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The Politics of Roman Memory in the Age of Justinian

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Marion Woodrow Kruse, III

Graduate Program in Greek and

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

Anthony Kaldellis, Advisor; Benjamin Acosta-Hughes; Nathan Rosenstein

Copyright by

Marion Woodrow Kruse, III

2015

ABSTRACT

This dissertation explores the use of Roman historical memory from the late fifth century through the middle of the sixth century AD. The collapse of Roman in the western in the late fifth century inspired a crisis of identity and political messaging in the eastern Roman empire of the same period. I argue that the Romans of the eastern empire, in particular those who lived in and worked in or around the imperial administration, responded to the challenge posed by the loss of by rewriting the history of the Roman empire. The new historical that arose during this period were initially concerned with Roman identity and fixated on urban space (in particular the cities of Rome and Constantinople) and Roman mythistory. By the sixth century, however, the debate over Roman history had begun to infuse all levels of Roman political discourse and became a major component of the Justinian’s imperial messaging and propaganda, especially in his . The imperial history proposed by the Novels was aggressivley challenged by other writers of the period, creating a clear historical and political over the role and import of Roman history as a model or justification for Roman politics in the sixth century. This dissertation examines the parameters of and conflicts between these new in order to demonstrate the existence of a coherent movement whose central concern was influencing the normative of Roman history in the sixth century. ii

Dedicated to Christopher Tam

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would never have been prepared to undertake this dissertation if Daniel Alig had not taught me to read in the literary equivalent of the Spartan agoge. Ruth Bellows taught me to love reading and to write like I had something to say, for which, and for many other things besides, I will be eternally grateful to her. Walter Stevenson first directed me toward the sixth century and the tutelage of Anthony Kaldellis. For that and for his unfailing humor and encouragement, I am indebted to him. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes has been an indispensable source of institutional and personal support. Had he not found the funds to send me to Oxford in the winter of 2014 my professional trajectory would have been altered, drastically and for the worse. Likewise, had I not had his humor to fall back on, it is unlikely that this dissertation would have been completed. My department could not ask for a better chair. I owe a great personal debt to many people whose love has made everything else possible, and in return I offer my love and thanks: to my family, especially Ethel de la Luz Piñeyro Kruse, Otte, and Tyler Kruse, for their examples and sacrifices; to Brooke, Kelly, and Amy for shelter and friendship; to Dr. Bellows for long conversations in the attic; to Laura for always standing her ground; to Emily for growing up with me; to Hank and Mike for their camaraderie; to Hanne and Joey for being symmachoi; to Pippa for warmth; and to for the most profound friendship of my life and for walking with me in worlds our eyes have never seen. My chief debt is reserved for Anthony Kaldellis, my mentor and friend, without whom none of this would have been possible. Whatever good ideas are present in this dissertation and whatever success I have found or will find in my professional career, it must all be laid at Anthony’s feet. The debt owed is universal, which is to say infinite and ever-expanding. Since he has no patience for , I will simply say thank you. I hope that, if I have too often been Thrasymachos, then at least I have never been so gullible as Glaukon.

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VITA

May 2004 ...... St. John’s High School

2008...... B.A. University of Richmond

2008 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate and Graduate

Enrichment Fellow, Department of ,

The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

“The Speech of the in : Justinian’s Foreign Policy and the Transition

between the Books of the Wars,” Classical Quarterly 63 (2013) 866-881.

“A Justinianic Debate Across Genres on the State of the Roman ,” in G. Greatrex,

H. Elton, and L. McMahon (eds.) Shifting Genres in (Burlington,

2015) 233-245.

“Competing Histories in the Sixth Century: Justinian and Procopius,” in E. Turqois and .

Lillington-Martin (eds.) Reinventing Procopius (Burlington, Forthcoming).

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Greek and Latin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments...... iv

Vita ...... v

Introduction: Roman History after the Fall of Rome ...... 1

The Historiography of the Sixth Century ...... 10

The Authors of the Sixth Century ...... 17

Chapter One: History and in the Age of Anastasios ...... 25

A for the Romans ...... 25

Zosimos: Rome and Anti-Rome ...... 28

Hesychios of Miletos and the Greek Rome ...... 62

Christodoros of Koptos and the of New Rome ...... 83

Anastasios and the Greek Rome...... 116

Chapter Two: Administrative Reform and Republican History in the Age of Justinian 119

