable to and controlled by
it. Uprisings in Constantinople are viewed as a
product of the citizenry’s voluntarist political
activity, aiming to impose its unanimous political
 BYZANTINE AND MODERN GREEK STUDIES
agenda. Kaldellis seems little concerned that histo-
riographical reports often treat cursorily or pass
over the different roles, motives and interests of
various social groups in these events, especially
the role of senatorial and church elites in canal-
izing the oppressed mob’s social discontent or
need for plunder in order to serve their political
agenda. From a period of seven centuries, only on
two occasions did a revolt in Constantinople result
in the deposition of the emperor (Michael V and
Andronikos I). This rather indicates the citizenry’s
limited ability to exercise sovereign control over
the imperial office. Questionable also is the view
that the activity of the Constantinopolitan citizenry
was representative of the public of the empire
(157). The ability of the Constantinopolitan
commoners to exert political influence due to
proximity to the emperor could hardly induce a
sense of political involvement and participation
upon common provincials, at least 80% of whom
lived in the countryside and only learned about an
uprising or a coup d’état in Constantinople several
weeks or even months after the event. This lived
experience rather reaffirms their exclusion from
political processes there.
Kaldellis argues that common provincials had
a decisive role in issues of central governance
through military rebellions of usurpation, since
these were determined by public opinion and an
emperor’s unpopularity: ‘the best protection
against rebellion was popularity’ (181). This is an
evidently problematic premise regarding a politi-
cally influential role of the provincial masses.
According to it, Basil II, who faced four rebellions
during his long reign, should be considered as a
very unpopular emperor Empire-wide. This could
not deprive him, though, of his autocratic rule. If,
instead, we regard his victories in the civil wars as
evidence that he and not his adversaries enjoyed
popular support, this again means that public
opinion hardly protected an emperor from rebel-
lions of the military elite and that the latter hardly
reflected the political opinion of common provin-
cials. Moreover, less than one out of five civil
wars in Byzantium ended with the reigning
emperor’s deposition. This demonstrates that,
whatever the role of ‘public opinion’ (if at all
measurable Empire-wide) in their outbreak, most
emperors had the arbitrary power to maintain their
throne against it.
Kaldellis fails to appreciate the role of the
ruling class in the majority of military rebellions
of usurpation (demonstrated in Winkelmann’s and
Cheynet’s classical studies). Even though these
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297
(and equally coups d’état) were a recurrent
phenomenon with a structural role in the repro-
duction of the imperial system, they also were
contingent political events determined mainly by
conflicting factional interests and personal
ambitions as well as the relocation of military and
political power within the elite. They had little to
do with a customarily regularized political
mechanism of popular control over imperial
authority. It was not common people’s opinion but
power networks and shifting loyalties in the army,
i.e. military power, that determined the outbreak
of rebellions and the outcome of civil wars, in
which the vast majority of the provincial popula-
tions had a marginal or passive role.
Kaldellis usefully reopens the discussion on
Byzantine political ideology. In deconstructing the
dated image of theocracy, he also seeks to dismiss
the political sovereignty of the emperor. To do so,
he downplays the dialectic relationship between
an undisputed dominant belief in a single person’s
rule and centralized control over economic and
military resources. These reproduced the charisma
of the imperial office, which concentrated
supreme political power on its holder and his
power faction in a city-state ruling over an
imperial realm. In G. Agamben’s theory (State of
Exception, Chicago 2005) – quoted by the author
– a prolonged state of exception becomes a state of
being that robs individuals or broader social
groups of their citizenship. Republican motifs in
Byzantium were principally instrumentalized to
legitimize a prolonged state of exception, the
emperor’s autocratic rule that deprived the people
of any participatory political rights.
YANNIS STOURAITIS
Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik
der Universität Wien
ioannis.stouraitis@univie.ac.at
BENT (J.T.) (edited by G. Brisch) The
Dodecanese: Further Travels Among the
Insular Greeks: Selected Writings of J.
Theodore and Mabel V.A. Bent, 1885–1888.
Oxford: Archaeopress, 2015. Pp. xiv + 195.
£15. 9781784910969.
doi:10.1017/S0075426916001051
Theodore Bent is perhaps better known as the
author of a book based on his travels to the
Cyclades in 1883–1884. That book, entitled The
Cyclades, or, Life among the Insular Greeks, was
first published in 1885 and then republished in