History
The Byzantine Empire was the end result of centuries of Roman rule and bureaucratic growth. During this era, a combination of growth of the aristocratic class, the difficulties of administering an increasingly expanding Roman republic led to a complex and opaque system of government that no one who had not grown up inside it had much hope of understanding.
It was so complex that Byzantine complexity has come to refer to any overly complex system.
Read more about this topic: Byzantine Complexity
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)