THE SCOPE, THE SOURCES, AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF LATER ROMAN HISTORY IN THE EAST
The period upon which we are now entering presents peculiar difficulties for the historian. The body politic under consideration is in some respects unique. Historians are not even agreed as to the name by which it should properly be designated. It is an empire having its capital at Constantinople; an empire not come suddenly into being in the year 395, at which point, for the sake of convenience, we are now taking up this history; but which is in reality nothing more or less than the continuation of that Roman Empire in the East, the affairs of which we left with the death of Theodosius. That emperor, as we have seen, held sway over an undivided Roman commonwealth. On his death the power that he had wielded passed to his two sons, one of whom nominally held sway in the East, the other in the West. The affairs of the Western division of the empire under Honorius and his successors have claimed our attention up to the time of the final overthrow of Rome in the year 476. We are now returning to follow the fortunes of Arcadius, the other heir of Theodosius, and his successors.
But whether this Eastern principality should properly be spoken of as the Later Roman Empire, or as the Eastern, Byzantine, or Greek Empire, is, as has been suggested, a moot point among historians. The difficulty is perhaps met to the best advantage if we disregard the controversial aspects of the question and make free use of each and all of these names; indeed, in so doing, convenience joins hands with logicality. The empire of Arcadius and his immediate successors was certainly entitled to be called the Roman Empire quite as fully as, for example, were the dominions of Diocletian and Constantine. There was no sudden breach of continuity, no thought of entrance upon a new epoch with the accession of Arcadius. It was no new thing that power was divided, and that there should be two capitals, one in the East and one in the West. On the contrary, as we have seen, there had been not merely a twofold but a fourfold division of power most of the time since the day of Diocletian. No contemporary could have predicted that after the death of Theodosius the Roman dominions in the East and in the West would never again be firmly united under a single head. Nor indeed is it quite true that the division was complete and permanent; for, as we shall see, there were to be rulers like Justinian and Zeno who had a dominating influence over the Western territories, and who regarded themselves as masters of the entire Roman domain. And even when the division became complete and permanent, as it scarcely did before the time of Charlemagne, it could still be fairly held that the Roman Empire continued to exist with its sole capital at Constantinople, whither Constantine had transferred the seat of power, regardless of the fact that the Western dominion had been severed from the empire. The fact that this Western dominion included the city of Rome itself, which had given its name to the empire, and hence seemed indissoluble from it, is the chief reason for the seeming incongruity of applying the term Later Roman Empire to the dominion of the East.