Basileus

Basileus (Greek Βασιλεύς), plural basileis, signifies "sovereign". It is perhaps best known in English as a title used by Byzantine emperors, but also has a longer history of use for persons of authority in Ancient Greece.

Etymology

The etymology of basileus is unclear. The Mycenaean form was gwasileus (𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), denoting some sort of court official or local chieftain, but not an actual king. Most linguists assume that it is a non-Greek word that was adopted by Bronze Age Greeks from a preexisting linguistic substrate of the Eastern Mediterranean. Schindler (1976) argues for an inner-Greek innovation of the -eus inflection type from Indo-European material rather than a "Mediterranean" loan.

Ancient Greece

Original senses encountered on clay tablets

The first written instance of this word is found on the baked clay tablets discovered in excavations of Mycenaean palaces originally destroyed by fire. The tablets are dated from the 15th century BC to the 11th century BC. They were inscribed with the Linear B script, which was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 and corresponds to a very early form of Greek.

The word basileus is written as qa-si-re-u and its original meaning was "chieftain" (in one particular tablet the chieftain of the guild of bronze smiths is referred to as qa-si-re-u). The word can be contrasted with wanax, another word used more specifically for "king" and usually meaning "High King" or "overlord". With the collapse of Mycenaean society, the position of wanax disappeared, and the basileis were left as the topmost officials in Greek society. In the works of Homer wanax appears, in the form anax, mostly in descriptions of Zeus (as king of the gods) and of very few human monarchs, most notably Agamemnon. Otherwise the term survived almost exclusively in personal names (e.g., Anaxagoras, Pleistoanax). Most of the Greek leaders in Homer's works are described as basileis, which is conventionally rendered in English as "kings". However, a more accurate translation may be "princes" or "chieftains", which would better reflect conditions in Greek society in Homer's time, and also the roles ascribed to Homer's characters. Agamemnon tries to order around Achilles among many others, while another basileus serves as his charioteer.

A study by Drews (1983) has demonstrated that even at the apex of Geometric and Archaic Greek society, basileus does not automatically translate to "king". In a number of places authority was exercised by a college of basileis drawn from a particular clan or group, and the office had term limits. However, basileus could also be applied to the hereditary leaders of "tribal" states, like those of the Arcadians and the Messenians, in which cases the term approximated the meaning of "king".

Pseudo-Archytas' definition of the Basileus as "sovereign" and "living law"

According to pseudo-Archytas's treaty "On justice and law", quoted by Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception (2005), Basileus is more adequately translated into "Sovereign" than into "king". The reason for this is that it designates more the person of king than the office of king: magistrates (arkhontes, "archons") power derivate from their social functions, or offices, whereas the sovereign power derivates from himself. Sovereign have auctoritas, whereas magistrates detain imperium. Pseudo-Archytas aimed at creating a theory of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the only source of legitimacy. He goes so far as qualifying the Basileus as nomos empsykhon, or "living law", which is the origin, according to Agamben, of the modern Führerprinzip and of Carl Schmitt's theories on dictatorship.

Use of Basileus in Classical Times

In classical times the use of basileus was limited to the very few states that never abolished the hereditary royal office in favor of democratic or oligarchic rule: namely the two hereditary Kings of Sparta (who served as joint commanders of the army, and were actually called arkhagetai), the Kings of Macedon and of the Molossians in Epirus, various kings of "barbaric" (i.e. non-Greek) tribes in Thrace and Illyria, as well as the Achaemenid kings of Persia. The Persian king was also referred to as Megas Basileus (Great King) or Basileus Basileōn, a translation of the Persian title Šāhanšāh ("King of Kings"). In spite of the common usage of the term basileus, in the Greek context his powers were usually severely limited by custom and law, and basileis who stepped outside these bounds were branded "tyrants" (e.g., Pheidon of Argos, by Aristotle).

The term was also used in classical Athens in the title of the Arkhōn Basileus ("Lord King"), which was an elected and purely ceremonial office supervising religious rites, apparently taking over some of the most important functions of the former "kings". In other city-states occasionally governed by authoritarian rulers the term basileus was never used in the Classical Period, and the titles tyrannos ("tyrant") or, more benignly, arkhōn ("lord", "ruler") were preferred. This signifies that a ruling Greek basileus had to be an heir of a long-standing, legitimate dynasty.

