PAUL FREEDMAN: We are
starting to use primary sources for our understanding
of the historical periods under discussion. Primary sources? Writings by people who
lived at the time. And as with all such sources,
the great advantage is vividness, immediacy-- the people lived through it. And the problem is distance
from us and strangeness. Procopius and Gregory of Tours,
who we'll be starting out with next week, are very
different writers. Procopius much more conscious
of style, a layman was somebody operating within
the classical tradition. Gregory of Tours, certainly
a person for whom style is not paramount. Or at least, it's not the
classical notions of rhetoric, smoothness, and vividness
that Procopius has. He is a bishop. He's very concerned
with supernatural events and the Church. Or let's say, supernatural
events controlled by the Church. Procopius, as you've seen, is
not very concerned with Christianity, and the
supernatural events that concerned him, such as Justinian
walking around the palace with no head, are not
Christian supernatural. They're from some other older
supernatural tradition. But both Gregory of Tours and
Procopius require an effort to figure out. Why not just read something by
a writer, a historian living now who may be easier
to figure out? And who is writing with
you and me in mind? Because of the vividness and
because of the trickiness of trying to reconstruct not only
what happened, which is hard enough, but also what the mood
of people was, and what the reaction was. We're talking about
Justinian today. So an emperor whose rule
occupies most of the sixth century, 527 to 565. So we're concentrating on the
sixth century as part of this overall survival and crisis of
the Eastern Roman Empire. His reign, or more precisely,
the earlier part of his reign until about 540, is the height,
apogee, maximum power of this empire which succeeds in
shall we say, reconquering or conquering. Taking back or adding the parts
of the Western Roman Empire, many parts of the
Western Roman Empire that had been lost effectively to the
barbarian invasions of the fifth century. If you still can refer to your
map, or if your memory of geography is-- OK. The major areas of conquest of
Justinian beyond the borders of the old eastern empire are
first North Africa-- this is the coast of modern Libya,
Tunisia, Algeria, and even Morocco, held by the Vandals and
seized by Justinian; parts of Spain, coastal Spain,
Mediterranean Spain, held by the Visigoths; and Italy,
held by the Ostrogoths. This is the centerpiece
of Justinian's reign. And for a time, it looked
as if he had, in effect, recreated the empire of
Constantine and Diocletian. But as we'll see, this is a
triumph with a terrible price. The terrible price being that
it weakened Byzantium. Now when we say of figures in
the past, or even figures in the recent past, that their
policies were a mistake because it turned out that
the future enemy would be something other than what they
were fighting, we can say that with the advantage of
being able to see what was going happen. In other words, there are people
who argue that the invasion of Iraq was a folly
or that the expenditures on the aggressive foreign policy
of the first years of the twenty-first century was
foolish, because as it turns out, economic problems,
domestic problems, the mortgage bubble, was really the
problem that people should have been addressing. Or they should have been
addressing the deficit. You can say that. In its own way, it's a fact. But it doesn't necessarily tell
you what people at the time should have thought of. Thus, we know from last lecture
that, first of all, Justinian should have
concentrated on the Persians. The Persians on his eastern
frontier who didn't interest him, who he just wanted to sort
of pacify in order to go west and make his conquests. The Persians would turn
out to be the biggest enemy of the Empire. And so, you know if you were
plotting this out as a kind of international political
strategy, you could say: "Forget about the Ostrogoths. Forget about the Vandals. Build up that frontier. Invade Persia, keep your army
there." And indeed, with a little more hindsight, we can
say, "Oh my gosh, in eighty years, the Muslims are going
to take the eastern part of your empire." Well, obviously, there's no way
he is going to be expected reasonably to know that. Except, if you're looking at
a distance, from over 1,000 years, 1,500 years. Then we can say, sure, the
eastern frontier turns out to be the point of vulnerability. So a classic kind of historical
problem, or early Middle Ages midterm question is:
"Justinian, overreacher or reasonable guy?" Or "The
conquest of the west: folly or grandeur?" And it's both. It is a classic example of
over-extension, over-extension of empires, meaning that empires
weaken themselves at some point fatally by simply
getting either too big or spending too much money. And the two are linked. If you get too big, you
have to spend more money to defend yourself. Not really having the resources
to keep what you have. The British Empire, to take a
reasonably clear and neutral example, at some point is
simply too large for the resources of a weakened
Great Britain. And our colleague Paul Kennedy
has explored, quite memorably, empires that simply could not
