Yes. The Byzantines had what you could consider a "standing army" in their Imperial tagmata, elite regiments of full-time professional soldiers used for a variety of operations, including the garrisoning of strategic sites and offensive campaigning. Sometimes seen as supplements for the thematic troops (part-time provincial soldiery), the tagmata were introduced by Constantine V in the 8th Century as personal forces that established the authority of the Imperial throne over the strategoi of the themes, who sometimes acted in their own interests and caused dangerous revolts.

Each tagmatic unit bore a special name (sometimes ethnically based) designated by the Emperor himself, that acted as a source of pride both within the unit and within the Empire as a whole, for example, with the famous Varangian Guard or the Kataphraktoi. The tagmatic system reached its height under the Late Macedonians in the 10th and 11th Centuries, but declined in the years between the death of Basil II in AD 1025 and the rise of Alexios I Komnenos in AD 1081. With the establishment of the Komnenian system (emphasizing the unchallenged rule of the Komnenos family) and the disappearance of the theme system, the original distinction of the tagma was lost, but the name endured.