The in the Sixth Century ...... 119

Novel 24 and the Trajectory of Empire ...... 122

Novel 13: Administrative Corruption and Urban Reform ...... 145 vi

Laws, Histories, and Offices ...... 166

Chapter Three: Consular History in the Age of Justinian ...... 168

Killing the Consulship ...... 168

Justinian’s Consular Novels ...... 171

Prokopios on the Consulship ...... 190

The Consulship in ’ Romana ...... 203

Lydos and the Consulship: The Missing Magistracy ...... 216

Republicanism and the Consulship ...... 240

Chapter Four: Rome and Roman History in the Age of Justinian ...... 244

Inventing the End ...... 244

Rathymia and Imperial Decline in the Novels ...... 249

Rome and in the Novels ...... 262

Rome and the Romans in Prokopios ...... 269

The Sixth-Century History of the Fifth-Century Fall...... 285

The Sixth-Century Consensus ...... 299

Conclusion: The Politics of Roman Memory in the Age of Justinian ...... 302

Bibliography ...... 310

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INTRODUCTION: ROMAN HISTORY AFTER THE FALL OF ROME

Therefore, most pius of principes, it befits your power and office that we should seek your concord, which we have done up til now out of friendship. For you are the most beautiful glory of all kingdoms, the helpful bulwark of the whole world, you whom other rulers look up to by law because they perceive that there is something innate to you alone. We, who with divine aid learned in your respublica how we are able to rule Romans equitably, do this most of all. Our kingdom is an imitation of yours, the image of your good intention, modelled on the one and only empire. In so far as we follow you, we surpass all other peoples.1 -, Variae 1.1.2-3

At some point near the middle of the reign of Anastasios (491-518), likely during the tense period for east-west relations between 505 and 508, Theoderic, king of the and , sent a letter to the emperor in Constantinople which had been drafted by his , the Roman Cassiodorus.2 In this letter, part of which is quoted above,

Theoderic claims to be a subordinate partner in the project of Roman government and describes his rule in as an imitation of the one true respublica Romana, which at the time was the Roman empire of the East. Theoderic occupied an unusual position in the

Roman world of the fifth century. He had been educated, as his letter mentions, in

Constantinople, where he grew up as a diplomatic hostage. After being released,

1 Cass. Var. 1.1.2-3: Et ideo, piissime principum, potentiae vestrae convenit et honori, ut concordiam vestram quaerere debeamus, cuius adhuc amore proficimus. vos enim estis rengorum omnium pulcherrimum decus, vos totius orbis salutare praesidium, quos ceteri dominantes iure suspiciunt, quia in vobis singulare aliquid inesse cognoscunt, aequabiliter imperare possimus. Regnum nostrum imitatio vestra est, forma boni propositi, unici exemplar imperii: qui quantum vos sequimur, tantum gentes alias anteimus.

2 For Theoderic’s , see A.H.M. Jones, ‘The Constitutional Position of and Theoderic,’ JRS 52 (1962) 126-130.

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Theoderic established himself as the leader of a confederation of Goths whom he eventually led into Italy, with the support of the emperor Zenon (474-491), to depose

Odoacer, the general who had himself deposed Augustulus in 476, an event that is today taken to mark the definitive fall of the . Once in

Italy, Theoderic established an independent Gothic kingdom in the heartland of the former Roman empire, one which was theoretically and rhetorically subject to the emperor in Constantinople, yet functionally independent. Theoderic’s in his letter to Anastasios may have been only diplomatically polite, but it underscores a fundamental dynamic of the sixth century: the former western Roman empire, including Rome herself, now sought to legitimize its Romanness and standing in the world by reference to the of Constantinople; Italy was Roman because of New Rome. The Roman heartland had shifted from Italy to , its political center from Rome to New Rome.

This inversion of the Roman world, in which Rome’s former imperial holdings came to usurp that city’s traditional prerogatives as the mother of empire, can be observed independently of the fraught modern debate over whether the empire experienced a decline and fall or a transformation. Whether or not we accept that the western Roman empire fell in 476 (or at any other point in the fifth or sixth century for that matter), it is beyond doubt that the circumstances of both the eastern and western empires and their relationship to one another had radically shifted by the year 491, when

Anastasios was acclaimed emperor in Constantinople. These momentous changes required explanation, especially in the east, and it is not coincidental that it was only a generation later that the idea that the western Roman empire ‘fell’ in 476 was first set

2 forth and our first explicit of Roman decline, Zosimos, penned his work.3

Scholars of the ‘transformation school’ of later Roman history have seen in the

‘invention’ of 476 evidence for the artificiality of the narrative of decline and fall, but we can flip this observation on its head and ask why these narratives of decline and fall began to appear at this historical moment, in the place that they did, namely Constantinople.

The creation of a Roman turning point in 476 may or may not tell us much about what really happened in 476, but it does tell us a great deal about the historical thinking of

Zosimos (ca. 500), Marcellinus in the , and Jordanes in the . Likewise, discussions of Theoderic as an ideal Roman in Italy, which can be found in the works of the eastern authors Prokopios and Jordanes, do not necessarily imply a fundamental continuity between the Roman and post-Roman west, but they do tell us how eastern Romans in the 550s understood the relationship between their empire and the

Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.

