>I heard a lecture this past Saturday on church-state relations in the
>Byzantine empire (given at the local Greek Orthodox cathedral). Amazingly
>enough, in the (Christian) empire, one of the titles of the emperor was
>"equal of God" ("Iso tou Theou", if I'm remembering the declensions right).
>
>So yeah, "living god" isn't all that far off the mark, at least as far as
>protocol went.
One of my favorite titles is "kosmokrator", i.e. "Ruler of the Cosmos", or less literally but more evocatively for me, "Emperor of the Universe". Just a tad hyperbolic, especially once Byzantium withered to the point that the Emperor didn't rule anything beyond the gates of his capital. But a seriously cool title, you'd have to agree.
The Penguin Classics translation of Anna Comnena's Alexiad has a whole lot on the bewildering array of titles invented by her father, often to flatter or buy off foreign rulers. Alexius would take an existing title like Sebastos ("Majesty"), and add "hyper" or "proto" or "pan" to it to create even more, all with fine distinctions as to which one was considered higher than the other, so a Panhypersebastos is slightly better than a mere hypersebastos, etc.
And who would want to be a Dux, when you could be a Mega Dux?
Cheers,
MOB --__--__--
End of Glorantha Digest
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