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Basileus
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- "Basilissa" redirects here. For the saint of this name, see Julian and Basilissa.
Basileus (Greek , plural , basileis), signifies "sovereign" or "king". 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, as well as for the kings of modern Greece.
etymology of basileus is unclear.
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- "Basilissa" redirects here. For the saint of this name, see Julian and Basilissa.
Basileus (Greek , plural , basileis), signifies "sovereign" or "king". 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, as well as for the kings of modern Greece.
Etymology
The etymology of basileus is unclear. The Mycenaean form was gwasileus (????????, 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 bronzesmiths 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 basileus 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) and in modern Greek is still in use in the description of the royal palace i.e. anactora meaning, "the mansion of anax". 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: the power of magistrates (arkhontes, "archons") derives from their social functions or offices, whereas the sovereign derives his power from himself. Sovereigns 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 empsykhos, 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, almost all Greek states had abolished the hereditary royal office in favor of democratic or oligarchic rule. Some exceptions existed, namely the two hereditary Kings of Sparta (who served as joint commanders of the army, and were also called arkhagetai), the Kings of Macedon and of the Molossians in Epirus. The Greeks also used the term to refer to various kings of "barbaric" (i.e. non-Greek) tribes in Thrace and Illyria, as well as to the Achaemenid kings of Persia. The Persian king was also referred to as Megas Basileus (Great King) or Basileus Basileon, a translation of the Persian title Šahanšah ("King of Kings"), or simply "the king". There was also a cult of Zeus Basileus at Lebadeia. Aristotle distinguished the basileus, constrained by law, from the unlimited tyrant.
At Athens, the Archon basileus was one of the ten archons, magistrates selected by lot. Of these ten, the archon eponymos, the polemarch and the basileus divided the powers of Athens' ancient kings, with the basileus overseeing religious rites and homicide cases. His wife had to marry Dionysus at the Anthesteria. Similar vestigial offices called basileus existed in other Greek city-states.
By contrast, the authoritarian rulers were never called Basileus in classical Greece, but archon or tyrant; although Pheidon of Argos is described by Aristotle as a basileus who made himself a tyrant.
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, preceded in its full form by the words pistos en Christo to Theo ("faithful to Christ the Lord"), 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. The full style of the Emperor was finalized in the phrase "X, in Christ the God faithful Basileus Emperor of the Romans" (Greek: "?, p?st?? e? ???st? t? Te? ?as??e?? ??t????t?? ??µa???", "?, pistos en Christo to Theo Basileus Autokrator Romaion").
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 Autokrator. Interestingly, "BASILEUS" was initially stamped on Byzantine coins (in lieu of the standard Latin abbreviations "C.IMP." for "Caesar Imperator") in Latin script. Then, Latin characters began to be gradually replaced by Greek ones and only somewhat later was the Byzantine Greek script (i.e. "BACI?EVS" or "BACI?EYS") used throughout.
The Byzantines reserved the term basileus among Christian rulers exclusively for the emperor in Constantinople, and referred to Western European kings as rex or regas, the 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 revulsion 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, or simply "Augusta", the proper style of an Empress Consort) rejected Charlemagne's marriage proposal, and refused to recognize Charlemagne's imperial title. Eventually a compromise of sorts 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 recognized as "basileus of the Bulgarians and of the Romans". As a result of these concessions the Byzantines increasingly replaced the simple usage of basileus with the fuller forms Basileus ton Romaion and Basileus kai Autokrator ton Romaion 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 Great Powers furthermore ordained that his title was to be ?as??e?? t?? ????d??, meaning "King of Greece", instead of ?as??e?? t?? ???????, 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.
It is interesting to note that the two Greek kings who bore the name of Constantine, a name of great sentimental and symbolic significance, especially in the irredentist context of the Megali Idea, were often, although never officially, numbered in direct succession to the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI, as Constantine XII and Constantine XIII respectively.
See also: Byzantine Empire, Persia
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