maintain their commitments. The Spanish Empire, the British
Empire, and, as it turned out after Kennedy
wrote his book, the Russian Soviet Empire. This is a pattern in history
that repeats itself. The question, however, is, under
the circumstances, and assuming the existence of that
empire, what are reasonable policies to preserve
it or to extend it? We know about Justinian's wars
of conquest and of defense-- he did have some wars against
the Persians-- his wars of conquest and defense
largely, although not exclusively, through
Procopius. He is our best source
in two works. One, the Secret History, and
the other, much more extensive, a series of books
called The Wars. And they're divided in
Persian wars, African wars, Italian wars. In The Wars, you can see that
once the Italian war starts to go badly, Procopius's opinion of
Justinian and of the great general Belisarius tend to
change from a kind of admiration and go, kill, get'em
spirit to uneasiness, to blaming, to a kind
of finger pointing. So we're dependent
on Procopius. And when you first read The
Wars, it seems very, very different from the
Secret History. It seems like it's by Thucydides
or some other sensible, objective
Greek writer. And he indeed is writing
in that tradition. Those of you who've read
Thucydides will remember he describes, often, folly and
very terrible events, but soberly, factually. And in a fashion of Olympian
sorrow at the folly of policymakers and generals. And to some extent, Procopius
has that tone, which seems to contrast very much with the
vehemence of the Secret History, leading some people
to assume that he was crazy when he wrote the
Secret History. Or off balance, let's say. Or that The Wars represented the
real Procopius, and this represented his "evil twin." The
term, evil twin, doesn't appear in Gibbon,
but it could. It could. What makes it more complicated
is a third work of his called Buildings. Buildings is, as the name
implies, a book about Justinian's building campaign,
which includes, but is no means limited to, the church
of Hagia Sofia in modern Istanbul, which is, continues
to be, to this day, an extraordinary building
of such immensity and such space in interior. A dome that seems unsupported by
anything and that seems to cover half the earth when
you're inside it. Both splendid and an extraordinary engineering feat. And then Justinian
built churches. He built churches that stand in
Ravenna with unbelievably beautiful mosaics,
Ravenna in Italy. And these are important because
Ravenna was outside the zone of territory controlled
by the iconoclasts. And, therefore while the
iconoclasts tended to take down or whitewash
representations of anything divine, their reach did not
extend as far as Ravenna. So in a way, the best examples
of Byzantine mosaic art of the earliest period-- Not in a way, but absolutely
are outside of the eastern Mediterranean, and in Italy. Buildings though, is not just
an account of Justinian's architectural essays, but a panegyric, a praise of
Justinian. Almost as slavishly adulatory
as the Secret History is a condemnation. And as I suggested last time,
these actually go together in a society where a tremendous
power is concentrated in one person, or one court, or one
setting, the reactions of people tend to be adulation
which is, to some extent, forced out of them, or at least
invited by the ruler. So again, to take an obvious
analogy: Stalin, for his seventieth birthday was pleased
that the greatest museum of Moscow, all the
permanent exhibit was set aside and warehoused, and the
whole museum was given over to gifts to Stalin on his
seventieth birthday from a grateful people. He didn't have to order it. Somebody came up with the idea
and he said, "Oh, don't go to any trouble." They had the
thing, this adulatory. This is what later would
be called the "cult of personality." And it's just one
of hundreds of examples. Naming cities after him, lauding
him as the "Great Gardener", "the Friend of
Children," "the successor of Lenin", and so forth. The other side of that is a kind
of hatred and diatribe, more or less secret. There were lots of jokes
about Stalin. You could and people were sent
to Siberia or executed for telling these jokes. But they were very good jokes,
under the circumstances. This is some of the explanation
for how you can get, at the same time, adulation
and demonization. The interesting thing, of
course, is it's in the same guy, Procopius. And although people at one time
thought, "Oh well, he wrote The Buildings earlier
and then became disillusioned." He did
become disillusioned. Everybody became disillusioned,
because after 540, things started
to go wrong. There's a huge plague in 542
that kills off a third of the population, for starters. But it looks as if he's writing
this stuff more or less at the same time. The Secret History
is not finished. That's why it begins so oddly,
not with Justinian, but with Belisarius and Belisarius' wife,
being kicked around by his wife, and Theodora and you
sort of don't know who these people are. And then suddenly we're
at Justinian. Well, the order of this
thing is not yet set. He probably did not finish it. He did, however, want it to be
published after his death. It's called the Secret History
or the Anecdota, sort of stories, by later writers. It survives in only
