Featured Justinian, and the Sufferings of the City of God

He might have been able to completely restore the Empire if the plague had not struck, if he had enough gold on hand to pay the mercenaries, and if he had not become jealous of Belisarius' success.

 

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...Oh, No, I'm going right back into the Classical weeds with this, but it would be interesting to see a comparison between the plagues under Justinian and Marcus Aurelius. ...Was there one under Gallienus, too?

 

Yale historian Paul Freedman compared Justinian with Stalin, arguing that the two had a lot in common. The sources on Justinian are very scant and largely limited to one author, Procopius.

Procopius wrote several works on Justinian's reign, including, on the one hand, the "Wars" and "Buildings" - in which he portrays Justinian as a caring ruler, who emersed himself in every detail of government, religion, architecture and art - and, on the other hand, the "Secret history" which is a diatribe against Justinian and his court.

"Wars" and "Buildings" were published in Procopius' lifetime. These works represented the official line, including the expected adoration of Justinian and the personallity cult that he had created.

The "Secret history", however, was to be published after Procopius was safely dead. In it, Procopius released all his anger and hatred of Justinian, portraying him as a brutal, decadent and largely incompent ruler, who devastated the empire to satisfy his own grandure.

Historians have long struggled to reconcile the two different portrayals of Justinian. Some even argued that Procopius may have gone mad between writing the different works. However, we now know that Procopius worked in parallel on the favourable and the condeming works.

Indeed, it is not so difficult to reconcile the different views. The same happened during Stalin's reign (Hitler would be another example). Many who praised Stalin according to the official line, secretly knew and sometimes wrote that he really was a villain and certainly proclaimed that much after his death.

This is probably also what we see in Procopius. To have the long life, which he enjoyed he had to stick to the official line during his lifetime, but he did leave us with an account of the true Justinian, which he reserved for the time after his own death.

Hence, Justinian was probably a bit like Stalin or Hitler and it is only thanks to Procopius' "Secret history", which survived in only one single manuscript that we know this truth.