In his book, Kaldellis puts a legitimate question: ‘Why Byzantium did not inherit from Antiquity a taste for ethnography?’ According to him, this lack of interest does not pervade all of the Byzantine millennium: he postulates ‘a fundamental rupture occurring in the seventh century’ (p. 44) with a revival in Metochites's works (p. 145), even though he admits occasional comebacks by Theophanes (p. 45), Attaleiates (pp. 54, 80), Epiphanius (p. 67), Leo the Deacon (p. 76) and Constantine vii (p. 91). The weakness of interest in the outer world among the Byzantines is a correct observation; but the author fails to answer his own question. The book's main point, its vehement attack on Obolensky's concept of ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, is legitimate though not entirely new; yet it is useful to repeat once again that ‘the Byzantines generally did not have an oecumenical outlook or adhere to the notion of an panorthodox commonwealth’ (p. 46). Kaldellis rightly derides the concept of ‘Christian ecumenism’ (pp. 118, 138) and insists that Christianity ‘did not weaken the cultural chauvinism of the Romans, but rather gave it a new religious valence’ (p. 59). The author compares the Byzantine attitude to barbarians with the ancient one and blames the Byzantines, because ‘in contrast to the ancient Greeks and Romans, [they] did not view their culture as being in dialogue with any other’ (p. 39). When Kaldellis reproaches the Byzantines, asserting that their descriptions of barbarians ‘denied them agency’ (p. 77), this is true but the same criticism applies to Bronislaw and Malinowski too, not to mention Tacitus. Can we legitimately speak of a ‘dialogue’, if neither Greeks nor Romans showed any interest in, say, foreign languages? Could the Ancients really ‘project a pluralist attitude that recognized Graeco-Roman culture as One Among Many’ (p. 70)? This ‘objectivity’ is hard to believe given that culture's common use of the term ‘barbarians’. But let us assume that Kaldellis is right; if the Romans had ethnography and the Byzantines did not, why then is the author so vehemently opposed to ‘insistence on the Christian identity of the Byzantines, and extreme reluctance … of viewing them as Romans’ (p. 137)? Kaldellis intends to publish a separate book on early post-Byzantine ethnography (p. 143). Let us hope that in it he will clarify some of his theoretical foundations. A couple of minor cavils: in denying Byzantines any knowledge of Islam, Kaldellis misses the Digenes epos, where this religion is depicted much more respectfully than in the Constantinopolitan literature. Also, I would disagree that the lack of interest shown by the Byzantines in the mission of Cyril and Methodius is ‘a paradox that has not generally been noted’ (p. 42), for I have written about it many times. The same applies to several other claims made by the author (pp. 125, 129–30). The book would have benefitted from a more thorough proofreading (cf. misprints on pp. 37, 39, 98, 137) and editing (the author repeats himself, sometimes verbatim, cf. pp. 47 and 48, 58, 67 and 101, 86, 150 and 151). It would also have been advisable to use fewer contemporary allusions (pp. 72, 78, 90, 108, 123, 135, 168).