Was the Roman Empire a military dictatorship? | Anthony Kaldellis and Lex Fridman

Kaldellis explains that the East Roman Empire requires careful terminological precision. The conventional term 'Byzantine Empire' is problematic because the Greeks had no equivalent term for 'empire' in their vocabulary. Instead, they used 'basileia' (monarchy), 'politeia' (polity), or 'Romania' (the proper name of the state). The Latin 'res publica' does not mean republic in the modern sense but rather refers to the common affairs and interests of a political community, regardless of regime type—even Cicero could envision it under a king. This understanding persisted under the Eastern Roman emperors.

The term 'empire' itself is problematic when applied to the Eastern Roman state because it conventionally denotes a state created through conquest where one group rules over others. The Eastern Roman Empire was instead constituted as a polity of Roman citizens ruling themselves through their own government. While the Romans occasionally conquered neighboring peoples (Slavs, Bulgarians, Muslims), these imperial relationships never reached a point where the entire polity should be classified as an empire. Kaldellis notes that even modern states like the United Kingdom have conquered territories (Wales) but aren't typically called empires.

'Monarchic republic' is proposed as the superior term because it captures the dual nature of the system: executive power concentrated in an emperor (monarchical) combined with a baseline republican ideology where the emperor was expected to serve the polity. This combination is unique among dynastic empires and emerged specifically from the Roman republican tradition. Regarding the military dictatorship question, Kaldellis argues the Eastern Roman Empire does not qualify as one because, despite emperors controlling armies and armies influencing succession through civil wars, the army was almost never used as an instrument of internal social control. For a thousand-year period, the population was not kept down through military force. This was possible because the army was recruited from and lived among the Roman people, understood as protecting them rather than oppressing them. Kaldellis notes that using armies to suppress one's own population is actually dangerous—it can backfire, as seen in modern examples like Egypt during the Arab Spring when regimes couldn't guarantee army loyalty. He identifies Justinian as one rare exception to this pattern.