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66 3. justin i and justinian
empire were accompanied and followed by profound difficulties; his muchvaunted
aim of restoration, realized in the great codification of Roman law
which took place in his early years, sat awkwardly with the harsh measures
taken against teachers and the effective closure of the academy at Athens;
the great church of St Sophia, perhaps his finest achievement, owed its very
existence to a serious riot which almost led to the emperor’s own fall.
Bitterly opposed, but also eulogized as a Christian monarch, Justinian
forced his own compromises on an unwilling church, only to fall into
heresy on his deathbed. Edward Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire, had some difficulty in deciding whether to place
Justinian’s reign in the context of Roman success or Greek decline, and
indeed it is still an open question whether the emperor’s policies overstretched
the empire’s resources to a dangerous level, as the propaganda of
his successor suggests. 22
Much of the problem is to be traced to the contradictions to be found
between the contemporary sources. Procopius of Caesarea began as the
emperor’s ardent supporter, but in the course of the composition of his
History of the Wars in eight books (finished a.d. 550/1–553/4) turned into
his bitter opponent. Procopius’ vituperative pamphlet, the so-called Secret
History, seems to have been composed while the Wars was still in progress
(a.d. 550/1), and was followed soon afterwards (a.d. 554/5) by a panegyrical
account of Justinian’s Buildings. 23 No reliable biographical data about
Procopius exist to provide us with an explanation for this change. 24 But a
similar ambivalence can also be detected in the work On Magistracies by his
contemporary John Lydus, a former official in the praetorian prefecture, 25
and in the work of the North African Latin poet Corippus, who wrote a
hexameter poem in praise of the accession of Justinian’s successor Justin
II (565–78); like his own contemporary, the historian and poet Agathias,
Corippus accords Justinian the respect due to a major emperor while at the
same time criticizing him. 26 The contemporary Chronicle of John Malalas
records the reign in detail and from a different and specifically Christian
22 For this see Corippus, In laudem Iustini minoris i.250–71; with notes in Cameron, Corippus; Agathias,
Hist. v.14; Menander Protector, ed. and trans. Blockley 1985: fr.8. There is also a hostile portrayal of
the reign in the work of the Chalcedonian church historian Evagrius Scholasticus, HE iv.30f., on which
see Allen, Evagrius 171–208. For Gibbon’s view of Justinian see Cameron, Averil (1997). The extent to
which Justinian’s military ventures resulted in a weakening of Roman resources (Jones, LRE 298–302)
is questioned by Whitby, ch. 11,p.288 below.
23 The traditional dates have recently been defended again by Greatrex (1994). The discovery of a
single manuscript of the Secret History in the Vatican Library (published by Alemanni, 1623) upset the
then prevailing favourable opinion of Justinian and led to Procopius’ authorship being denied.
24 See Cameron, Procopius for the argument that the works are more similar than would at first appear,
and that Procopius’ ‘change of view’ is explicable in relation to the developing circumstances in which
he wrote. 25 See Maas, John Lydus.
26 Cameron, Corippus; cf. Agathias, Hist. v.14, with Cameron, Averil (1970) 124–30. Evagrius’ criticisms
(see n. 22 above) are combined with a neutral account of Justinian’s wars drawn from Procopius’
Wars, but Evagrius apparently used neither the Buildings nor the Secret History. On the hostility to
Justinian expressed here and elsewhere, see Carile (1978) 81–4.
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