This dissertation will examine the process by which the emperors, , and poets of the eastern empire employed history and mythistory in order to come to terms with the political realities of the sixth century. In particular, it will focus on the creation of new historical narratives, the manner of their deployment, and the debates they inspired in order to understand how eastern Romans came to reimagine themselves not merely as eastern Romans, but as the only Romans worthy of the name, a process with profound implications for our understanding of the intellectual and political climate of the sixth century. As such, this study will focus on a series of central questions concerning

3 For 476, see B. Croke, ‘A.D. 476: The Manufacturing of a Turning Point,’ 13 (1983) 81-119.

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Roman identity and politics that were current in the sixth century: What did it mean to be

Roman after ca. 500? What were the implications of this new formulation of Roman identity for the inhabitants of the former western Roman empire? How could an empire be Roman without the city of Rome? More pointedly, how could an empire be Roman when it was at war with Rome? How did these issues motivate and shape historical constructions of Constantinople as New Rome? How did the idea that a Roman empire could fall influence political rhetoric in Constantinople? Whereas a great deal of scholarship has attempted to understand the post-Roman west,4 the process by which the

4 For post-Roman , see J. Conant, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 (Cambridge, 2012). The bibliography on post-Roman , in particular Italy, is massive. For the transition to the , see A.C. Murray (ed.) After Rome’s Fall:Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto, 1998); C. Wickham, Framing the : Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford, 2007); J.M.H. Smith, Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000 (Oxford, 2007); P. Heather, Empires and : The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (Oxford, 2009); C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 (, 2009); P. Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700 (Oxford, 2011): P. Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian and Imperial (Oxford, 2014). For the barbarian and Roman identities in the post-Roman west, see W. Pohl (ed.), Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1997); R. Collins, ‘Law and Ethnic Identity in the Western Kingdoms in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries,’ in A.P. Smyth (ed.) Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe (New York, 1998); A. Gillett (ed.), On Barbarians Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2002); W. Pohl and G. Heydemann (eds.), Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout, 2013); B. Swain, Empire of Hope and : Jordanes and the Invention of Roman-Gothic History, Dissertation (The Ohio State University, 2014). For the in Italy, see T. Burns, A History of the Ostrogoths (Bloomington, 1984); P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (Cambridge, 1997); P. Heather, ‘ and Regnum among the Ostrogoths’, in H. Goetz., J. Jarnut, and W. Pohl (eds.) Regna and Gentes (Leiden, 2003) 85-133; S. Barnish and F. Marazzi (eds.), The Ostrogoths: From the to the Sixth Century, An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 2007). For the reign of Theoderic, see J. Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford, 1992); A. Golz, Barbar—König—Tyrann: Das Bild Theoderichs des Großen in der Überlieferung des 5. bis 9. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008); S.D.W. Lafferty, Law and Society in the Age of Theoderic the Great: A Study of the Edictum Theoderici (Cambridge, 2013); J. Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (Cambridge, 2014). For the question of Rome’s fall in general, see B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2007); P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New and the Barbarians (Oxford, 2007); J. O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (New York, 2009). For the economic case against the fall of the Roman Empire, J. Durliat, Les finances publiques de Dioclétien aux Carolingiens (284-889) (Sigmaringen, 1990). Contra Durliat, see C. Wickham, ‘The Fall of Rome Will Not Take Place,’ in L. Little and B. Rosenwein (eds.) Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Oxford, 1998) 45-57.

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Romans of Constantinople came to terms with their new place in the world and the

Roman historical imagination has not been explored.5 The goal of this study is to begin redressing that imbalance by investigating the ways in which the shifting historical and mythistorical narratives of the sixth century reflect the attempts of eastern Romans to reconfigure their understanding of Roman history in order to account for the political realities of the sixth century, their own predicament for which there was no clear precedent, beginning with the reign of Anastasios and continuing through the publication of the major works covering the reign of Justinian in the 550s.6

The subject of this study is restricted to historical memory as constructed in texts, especially imperial pronouncements, laws, histories, and other forms of ; the subject of cultural memory more broadly is not addressed. Moreover, it is not primarily concerned with distinguishing fact from in the historical accounts of the period, but rather with attempting to understand why the authors of the sixth century chose to write them the way they did. Rather than assess the factuality of their accounts, we will investigate the rhetorical implications of their authorial decisions with an eye to

5 Studies have considered the eastern Roman reaction to the fall of Rome and the continuation of Roman political systems in the eastern Roman empire. See respectively, W. Kaegi, and the Decline of Rome (Princeton, 1968); A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA, 2015). For the development of a Greek Roman identity in late antiquity and Byzantium, see A. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2007) 42-119.

