ABSTRACT
The first Christian emperor, Constantine, created an additional capital for the Roman Empire in the Greek city of Byzantium, renaming it modestly after himself as Constantinople, the present Istanbul. The image of Byzantium in Western Europe has tended to be of a large stagnant empire, where nothing changed. Byzantine man, certainly as typified by Kekaumenos, clearly felt no great attachment to his polis or to his community in the way which was so characteristic of the society of Greek and Roman antiquity. Prokopios, who is Byzantium's best-known historian, continues in his preface to imitate not only Thucydides and Herodotus but also Diodorus Siculus and parades further imitations of such well known episodes in Thucydides as the plague and the siege of Plataea. Basically the Byzantines had inherited a way of writing history that went back to Herodotus and Thucydides in the fifth century BC. Such histories were very much about war and politics and were written in a grand style.
