What can a book from the interwar period (1933) by an eccentric Scottish historian offer the average Greek reader, who will read it in 2025 and it concerns a part of the history of the place where they live? This is a very reasonable question. The answer is disarming: Steven Runciman, with "Byzantine Civilization," opened up avenues for both a more favorable and "down-to-earth" view of Byzantium and for how, within a limited number of pages (this particular Greek edition has 414), a complete summary of 1,123 years and eighteen days of Byzantine history, as he himself counted them, can be achieved.

Steven Runciman, therefore, and this particular book are the source and school for many of today’s Byzantinists. To the author and the book, we owe a series of defensive lines and counterattacks against all those who for centuries saw Byzantium as a stain on human history. Also, part of the post-modern Greek national ideology was based on this book. Thus, Runciman and this book in hand played a leading role in shaping a more serious and scientific approach to Byzantium.

Runciman’s particularity was that he was multilingual and had delved into Orthodox theology. This gives this work advantages that even today’s books do not possess. However, it also brings weaknesses.

It is obvious that Runciman (too) carries his own prejudices. Sometimes he becomes emotional in his descriptions and characterizations. He makes anachronistic parallels. He does not hide what he likes and what disappoints him. In some lines, you get the feeling he is speaking more about the era in which he wrote the book and his own background, rather than about Byzantium itself. He takes it personally and almost identifies with it. Apart from being historical, his book is literary and narrative, and for this reason, enjoyable.

However, some of the facts or interpretations provided by Runciman have been updated. For example, the defeat at Manzikert in 1071 was not so "crushing" that the Byzantine army "never managed to recover." It is obvious that the emperor’s capture was humiliating, but pitched battles were few and losses limited—in no way comparable to the losses suffered by the Byzantines in 811 and 917 AD from the Bulgarians. However, "Manzikert" set in motion developments that, however, were due to the persistent conflicts between the center (Constantinople) and the provinces (themes).

Furthermore, even the pro-Byzantine Runciman approaches Byzantium orientalistly. He does not see it exactly as the natural (and only?) continuation of the Roman state, but at best, as a distinct, special, eastern civilization. Also, even after so many centuries of writing about Byzantium, he treats the Turkish and Islamic reality as a historical deviation from the expected flow of history. As much as Runciman is hurt by the loss of the City and the fall of the empire, it is truly doubtful whether the Seljuk Turks could have been Christianized and absorbed by the Byzantines, "if a new Turkish tribe, the Ottomans, had not appeared," given that Islam, as it turns out to this day, is anything but a historical parenthesis.

Finally, Runciman treats population groups as "purebred" and racially distinct, while he views their movements as compact, causing mass mobilization ("pushing") of other ("purebred") populations they encountered or eliminating them and taking their place in a given area. Although he presents the complex climate of intermixing, intermarriage, and, more generally, population mixing, he does not escape the interwar model of "colliding billiard balls." Today we know and experience that migrations and the settlement of people in new places are much more complex.

In any case, however, we are talking about an emblematic book, in an excellent translation and quality of publication, which should not be missing from any self-respecting historical library.