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Episode 335 - 10 Influential East Romans with Anthony Kaldellis. Part 1

January 6, 2026·1 hr 15 min·5 clips

Why did a top Byzantine scholar call Gregory of Nazianzus a 'whiny little bitch' with daddy issues?

Byzantium gets a second look after the narrative has run its course. The host sets up the conversation as a move away from emperors and campaigns, toward people who shaped East Roman life from the edge of the political story. Professor Kordelis brings the first five names. The point is not to retell the empire through different heroes. It is to ask how much force a voice, a style, or a public reputation could carry when power was elsewhere. The tone stays careful, but there is bite in the details. John Chrysostom belongs on the list because his homilies still feel alive on the page. Kordelis contrasts their readable, ordinary Greek with the more worked-up rhetoric of Gregory of Nazianzus. Style is not decoration here. Accessibility helped the writing travel, and readers can sense a person at work rather than someone simply obeying inherited forms. That influence came with a bill. Chrysostom comes across as passionate, memorable, difficult, and not built for the courtly diplomacy demanded by Constantinople. He made enemies with remarkable ease. By the time he was tried and deposed, hostile witnesses in the capital and at court were ready to help finish the job. The dry institutional joke is hard to miss: hiring fiery speakers from Antioch starts to look less wise once Nestorius gives the pattern another outing. The argument also gets physical. The clashes around Chrysostom's supporters and enemies are connected to the burning of the first version of Hagia Sophia, which makes cultural authority feel less abstract and a lot more combustible. The court finally judged him too much trouble. Later, his reputation could be handled another way, when he was brought back with honors and reburied in the imperial mausoleum. The closing exchange turns to prose. Kordelis puts early ninth-century writing in an intermediate period, still recovering from the so-called dark ages and lacking the dense school culture and classical engagement he sees in Procopius or later writers. He is blunt about taste. That prose is not for him, and he leaves it to people who actually enjoy it.

As heard by us

A measured return to Byzantium's cultural figures, with a clear sense of why they mattered.

Episode 335 steps away from the main political thread and spends its time with 10 influential East Romans alongside Antony Kordelis, part one. That narrower focus gives the episode a cleaner shape, and it lets the figures matter on their own terms.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a guided tour of East Roman legacy beyond emperors and battles.

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