[Delivered as one of the Grey Lectures in Cambridge on
20 February 1935. Unpublished.]

I HAVE chosen for the subject of this lecture the Byzantine
State, since it is the peculiar characteristics of this State
which above all else distinguish and differentiate East Rome
from Western Europe of the early Middle Age. If it be true
that the history of the ancient world is the history of Empires,
that the history of Western Europe in the Middle Ages is the
story of small states--Kleinstaaterei ist Mittelalter--then the
Byzantine Empire may be regarded as a survival into Europe's
Middle Age of the conditions and institutions of an older
world. For here set against localism and decentralization stands
a highly centralized government--a government not merely
centralized in administration, but centralized--obviously, un-
mistakably--in one single city, Constantinople. Here as
against conflicting systems of law--the law of many local cir-
cumscriptions--is a realm governed by a single law--that law
emanating from a single source, the Roman emperor, and here
is to be found that single sovranty which was lacking in
Western Europe. One can come to an understanding of East
Rome most effectually, in my judgement, if one studies its
most distinctive peculiarity--the Byzantine State.

Constantinople was a Greek city before it became the eastern
capital of the Roman Empire: it was set in the Greek sphere,
and thus in a world to which absolute rule had through the
centuries of Hellenistic civilization become second nature. The
Greek East had never understood anything of that which
underlay the conception of the Principate--the outcome of the
Romanism of the thought of Augustus. The theory of the East
Roman State was fashioned by Greek thinkers, and they
desired nothing but that form of rule with which they had long
been familiar. When one emperor of East Rome had the curi-
ous idea of converting the State into a democracy--whatever

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