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 Roman law was gathered into the form that carried it into the European future. Born to a peasant family in the Latin-speaking Balkans, raised to the throne by his uncle Justin, he ruled with an ambition for restoration: to recover the lost western provinces, to settle the church’s doctrine, and to bring the empire’s tangled inheritance of law into a single order.

The legal project is the most durable. On Justinian’s command a commission under the jurist Tribonian compiled the Corpus Juris Civilis — the code of imperial statutes, the Digest abridging a thousand years of juristic opinion, an instructional Institutes, and the later Novellae of his own reign. Rediscovered and taught in the medieval Italian universities, this body of work became the trunk from which the civil-law traditions of continental Europe grew. Much else of his reign was costly and partial: the western reconquest under the general Belisarius retook Italy, North Africa, and southern Spain at ruinous expense and did not hold; the rebuilt church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople still stands.

For the study of late antique thought, one act of his looms larger than its scale. In 529 an imperial edict barred those who held to the old gods from teaching, and the Platonic school at Athens — the institutional descendant, in name, of the Academy, and by then the last redoubt of pagan Neoplatonism — ceased to function as a public center of philosophy. Its head, Damascius, and several colleagues, among them Simplicius, are reported to have departed for the Persian court of Khosrow I, returning some years later under the terms of a treaty. Historians have long treated 529 as a convenient marker for the close of pagan antiquity, while cautioning that the date is tidier than the reality: philosophical teaching persisted elsewhere, notably at Alexandria, and the law’s exact effect on the school is debated.

Justinian governed the church as he governed the state. He convened the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 and legislated on doctrine, monastic life, and the conduct of clergy, pressing throughout for a single confessed faith under a single Christian sovereign — a vision in which emperor and orthodoxy were bound together. His theological edicts and his closing of the old schools belong to the same impulse: the consolidation of a Christian Roman order with no sanctioned place left for the philosophies it had displaced. The schools that closed had spent three centuries reading Plato as a path to the divine. The questions they had asked — how the soul reaches what is real, what the world is made of and why — outlived the edict, taken up again in another vocabulary by those who came after.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Monasticism · Middle Ages