Justinian I

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Justinian I (c. 482–565) was emperor of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, empire from 527 to 565, and the figure under whom the inheritance of a thousand years of Roman jurisprudence was gathered into the form that carried it into the European future. He was born Petrus Sabbatius, in a Latin-speaking village near Naissus in the Balkan interior, to a family of peasant stock — the last emperor whose mother tongue was the Latin in which the law had been written, ruling a court and a capital that thought and prayed in Greek. His rise was his uncle’s doing. Justin, an illiterate soldier who climbed from the ranks of the palace guard to the throne in 518, summoned his nephew to the capital, adopted him, schooled him, and made him heir; when Justin died in 527 the nephew he had raised already held the substance of power. Justinian ruled with a single ambition broken into three tasks: to recover the lost western provinces, to settle the church into one confessed faith, and to bring the empire’s tangled mass of statute and juristic opinion into a single, governing order. The third of these is the one that lasted.

The law

The legal project is the most durable act of the reign, and it was undertaken with a speed that still astonishes. On Justinian’s command a commission directed by the jurist Tribonian — quaestor of the sacred palace, the most learned lawyer of the age and the controlling mind of the whole enterprise — assembled what would later be called the Corpus Juris Civilis, the body of the civil law. It came in parts. A Codex of imperial constitutions, cleansed of what was obsolete and contradictory, was issued first in 529 and reissued in revised form in 534. The Digest, or Pandects, completed in 533, was the towering labor: Tribonian’s commission read through the writings of the classical jurists — by the work’s own reckoning some two thousand books, more than three million lines — and distilled from them a single ordered anthology of authoritative opinion, with the emperor’s authority making the excerpt law and the discarded remainder void. The Institutes, an introductory textbook for students modeled on the second-century handbook of Gaius, was published the same year and given the force of law on the day it appeared. The later Novellae — the new constitutions of the reign, most of them in Greek — completed the structure as Justinian went on legislating. The aim was totality: one consistent body of binding law, the legislator’s word fixing what every earlier authority had only argued.

For three centuries the work then receded into use and neglect, and its second life came from a manuscript. A complete copy of the Digest survived in Italy — the codex later kept at Florence, the Littera Florentina — and in the late eleventh century the text was taken up again in the schools of northern Italy, above all at Bologna, where the glossators read it line by line and built around it the ius commune, the common learned law of medieval and early-modern Europe. From that revival the civil-law traditions of the Continent grew; the name Corpus Juris Civilis itself belongs to the sixteenth century, fixed by the editor Dionysius Gothofredus, who set Justinian’s body of civil law against the Corpus Juris Canonici of the church. The categories the Digest preserved — contract and delict, property and obligation, the person and the thing — became the working vocabulary of European legal thought, taught in universities that did not yet exist when the commission did its work. Justinian had meant to fix the law of a living empire. What he fixed instead was the legal mind of the civilizations that came after the empire was gone.

The reconquest and the great church

Much else of the reign was magnificent and ruinous at once. The dream of restoration — renovatio imperii, the recovery of the Roman world entire — sent the general Belisarius west. In a single swift campaign of 533–534 he destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa; the long Gothic War in Italy, opened in 535, took Sicily, then Rome, then dragged on for two decades of siege and counter-siege that left the peninsula wrecked and depopulated before it was nominally recovered; a foothold was seized in southern Spain. The conquests were real and they did not hold: within a generation of Justinian’s death the Lombards had taken most of Italy, and the cost in men and treasure had hollowed the eastern provinces it was meant to crown. The reign carried other catastrophes — the Nika riots of 532, which burned the heart of the capital and nearly toppled him, and the great plague of 541–542 that emptied the cities. Out of the ashes of Nika rose the act of building for which he is most seen: the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, raised between 532 and 537 by the geometers Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, its enormous dome set over a single vast space as though resting on light. It still stands. Among the works of the reign, the law and the great church are the two that outlived the empire that made them.

The edict of 529 and the school at Athens

For the study of late-antique thought, one measure of his looms larger than its scale. Among the early legislation of the reign came an edict barring those who held to the old gods from teaching and from drawing public salary, and the Platonic school at Athens — the institution that styled itself the heir of Plato’s Academy, and that had become by the sixth century the last endowed redoubt of pagan Neoplatonism — ceased to function as a public center of philosophy. Its head was Damascius, the most rigorous metaphysician the school produced, who carried its negative theology of the One past the point where his predecessors had let it rest; under him the lineage of named heads, reckoned as a succession reaching back to the founder, ran out. Damascius and several colleagues, the commentator Simplicius among them, departed eastward to the Persian court of Khosrow I, where a king reputed as a patron of learning was thought to shelter the philosophy the empire had outlawed. They returned within a few years under a clause of the peace concluded between Rome and Persia in 532, which secured them the freedom to live unmolested and unconverted — a small, strange episode in which the conscience of a handful of scholars surfaced in a treaty between empires. The journey and its aftermath belong to Damascius’s own account; the law belongs to Justinian.