one manuscript, as I think I remarked. Nevertheless, because it has a
highly rhetorical style, it clearly was to be read
by other people. It's not just a set of
jottings for his own satisfaction. It is a work that he hoped would
be widely published when he was safely dead. And Anecdota literally means,
not "stories" as it would now, anecdotes, the false cognate,
it means "not to be published". So in the Secret History,
Justinian is a monster. Let's set that aside for a
moment and talk about what Justinian actually did. Justinian was the power behind
the throne of his uncle, Justin the First. So
in a way, his rule goes back to the 510s. Justinian's character, as
portrayed by Procopius in both The Wars and in the Secret
History, is very smart, hard - working-- Procopius says he almost
never slept-- devoted to details, capable of
immersing himself in many different things: architecture,
church ceremonies, theology, and law. He was of humble birth. His uncle, and his family
were soldiers. They were from modern oh,
Croatia, more or less, the Balkan peninsula, the
former Yugoslavia-- Illyrians, as would have been
the term used at the time. He grew up speaking some form of
Latin, and he is, as I said last time, the last emperor
whose native language was Latin as opposed to Greek. He dressed very simply, and
he was approachable. He did not have that
awe-inspiring splendor of Diocletian or Constantine,
for example. He was seldom angry, but he was
cold and seems to have had no trace of mercy or kindness. He reminds me of some
professors of mine. He was intolerant; he was unforgiving; and he was
merciless. He had a grandiose conception
of the Empire. And he was willing to tax his
subjects heavily and to endanger the security of the
eastern frontier in order to expand his territory
and his prestige. I think that is a fair
judgment to make. He believed that his
predecessors had, through neglect, lost what the ancient
Romans had conquered. And he believed that you
couldn't call it the Roman Empire if all it consisted of
were possessions in the eastern Mediterranean. And, as we've said, he did
indeed conquer, at great cost, North Africa, parts of
Spain and Italy. He had a-- I think it's wrong to use the
term totalitarian, but certainly a very strong conception of imperial
rulership. He tried to impose doctrines
on the Church in order to resolve the age - old
Monophysite question. He was no more successful than
Constantine or Theodosius by the way, but, for example, just
to give you a sense of his methods, he kidnapped the
Pope in Rome, tried to browbeat him, and exiled
him to the Crimean Peninsula where he died. Theodora. One of the most interesting
things about Justinian is that he gave so much power and
respect to his consort, Theodora, who was of even more
humble birth than he was. Now, I don't think we have to
believe Procopius on the details of Theodora's youth. He certainly reserves
his most hysterical diatribes for Theodora. I think it's fair to say that
Procopius was not a great admirer of competent women. The historian Bury, J. B.
Bury, one of the great historians of late Rome and
Byzantium, who wrote about 100, 120 years ago, describes
her youth as stormy. An adjective that I like,
because it could be anything. Her stormy youth. Probably her father
was a bear keeper. Somebody who kept bears for the
entertainment of people at the circus. An animal trainer. She was the mother
of a legitimate [correction: illegitimate] child. She may have had a background
of amateur or quasi-professional, semi-pro
prostitution. Notice that Procopius condemns
her, first for being a prostitute, and then for
suppressing prostitution once she became Empress. There's a logic to that. Procopius is not opposed
to prostitution. One has the sense that he's, if
not a connoisseur, at least a now-and-then partaker. But for prostitutes to be
anything other than this firmly subordinated class, that
is, for prostitutes to have some sort of voice or
opinion, or for people to endeavor to help them, or
respect them, is, in his mind, ridiculous and scandalous. Procopius is a conservative. He doesn't like the weakening
of the senatorial classes. He represents the land
- owning interests. He doesn't like too much
imperial power. He's quite happy to respect the
emperor, but is angry when the emperor seems to be
taxing rich people. He doesn't like upstarts. Upstarts like Justinian. Who is he? A soldier's child. Upstarts like Theodora. Upstarts like Antonia, the
wife of Belisarius. Justinian and Theodora
ruled as a team. They had very different
personalities. A very interesting team. Theodora loved sleep, luxury,
was sympathetic to the Monophysites. Justinian was completely the
opposite: an insomniac, somebody who dressed in
extremely ordinary clothing and firmly anti-Monophysite. They, in fact, supported
different factions in the circus. Here is a Giants-Jets
marriage. The circus. The circus was a arena attached
to the palace, where the emperor would make his appearances at sporting events. Although we've said Justinian
was approachable, by that we mean that people in the
government or in high positions could see him without
too much ceremony. That doesn't mean he's
approachable just to anybody. In an absolutist state, there
are certain kinds of events at which the ruler has to show
