Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire?

[Figueira]

If I was writing something formal, I would just call them the Roman Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire if I really need to be specific. Although to be fair, I usually just call them the Byzantine Empire because it's what everyone else calls them.

Why would it be the Eastern Roman Empire when it didn't even include Rome?

Rome (the city) stopped being the most important city in the Roman Empire long before it split up.

I would say Eastern Roman Empire until 635. Didn't Latin stop being a linga fraca then? Byzantine was a name made up after the fact by a 100 years. So I guess I would just have considered them the Greek Empire after Heraclius.

They spoke Greek, but they did not identify themselves as "Greek" so calling them that is just as ahistorical as Byzantine.

[Figueira]

I like the term "Byzantine Empire" specifically because it sounds cool.   However, I maintain there is not some point in time where you can logically "de-Romify" the Eastern Romans based on some event/trend/factor.  As I have posted before on this topic, being "Roman" by the Fifth Century AD was no longer AT ALL descriptive of Italic ethnicity, speaking Latin or being from the city of Rome (or Italy).  It just wasn't.  People had begun to view Rome as the "one true empire of God on Earth," and being Roman was entirely dependent on fulfilling that vision and carrying on that legacy.  If the US split into the Western US and the Eastern US, and the Eastern US (i.e., where the original English Americans started out "civilization") fell, NOBODY would consider the Western Americans as not just "Americans," even if they ended up speaking Spanish in this future scenario.

The difference is that the US isn't called the United States of Washington DC (it has the opposite problem of having a too generic name rather than a too specific one ). It's really just a semantic issue, as I already said that the Byzantines are absolutely a political and cultural continuation of the Romans. But there is something weird about calling an empire over a city that it only held nominal control (and later no control) over and which had no real political relevance within it. And I'm aware that the political decline of Rome within the Empire started long before the fall of the West. That's why if anything I'd be in favor of retiring the term "Roman Empire" earlier. But again, it is just semantics.

Maybe we should just call it Rhomania (I'd suggest Romania but that adds a whole nother level of confusion).