An important aspect of the sacramental commonwealth was its predilection for absolute monarchy,[6] another thing that does not go down well with the moderns. True, even in the reign of Diocletian (A.D. 284-305), just before the Christian period, there had been trends towards absolutism in court ceremonial and art, but it was the Christians who perfected that trend. No modern historian has really explained why this should have been the case, or why it should have persisted for over a millennium. Absolutism has often been passed off as one of those many "oriental" influences that transformed the East Roman empire into "Byzantium". Even in the writings of the most astute commentators, it would appear that being Christian, medieval, and Greek means that one was sufficiently warped to be absolutist as well. Ernest Barker, for instance, one of those most sympathetic to New Rome, apologetically states that: "The basileus, it is true, was an autocrator". He then proceeds to enumerate how, despite the emperor's autocracy, there were little cracks in the edifice which a good liberal Englishman could approve of.
Let us give the "Byzantine" view, then. The autocrator was the reflection of God, and thus there could only be one. In his person, the Social Myth of perfect justice, law, and piety for all his people was embodied. Precisely because he was appointed by God and acclaimed by God's people, he had nothing material to desire. He could afford to, and was obliged to execute affairs of state in the interests of the common will. In contrast, oligarchy (what the Byzantines called "democracy") was seen as a disease, as the subordination of the common will to individuals, namely to individual greed and exploitation of one's neighbour. In democracy, one imperative was replaced by many.
Such an attitude is almost universally attributed today to the "Byzantines'" regressive attitude to political, social and economic life. But in fact it is a manifestation of the Social Myth whereby the emperor as emperor was answerable to God for the good of his people. Absolute monarchy meant absolute altruism, something that even British monarchs such as St. Charles Martyr understood perfectly well - that is precisely why he lost his head to the ancestors of the Thatcherites.
[6]The author maybe means that there were not feudal princes, and in this he is right. Yet monarchy was not absolute for another reason, because some degree of self-government of the various cities of the empire, was never absent. Monarchy regarded the very general affairs, and even there it was not absolute, since the bodies that elected the king (bureaucracy, army and the people) could always change him. A revolution was considered almost a normal way of politics, when the king proved himself unworthy, which is the reason of many revolutions happening, without the social order of Byzantium being harmed; they were just for the change of the king or for the return to the throne of a king illegally deposed. Byzantium could not have lasted a millennium with this social cohesion and under so many difficulties, if it was a totalitarian state.