himself, or traditionally shows himself. So in the Soviet era,
the May Day parades. There's a reviewing stand in
Moscow at the tomb of Lenin. And foreign correspondents and
intelligence people would try to see who was in and out of
power by who appeared with the leader, who wasn't there, where
they were standing. The Hippodrome, the horse
racing arena in Constantinople, was
a bit like this. The Emperor had his own box and
the people could make sort of celebratory gestures to him,
praise him, and if they were in a rebellious mood,
criticize him as well. There were of circus factions,
as they're called. That is, people who were
cheering for one side or another, the most important of
which in Constantinople are the Blues and the Greens. The Greens tended to be somewhat
pro-Monophysite. And Theodora was a partisan
of the Greens. The Blues, anti-Monophysite,
Justinian was a partisan of theirs. In 532, the circus factions
revolted. Partly, it's a tax revolt. Partly it's factions fighting. It doesn't do to try to probe
what these factions represented too much. After a while, they're
simply factions. They're simply people
who like to fight. Or who like to root for
one side or another. But they are rowdy,
and even criminal. They have very outlandish
costumes. They expend all their money
and all their energy on sporting events and
on rowdiness associated with them. This is not completely
unfamiliar. The prefect of the city arrested
seven people for rioting and condemned
them to death. Two of them escaped when
the rope broke. It always pays to
maintain your-- I mean, this is a tip
from a historian-- always pays to maintain your
coercive equipment. Once these guys escaped,
then they were heroes. And they were shielded
from the crowd. They were put in a monastery
where they had sanctuary. And conveniently enough,
one was a Blue and one was a Green. So the Blues and the
Greens united. They ran through the
streets demanding pardon for the escapees. And when Justinian refused,
a riot took place. The battle cry of these rioters
was "Victory." Right? Nika, not to be confused with
sporting equipment. Nika - victory. The crowds tried to overthrow
Justinian and Theodora. And in the process, they burned
down a lot of the city. Justinian is reported
by Procopius as being ready to flee. But Theodora stiffened his
resolve, basically telling him she preferred to die in the
shroud of the imperial robes, rather than flee in disguise,
and mobilized the generals, Belisarius and Narses. We've met Belisarius already. And they cracked down on
the mob and killed maybe 40,000 of them. How many people attend
a Yankee game? About 80,000? So 30,000, 40,000 people, and
that ended the riots. Constantinople was
partially burned. Justinian loved building. This was a great opportunity. He couldn't have asked for a
better moment, in a sense. Of course, it required more
taxes, but people now had seen the problems with
resisting taxes. And so this is where we start
the building of the new Hagia Sofia that we see today. Built in five years. Compare this to grand projects
like you know an exit on the Connecticut Turnpike, which
take fifteen years or so. The way you build something in
five years is by an incredible number of workmen. And lavish expenditure
of money. The patriarch's throne in Hagia Sofia was made of silver. It weighed 40,000 pounds. The columns are of porphyry,
many of them. It uses a lot of glass in
order to emit light. And the light comes from so far
away that it forms these wonderful patterns, depending
on the time of day. Justinian also rebuilt the
Senate, the baths, the imperial palace, and in the
Church of Saint Irene, the Church of the Apostles,
et cetera, et cetera. He started his wars against
Persia before the Nika revolt. And the war with Persia
is one episode of a multi-century war. In this case, it's over
influence in the Caucasus. But it's really about trying
to protect Byzantium from Persian invasion. But as I said, Justinian's
interest was not really in Persia. He was interested in peace with
Persia and in securing enough of the frontier so that
the Persians couldn't launch, at least not easily,
a surprise attack. And in 531, the Eastern Roman
Empire and Persia signed a perpetual peace. And Justinian then moved his
troops to the west, the site of his real ambitions. The Vandal War in North
Africa was a triumph. What we're seeing is one of
those cases in which a policy seems to succeed miraculously
easily. The Vandals fell, it seemed,
without a fight. Here, the people who had been
the terror of Rome 100 years earlier, who had sacked Rome
in 455, who had seized the granary of Rome in 430,
fell almost, it seemed, without a fight. True, the native Berber
population who were subordinate to the Vandals,
desert people, revolted. And they were able to raid the
coast and to undermine the position of the Byzantine
occupiers. The next stop was
Italy in 535. 533 - 534, the conquest
of Africa. But Italy would take twenty
years, not one. And in the process, Italy itself
would be devastated. And with that devastation, a lot
of classical culture would be lost. What wasn't destroyed
by the fifth century invasions-- and remember we said the
Ostrogoths were pretty reasonable occupiers-- would be destroyed by the
Romans themselves. I will not tax you with the
