On Completion

Half the battle is knowing when to leave. It is with decidedly mixed feelings that we announce that The Byzantine Review is ceasing regular publication.

The Review was a product of the Covid epidemic. Even at this brief remove, it is difficult to remember just how completely strange and disorienting those times were. The world was closed. All of it. Civil liberties were arbitrarily suspended, both at home and abroad…people were arrested for daring to walk in the open air without a rag over their faces. Both government and media united to suppress free speech: if you dared to question any of the government dogma, especially as it concerned the Covid virus, you were ridiculed and shunned.

Against that background, writing about history unfiltered and un-spun was a near-revolutionary act.

It was also an honest intellectual pursuit: we wanted to find out if there was still unbiased history being published. On that point there was good news: plenty of honest history is still in print, you just have to dig to find it. Each of the books we considered has merit, but four stood head and shoulders above the rest, set apart by both their mastery of topic and their ability to frame an entire period: Taylor’s The Fall of the Dynasties (published in 1963), Morison’s The European Discovery of America (1971), Paxon’s History of the American Frontier (1924), and of course Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). Like wine and music, most of the good stuff has some age to it.

Our original mission was to find the gay players in history. Against that goal, I’d say we scored pretty well. We certainly found plenty of People Like Us, sometimes in unexpected places, occasionally in compromising positions. There is a certain symmetry in ending at this point. We began with Jones’s The Templars which proved unexpectedly gay, and which led to a series of personal letters that expanded into The Byzantine Review. And we end with Suetonius, who did the work for us and found every gay angle (and position) possible in The Twelve Caesars. But we also found historically the same as Kinsey found scientifically, that gay folk really are only about 10% of the population. That fact ripples through to the historical literature: we find gays in all periods, but we are distinctly a minority. Which means that about 90% of history is fascinating on its own, without a gay angle, and the reviews on this site have increasingly reflected that fact.

By now most business has reopened from Covid, but companies struggled to find their feet after forced shutdown and then four years of eye-watering financial inflation, of the sort unseen for half a century. Public discourse remains uncivil, but it is now possible to have dissenting opinions on complex issues. Education is another matter. We haven’t reached any sort of end point, of course: history continues to unfold. But it does seem that the conditions that led us to write have passed, and so we are suspending publication.

To those who read along, or at least read a single piece on the site, many sincere thanks: it is a great honor to be read by anyone. We hope you found a book worth reading, a fact worth knowing, or at least a bit of cocktail party trivia that was fun to pass on.

For all of us: keep reading history, on all levels. Life, as recent events have demonstrated, is weird. And history specializes in weird. Perspective helps.

The Curmudgeon

February 2025