Historians call the republic’s later, third phase the Dominate—during which military emperors, ruling from wherever military necessity demanded, came to be addressed for the first time in Roman history as Domine, or “Lord.”
The fourth, final, and longest phase, by far, was Byzantium, lasting from the fifth to the 15th century, during which emperors ruled as civilians from the city officially named New Rome but commonly called Constantinople (“Constantine’s city”)…
All along, the empire’s people called themselves Romans. (The term “Byzantine” is a modern Western invention.) And all along these Romans identified their empire as a res publica or politeia, boasting that unlike other empires theirs was committed to the common good.
From beginning to end, “Byzantine” Roman emperors were obliged to justify their actions by appeals not to divine right or divine law but to the common good, and the undisputed arbiter of the common good was the politeia, which included everyone—the aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the army, the clergy, and the various classes of people: merchants, tradesmen, farmers, etc.
Any one of these could challenge an emperor’s right to rule on the basis of his failure to serve the common good. Byzantine emperors therefore lived in fear of the people and did whatever they could to keep the people happy, presenting themselves as civil servants working tirelessly for the public’s benefit.
The people did not live in much fear of the emperors, however. They were often irreverent and disloyal, verbally abusing the emperor in public, even in his presence, and disregarding new laws they didn’t like.
“Byzantine history abounds in instances of men and women who refused to obey an emperor’s orders, mostly on religious grounds,” writes Kaldellis.
