Honour among Romaioi

Medieval Greek writers of biography and encomium, like their ancient models, conventionally began by extolling their subject’s γένος (birth, kin, ancestry) and πατρίς (native land or city) as the two basic co-ordinates of a social existence, which both conferred an honourable start in life, and gained glory from a life honourably lived. This was not just a rhetorical convention. In a world where neither settlement and communication patterns nor economic and social priorities have changed radically until recent times, the kin group and the community had much the same significance for the medieval subjects of the East Roman emperor that they had for the citizens of the ancient polis and have had for the inhabitants of the modern Greek villages studied by social anthropologists. The patris was still, for most people, a small, introverted, self-regulating agricultural community whose members all knew each other well, wanted to know more about each other’s business, and took a pride in their unique collective identity. The genos of relatives (συγγενεῖς) sharing a common great-grandparent was still, within the patris, the group in which most people instinctively invested their loyalty and trust, and with which one of the basic qualifications for honourable status — εὐγένεια (good birth, nobility) was associated. ² Although the institutional system through which honour was pursued and recognised was no longer that of the city-state where the notions of patris and genos had been forged, these notions were adapted to the realities of a large, monarchical, territorial state — or, to put it more accurately, that state never grew out of the thought world of the ancient polis. Constantinople, the New Rome, was more than the imperial capital: it was the ‘ruling city’, the ‘common fatherland’ (κοινὴ πατρίς) of all who belonged to the ‘Roman race’ (γένος ‘Рωμαίων). The words genos and eugeneia were loaded with all the rejection of aliens, barbarians and slaves which had characterised citizenship in the ancient world. To be well born was, in principle, to be free-born and native, and, ideally, to belong to a genos which was good because it was indigenous to, or adopted by, the New Rome.