ins and outs, and ups and downs of this campaign. Suffice it to say that the
general, Belisarius, at first was able to triumph in Italy. The Ostrogothic resistance,
however, proved to be much stronger than he expected. And Justinian recalled
Belisarius. Almost all of Italy was
reoccupied by the Ostrogoths and it was only the second
general, Narses, who from 552 to 555 is able to
take over Italy. 540 is the year that Ravenna
falls to the Byzantines, and it seems to be the zenith
of Justinian's reign. In that year, the Persians
invaded. That perpetual peace had
lasted nine years. And the Persian invasion
was quite successful. It resulted in the sack of the
largest city of the Empire after Constantinople and
Alexandria, the city of Antioch in the Eastern
Mediterranean. And this was followed
then by a plague. The so-called Justinianic
Plague, which seems to be related perhaps to the plague
of Peracles' Athens or the Athens of the Peloponnesian War,
and maybe to the Black Death of 1348, 1349. Hard to say. And in fact, research now being
done on the DNA in mass graves from that plague will
perhaps tell us what the disease really was. Although so far, apparently,
it hasn't. So from 540 to 565, the death of
Justinian, his policies are officially successful. 555, the fall of Italy. The plague eventually
goes away. The Persians are pushed out of
Antioch, at least. But the Empire in the later years
of Justinian is clearly staggering under the weight of
taxation, economic downturn, declining population,
and over-extension. They had conquered Italy, but
the Italy they had conquered was ruined. And this empire, stretching now
from Sicily to the Persian frontier is clearly too
big to hold onto. So this is some of what
Procopius' anger is about. But he's bitter and
disillusioned. He says, "But I grow
dizzy when I write of such suffering. And pass on to future times
it's memories." Here, he's speaking about the Persian
invasion of Antioch. "For I cannot understand why it
is the will of God to exalt the fortunes of a man, or place
him and cast them down for no reason that
we can see." Now if you contrast him with
what you've read in Augustine, in The Confessions, you can see
that Augustine has some reasons why this happens. Procopius resists the Christian
explanation here. And this is led some observers
to think, in general, that he's not really somehow
a Christian. He is, but he's writing in
a classical tradition. And he is also, remember, an
"elitist" a conservative. I use the term elitist in
a fairly neutral sense. It's hard to expect someone
whose writings come down to us all this length of time to be,
somehow, an ordinary person. Yes, he represents a class. But doesn't really like
religious controversy. But doesn't really like all of
the fussing about the natures or nature of Christ. But there are other things that
are not in Procopius that are somewhat surprising. Justinian is best known for
architectural monuments like Hagia Sofia; to historians, for
what we are essentially talking about today, the Western
conquest; and for his legal reforms, the Justinianic
Law Code, which is the basis of all European law. European, that is, as opposed
to Anglo-American. Anglo-American law is a
separate tradition. European law is based ultimately
on a reworking of Roman law precedents. And so I want to talk a little
bit about his legal accomplishment, which Procopius,
a man who would be familiar with law courts, with
legal systems, doesn't tell us anything about in his works. Virtually nothing. Justinian essentially codified
the Roman law. And this is important, not only
because it's the basis of European law, but law is related
to political and administrative order. However much we may hate
bureaucracy, or denounce administration, that is how
governments provide whatever it is they are providing
for their citizens. And since the alternative to
government is anarchy, and since there are examples before
our eyes of anarchic societies, it won't do to
underestimate the benefits of law, however cynical we may be
about its implementation. Roman law at the time of
Justinian was, as law tends to be, learned and unwieldy. If you wanted to know how to
resolve a question, you could go through the thousands and
thousands of what are called "responsae", or you could
look at legislation. Just as in the Anglo-American
tradition, and some of you will learn this very soon in
law school, you can either look at statutes passed by
legislatures or court cases-- precedents. The equivalent of a statute,
Connecticut passes a law saying that you can't have
a gun in your car. Whereas Texas has laws that say
you could have a gun in your car under such and such
circumstances, OK? So you have a whole set of
statute law, which would be imperial statutes in the Roman
Empire, imperial legislation. Or, if the statutes don't cover
a particular situation, or you want something that
has the particularity-- a tree on my property falls
on my neighbor's-- did I mention this already? Yeah, that one-- on my neighbor's garage. Who's to blame? OK, you go and you say, well,
this case came up in Cincinnati in 1949, and this
is what the judge found. In the absence of computers,
the search for this stuff is very hard. In Anglo-American law this is
called "precedent." In Roman law, they're called "responsae."
