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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Voulgaroktonou, post: 3072478, member: 84047&quot;]Further to the thread of the Last Romans, I would opt for the fall of the empire in 1453, rather than the last quarter of the fifth century. After all, the coins of Constantine XI (1448-1453) name him, although in Greek, Κωνσταντίνος ο δεσπότης ο Παλαιολόγος θεοῦ χάριτι βασιλεύς των Ρωμαίων (Constantine Palaeologos, the despot, by grace of God emperor of the Romans). My diminutive eighth stavraton (the first coin image below) of Constantine XI lacks this long inscription, but you can see it in the second photo (albeit with the name of John) on one of my stavrata of John VIII (1423-1448): Ιωάννης ο δεσπότης ο Παλαιολόγος θεοῦ χάριτι βασιλεύς των Ρωμαίων. The epigraphic orthography has changed, and the legends are never complete, but it’s there.</p><p><br /></p><p>The use of Latin in the eastern empire was disappearing by the 6th century, and Justinian was the last emperor whose native language was Latin. So the vast majority of what we would call “Byzantine” emperors and their subjects spoke Greek, but so did many educated Romans from the establishment of the Principate under Augustus through the fifth century, when political ties with the eastern empire caused the use of Greek in the West to die out, just as it did the use of Latin in the East. But in its near thousand year history, what we call the Byzantine Empire manifested unbroken continuity back to the time of Augustus.</p><p><br /></p><p>Or, if one chose to consider the shadowy empire of Trebizond along the shores of the southern Black sea, one could push the date forward to 1461, when the Ottomans absorbed that final outpost of Hellenism.</p><p><br /></p><p>Or even further: Years ago, I attended a lecture when the speaker, a Greek Byzantine historian, told about an event in his youth when his island was liberated from the Turks. As the Greek marines waded ashore at the harbor, he recalled crying out: “Οι Έλληνες, οι Έλληνες! – the Greeks, the Greeks!” A marine replied to him: “Δεν είμαστε Έλληνες, είμαστε Ρωμαίοι– we are not Greeks, we are Romans.”</p><p>[ATTACH=full]772211[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]772213[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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