6 This study of historical memory in the sixth century is anticipated and aided by a number of excellent studies in historical memory that have appeared in recent years, covering both the ancient and medieval periods and effectively bracketing the period of late antiquity, for which no such studies exist. For the Roman Republic, see A. Gallia, Remembering the Roman Republic: Culture, Politics, and History under the (Cambridge, 2012); A. Gowing, Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (Cambridge, 2005). On medieval memory generally, see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990). On the Carolingians, see A. Latowsky, Emperor of the World: and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 (Ithaca, 2013); R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004).

5 understanding the and agendas that motivated the composition of their works.

Just to be clear, this approach does not reflect the attitude, expressed by some scholars, that facts do not matter or that ‘the insoluble contradiction of ‘truth against fiction’ is devoid of meaning.’7 Indeed, facts are essential to the current project as they allow modern scholars to recognize moments of innovation and invention in historical writing, and it is precisely at these moments that we may gain our clearest insight into the rhetorical aims of an author.

The writing of history and the role of history in creating a useable past to guide present and future debates will therefore be at the forefront of this study. In this respect, this dissertation follows the approach of Alain Gowing’s monograph Empire and

Memory. However, where Gowing restricted his subject to discussions of a specific time period (the Roman Republic) in texts published over the course of more than a century after the end of that time period, this dissertation will engage with sixth-century discussions of the full range of Roman history—from the mythistorical narratives of the founding of the Latin people by through contemporary sixth-century events such as the various of Rome that punctuated Justinian’s campaigns agains the Goths in

Italy—that were written over the course of roughly sixty years, from the accession of

Anastasios in 491 through the early 550s. In other words, this dissertation will consider a wider range of historical episodes from works written during a smaller window of time.

As a result of this shift, this study will not be able to offer definitive conclusions on the

7 J.C. Smith, The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century (Phildelphia, 2010) 32.

6 role of a particular period in the historical imagination of sixth-century authors. Instead, it will attempt to understand the methods and motivations behind the creation of historical memory and use historical memory as a marker through which to detect and delineate political discussions taking place in the sixth century.

The political discussions that lie at the heart of this dissertation relate to and are informed by the lived realities of their authors. While these realities are largely beyond the grasp of history, the study of the historical conversations taking place in the sixth century nevertheless offers a window into an important, if particular, social group. As

Rosamond McKitterick has argued in her study of Carolingian memory, ‘recalled past experiences and shared images of the past are the kinds of memories that have particular importance for the constitution of social groups.’8 This is likewise true of the sixth century and it should be noted that the authors studied in this work, who will be discussed more systematically below, are almost universally bureaucrats with close ties to the imperial government living and writing in the city of Constantinople.9 The close correspondences between these authors that will be highlighted in this dissertation prove the existence of a coherent literary and intellectual movement in sixth-century

Constantinople, whose members generally belonged to a recognizeable social (though not necessarily economic) class. The coherence of these authors’ views of history and their widespread opposition to the historical models offered by the emperor Justinian

8 McKitterick, History and Memory, 3.

9 Even those with no record of service in the imperial administration, such as Christodoros, can be shown to have close ties to the imperial court. This rule also applies to Justinian’s Novels which were, in the period discussed in this dissertation, written by the .

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(ghostwritten by the quaestor Tribonian) in his Novels or ‘new laws,’ makes clear that what might in isolation be dismissed as intellectual differences between authors is in this case a battle over historical authority. Mary Carruthers, in her classic study of medieval memory, highlights the difference between ‘authoring’ and ‘authorizing’, arguing that ‘in the context of memory, the first belongs to the domain of an individual’s memory, the second to what we might conveniently think of as public memory.’10 In other words, a single author may write a particular historical narrative, but that narrative only begins to reflect public or social memory when it is authorized by a broader acceptance and rehearsal.

In the sixth century, Justinian’s Novels attempt to authorize the emperor’s version of Roman history by relying on his imperial position and the pretence of exhaustive imperial research. The response of contemporary authors, especially those writing in the

550s who vehementally and systematically refute and undermine Justinian’s historical formulations, represents an attempt to deauthorize Justinian’s account of Roman history. This is an important conclusion as it not only confirms a broad opposition to

Justinian’s policies in the halls of his own government, but also indicates that the emperor’s histories were viewed as a serious enough historical formulation to merit a response in many of the major authors of the period. That this response can be narrowly located in a specific , at a specific historical moment, in a single city demonstrates the existence of a struggle by a against the emperor’s attempt to control or influence the development of public memory. The

10 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 189.

