Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops
I think if you showed Titus Tatius and Konstantine XII to one another they both would've wondered "who's the weird foreigner?".

I feel that the Papacy is some kind of a fragmentary descendent of Rome (il papa certainly acts like a Roman official at times) as was the Venetian republic until its dissolution. I am sure there was much more of old Rome in classical Islam than there was in medieval Germany, and more again of New Rome (the idea, not just the real estate) in Mehmed II's Stamboul than Henry VI's London.

However its a point fairly made that even what we all agree was "Rome" as an entity was broken and remade several times. I feel the civil wars in the 200's were a very thorough-going uprooting of the old republic (Darth Diocletian), and a shattering of the whole Kartho-Greek medditeranean trade web so painstakingly built up over a thousand years. I feel there is a deep self-barbarization by the time of Constantine, and only the massive inertia and collosal intellectual reality of Rome held it together despite in the absence of any military or economic cohesion.

I reckon there is arguably a deeper gulf between Marcus Aurelius and big Kon than there is between the two regicidal Brutii, or between Kon 1 and Kon 12.
I understand your reasoning. The reason I believe the Eastern Empire to be a continuation of the Roman Empire is through Megas Konstantinos (Contantine the Great) who was indeed a Roman Emperor, and yet made his court and capitol at Constantiople and not Roma.