A Temple to Justice

I read Peter Sarris’s Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint in September 2024. I had long been interested in Justinian. By the end of the book, that interest had become admiration.

Not uncomplicated admiration. Sarris gives no basis for that. Justinian could be ruthless, intolerant, vindictive and intensely autocratic. He persecuted religious dissent, treated disagreement as a threat to imperial and divine order, and possessed a formidable sense of his own authority.

But there is something about the scale of the man that I find difficult not to admire.

He seems to have regarded government not as a position to be occupied but as a task that could never quite be finished.

Law, taxation, provincial administration, war, theology, architecture, poverty, diplomacy, ecclesiastical discipline, court politics: everything seems to have demanded his attention. Sarris repeatedly evokes the “sleepless emperor”, and after following the reign in detail, the description feels entirely appropriate.

The other figure who emerged much more vividly for me was Theodora.

Their story is extraordinary even before either of them reaches the throne.

Justinian himself had risen from provincial obscurity through the astonishing ascent of his uncle Justin. Theodora’s origins were even more socially improbable. Sarris carefully works through hostile and sympathetic sources alike, but the broad fact is difficult to escape: the woman who would become Roman empress came from a world unimaginably distant from conventional aristocratic respectability.

And Justinian appears to have loved her.

That matters to me because so many imperial marriages were essentially dynastic transactions. Justinian was already approaching middle age when he formed his relationship with Theodora, a woman perhaps ten or fifteen years younger than him, and he seems to have been willing to challenge convention to marry her.

She was not simply elevated by him and then placed beside the throne.

She became formidable in her own right.

Sarris shows her intervening in ecclesiastical affairs even before Justinian’s accession, pleading for persecuted anti-Chalcedonian churchmen despite Justinian himself adhering to the Chalcedonian position. Later, her influence extended through politics, patronage, religion and social legislation. Sarris also points to legislation protecting women, widows, the poor and women exposed to sexual exploitation, where Theodora’s influence may well have mattered.

Then comes the Nika revolt.

This was one of the episodes that I knew perfectly well before reading the book and yet experienced differently through Sarris.

In January 532, Constantinople ceased to function as the imperial capital and became something close to an urban battlefield.

The Blues and Greens, normally bitter rivals, united. The Hippodrome filled with hostility. Crowds moved through the city. Government buildings were attacked. Fire spread through monumental Constantinople. Opposition to particular officials became opposition to Justinian himself.

“Nika”, the crowd shouted.

Conquer.

For a ruler who had been emperor for barely five years, the situation became existential.

A rival emperor was proclaimed.

Parts of the city burned.

The imperial government appeared to be disintegrating around Justinian.

And at some point the possibility of flight was apparently discussed.

Here Theodora enters history in one of those scenes so perfectly dramatic that one instinctively wants it to be true even while knowing that Procopius has shaped it for literary effect.

According to him, she opposed abandoning the city and reminded Justinian of the old saying that “kingship is a good burial shroud”.

The line is magnificent.

Even Sarris, while carefully analysing the literary allusion behind it, cannot remove its force.

Stay.

If the throne is lost, die as emperor.

Whether Theodora actually spoke precisely those words is almost secondary to what the episode reveals about how contemporaries understood her. She could plausibly be represented as the person in the room whose nerve did not break.

The regime stayed.

Belisarius, Mundus and the imperial troops entered the Hippodrome.

What followed was slaughter on an immense scale.

The revolt ended with thousands dead, the rival claimants executed, senatorial fortunes confiscated and much of monumental Constantinople in ruins.

There is nothing romantic about that ending.

And yet the transformation that follows is astonishing.

From the ashes of the Nika revolt came Hagia Sophia.

This is perhaps the moment where Justinian’s character becomes clearest to me.

A rebellion nearly destroys his reign and burns the ceremonial heart of his capital.

His response is to build something larger.

Not simply to restore what existed before, but to create something that would dwarf it.