8 writings of Jordanes, Lydos, and Prokopios therefore articulate an idiom of resistance to

Justinian’s attempts to recreate the Roman past. Given the warm reception these historical narratives receive in subsequent authors, in particular and Evagrios, we must determine that the authors of the 550s were largely successful in deauthorizing

Justinian’s history and authorizing their own.

Despite the social implications of this dissertation, it is not primarily concerned with the identification or investigation of particular social groups. Rather, the current study is unapologetically political. The writing of history is an inescapably political ; modern scholars remain unable to their work from its political context and ancient authors never made any such effort. In fact, history in the ancient world was, if anything, a more explicitly and nakedly political act than its contemporary counterpart.

Discussions of the personalities and policies behind Roman successes and failures were meant to offer examples to contemporary Romans, a conceit which holds true for historians as diverse as Prokopios and the emperor Justinian.11 Understanding political thought in the sixth century requires us to understand how and why written in the period took the shape they did. That these debates reflected a broader social divide between the emperor and elements of his administrations is an important, but ultimately secondary, conclusion.

11 The locus classicus for exemplarity in Roman history is of course , see Livy, 1.1.10.

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The Historiography of the Sixth Century

The sixth century is an unexpected century, one that interrupts and interferes with attempts to posit either a smooth transition or a violent discontinuity between the classical Greco-Roman world and the middle ages.12 This is particularly true of the sixth- century eastern Roman empire, which asserts itself forcefully in the historical record after a long and largely silent fifth century hiatus. Yet in many ways, the study of the sixth century is a victim of the richness of its historical record, which is unparalleled at any other point in Roman history, including the fall of the Roman Republic and the reign of

Augustus. The sixth century offers us the single most comprehensive work of ever created (Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis and Novels) alongside Latin poets working in the tradition of Vergil (’ Iohannis); our first complete classicizing histories since the third century (Prokopios’ Wars and Agathias’ Histories); specialized studies of

Roman institutions (Ioannes Lydos’ On the Magistracies of the Roman State and On the

Months); dedicated histories of foreign peoples (Jordanes’ ); a wealth of in a range of languages including Latin, Greek, and Syriac which formulated history according to a variety of schemata (Jordanes’ Romana, the Chronicon of , the , the Chronographia of Ioannes Malalas, and the

Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor and its Syriac continuator to name a few); philosophical dialogues in the tradition of and (The Anonymous Dialogue on Political Science); hagiography (the Lives of the Eastern by Yuhannan of

Amida, also known as John of Ephesos); history (the Ecclesiastical History of

12 I borrow the phrase ‘unexpected century’ from Anthony Kaldellis.

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Yuhannan of and that of Evagrios Scholasticus); philosophical commentaries (the extensive writings of Ioannes Philoponos); geographies (the of

Kosmas Indikopleustes); ekphrastic works in and (Christodoros’ Ekphrasis on the Statues of the Zeuxippos Baths and the Silentary’s Description of Hagia

Sophia); letters to the emperor in the tradition of Seneca (Agapetus’ Advice to the

Emperor); the Acta of Church Councils (including the Second of

Constantinople); and letters to and from (including those of Severus of and the emperor Justinian). This list is a brief survey of the written sources available to students of the sixth century, and as such does not include material that comes from such fields as numismatics, , papyrology, prosopography, art history, and . It will come as no surprise then that the attempt to study the sixth century resembles nothing so much as the attempt to drink from a firehose.

In the face of such overwhelming ancient evidence, it is not surprising that historians of the period have a tendency to fragment, clustering around specific author or themes. This tendency is exacerbated by the longstanding neglect of the period, which has only recently begun to be taken up in earnest in scholarship (traditionally much more attention has been paid to the topics of Christianization in the fourth century and the barbarian settlements in the fifth). Where authors such as and Vergil have been the subject of countless studies in modern scholarship, Prokopios, the most prominent author of the sixth century, has been the subject of only four monographs in

11 the last fifty years, only two of which offer strongly competing interpretations.13 The result of this combination of abundant documentation and histiorographic neglect has been the simultaneous development of several different sixth centuries, the shape of which generally corresponds to the sources used.

