Kirialax

That really depends on how great you think the plague really was. It seems pretty horrific from the literary sources, but archaeologically, there is little or no evidence for a significant portion of the population dying and the economy taking a severe hit from this. However, one must be careful with that as well due to the poor state of Byzantine archaeology. Mark Whittow remarks that we have found no mass graves that can be dated to the early 540s, but this in itself isn't quite enough to throw the "literary" plague out the window, simply because very little excavation has been done.

Iolo

Assuming that it was the same disease as the Black Death, it probably WAS pretty horrific. The archaeology of diseases and mass mortality is not very developed anywhere, I think (the same number of people die, but a bit earlier). The trouble is that historians tend to use it only for the odd purple passage. We all know the Spaniards carried all sorts of diseases ot the New world, but has Mexican archaeology demonstrated mass mortality? If so, I've not read about it.

Inflames

Justinian was a very ambitious man and he cost the Byzantines greatly. There were some things he could not account for like the arrival of the plague and betrayal of the Persians (although that was not too surprising) but he must have know some of what he was doing was harmful. His dream was to unify the Eastern Empire back with the Western Empire with him as the overall Emperor but the task was too expensive in both supplies, men and the massive amounts of gold he spent.

Justinian was only able to do what he did because Emperor's before him were penny pinchers. He was left with the empire filled with mountains of gold and he sent a big chunk of that to the Persians and spent the rest raising an army that had no hope of holding the land they captured in Italy and beyond and the losses of real trained Byzantine soldiers led to widespread reliance on barbarians in the army. This would lead to the army looking more like the Western Roman one near its fall very different, less professional and less equipped.

But he built the Hagia Sophia, a massive church that represented the rebirth of the Eastern Roman Empire in its glory (that ended when Justinian died until the 9th century revival). He also developed the Justinian Code which was one of his greatest accomplishments by far, not to be matched until Napoleon. He also made taxing more efficient, made government more powerful and redefined Constantinople herself to prevent floods.

But Procopius was likely more right than wrong when he described how badly Justinian ran the Empire at home. Most of that supernatural and evil stuff is Procopius taking shots at the crown and I'm sure l Belisarius wasn't as big of a douche as he would like us to believe.

If anyone wants first hand stuff from Procopius reading his "Secret History" is a must.

TLDR: Justinian was a villain who meant well.

sylla1

Dualist Manichean-like terms like "villain" are hardly ever useful for the analysis of a political figure.
Justinian tried to re-conquer the lost portion of the Roman Empire; I can't imagine any great Roman emperor trying otherwise whenever their resources allowed them so. It was just in their nature.

We all know the attempt was eventually unsuccessful, but mostly for the incoming of Islam a century later; hardly we could blame this Roman Emperor for not foreseeing such portentous event...

On the other hand, for better or for worse, the social and cultural legacy of his reign (from the definitive crushing of the Classical civilization by Christianity to the Justinian Codex) have been much more lasting and influential all along History, nowadays included.

Must agree on Kirialax's skepticism on the effect of the plague. For one, biological weapons (intended or not) are utterly unspecific and fair; there's a priori no reason why Persians, Germans and other Barbarians wouldn't have been as affected by the plague as the Romans themselves.

Kirialax

Despite all of the scholarly work put into it, and myself having just spent four months studying it in Greek, I'm not convinced that we fully understand that text. It is difficult to study it within a literary genre, because it does not seem to have one. Despite all of Averil Cameron's protestations that Procopius seriously believed all that he wrote in that work, I'm not convinced. 'The Wars' and 'The Buildings' both have a good degree of complexity within them and show Procopius to be highly intelligent and subtle in his use of genre and criticism of people. On account of that, the 'Anekdota' seems sloppy and unfinished, as it jumps through various genres and through space and time.

Personally, I suspect that the text that has come down to us is only an early draft of what would have been a far more complex document, and that the problems associated with understanding the 'Anekdota' derive from its status as an unfinished document. However, that is just my opinion, and there are many more books and papers to read on the topic that I have not yet studied.

When studying Belisarios, keep in mind Procopius' changing attitude towards him, and the theme of gender and masculinity that runs through his work. Belisarios is a great hero to Procopius in the early books of 'The Wars'.

Inflames

Yeah my professors basically have concluded that his "Secret History" was a record of many events he was going to never publish in the state we have it now. Its like if someone 1000 years from now read your laptop files and found your rantings on George Bush that were never intended to be released for any reason. He may have come out with it later or if for some reason Justinian died much earlier than he did he might have felt safe enough to water it down a bit. But in the stage we have it in now it would have been a one way ticket to the gallows if someone got ahold of it. I remember him going quite hard on Justinian and his "special" wife which he holds absolutely no respect for in any way shape or form in this record.

Its still a window into the time period, it lists many events that we know happened which we get to actually have described for us from someone who was literally there in that spot at that time. It was a required text for my class on the period and it was a very interesting read. He told us to just ignore most of the parts where the author writes things like Justinian walking around with his head under his shoulder and stuff.

Inflames

Ok he was an ambition man who tried to do well but failed and left the Empire much weaker than he inherited it.

Cicero

It suceeded but wasn't lasting, and that couldn't necessarily have been predicted in advance, as no complex, and protracted enterprise, especially war can lend it self to precise calculations. What he, Belasarius, and Narses did accomplish was remarkable in such a short time.


Justinian's Flea did give a plausable explaination why the plague had a disporportiante affect on the Byzantines as opposed to the Persians, and I am afraid that I have forgotten the details of the whole argument. The gist of it was that the emergence and eventual persistence of the pague required the exact mixture of climatic conditions and cultural conditions that were perfect in Byzantium at the time and generally lacking the more arid and warmer Persia. I should reread that section again.

It also must be remembered that Justinian contacted the plague himself and, though he survived, he was never the energetic person that he was before hand. This may have affected his ability to sucessfully prosecute the enterprise in subtle ways.

Kirialax

It was probably meant to be published after Justinian's death. However, Procopius seems to have died sometime in the early/mid 550s. The older argument is that he outlived Justinian, because John of Nikiu mentions that a "Procopius" was praefectus urbi in int he 560s, but Procopius is a common name. The fact that he fails to note the collapse of the first dome of the Hagia Sophia and remains so critical of Belisarios, despite his successful campaign against the Kotrigur Huns in 559 suggest that he died sometime in the 550s. However, parts of the 'Anekdota' were probably written earlier. Theodora died in 548, but he is particularly critical of her in his unpublished work. It seems unlikely that if he was writing the 'Anekdota' around the time he died that he would give her so much page space, as her memory would have been dying off. More likely, parts of it were composed around the time of her death, in response to the encomiastic and sycophantic outpouring towards her. There is no reason to suggest that he wasn't planning on publishing it as a companion volume to 'The Wars'. However, what we have is probably a very early draft, in which he had yet to properly set his genre and tone. The only highly developed part of it from a literary standpoint is the prologomena, and many scholars believe that it was a later addition.

We can't just disregard it, for it is part of understanding the work as a whole. This sort of superstition was very familiar to Late Antique peoples, and despite Procopius' seemingly-Thucydidean rationalism, he may very well have believed it, and thus this is important for understanding Procopius as an author and a man.

Inflames

Its important for our understanding of him and the timeframe but should not stand in the way of many things we can learn from the text itself, many of which stand outside the confines of his apparent change of heart in regard to Justinian / Theodora ect. Not all of it is biased or sprinkled with bits of supernatural speculation.