ABSTRACT

The four chapters that follow in this section represent four different aspects of the evolution of the Byzantine state during the ninth century. Significantly, however, they do not deal with the expansion of the so-called 'theme system', nor with fiscal administration and the state budget, all of which would certainly merit attention in a Symposium dealing with this period. They do not deal, in other words, with the institutional and administrative structures of the state, but rather with aspects of the state's being which might be seen as part of its existence in the minds and beliefs of those who inhabited it, who thought about it as a thing, an object of political-religious discourse. The state as a concept was, of course, crucial to the identity of those who had the time, or the need, to consider it: imperial, orthodox Christian, and Roman were all terms which evoked for Byzantines at any period a specific group of notions and ideas about the world and their role in it. But the vocabulary employed to describe the state was derived from pre-Christian politics and philosophy or, in more restricted legal writing, classical Roman notions. And these following chapters all examine different ways in which these definitions were re-interpreted, enhanced, and given new meaning in the course of the ninth century.