The challenges facing the study of the sixth century, and this dissertation’s role in scholarship, can be understood if we try to situate this work inside the relatively narrow field of politics and political thought in the sixth century, in particular by focusing on three recent studies by Christopher Kelly, Peter Bell, and Shane Bjornlie.14 Kelly, operating in the tradition of A.H.M. Jones, approaches the period of late antiquity broadly, beginning at the end of the third century and continuing through the reign of

Justinian, in an attempt to understand the nature and function of the late antique imperial administration. Kelly is attempting to understand the ways in which the administration of the Roman empire changed during late antiquity and the corresponding consequences for the political attitudes of rulers, bureaucrats, and subjects. Kelly anchors his study with the works of Ioannes Lydos (whose writings will be explored in chapters two and three of

13 These are J.A.S. Evans, Procopius (New York, 1972); A. Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Centry (Berkeley, 1985); A. Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of the Antiquity (, 2004); H. Börm, Prokop und Die Perser: Untersuchungen zu den römisch- sasanidischen Kontakten in der ausgehenden Spätantike (Stuttgart, 2007). Cameron and Kaldellis are the two works that offer contrasting interpretations. Evans offers a general survey of Prokopios’ works, while Börm discusses Prokopios’ treatment of the and the possible Persian sources for his history. This problem is not restricted to the sixth century; the fourth century historian has only recently received his first book length literary study, G. Kelly, Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian (Cambridge, 2008).

14 C. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2004); P. Bell, Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management, and Mediation (Oxford, 2013); S. Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, , and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge, 2013).

12 this dissertation), using Lydos as a window into the administration of the Roman empire during the age of Justinian, the logical telos of his work. Bell is also concerned with interactions between rulers and ruled, but defines both terms more broadly, exploring the problems generated by the often extreme differences between those with and those without (economic means, liberty, orthodoxy, political authority, etc.) in the age of

Justinian. Bjornlie, in turn, focuses on the political rhetoric of tradition in politics between Gothic Italy and the eastern Roman empire, with a particular focus on

Cassiodorus’ Variae, a collection of (subsequently edited) letters that Cassiodorus composed for the Amal court in Italy.

Each of these studies is excellent in its own right, and each has contributed significantly to our understanding of the sixth century. This dissertation seeks to build upon these works and provide, for the first time, a roadmap of the major political debates taking place in sixth-century Constantinople.15 This dissertation will attempt to construct such a guide by employing the toolset of classical philology and literary analysis in order to detect, delineate, and connect the political arguments that were current in the sixth century.16 It will accomplish this by applying close readings, intertextuality, and a knowledge of the techniques of classical historiography to the histories (broadly understood) written in the sixth century in order to identify points of interaction and response. In doing so, this dissertation seeks to mimic the habits of mind and reading

15 It should be noted that Bjornlie does an excellent job fitting Cassiodorus into his intellectual context with reference to other writers, but this is not the primary focus of his study.

16 For a survey of the ways the tools of classical philology enhance the reading of , see J. Marincola (ed.), A Companion to Greek and , 2 vols. (Oxford, 2007).

13 techniques contemporary authors with a traditional classical would have brought to these texts. Put differently, regardless of whether Justinian intended for the historical content of his Novels to be read and analyzed as a coherent corpus based on the standards of classical historiography, this is how many (if not all) of the authors discussed in this dissertation would have been trained to read history, regardless of its origin. Furthermore, this dissertation will afford the authors of the sixth century the benefit of the doubt, crediting the literary merit of their works as a default position and assuming the intentionality of their intertexts.17 The study of late antiquity has long suffered from an unwillingness on the part of scholars to credit the intelligence or originality of its authors, a trend that has only recently begun to be reversed, but which still leaves a large gap in fundamental studies even for major authors.18

Current scholarship on the sixth century remains dominated by two interrelated metanarratives, which have directed scholarly attention to a relatively narrow set of questions. The first of these narratives is that of Christianization, which assumes that the sixth century was for all intents and purposes a post-pagan century in the eastern Roman empire.19 This narrative ignores the increasing evidence for the presence of pagans and pagan sympathizers throughout the sixth century and especially in the imperial

17 This courtesy has not always been afforded authors of the sixth century. Such a dispute, for example, lies at the heart of the disagreement between Cameron and Kaldellis over the interpretation of the corpus of Prokopios.

18 Recent reference works have begun to incorporate late antiquity into classical literature, see A. Dihle, Greek and of the Roman Empire: From to Justinian, trans. M. Malzahn (New York, 1994). For the of the study of in late antiquity, see S. Johnson (ed.), Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, , (Burlington, 2006).

19 This is one of the conclusions of Alan Cameron’s recent work on in late antiquity, A. Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2010).