And interestingly enough, this term is also
singular, plural. It applies to Jewish law. A response is a response. A judge, an expert, a law
professor, in effect, is asked his opinion on something. And his response becomes
preserved as a kind of precedent. These were voluminous and
represented centuries of law. And even more, of course, the
responsae conflicted. One judge says, "You have to pay
because it was your tree." Another says, "It's an accident,
he's responsible for his own remedies." What do you do if you have
a conflict of judges? What would you do if you
have two kinds of contradictory responses? You've got to decide who
is more authoritative? Which one is better? So the work of Justinian's
compilers was to sort out legislation, statutes, and the
responses, and also to decide among contradictory ones. What is in this law? Well, what's in any law? We think of law as having mostly
to do with criminals and stuff like that. But criminal law is actually
very simple. It's like the Burgundian code. If you murder someone, this is
what's going to happen to you. There may be different
kinds of killing. If you murder them with intent
and premeditation, that's worse than if you murder them in
a fight and spontaneously. Manslaughter is different
from murder. Manslaughter is where you didn't
intend to kill the person, but you did. You punched him, and you didn't
know they had a weak heart and he died. That's manslaughter. You punched them. You intended to hurt him, but
you didn't intend to kill him, but he died. Vehicular manslaughter. What's the difference
between negligence-- you should have seen something
and you didn't-- versus criminal intent? You did it deliberately. But it's very simple,
the criminal law. There aren't a whole lot of gray
areas, and you can get through the criminal code
pretty quickly. But what about contracts? What about property? This is endless. This is endless. So you know in law school,
criminal law will be the cream, or the tip of the
proverbial iceberg, or some little side issue. Most of your time is going
to be spent on-- those of you who go
for this option-- on property and contracts. And that's what the Justinian
law is mostly: property and contracts, legal arrangements
for buying and selling, inheriting, partnerships,
guardianships, security, surety, obligations. This is a very advanced
science in Roman law. As advanced as it is anywhere,
at any time. This is very different from "You
cut off one finger; you pay five solidi", which we were
looking at last week. The work that ensued, the
so-called Justinianic code, or the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the
body of civil law, was drawn up in five years. Here, again, is an example
of unbelievable rapidity, compared with the length of time
it takes now, merely to reform the Connecticut
tax code-- for that matter. It was undertaken
by a commission. Four books were issued. The first is a collection
of statutes, and it's called the Codex. Collected laws of the
Senate and imperial laws of previous centuries. The largest book is the Digest,
or in Latin, Digesta. The Digest is the weeded-out
responsae, organized by subject. So this would be where you would
go to try and figure out what happens if a river changes
its course a little, and your land seems to be now
taken over by your neighbor. Is the river the border, or is
an artificial line the border? The third book is a kind of
textbook, or a survey of the whole law and what it's supposed
to mean called the Institutes. And the fourth is called the
Novella, or new laws, because obviously, new laws would
have to be made. The Codex, the Digest, the
Institutes are in Latin, because Latin was the language
of the Roman Empire. But the Novella are in Greek,
because Greek was the language of the Empire now. "Now" being 534 when this
work was finished. The Justinianic Code is more,
however, than a rearrangement of old laws. It displayed a consistent
philosophy of government where law is more than precedent, is
an active force in society. The Emperor is seen as the
servant of the law, the implementer of the law,
but he's also the master of the law. He is an absolute power. He is the embodiment
of the law. This is a well-run, immense,
burdensome empire. Procopius gives us, unreliable
though he may be as to Justinian being a demon, et
cetera, Procopius gives us a vivid picture of a
highly-governed, even efficiently-governed, but
oppressively-governed and very ambitious society. Now for next week, and a little
bit after, remember we have no class on Wednesday. We have class on Monday. We are going to read from
Gregory of Tours about Clovis and the Franks. And it will seem more violent
and more primitive than what we've been reading. But violence and primitiveness,
unfortunately, are part of history and
government at almost any time. And so, enjoy the intrigue. I'm not going to test
you on the names. You'll see there are lots of
great cat names of the Frankish barbarians. But pay attention to the figure
of Clovis, and to the attitude of Gregory. Because, as with Procopius,
we've got an interesting, if not completely reliable source.
