By then, the empire had ceased to exist, so Westerners with no knowledge of Greek or access to the relevant documents had no way of checking the historical reality against the disparaging claims of Edward Gibbon and others, for whom the Byzantines served as a convenient starting point for the Whig writing of history—the primeval nightmare of superstitious despotism out of which the Western world awoke and arose.
Some kinder 20th-century scholars have offered modest corrections to the conventional narrative, denying the accusation of caesaropapism and celebrating Byzantine art and culture, but no one has gone as far as Kaldellis in asserting the secular basis of Byzantine politics or in demonstrating the blindness of Western historians who only understand politics according to Enlightenment categories of thought.
Reading Roman history, but not rightly, early modern Western political theorists divided governments into two basic categories, monarchies and republics, defining the latter as self-governing polities without a monarch and understanding the former as either absolute or constitutional.
As Kaldellis explains, the ancient Greeks and Romans saw things differently.
Their two basic categories were kingdoms and commonwealths. A kingdom, in their experience, was the possession of a king ruled by his might for his own satisfaction. A commonwealth—res publica in Latin, politeia in Greek—was an independent polity variously governed but administered for the good of all.
Commonwealths could therefore be monarchies, aristocracies, or democracies. Cicero himself said as much, even while bewailing the waning of senatorial power.
The standard story that the Roman republic ended with Caesar Augustus becoming emperor is therefore simply wrong, says Kaldellis. The republic lived on, albeit in a new phase, the Principate, in place of the earlier Consulate.
