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]
Biography
Anthony Kaldellis was born on 29 November 1971 in Athens, Greece. He received two bachelor's degrees in history and philosophy (1994) then a Ph.D. (2001) in history from the University of Michigan. After gaining his Ph.D., Kaldellis has served as assistant professor (2001–2006), associate professor (2006–2007), full-time professor (2007–) and chair (2015–) of the department of classics at Ohio State University. In 2022, he joined the department of classics at the University of Chicago.
Kaldellis is a member of the advisory boards of the Journal of Late Antiquity (2016–), Minerva (2013), and Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (2008–); a member of the editorial boards of the Byzantine Greek series of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (2008–) and Estudios Bizantinos: Digital Journal of the Spanish Society of Byzantine Studies (2012–); and Associate Editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2017–), of which he was Editor from 2010 to 2017. He has previously been Series Editor of Routledge Classical Translations (2011–2015), member of the editorial board of Medieval Confluences: Studies in the Intellectual History and Comparative History of Ideas of the Medieval World (2009–2019), and Review Editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies (2006–2012).
Selected works
The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia, 1999
Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity, 2004
Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, 2007
The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens, 2010
Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and People in Byzantine Literature, 2014
A New Herodotos: Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West, 2014
The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome, 2015
Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade, 2017
A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, 2017
Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, 2019
Byzantium Unbound, 2019
The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, 2023
^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).
^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.