14 administration itself.20 As a result, authors who express a deep interest in or concern with traditionally pagan topics are often marginalized or assumed to be closet Christians.21

The desire to Christianize, and thereby sanitize, the messy religious reality of the sixth century is related to the second metanarrative, that of the transformation of the eastern

Roman empire into Byzantium as a subset of the larger transformation of the Roman empire into its three daughter civilizations: Carolingian Europe, Byzantium, and the

Islamic Caliphate. The idea of transformation was popularized by in 1971 and has since come to be the dominant historical paradigm for late antiquity.22 As a consequence, the sixth century, and the reign of Justinian in particular, has come to be identified as the moment of transition between and the middle ages.23

The transitional model of late antiquity tends to rely on artificial dichotomies between the ancient and medieval worlds and encourages the use of hermeneutics and questions which presuppose a transition.24 The narrative of Christianization functions as a handmaiden to transformation by calling attention to a social movement that can be

20 Anthony Kaldellis has been especially concerned with identifying pagan figures in the sixth century. See, A. Kaldellis, ‘The Making of Hagia and the Last Pagans of New Rome,’ JLA 6.2 (2013) 347-366; idem, Hellenism in Byzantium, 11-119.

21 See, for instance, the dismissal of Zosimos in W. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome, 101. For the Christianization of sixth century authors, see inter alia M. Maas, ‘‘Delivered from their Ancient Customs’: and the Question of Cultural Change in Early Byzantine Ethnography,’ in K. Mills and A. Grafton (eds.) Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (Rochester, NY, 2003) 152-188; idem, John Lydus and the Roman Past: Antiquarianism and Politics in the Age of Justinian (New York, 1992).

22 P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (New York, 1971).

23 J. Moorhead, Justinian (New York, 1994) 1.

24 This bias can be plainly seen in the title of volumes, see for instance P. Allen and E. Jeffreys (eds.) The Sixth Century: End or Beginning? (Brisbane, 1996).

15 objectively shown to originate, grow, and come to predominate during the latter part of classical antiquity and the early middle ages. The problem is not that this narrative is fundamentally incorrect, that is not the case, but that this narrative is often placed at the center of the late antique world, to the exclusion of all other considerations. To quote the introduction to the recently published Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ‘in the late antique world, religious values became the central values, even the supreme values, for conceiving of the world and for justifying discourse and .’25

The current study seeks to challenge the centrality of Christianity, and in general, in the intellectual world of late antiquity by identifying and adding to the discussion another set of questions which lay at the heart of identity and politics in the sixth century. In particular, it will argue that there are a number of concerns, in particular secular questions of Roman history, which are addressed with similar frequency and intensity among a specific social group as questions of Christian history among late antique chroniclers or questions of religious doctrine among sixth-century bishops and theologians. The sixth century, and late antiquity as a whole, cannot be reduced to a single primary concern, and the idea that it can is an illusion generated by the preponderance of scholarly attention directed at Christianity. In attempting to broaden our understanding of the sixth century to include secular or at least non-Christian discussions, in particular of elements of imperial politics, this dissertation follows in the tradition of scholars such as Peter Bell, Anthony Kaldellis, Charles Pazdernik, and Shane Bjornlie.

25 H. Inglebert, ‘Introduction: Late Antique Conceptions of Late Antiquity,’ in S. Johnson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012) 3-28 at 16.

16

The picture which will emerge from this study is that of a coherent eastern Roman intellectual movement centered on Constantinople and concerned with the development of historical narratives that supported the Roman identity of the eastern Romans, the status of Constantinople as the New (and only true) Rome, the organization of the imperial administration along traditional lines, and the maintenance of Roman traditions.

While the primary goal of this study is to understand the role of historical memory in the sixth century, it is hoped that the conclusions it reaches will have a broader effect on the scholarship of the period. To wit, this dissertation will provide much needed context for the study of politics and the imperial administration in the sixth century by providing the first non-theological intellectual history of sixth-century Constantinople.

The picture provided will inevitably be incomplete, but by improving our understanding of what issues were on the minds of the leading authors of the sixth century it will be possible, for the first time, to situate those authors and their concerns into their larger context. Not only will this allow us to use our sources more responsibly, it will also begin the process of tying together existing scholarship by generating a spectrum of concerns and questions, both ancient and modern, which can be accessed through extant sources.

The Authors of the Sixth Century

This dissertation, like many studies of late antiquity, does not fit neatly into the categories of scholarship laid out by modern departments and universities. It straddles the line between classical philology and history as well as the temporal divide between classical antiquity and the middle ages. As a result, it cannot be assumed that this dissertation will

17 be read only by those familiar with the sixth century, so a brief survey of the major authors whose works appear in this dissertation would be helpful. Each of these authors, along with full bibliographic entries covering their lives and works, will be reintroduced as they appear in the dissertation itself, but the following should provide a useful reference for readers unfamiliar with the sixth century.

