Anthony Kaldellis

Anthony Kaldellis
Αντώνιος Καλδέλλης
Born (1971-11-29) November 29, 1971 (age 52)
Athens, Greece
Academic background
Education
Academic work
DisciplineByzantine studies
Institutions
Websitehttps://kaldellispublications.weebly.com/

Anthony Kaldellis (Greek: Αντώνιος Καλδέλλης Antonios Kaldellis; born 29 November 1971) is a Greek-American historian and Byzantinist[1] who is a professor of classics at the University of Chicago.[2] He is a specialist in Greek historiography, Plato, and Byzantine studies.[2]

As the author of monographs on classical antiquity and the Byzantine Empire, Kaldellis has called into question a commonly accepted view of Byzantium as an absolutist world; he considers instead the Byzantine Empire a "bottom-up monarchy", where the common people have a good share in government, since emperors impose laws by acknowledging their customs and demands.[3]

  1. ^ Kaldellis, Anthony (2019). Byzantium Unbound. Past Imperfect. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. p. 83. The general impression that I have is that Byzantine art historians see themselves as art historians first who only happen to work on Byzantium, rather than primarily as Byzantinists (which is what I am).
  2. ^ a b "Anthony Kaldellis". Academia.edu. Archived from the original on 2022-09-24. Retrieved 2022-09-24.
  3. ^ Kaldellis, Anthony (2015). The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome. Harvard University Press. p. 3, 33, 89. "A bottom-up model of political authority will be presented to temper, even push back against, the top-down one that prevails in the field. Incidentally, this model will help to explain two unique features of the Byzantine political sphere: why it survived for so long as an integrated, coherent moral and political community (longer than any other monarchy) and why the imperial throne sat atop a political realm that was so turbulent and potentially disloyal. Ordinarily, these two facts would be in tension, but in the Byzantine "monarchical republic" they reinforced each other.";" But the republican model authorizes a bottom-up perspective according to which the emperor derived his authority from the Roman people and was answerable to them in both theory and fact.;"This effort will make good on the promise of Chapter 1 to provide a bottom-up model of the Byzantine polity that will act as a counterweight to the top-down one that currently prevails.