 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Purple Prose – Byzantine Political Philosophy. Maybe you've seen this old sketch from the American TV show Saturday Night Live in which customers to a diner are rudely made to understand that the only thing they can order is a cheeseburger. Given that the skit is set in a Greek diner, I've always assumed it was meant as a satire of political life in the Byzantine Empire. There the menu of options was, similarly, limited to one choice – absolute rule by a single man or, occasionally, woman. For this reason, scholars have made rather discouraging remarks along the following lines – Byzantium did not produce any original political theory, nor did it trouble itself to discuss rival theories and the nature of the empire. And – perhaps the most striking feature of Middle Byzantine political culture is the paucity of political theory, the dearth of treatises on government and of philosophical discussions about the ideal constitution and the function of the state. Untrammeled imperial power was their cheeseburger, and it never occurred to them to order anything else. Actually, though, the Byzantine intellectuals were more like customers who just happened to prefer cheeseburgers. They were well aware of other ways of structuring society. A standard class assignment for students of rhetoric was to write an essay about the relative merits of the three classically recognized constitutions, namely monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Monarchy was the preferred option, on the grounds that a single authority is needed to ensure a stable and harmonious state. And another kind of authority encouraged this way of thinking – the intellectual authority of Plato, whose Republic was an influential text among the Byzantines. They were persuaded by his vision of a completely just society ruled by philosopher kings and queens and also by his critique of the other constitutions as defective. This ideology of the single, wise, virtuous ruler is evident from a number of sources, including the showpiece speeches written in praise of various emperors as a display of rhetorical brilliance, not to mention judicious flattery. Already among the pagans of late antiquity, rhetorician philosophers like Themistius had pushed the idea further than Plato had done. In one speech, Themistius compared the basileus, or emperor, to Zeus, arguing that the virtuous ruler on earth exercises a sovereignty like that of the father of the gods. Eusebius echoed the theme in a speech in praise of Constantine the Great, the ruler responsible for the Christianizing of the empire. As one scholar has written, this became the basis for a political theory that went almost unchallenged in its essentials for over 1,000 years. Moving past late antiquity into the early Byzantine period, we have a pair of interesting texts on political philosophy written under Justinian I. Both fall into the genre called Mirrors for Princes, works aimed at rulers giving advice on how best to carry out the duties of his office. The Byzantines will produce several more texts along these lines, and later on in this series we'll see famous examples from Renaissance Europe, notably Machiavelli's The Prince. One of the two texts from the time of Justinian is an anonymous work on political science, known only from a single manuscript and Fodius's summary of the work. The other is an influential and widely diffused treatise by a deacon named Agapetus. His Mirror was even translated into English in 1564 in a version dedicated to Mary, Queen of Scots. In these writings, the influence of Plato's Republic and other philosophical sources is palpable. Agapetus is not content to commend Justinian for his godlike virtue, but praises him as a philosopher-king, writing, Notice here the Christianizing of the very idea of philosophy, something we've seen already in John of Damascus. As for the anonymous author, he too shows knowledge of Plato and the ideal of the philosopher king, but also Aristotle and even Cicero's Latin political treatise, likewise titled The Republic. This anonymous author does seem to be critical of some of the more radical ideas in Plato's original Republic, such as the common sharing of children among members of the elite guardian class. But recent interview guest Dominic O'Mara has argued that this may simply be because the anonymous author sees it as an arrangement that could be adopted only in an ideal society, not in real life. That would be similar to the way such proposals were handled by the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus. Our anonymous political theorist also betrays a Neoplatonic mindset when he describes kingly authority flowing down through the ranks of society the way that divine providence emanates through the cosmos. This idea appears frequently in Byzantine literature on the emperor, especially in the form of a metaphor that compares him to a sun shining benevolently on all his citizens. One vivid representation of this metaphor was a court ceremony called the prokipsis, in which the emperor would emerge onto a lighted stage like the rising sun. In the same vein, a treatise written under Constantine VII Porphyrio Genetos compared the imperial court itself to the cosmos because of its harmonious and hierarchical arrangement. What exactly were the virtues possessed by the ideal emperor? In theory, all of them, since he was meant to be an image of God's goodness. But particular emphasis was often laid on the four cardinal virtues identified in Plato's Republic, namely courage, temperance, wisdom, and