ENDNOTES

1. Throughout this paper the term 'eastern Roman Empire' will refer to what is popularly known today as Byzantium. The 'Roman Empire' will refer to the pre-Christian empire. The word 'Byzantium' will only be used to make a specific point or stress a certain connotation. I stress that these are conventional terms I am using in order to save the reader any confusion. (back to text)

2. The reader is strongly advised to consult this article since many of the ideas expressed therein are implicitly relevant to the present author's analysis of Romanisation and other, theoretical, matters. (back to text)

3. It may be said, for example, that the heyday of the popular British imperial metanarrative lasted from 1878-1918, an extremely short period indeed when compared to the history of British imperialism, which is generally regarded as extending from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. (back to text)

4. Turcan, in his otherwise observant discussion, is wrong to describe the emperor's position in terms of 'Caesaropapism' (Turcan 1996: 340), a term long out of favour and highly misleading. (back to text)

5. When considering the importance of Christianity in the revitalisation of the Roman metanarrative in the face of the Sassanian, it is worth keeping in mind that the two client states that suffered most from the antipathy between Rome and Persia, Armenia and Ethiopia, are the earliest Christian states in existence (Fowden 1993: 104, passim). (back to text)

6. On the important question of so-called Roman political collapse on the limes and how in fact this involved a transformation of the Roman metanarrative, see Whittaker 1994: chapter 7 and pages 248, 266 and 278 in particular. (back to text)

7. Similar problems today face countries in the Balkans and the Middle East who have been dragged out of the universal ('Roman') empire of Constantinople (in both its Christian and Islamic form) only during this century or the last, to dive headlong into a world of nation-states and -- even worse -- national boundaries. It is no coincidence that the two states in the region which have the most pervasive (but actually illusory) historical ties with the West, Greece and Israel, are those which do not seem to be able to 'fit' comfortably into the broader region as it has been redefined since the late nineteenth century. Both are, in essence, cultural colonies of the West, and remain so. Likewise, the countries of Eastern Europe, including Greece, have difficulty in adjusting to the new reality of the European Union, precisely because their heritage of Romanitas is not shared by Brussels, where Romanitas has been re-interpreted in the sense of Europa. The concept of 'Europe' is essentially Carolingian in origin (see Riché 1993: 361-3) and the Carolingians represent the alter-ego of the eastern Roman metanarrative. (back to text)

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Copyright © D. Turner 1998

Copyright © assemblage 1998