What the law belongs to is contested ground. The chronicle of John Malalas, the main source, reports the measure briefly, and the institution it touched was not the Academy Plato founded in the fourth century before the common era — that school had ended long before — but its self-appointed successor, refounded and re-endowed across the intervening centuries and, by 529, a refuge for the uncompromisingly pagan. Historians have long taken the date as the convenient terminus of ancient philosophy, while cautioning that it is tidier than the reality. The closing of the school stands among the most debated events of the later empire: to some readers an act of small consequence and brief effect; to others nothing less than the death of classical philosophy. Both readings overstate the cleanness of the line. Philosophical teaching continued — most visibly at Alexandria, where a Platonist school went on under terms of accommodation with the Christian city for generations more, and where the work of commentary that the eastern travelers carried with them was still being written in the decades after Athens fell silent. The edict did not end thought. It ended an institution: it dissolved the standing — endowed, salaried, publicly succeeded — that had made the pagan philosopher a recognized figure in the Roman order, and left the chair that had passed from teacher to teacher with nowhere to sit.

The Neoplatonism that lost its Athenian seat was the systematic theology built by the late Platonists — the schools of Iamblichus and Proclus, who had read Plato as sacred scripture, ranked the gods of cult as the order of powers descending from the first principle, and made the sacred rites the tradition called theurgy central to the soul’s ascent. That whole architecture — its grades of being, its science of the One, its discipline of the soul’s return — did not die with the edict but changed custody. It had already passed, in part, into a Christian key: the Pseudo-Dionysian writings of the same generation folded Proclus’s hierarchies into a Christian Neoplatonism, and the Greek East that Justinian governed would carry a continuous Byzantine Platonism forward through the centuries. The pagan Platonic theology the school had guarded as a living cult was what the law withdrew sanction from; the questions it had asked moved on under other roofs.

The church and the emperor

Justinian governed the church as he governed the state, and the two were, in his conception, a single thing. He legislated on doctrine, on monastic discipline, on the conduct of clergy and the management of sees; he closed temples and pressed conversion at the empire’s edges; he wrote theology himself and convened councils to ratify it. The doctrinal arc of the reign closed at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 — the Fifth Ecumenical Council — which he summoned and steered to condemn the so-called Three Chapters, the persons and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa. The intent was reconciliation: by anathematizing what could be read as the Nestorian extreme, Justinian hoped to draw the Miaphysite churches of Egypt and Syria back toward the Council of Chalcedon, the formula of one Christ in two natures that had split the eastern provinces for a century. The theology that made this thinkable was the Neochalcedonian reading of Chalcedon through the language of Cyril of Alexandria, holding the two natures together while insisting that the single subject of every act of Christ was the divine Word himself. The same council saw fifteen anathemas directed at the long-dead Origen and the Origenist teaching that had unsettled the monasteries of Palestine — the pre-existence of souls, the final restoration of all things — though whether those condemnations were formal acts of the council or business transacted by the bishops before it opened has been argued ever since. Through all of it the Pope of Rome, Vigilius, was held in Constantinople, pressured for years, and bent at last to the emperor’s will. The councils Justinian called were instruments of his policy as surely as the campaigns and the codes.

This is what later observers named caesaropapism, and the word, however contested, points at something real in the reign: in Justinian’s order the emperor was not merely the church’s protector but the arbiter and articulator of its faith, doctrine settled by imperial edict and conciliar ratification working together toward one end. His theological legislation, his closing of the pagan schools, his pursuit of the western provinces, and his rebuilding of the great church were not separate enterprises but a single design: a Christian Roman order, unified in law, in faith, and in territory, under one sovereign answerable to God and to no earthly authority above him. The edict of 529 and the council of 553 are the two poles of that design — the silencing of the rival theologies and the binding of the surviving one to the throne — and between them lies the whole logic by which the emperor understood his office.

That logic carried a paradox he did not live to see. The reconquest, the labor into which he poured the strength of the empire, melted within a generation; the unified faith he forced through at Constantinople did not hold the Miaphysite East, which drifted further from the imperial church rather than nearer. What endured was the work he treated as administrative housekeeping — the gathering of the old jurists’ opinions into a fixed text. Centuries after the empire of one faith and one frontier had failed on both, the Digest was read again in an Italian schoolroom, and from that reading the law of a continent was rebuilt. The emperor who set out to restore the Roman world handed down not the world but its law: the one Roman order he made permanent was the order of the code.

Sources and scholarship

The reign is documented from inside by its own legislation and by contemporaries who watched it. The Codex, Digest, Institutes, and Novellae survive as the central monument; the soldier-historian Procopius wrote both the official Wars and the venomous Secret History; John Malalas’s chronicle supplies the brief notice of the 529 measure. On the law, Tony Honoré’s Tribonian (London: Duckworth, 1978) reconstructs the commission and its presiding jurist, and the standard general account of the reign remains Averil Cameron’s The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity and her treatments of the period. The case for reading 529 with caution — as the end of an institution rather than of philosophy — was made decisively by Edward J. Watts, first in Justinian, Malalas, and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529 (Journal of Roman Studies 94, 2004) and then in City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), which traces how teaching at Alexandria outlasted the Athenian closure. On the doctrinal settlement, Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition sets the Neochalcedonian theology and the Three Chapters in their context; the conciliar acts themselves are gathered for the Second Council of Constantinople. The texts that the edict of 529 drove from their Athenian seat survive in the open record where the school’s own institution does not: the Enneads of Plotinus, the doctrinal spine of the whole tradition, in Stephen MacKenna’s translation, and the Chaldæan Oracles the late Platonists received as revelation — the philosophy outlawed in the capital, readable still in the hands that copied it.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1917–1930) · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Monasticism · Middle Ages · Damascius · Alexandria · Plato · Byzantine Empire · Roman Empire · Neochalcedonian Christology · Christianity · Christian Neoplatonism · Byzantine Platonism · Pagan Platonic Theology · Origen · Theurgy · Logos · Soul