Procopius of Caesarea wrote the history of Justinian’s wars in eight books, and in so doing he accomplished exactly what Justinian wanted, making the regime of the soldier’s nephew into a thrilling tale of reconquest and imperial glory: Persians, Vandals, and Goths all fall at the feet of the mighty Roman. But Justinian did not see through the ironies and complexities of Procopius’s text, and many readers since have missed them as well. Though Procopius leaves the serious reader with no doubt that his Justinian was anything but a great emperor and hero, his real disdain simmers unmistakably half an inch below the surface, and in his public histories he succeeded in capturing the ambiguous spirit of his age. He could still write an appendix to his histories of the wars, an entire volume devoted to Justinian’s buildings, outwardly glorifying the shells of empire that Justinian constructed but leaving the readers to form their own judgment.
The Secret History
Procopius then wrote another book, one not published in his lifetime, and one that cannot be ignored in any discussion of the sixth century or of Justinian. The Anecdota (literally, “unpublished material,” usually rendered in English as The Secret History) was first published and read, as near as we can tell, in the seventeenth century. It is the scandal sheet of its times, and no modern writer can resist it.
Procopius told his explicit misogynistic stories to shock, but their historical value, at the very most, is to say that well-bred Constantinopolitans were appalled that their emperor had not chosen to perfume himself with an ambitious marriage to a society girl. Instead he reached below his social station for a partner of whom the worst had to be said, whatever the truth might be. If you insist on reading the stories—as most readers certainly will—then you should at least learn their main lesson, that Procopius knew how to manipulate his audience’s attention to make a point. Justinian and Theodora on the throne may very well have been the happiest (or sappiest) and most devoted of old marrieds, very nearly the least interesting people in the empire, but Procopius succeeded in making them larger than life istanbul private tours.
And that was his greatest disservice to history. Many moderns—I am not one of them—think the exaggerations just that, irresponsible and vengeful “stretchers” (as Huck would say), which distort the history of a serious and successful emperor. Rather, I think the stories clearly intensify rather than falsify the atmosphere of self-absorption and corrupting adherence to principle in a court that had lived too long on its own with too few roots in the society it dominated. There is plenty of evidence for a Justinian at least as dismally arbitrary and unpleasant as Procopius’s gossip makes him out to be. (And there is none to suggest that his slanders of Theodora should be credited.)
Emperor quailing before the Nika riots
The Justinian who sat alone in an empty hall of the palace with a few theologians late into the night, and the Theodora of a shady past who said, “An empire makes a fine burial shroud,” and thus planted courage in the heart of an emperor quailing before the Nika riots, are figures from what Hollywood would call a high-concept story—the worst kind. Better Hamlet for an analogy, a royal figure not quite connected to his society but always powerful within it—like Justinian. The origins of the prince and the emperor separated them from their peers and colleagues, and they never quite grasped what any of their contemporaries were about. If we map Theodora into the Hamlet story, her part is divided between the two poles of unattainable enticement, Gertrude and Ophelia. Justinian’s fate is to be shown as the cat’s-paw of a temptress witch, himself a figure of power without potency, energy without production Severus and Jacob Baraddaeus.
Justinian died childless, surrounded by the sexual legends in which he is the invisible and passive partner, a hollow and tottering figure still larger than life after thirty-eight years of sole rule, the longest reign since Augustus. Had he died in the plague in 542 (he sickened of it, we know), he would be remembered as the man of law, the man of buildings, and the man who started wars he did not finish. Someone else would have had to invent the world for his successors. Instead, he lived a long time and carried his own intentions through to their morbid conclusions. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut’s doomed men and women of Dresden might say, and we should realize that longevity is itself a marker not of success, but only of endurance.