Hagia Sophia was inaugurated in 537, only five years after the revolt.

Even now that fact seems absurd.

In the sixth century, without modern engineering, machinery or logistics, Justinian’s government conceived and completed one of the most extraordinary enclosed spaces ever created.

And it still exists.

That matters enormously to how I think about Justinian.

There are rulers whose achievements we know because historians tell us about them.

With Justinian, one can walk inside one.

One can stand beneath that dome and know that the space above was created because a sixth-century emperor looked at a burned capital and decided that devastation would be answered with construction.

The same almost unreasonable ambition appears in law.

Only six months after becoming sole emperor, Justinian announced a complete new codification of imperial legislation.

That alone would have been formidable.

It was not enough.

Roman jurisprudence had accumulated over centuries into an enormous and sometimes contradictory mass of enactments, opinions and commentary. Earlier emperors had attempted partial codifications. Justinian decided to reorganise the inheritance of Roman legal civilisation itself.

The numbers in Sarris are extraordinary.

The classical juristic writings available to the commissioners ran to nearly two thousand volumes and roughly three million lines of Latin text.

Justinian ordered them read, compared, excerpted, harmonised and reduced.

The result was the Digest.

Only a small fraction of the material survived the process.

He described the task in characteristically grand terms, instructing that the law be arranged into fifty books and dedicated as “a proper and most holy temple to justice”.

I find that phrase remarkable.

A temple to justice.

It captures Justinian almost completely.

Law for him was not merely administrative machinery. It was architecture.

Confusion could be ordered.

Contradiction could be reconciled.

A millennium of inherited legal thought could be taken apart, examined, reassembled and given a durable form.

The Codex, Digest and Institutes became the foundation of what would later be called the Corpus Iuris Civilis.

His armies reconquered provinces that were later lost.

His lawyers organised texts that survived fifteen centuries.

Then there is Africa.

The scale of the gamble becomes easy to underestimate because we already know that Belisarius won.

In 533 Justinian sent an expeditionary force across the Mediterranean against the Vandal kingdom in North Africa.

This was territory the Roman Empire had lost generations earlier.

Failure could have destroyed an army, a fleet and immense amounts of imperial treasure.

Instead the Vandal kingdom collapsed with astonishing speed.

Carthage returned to Roman control.

The Vandal king Gelimer was captured.

For Justinian, it must have appeared that history itself was reversing.

Rome could come back.

That success made Italy irresistible.

Here the story becomes darker.

The Gothic War was longer, more destructive and much less cleanly triumphant. Rome changed hands. Cities were damaged. Populations suffered. The resources consumed were immense.

The reconquest succeeded militarily to an extraordinary extent, but victory came close to destroying what had been reconquered.

This is one of the places where admiration has to coexist with discomfort.

Justinian’s western policy was magnificent in conception and often catastrophic in effect.

Yet I understand the impulse.

For Justinian the Roman Empire was not one polity among several.

There was one Roman Empire.

Its emperor happened to govern from Constantinople, but Africa and Italy were not foreign countries to be conquered. They were parts of the Roman world that had fallen outside imperial control.

That distinction makes his ambition intelligible.

Then, at the apparent height of his achievement, nature intervened.

The plague reached the empire in the 540s.

This section of Sarris’s book is difficult to read without thinking about the fragility of all political plans.

Justinian had negotiated with Persia, rebuilt Constantinople, reorganised Roman law, conquered Africa and fought his way through Italy.

Then a bacterium arrived.

The plague killed on an enormous scale.

Taxpayers disappeared.

Soldiers disappeared.

Workers disappeared.

Commercial networks were disrupted.

Administrative assumptions ceased to hold.

And Justinian himself became ill.

He survived.

That fact almost feels consistent with the rest of the reign.

Of course he survived the plague.

And then returned to work.

But the empire that emerged from the catastrophe was not the same empire.

