Neoclassical ideals emphasized order, perfection, simplicity, virtue, rationality, all qualities retroactively applied to the Rome of antiquity, but not to the “Eastern” Empire. Then it became a pejorative adjective meaning “excessively complicated.” Not coincidentally, this also happened to be the opinion of the Neoclassicists when it came to the late Roman Empire. ‘Byzantine empire’ is a made up term that appeared in the course of the 16th century.” Originally meant to suggest the Greek influence on the late Roman Empire, the word became a way of bracketing off the late empire as strange and exotic. Similarly, the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, ruled from Constantinople by Constantine and his successors, never thought of itself as anything other than Roman, and certainly not as “Byzantine,” a word that comes from the city’s ancient name, Byzantium.Īs the poster of the video above writes, “the empire this video is about was neither called ‘Byzantine’ nor ‘Eastern Roman,’ but simply ‘Roman/Romaioi’ but its contemporaries. Western Europeans, however, exclusively used the terms Ottomans or Turks, in rhetoric designed to evoke fears of dangerous, threatening others. They called themselves Rūmī, Romans, inheritors of the Empire. (It was later the favored style of Mussolini and, more recently, Donald Trump.) Academics and statesmen redefined the cultural boundaries of ancient Rome to suit the agendas of their age.Įlites of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th century, for example, believed there was no separation between themselves and ancient Rome. Neoclassical art was an ennobling artifice in a time when European empires were swallowing up the globe. Where Rome once encompassed a global empire, it began to inhabit a narrow range of ideas, imposed by humanist scholars, French Jacobins, bourgeois revolutionaries in the North American colonies, and the courts of Louis XVI, George III, and Napoleon. But the Roman world seemed to shrink during the Neoclassical period, an Enlightenment-era movement to purify the arts.
![roman empire timelime roman empire timelime](https://0701.static.prezi.com/preview/v2/bhz7w2v7lil2g3nmy4cru4ex5p6jc3sachvcdoaizecfr3dnitcq_3_0.png)
The history of Rome is, more or less, the history of the modern world.