above all, justice. Also distinctive of the emperor was a trait called philanthropia, which has a somewhat more capacious meaning than our cognate term philanthropy, as the Greek term just means love of humankind. So though philanthropia did show itself as material generosity, shown by the emperor to his subjects, which is close to philanthropy in our sense, it could also include such things as merciful restraint in punishing the guilty. Such idealistic sentiments run right through Byzantine history and were still being expressed in a work on the emperor written in the 13th century by N. Kefirot Blomedis. Some few authors inclined towards more hard-nosed realism, admitting that you can't make the cheeseburger of stable political rule without breaking a few eggs. In a previous episode, I mentioned that in his work of imperial portraiture, the Chronographia, Michael Pselos seems to recognize that a successful emperor will sometimes have to be less than virtuous. This is clear from his occasional remarks on the role of emotion in good governance. He certainly believes that emperors can fail when they are too vulnerable to emotion and desire. For him, Constantine VIII was a good illustration. Yet Pselos also says that anger, when justified, can be useful and praiseworthy, something clear from his description of yet another Constantine, because in Byzantium there's always another Constantine, namely Constantine IX Monomachus. Mirrors for princes also recognize that rulers may have to get their hands dirty, morally speaking, and accordingly take up the question whether an emperor has to do penance for his official actions. Rather than answering, as one might have expected, that a good emperor is virtuous and therefore has nothing to repent, a distinction is made between the emperor as a private person and as a public official. This would make it possible for him to, say, impose the death sentence on someone who deserves it while keeping a clean conscience as an individual Christian despite the commandment not to kill. Of course it's hardly a shock that works written for the emperor himself would offer the emperor absolution for his own morally dubious actions. But mirrors for princes and speeches of praise also sought to influence the emperors and bring them to a more merciful and ethical style of rule. As Dimitar Angulov has written, The personal concerns and agendas of the orators were supposed to remain hidden beneath the glittering surface of laudatory discourse. But these authors and speechmakers certainly had their own axes to grind. Emphasizing the emperor's generosity and advising leniency in taxation makes quite a bit of sense when you yourself might be in line for gifts at court or a visit from the tax collector. At a less self-interested level, praise for righteous rulership could go hand in hand with warnings against wicked rulership. Another of the running themes in Byzantine political writing is therefore the contrast between the good ruler and the tyrant. Most basically, a true king rules for the good of his subjects rather than his own good. To use an analogy found in the first book of Plato's Republic and repeated in that anonymous treatise from the time of Justinian, the ruler is like a shepherd whose occupation requires him to look to the good of his flock. Just as there is an art of shepherding for achieving that end, so the goal of political science is to help the citizens of the state to flourish. Again, this is fairly predictable, and again it can still be founded much later in authors like Blemades. But we may not have expected to hear from Theo Phylact, a student of Michael Pselos, that tyrants differ from true kings in that they seize power by force rather than assuming their office through the consent of the people. Didn't men don the purple robes of the emperor precisely by seizing power, or by inheriting the throne from family members who had done so? Yes, but even usurpers usually made a show of having the people acclaim their support, so that popular consent was in principle included within imperial ideology. Another way to conceptualize tyranny was as defiance of the laws, or just arbitrary changing of the laws. Here we come to a question that was rather unresolved among the Byzantines themselves. On the one hand, the emperor was seen as a living law, to use a formulation that appears in the corpus of laws compiled under Justinian. On the other hand, in those same documents we find the rule, let the general laws apply to the emperor, in keeping with the latter idea intellectuals sometimes encouraged, if not demanded, that emperors govern within the law. Photeas is an example. In an introduction to a law code he wrote during the reign of Basil I, he stressed that kings should obey legal guidelines and also allow a degree of autonomy to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Yet, it was also seen as a right of the emperor to promulgate laws. Indeed, this is part of what distinguished imperial power from other forms of power. Then too, departing from the letter of the law could be praiseworthy. Remember what we said about philanthropy. A benevolent emperor might refrain from imposing a justly deserved penalty. That too would be breaking the law, albeit in a way no one would describe as tyranny. All this concerns standing laws laid down by previous emperors or inherited from antiquity. But there was another source of hypothetical constraint in the form of what Aristotle called natural justice. A commentary written on Aristotle's politics by Michael of Ephesus contrasts