ha ha, by the way, does your name mean general?

i'll pass, since i am actually a whiny putz, and you know it too well stratagos ;D

that means he wants you to join!

@ Dave, yes - it's a legacy of my BA in History (which has been completely and utterly worthless except for random trivia) - a "stratagos" or "strategos" was a Governor/General responsible for a province in the Byzantine Empire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategos

could I join?

Its also ancient greek for general. If you convert it to greek letters that is. And i thought it had an "o" not an "a" near the end.
I only know this because I'm super cool

I've only got 3 available: I can't join!
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Of course, I'm not seriously going to complain if someone doesn't complain.

Or I *will*, but that's the theme of the game, so it isn't meant to be taken seriously

The Byzantines were the greeks, so that makes sense ;)

i wonder which game will fill up first, the crybaby one or the non crybaby one.
I would join, but have decided only to join non-live games if i know there's no chance of multis

But surely, if you join the crybaby game, the first thing you can do is bitch and whine about the multis...

So I see that 7 crybabies have joined, have fun bitching guys.....could we play guess the players? My first guess is SirLoseAlot AKA SoreLoserClot, am I right?

Byzantines was Rome, just because they spoke greek, it was still part of the Roman empire, and surivived 1000 years longer than the western Empire. (more deserving of the title than the Holy Roman Empire, it even held the seat of the patriarch of Constantinople - the equivalent of a pope for the Eastern Orthodox church.)

East rome, which didn't fall to 'barbarians' and enter a dark age, until it was overrun by the ottomans of course, and they had all the arabic-islamic science. (who made up the name Byzantium? was it a scholar from western Europe who didn't want to simply call it the Eastern Roman Empire? What did they call themselves? p'ah piffle and did you see the discovery of great zimbabwe, which was first described as most likely egyptian, because black people couldn't possibly have built such a huge city...)

</rant>

sorry, i prefer a little ranting to a decent baby-cry.

no way to tell until the game is over, Maniac. Well, I'm in there obviously, but no clue on the rest.

And I stand corrected orathaic, I'm juggling a *lot* of crap right now so I didn't do a lot of thought related to my off the cuff response.

And feel free to rant away ;)

that rant was ignorant and stupid but aight :/

thanks Acosmist, i'm always glad to recieve such ewll thought out criticism. And Stratagos, I entirely agree with your opening: whine all you like (or get over it and play the game, or be a sore loser and no-one will want to play with you anymore or dcide you don't like dip because people are mean and go play a safer game, like tic-tac-toe... you wouldn't have to worry about having your feelings hurt then!)

Oh you want me to point out how wrong you are? Ouch.

Ok..

The "Roman Empire" fell. I mean, Rome came under the dominion of Germanic warlords. So there was no Roman Empire anymore. This is perfectly clear to people with brains. So the Byzantine Empire could not be the Eastern Roman Empire. Was there continuity with the petty Germanic chieftains ruling over in what is now Italy? Clearly not. So why the bizarre claim to be the Eastern Roman Empire, at this point?

The Bishop of Rome was always back west, so I am not sure why we should care that the patriarch of Constantinople was in the east...at best, he would come in second to the Bishop of Rome for, you know, ECCLESIASTICAL INFLUENCE OVER ROME. This is almost tautological.

What's east Rome? Why apply the name "Rome" to a place entirely separated from Rome, but a long distance, a language, and a culture? All the Byzantines did to maintain continuity with Rome was to retain some of the legal forms they had when they were an administrative division of the Empire. This isn't nothing, but it's surely not everything.

Did the Byzantine Empire not enter a Dark Age? I can't recall much serious scholarship from that time. Jewish, Islamic, and "other" scholarship was fruitful in ARAB-CONTROLLED territory, of course, but the Byzantine Empire wasn't well known for such original scholarship. Take the big names in Jewish and Islamic philosophy - where did they teach?

The utter non sequitur about black people was baffling and insane.