Alexander the Great

Basileus and Megas Basileus were exclusively used by Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic successors in Ptolemaic Egypt, Asia and Macedon. The female counterpart is basilissa (Queen), meaning both a Queen regnant (such as Cleopatra VII of Egypt) and a Queen consort. It is precisely at this time that the term basileus acquired a fully royal connotation, in stark contrast with the much less sophisticated and authoritarian earlier perceptions of kingship within Greece.

Romans and Byzantines

Under Roman rule, the term basileus, as a generic designation for a sovereign monarch, came to be used (at first informally) to designate the Roman Emperor. The usage had become standard by the reign of Constantine the Great. Starting in the reign of Herakleios basileus generally replaced other imperial titles in the official documents, as official usage of Latin in coinage and state documents was almost completely replaced by Greek.

This use of the word is the result of a gradual development — when the Romans had originally conquered the Mediterranean, the imperial title Caesar Augustus was initially translated as Kaisar Sebastos or Kaisar Augoustos. Imperator, another standard imperial title (and the origin of our "emperor"), was translated as Autokratōr. Interestingly, "BASILEUS" was initially stamped on Byzantine coins (in lieu of the standard Latin abbreviations "C.IMP." for "Caesar Imperator") in Latin script. Only somewhat later was the Greek script universally used.

The Byzantines reserved the term basileus among Christian rulers exclusively for the emperor in Constantinople, and referred to Western European kings as rēx or rigas, a Hellenized forms of the Latin word rex ("king"). The title of basileus became an issue of great diplomatic controversy when Charlemagne was crowned as "Emperor of the Romans" by Pope Leo III on December 25, 800 AD, at St. Peter's in Rome. The matter was complicated by the fact that the Eastern Empire was then ruled by the Empress Irene, who had ascended the throne of Constantinople after the death of her husband, the emperor Leo IV, as Regent to their 9-year-old son, Constantine VI. Following Constantine's coming of age, the Empress Dowager eventually decided to topple him and rule in her own name. In the conflict that ensued, Irene was victorious and Constantine was blinded and imprisoned, to die soon after. The repulsion generated by this incident of virtual filicide cum regicide was compounded by the innate Frankish aversion to the concept of a ruling female sovereign.

Charlemagne, in an effort to advance his own dynastic affairs, proposed marriage to the aging Empress, but Irene, who now styled herself "Basileus" (in the masculine, rather than "Basilissa", in the feminine) rejected Charlemagne's marriage proposal, and refused to recognize Charlemagne's imperial title. Eventually a compromise was reached, whereby Charlemagne was recognized by the Byzantine court as "basileus of the Franks", but not "of the Romans". A similar diplomatic scuffle (this time accompanied by war) ensued from the imperial aspirations of Simeon I of Bulgaria a century later. Similarly to Charlemagne, Simeon was eventually recognized as "basileus of the Bulgarians" but not "of the Romans". As a result of these concessions the Byzantines increasingly replaced the simple usage of basileus with the fuller forms Basileus tōn Rōmaiōn and Basileus kai Autokratōr tōn Rōmaiōn to further emphasize their exclusive claim on the "true" Roman imperial legacy.

Modern Greece

During the post-Byzantine period, the term basileus, under the renewed influence of Classical writers on the language, reverted to its earlier meaning of "king". This transformation had already begun in informal usage in the works of some classicizing Byzantine authors. In the Convention of London in 1832, the Great Powers (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, July Monarchy France and Russia) agreed that the new Greek state should become a monarchy, and chose Prince Otto of Wittelsbach as its first king.

The Powers furthermore ordained that his title was to be Βασιλεύς της Ελλάδος, meaning "King of Greece", instead of Βασιλεύς των Ελλήνων, i.e. "King of The Greeks". This title had two implications: first, that Otto was the king only of the small Kingdom of Greece, and not of all Greeks, whose majority still remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Second, that the kingship did not depend on the will of the Greek people. Indeed, Otto ruled for 10 years as an absolute monarch, and his autocratic rule, which continued even after being forced to grant a constitution, made him very unpopular. After being ousted in 1862, the new Danish dynasty of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg took over with King George I. In a demonstrative move, as to assert both national independence from the will of the Powers, and as to emphasize the constitutional responsibilities of the monarch towards the people, his title, was modified to "King of The Hellenes", which remained the official royal title until the abolition of the Greek monarchy in 1974.

See also: Byzantine Empire, Persia

References

Jochem Schindler, "On the Greek type hippeús" in Studies Palmer ed. Meid (1976), 349–352.
Robert Drews, Basileus. The Evidence for Kingship in Geometric Greece, Yale (1983).
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Oxford University Press (1991).

External link

http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/25.html

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