natural to artificial or political justice and follows Aristotle in saying that what is naturally just applies to all humans at all times and places. This is fairly close to the Latin medieval concept of natural law and is inspired by the same passages in Aristotle. A typical example of an artificial or non-natural law would be that the British drive on the left while in most countries you drive on the right. Michael gives the far less typical example that incestuous sexual relationships are not, repeat not, against nature. His rationale here could be that the first generations of humans after Adam and Eve would necessarily have propagated through incest between brother and sister, and this could hardly have been against God's plan. Michael of Ephesus holds that what is truly just by nature is recognized as such by everyone, which undermines the moral relativism he associates with the sophists. To the objection that some people do in fact violate what is supposedly just by nature, which shows that not everyone values justice, he gives the question begging response that such people don't count because they are wicked. Their judgement is skewed, like sick people who don't find naturally sweet-tasting things to be sweet. We mentioned the Patriarch of Constantinople a moment ago, but should say a little bit more about the relationship between the emperor and religious life. As we saw back in episode 269, medieval Latin Christendom was beset by a long-running antagonism between the Church and the secular powers. The Byzantines sought, not always successfully, to avoid that kind of tension. The emperor was crowned by the Patriarch, and smooth collaboration between the two was seen as essential to the health of the empire. Already Eusebius had credited Constantine with uniting secular and religious authority in his single person, and this combination was seen as a distinctive feature of the emperor's office in later Byzantine history. So, his influence extended over religious affairs to no small extent, with the decisions of Church councils ratified by the emperor, and figures such as Justinian getting deeply involved in the making and enforcing of orthodoxy. Of course, iconoclasm and the subsequent restoration of the icons displayed the potential for imperial interference in Christian ritual and belief. Remember that some of the most revealing iconoclast documents to survive today were originally published in the name of the emperor, Constantine V. Yet that same controversy shows us that political power could not constrain religious conscience. A man like John of Damascus was hardly going to give up the icons just because the emperor told him to. He even wrote that as a matter of principle, he could not be persuaded that the Church is governed by imperial edicts. As John of Damascus's own life story shows, the emperor never had effective authority over all of Christendom, however unwelcome that fact may have been at Constantinople. For starters, there were the lands that had belonged to the Western Roman Empire in antiquity. Despite a long-standing foothold in southern Italy, these largely lay outside the control of the emperor. Then there were those places and communities that did fall under his nominal control, but in practice had their own local rulers. These rulers were not, in the normal course of affairs, allowed to style themselves as basileus, nor as already mentioned could they promulgate laws. The carefully chosen wording of diplomatic documents emphasizes the supremacy of Constantinople over client peoples like the Russians, Hungarians, and Pechenegs. Yet local rulers had an annoying habit of acting as if they were something other than inferior provincial lieutenants. Just as the Byzantines were more than a little disquieted when Charlemagne provocatively began to style himself emperor in 812, it was a blow to the dignity of the court of Constantinople when Simeon, the ruler of Bulgaria, got himself proclaimed emperor of his people in 913. Yet a third position was occupied by Eastern Christians who did not recognize the so-called Orthodox teachings established at the Council of Chalcedon. An interesting book published a few years ago by Philip Wood investigates the political dimension of a culture we've already examined, namely Syrian Christianity. One work from this milieu, written in the 6th century, tells the story of the Roman Emperor Julian, who temporarily restored paganism as the official state religion. Since Julian is obviously a villain from the Christian point of view, the story forms a kind of reverse of the texts written in praise of the virtue and piety of Byzantine emperors. You could call it a funhouse mirror for princes. Julian's lust and impiety are brought into sharp relief by descriptions of contemporary Christian saints and by his pious successor, Jovian, who pointedly refuses to accept the imperial crown until he is acclaimed by good Christians. Other works from Syria, especially Hagiographies, tales about the lives of saints, praise the holy and ascetic leaders of the Miaphysite community and show how God's displeasure with Chalcedonian Christianity has manifested in natural disasters like plagues. That by the way is another typical feature of Byzantine political ideology. Epidemics, earthquakes, and also military failures were routinely understood as signs that God was withdrawing his support for an emperor, which could encourage usurpers to make a bid for power. Speaking of disasters, let's conclude with a few remarks about how political thought developed after the catastrophic fall of