Originally Constantinople was also known as 'New Rome' because it supposedly mimicked the seven hill structure. It also depends where you draw the line in terms of continuity with the West. In several periods during the 6th century AD the Byzantine General Belisarius recaptured Rome from the Ostrogoths. He also reconquered parts of North Africa.

You're right about the ecclesiastical points.

I'm pretty sure the Byzantines retained more than legal structures from Rome. They maintained the Augustus/Caesar system established by Diocletian for several centuries. The languages weren't 'entirely' separated either, I'm sure Latin had a prominent place, though perhaps not as prominent as Greek. The Western Roman Empire had a bilingual ruling class in Latin and Greek which wasn't so different.

While you're right in that most of the driving intellectual force came from Arab scholars, many of these works were based upon rediscoveries and developments of older texts taken from Byzantine archives as it was conquered. The Empire itself maintained order and the old 'civilised' model until it's demise. This was certainly less 'dark age' than the rest of Europe at the time. This is reinforced by the fact that the Enlightenment was driven largely by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmet II. When that happened most of the scholars and intellectuals fled West...bringing ancient learning and much new imported scholarship to the West.

As far as I know by the way, the name 'Byzantium' was the Greek name for the pre-Roman settlement in the area that Constantinople was largely built over.

live game right now ....live game 8

The Roman so it was split up by Diocletian in 285 into seperate administrative areas. At that point both the 'eastern' area and the 'western' area were parts of the Roman Empire. Continued Administration from this area constitutes a continuation of that empire.

The eastern half was mainly territory which had (before being part of Rome) been part of the Macedonian empire. Thus it was more civilised and urbanised than the western provinces in what are modren day France and Spain and they spoke greek; but there was no overthrow of the Imperial system, no declaration of the sovereignty of the Byzantiums, they continued ruling the Eastern area of what had been the Roman Empire under the same authority they claimed before Germanic tribes sacked Rome. They same laws which Diocletian had put in place setting up that administrative division.

As i said, comparing to the 'Holy Roman Empire', was rarely holy and neither not Roman, nor an Empire. (to misquote something famous) Actually the Patriarch of Consantinople's break from the Roman Catholic church was an example of the distance which had occured culturally between Rome and Constantinople in he several centuries between Rome being sacked and the formation of the Eastern Orthodox church, but a thing changing over time does not make a new thing. The Roman Empire was a different thing in 100 AD than the thing it was in 200 AD but that doesn't mean it asn't the same empire.

The story of Great Zimbabwe is an example of western historians changing the facts to suit their world view. They coudln't accept that Black Africans could have built the ruined city the found, so they claimed it was Egyptians, or aliens, or anyone else, just don't overturn the western world view (which at the time included the idea that Black people were inferior)

Did the Eastern Roman Empire enter a dark age? Well it was in decline for 100s of years so perhaps this continued, there i may be wrong.

However my rant is mostly about this creation of the name 'Byzantium' for an Empire which was ruled from the city of Constaninople, named after a Roman empire, if there had been a Byzantium Empire don't you think they would have re-named the city? (back to it's original name)

The Byzantines saw themselves as citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire. And that's how they described themselves, East Romans. The term Byzantine was first used by historians in the nineteenth century or thereabouts, I think.

From a standpoint of political theory, the Byzantine Empire was continuous with the Roman Empire because it was under one single sovereignty that survived all the way to 1453. Culturally it was indeed quite different, but what does that matter? The question is whether or not they were truly a continuation of the Roman Empire. For the to be a yes, three criteria must be met:

They themselves must see themselves as a continuation of the Roman Empire. They did.

The Romans before their demise must have officially designated that they were a continuation of the Empire. They did.

They must never actually give up their title or redefine themselves in official terms as anything but the Easter Roman Empire. They never did. Constantine XI defined himself as the Roman Emperor, and so did his people, and incidentally, so did Mehmet. When he died fighting in the streets in 1453, the Roman Empire died with him.