[mbg721]

Surely this is a Ship of Theseus situation, isn't it? There may have been little change from year to year, but a red-blooded Jupiter-Optimus-Maximus-fearing classical Roman citizen transplanted into the future would have been horrified at various moments, first when the Republic became an Empire, again when Christianity took over, when the Empire was split in the Tetrarchy, and when it became apparent that the Greek-speaking half was all that was left. Sure, there's a continuous line of succession much later, but for Gaius Quinctilius Budweiser, I think the traditional break when the West finally gave up is as good as any.

[quanto]

> I think the traditional break when the West finally gave up is as good as any.

Except that the Greek-speaking part was as Roman as the Latin-speaking part in culture, heritage, bureaucracy, governance, and self-identity. The later Western European historians' designation of the East as "Byzantine" (read: not "real" Romans) is much motivated by the West Europe's desire to see themselves as intellectual descendants of the Roman Empire (n.b. Italian Renaissance and Classicism).

[coldtea]

>Except that the Greek-speaking part was as Roman as the Latin-speaking part in culture, heritage, bureaucracy, governance, and self-identity.

Not that much. It was roman in leadership and had the roman legal structures, but it was always the area of prior Greece and the Hellenistic kindgoms, which had millenia of history and culture all of its own (to the point of the Roman's saying that when they conquered it millitarily, it conquered them culturally).

[evol262]

That's also true of the areas in Southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa, and Illyria. Nothing about the East differentiated it, and the Romans saying that it conquered them culturally were the same as the Americans now lamenting that the US has seen cultural changes. "Oh no! You're not sending consular armies out every year to acquire new territory as your sole cultural identity!" was the complaint.

Completing the conquest of the Mediterranean basin and being left bordering only states against whom the Romans never had any particular success, the Sahara, (Parthians/Sassanids) or holding the line against rotating groups of peoples pushed further west in the Balkans and Germania left the Roman state without obvious paths to expansion. That does not mean that Hellenistic states "conquered them culturally".

If you think the West was some unified area with "Latin-speaking" culture, heritage, bureaucracy, and self-identity, you'd need to write a thesis-length paper justifying it no matter what century. Even the Italian peninsula was none of those things until long after the establishment of the Principate, at which point wealth had already precluded the existence of men like Cincinnatus.

[mbg721]

Maybe my perception is a little off, but I think of the Romans as having outsourced their "high" culture from the very moment they could afford it--formal education, medicine, and theater were for Greek slaves to do. A dignified Roman was more suited to the manly pursuits of farming, conquest, and engineering.

[evol262]

This is completely arbitrary. Both from the sense that, as you mentioned, there are a number of inflection points prior to that, and in "Greek-speaking" being distinctive at all.

If the classical Roman citizen weren't horrified at the organizational changes under Diocletian, or the difference in response between Adrianopole and Cannae, or moving the Imperial seat, or Romanized barbarians leading legionary armies (all of which were 100+ years before the fall of the west), they'd keep going.

The fact that the population in the East spoke Greek (and Syraic, and Aramaic, and a bunch of other languages) is a meaningless distinction. The West never truly had a formalized language anyway, at least among the citizens. The East had the same history, the same institutions, the same government

[rnmwfQ3f]

I think the same arguments could be applied to the USA

[dr_dshiv]

Can you imagine a USA where half spoke Spanish, half English and less than 1% both?

[m_eiman]

I can image in a USA where the population is divided in half, each half with so widely different world views that they might as well be speaking different languages…

[dr_dshiv]

Like different species! I mean, I don’t think they interbreed…

[m_eiman]

Give it a few hundred generations and we’ll see!