Constantinople to the western crusaders in 1204. Imperial ideology and ritual survived to some extent in the smaller states that were spun off from the fallen capital, especially the court at Nicaea. Eastern rule then resumed at Constantinople after the capital was retaken by the Palaiologan dynasty in 1261. The same sorts of political writing we've been discussing continued to be produced for the Nicaean and Palaiologan courts right down to the last Byzantine emperor who was called of course Constantine the 11th Palaiologos. The intellectual John Argyropoulos wrote an oration in his honor, falling into the genre of mirrors for princes. But it wasn't purely business as usual. A particularly interesting author in this period was Theodore II Lascaris, who was himself a ruler. He reigned in Nicaea from 1254 to 1258 and wrote treatises expressing his personal political philosophy. He was critical of the way that Byzantine political life was dominated by family connections, something that had become especially prevalent during the earlier Komnene dynasty. For Theodore, the imperial elite and indeed society as a whole should be held together by friendship, not kinship. Here he was drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which identified three ways that friendship can arise. You and I might be friendly to one another because we enjoy each other's company, because we find each other useful, or in the best case, out of admiration for one another's character. Aristotle also thought that a perfect friendship presupposed equality between the two friends. Theodore ignored that bit, in order to propose that the emperor is the ultimate friend. Of course, no one is more useful or a more reliable source of pleasure, given the resources at his disposal. And we already know that any emperor worthy of the title has a virtuous and admirable character. For Lascaris, it is virtue, and not aristocratic blood, that makes somebody truly noble and fit to rule. As the Byzantines steadily lost power and territory in this later period, other theorists proposed further alternatives for shoring up imperial legitimacy and stability. Writing around 1300, Manuel Moscopoulos put forward a sophisticated theory of political development according to which political institutions emerge from a chaotic state of nature through a kind of contract between the people and the ruler. That sounds like a breathtaking anticipation of Thomas Hobbes, but it's not entirely original with Moscopoulos since it is another idea one can find in Plato's Republic. More innovative was Moscopoulos' point that a monarchy based only on this contract will always be unstable because of infighting among the subjects. The citizens must be brought into harmony, and the only authority that can achieve that is divine authority, which no one can hope to escape. So the most binding political arrangement is loyalty to the emperor secured through a sacred oath sworn before God. Yet another noteworthy text from this period was written by a member of the royal family, Theodore Palaiologos, not to be confused with the aforementioned Theodore II Lascaris. The Greek version of this treatise is lost, and in fact we know it only through a medieval French translation of a Latin version, not exactly the ideal way to access Theodore's ideas. Having lived as a young man in Italy, he was apparently impressed by the way that rulers there took advice from a council of advisers. In the French translation, this is actually called a parlement. So in this work, called On the Rule of the Prince, Theodore argues that good governance requires the monarch to be open to such advice. He criticizes certain Byzantine rulers, including the Palaiologan emperor Andronicus II, for failing to pay attention to their councilors. In the final analysis then, it might be better to say that Byzantine political theorists were like restaurant patrons who happily accept cheeseburgers as the only item on the menu, but tactfully suggest that the cook should make sure the burgers are well done and have only the best toppings. Monarchial rule was indeed taken as a fact of life and as the best form of constitution, but emperors were constantly reminded that this form of rule could succeed only through divine favor, personal virtue, a generous, friendly and open-minded attitude from the emperor towards his subjects, or at least his elite advisers. And also, being named Constantine wouldn't hurt. You may have noticed while listening to this episode that while these political ideas were indeed influenced by ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, they were almost never put forth in works that one would classify as philosophical in the narrow sense. The only work I mentioned that belonged to philosophy as a genre, in the sense the Byzantines might have used that term, was Michael of Ephesus's commentary on the politics. Instead, we've been drawing mostly uncourtly literature written as displays of rhetoric. This art stood alongside, and arguably even outshone, philosophy as a major inheritance from classical culture and Byzantine civilization. But in truth, there is no pulling apart the traditions of rhetoric and philosophy, as we'll see next time when we consider the fortunes of Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric at Constantinople, and consider the literary theories that were developed by Michael Psellos and other master stylists. So join me for a look at the arts of oratory so interesting that it might ironically leave you speechless. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.