Byzantine Studies has long resembled a stage that has been flooded by artificial smoke. When you walk onto it, you can discern individual parts of the set if you get up close to them, and see how they are linked to those next to them, but if you try to look at the whole it seems shrouded, opaque, and mysterious. It does not help that we have been pointing colored spotlights at the background too, casting the whole in an unearthly, exotic, and fictionalized light. This is how the concepts “Byzantium” and “the Byzantines” have operated. They rarely prevent scholars from carrying out good research on specialized topics, but when it comes to giving an account of the civilization as a whole, about who its people were, what their relationship was to ancient traditions and their place in world history, the results range from confused or distorted to metaphysical or just made up. The essences that have been invented for Byzantium seem like figures discerned in the clouds.

Getting rid of those labels, along with their accumulated associations, and using instead the labels that are consistently used in our sources will be like a crisp wind blowing the smoke away. We will then be able to see this polity, its society, history, and civilization for what they were, and we will also be able to relate it properly to its antecedents, neighbors, and successors. Our field will no longer be cut off from the mainstream of human history, as a magical land held in the grip of esoteric delusions and mystical essences. It will be as familiar and pedestrian as the Roman empire, which is what it was.

It is imperative that we reclaim the long east Roman paradigm. Byzantine Studies has been losing ground, with its greatest losses going to late antiquity. Late antiquity has occupied a large part of our field and turned it over to classicists and early Christian scholars, who have little inclination to look at anything Byzantine after the seventh century. As a result, Byzantium has never been more cut off from its ancient sources than it is now. It has become a smaller field, more isolated, and Hellenocentric, revolving around Greek sources and the Greek Orthodox Church.