A Greek-speaking religious totalitarian

[samiaseo75]

Superstate covering much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa ruled by a semi-divine autocrat, state and absolute monarchy in the Eastern Mediterranean, a bit of Asia Minor ruled by a Flemish warlord, and finally a little Greek kingdom on the Bosphorus; to say nothing of a loose confederation of German princedoms which,as Voltaire observed, was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, but which lasted until Napoleon scrapped it in 1806.

The tergiversations history inflicts upon political terms may finally be illustrated by the nature of the last "Roman Army" to enter Rome under the banner SPQR, Senatus Populesque Romanum, "the Senate and People of Rome". It consisted, in 535 AD, of a band of Thracians, Anatolians, Germans and Slavs, commanded by a Thracian Slav whose phone number list name, Belisarius, was an elison of Byely-Tsar, "White Caesar", the last word therein being a Roman family name from 500 years earlier which had originally meant "Hairy" but had become a word for "Emperor" (as if Britain were to be ruled in perpetuity, as at one time seemed horribly possible, by autocrats called "the Thatcher").

This un-Roman assemblage obeyed the will of the son of a barbarian peasant from Bulgaria who ruled a Greek- speaking state in ideological thrall to a Jewish sect, and it marched into a Rome peopled largely by descendants of Syrians, other Western Asians and Greeks in which ethnic Romans were an impotent and largely self-unaware minority, ruled by the descendants of southern Swedish tribesmen. The impotent phantom of the Roman Senate supported, for what it was worth, the King of the Visigoths the "Roman" Army was invading Rome to drive out, and the People of Rome in the original sense were all but extinct. This "Roman" invasion of Rome started a twenty year war which devastated Rome and much of Italy and ended any last chanceof the revival of any power based in Rome itself. Yet it was all done under the banner of the Senate and People of Rome!