When Events Like Streams Flood the Earth - Threat Discourse in the Reign of Herakleios
When Events Like Streams Flood the Earth - Threat Discourse in the Reign of Herakleios

Summary/Abstract: The seventh century is widely regarded as a time of epoch-making changes in the Eastern Roman Empire and some students of the period are inclined to speak of it as a time of “crisis”. But what does “crisis” entail and can this concept help to explain the social dynamics? Social theory regards the establishment of a “threat discourse” as the first step towards successful crisis management and stresses the fact that coping is only possible after such a threat discourse has become predominant. This paper considers the evidence for the development of a threat discourse in the reign of Herakleios. During the first decades of the seventh century the Roman Empire faced major threats from the outside and the inside: the attacks of the Avars and the Slavs, the war with the Sasanian Persians together with a shortage of grain supply and money, military defeat, and internal strife led to frustration among the population. Those tensions are mirrored in contemporary literary sources: the poems of Georgios Pisides; the homily on the siege of Constantinople in 626 commonly attributed to Theodoros Synkellos; the work of the historian Theophylaktos Simokates. The aim of this paper is to describe how contemporaries perceived the current threat. It is argued that specific aspects of the threat discourse created a sense of community among the population and a bond of trust between the people and the emperor. This association was finally able to concentrate all available forces to handle the crisis and save the Roman Empire.

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