Theodora did not survive much longer.

She died in 548.

Sarris makes an observation here that stayed with me: Justinian’s dependence upon her appears to have been so profound that after her death his focus initially began to drift and his grip on power loosened.

That detail humanised him more than any imperial title.

The sleepless emperor had lost the person beside whom he had built the reign.

The mosaics at San Vitale in Ravenna acquire a different meaning once one knows their story.

Justinian on one wall.

Theodora opposite him.

They are presented separately, each surrounded by attendants, each participating in the sacred and imperial ceremonial of the church.

Fifteen centuries later they are still facing one another.

That image affects me more after Sarris.

Theodora was not simply “the wife of Justinian”.

She was the woman from an almost impossible background who became Augusta of the Romans, participated in government, protected religious communities, stood firm during the greatest internal crisis of the reign, and whose absence Justinian apparently felt politically as well as personally.

After her death the reign continues for another seventeen years.

But something has changed.

The later Justinian seems increasingly isolated.

The wars continue.

The theological controversies continue.

The legislation continues.

The emperor grows old inside a political system that still demands his attention.

And yet the scale of what he and his generation had attempted remains almost unbelievable.

A transformed Constantinople.

A new Hagia Sophia.

A reordered legal inheritance.

Africa reconquered.

Italy reconquered.

Imperial administration reorganised.

Doctrinal unity pursued with exhausting persistence.

A Roman state recast into something increasingly recognisable as medieval Christendom.

Not all of it lasted.

Much of Italy was invaded by the Lombards only a few years after Justinian’s death.

Religious divisions remained.

The reconquests strained imperial resources.

Some of his policies were cruel.

Some of his ambitions exceeded what even the Roman state could sustain.

But this is precisely why Sarris’s portrait is so compelling.

Justinian was not great because everything he attempted succeeded.

He was great in scale.

He seems incapable of encountering disorder without trying to impose form upon it.

A confused legal tradition becomes the Digest.

A burned city becomes Hagia Sophia.

Lost provinces become campaigns of reconquest.

Religious division becomes councils, laws, correspondence and endless theological intervention.

Even catastrophe seems to provoke more administration.

There is a kind of temperament here that I recognise and admire: the conviction that confusion is not an argument for surrender, but an invitation to understand the system better and rebuild it.

Perhaps that is why Justinian stays with me.

His greatest victories were not necessarily the territories he recovered.

Africa was eventually lost.

Italy fragmented.

The geopolitical world he tried to restore proved impossible to stabilise.

But the legal work remained.

The architecture remained.

The conception of Christian Roman statehood remained.

The theological arguments remained.

His reign became one of the great reference points through which later Europe understood Rome, law, empire and Christian rulership.

Peter Sarris ends by arguing that this ancient emperor remains our contemporary.

I understood what he meant by the end.

I live in a Europe whose civil-law traditions still descend in part from the legal order reconstructed under Justinian.

I can fly to Istanbul and stand inside Hagia Sophia.

I can go to Ravenna and look at Justinian and Theodora in mosaics made while they were alive.

Few historical figures survive at so many levels simultaneously.

Text.

Law.

Stone.

Mosaic.

Theology.

Institution.

Memory.

And in 2027, it will be fifteen hundred years since Justinian became sole emperor in 527.

That is what I want to remember on that anniversary.

Not a saint.

Not the demon king of his enemies.

Not simply the reconqueror of Africa and Italy.

A provincial boy who became Roman emperor.

The woman he loved, who rose beside him from an even more improbable background.

A capital in flames.

An empress refusing flight.

A general entering the Hippodrome.

A new church rising over the ruins.

Lawyers buried under millions of lines of Roman jurisprudence.

Ships sailing west for Carthage.

Rome recovered and devastated.

Plague entering Constantinople.

Theodora dying.

An old emperor still legislating.

And, fifteen centuries later, the strange fact that so much of what they made is still here.