Who needs Game of Thrones when we have Byzantine history?

It is a story of "the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides"

Byzantine art.
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

I have no idea why anyone bothers watching Game of Thrones, which began its eighth and final season on HBO four weeks ago amid record viewing figures. I say this not simply because I think the show is depraved (though as a former viewer, I do). It is because if I wanted to spend hundreds of hours of my life absorbed in the mostly unedifying history of a kingdom and its people — some of them proud and beautiful, some others vicious, most of them worldly, a very small number rather saintly — I would just read more about Byzantium.

I am afraid to say that the Eastern Empire, the thousand-year sequel to ancient Rome that at its height spanned the entire Mediterranean world from the coast of Spain to the Levant, has not always gotten good press. In his History of European Morals, the Anglo-Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky dismissed Byzantium as "the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed." "There has been no other enduring civilization destitute of all the forms and elements of greatness," he said. "The history of the Empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides."

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.