The Emperor Justinian

The emperor Justinian (r. 527-565) occupies a central place in this dissertation as three of the four chapters are devoted to discussions that took place during his reign. Justinian is also an important literary figure for the sixth century as he is the purported author of a series of Novels, or new laws, that were published after the second Codex in 534. The

Codex was part of a larger program in the organization and reform of Roman law jointly referred to as the Corpus Iuris Civilis or ‘Body of Civil Law.’ The Corpus was composed of three parts: the , which contained excerpts from imperially approved jurists

(semi-professional legal commentators); the Institutes, an official textbook for legal instruction; and the Codex or code, a collection of all the laws still in effect at the time of its publication in 534. The Novels are separate from the Corpus and are so named because they are additions to the laws laid out in the Codex.

Tribonian

Tribonian served as quaestor, Justinian’s chief legal official, from 530-532 and again from 535-541/2. Prior to this, Tribonian served on the commission that created the first

18 edition of the Codex and was the primary figure behind the creation of the Digest,

Institutes, and the second edition of the Codex. It is widely accepted that Tribonian functioned as Justinian’s ghostwriter for the Novels that appeared during his tenure as quaestor. Tribonian is mentioned in Prokopios for both his significant erudition and manifest corruption, the latter of which was likely connected to the calls for his dismissal that coincided with the Nika Revolt of 532. Tribonian wrote in both Greek and Latin, the

Corpus Iuris Civilis was published solely in Latin, while the Novels he authored were generally published in both languages. Latin had long been the official language of law even in the largely Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire, but was replaced by Greek during the latter half of the reign of Justinian.

Zosimos

Relatively little is known of Zosimos and his sole work, the New History, survives in only a single . Based on later testimonia, it is understood that he was employed as a financial official, an exadvocatus fisci, in the imperial administration in

Constatinople. His work is generally assigned to the late fifth or early sixth century and comes down to us in an incomplete form. A major lacuna covers the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book of his history, and the ending of the work is suspiciously abrupt, though this may have been a result of the author’s death rather than the transmission of the text. Zosimos’s dates are established primarily based on his brief mention of a tax abolished by Anastasios, but this dating is far from secure. Although his history is generally disregarded as being poorly written and the work of the last

19 adamantly pagan author of late antiquity, Zosimos’ New History is much closer to the mainstream of sixth-century historiography and political thought than has generally been appreciated, a point which will be discussed in this dissertation.

Hesychios of Miletos

Hesychios of Miletos served as an in the office of the prefect of Constantinople for nine years during the reign of Anastasios (r. 491-518). He was the author of a Greek

Roman and General History, which appears to have begun with Belos, the king of

Assyria, and continued originally through the death of Anastasios, though it was later extended, presumably by the same author, to cover the reign of (r. 518-527). His history is no longer extant, but a fragment survives in a tenth-century collection of Patria

(local histories) of the city of Constantinople. Hesychios held the rank of illistrius, indicating a relatively high , and can be linked to a number of buildings, in particular a bathing complex, in his native Miletos.

Christodoros of Koptos

Christodoros of Koptos (in ) was a Greek poet and a member of the school of

Egyptian ‘wandering poets’ first identified by Alan Cameron. The degree to which he was a professional poet, meaning that he derived his livelihood from writing poetry, is debated, but it is likely that poetry was primarily a source of social and professional rather than monetary gain. Christodoros was a prolific author of Patriai for cities around the eastern Roman empire, including Constantinople. He was also the author of an

20 poem, the Isaurika, covering the emperor Anastasios’ campaigns against the Isaurians, an un-Romanized tribe of barbarians in central Minor. It is also possible that he was the author of an epigram inscribed on the Gate (a bronze public gate to the imperial palace in Constantinople) by Anastasios, which also commemorated the emperor’s

Isaurian triumph. Aside from this inscription, Christodoros’ only extant work is a description of the statues in the Zeuxippos bathing complex, which was adjacent to the palace, the Chalke Gate, and the hippodrome in heart of central Constantinople. This poem was included in the first edition of the Greek Anthology, a collection of Greek poetry first compiled by Agathias, whose other works include a continuation of

Prokopios’ history of Justinian’s wars, in the second half of the sixth century. As is evident from his corpus, Christodoros had close ties to the imperial court of Anastasios.

Marcellinus Comes

Marcellinus, who is distinguished from other authors of that name, in particular the fourth-century Latin historian Ammiaus Marcellinus, by his title of comes or ‘count,’ was from , a Latin-speaking in the under the authority of the eastern

Roman empire. Justinian and his uncle Justin were both from the same , and it is likely based on their shared origin that Marcellinus was chosen by Justinian to serve as cancellarius on his personal staff prior to his accession as emperor in 527. Marcellinus does not appear to have served in any further official capacity for Justinian after 527, but he was rewarded with the title of comes and the social rank of vir clarissimus.

Marcellinus wrote several works, but the only one still extant is his Chronicon, a

21 in Latin that picks up where ’s chronicle ended in 378 and continues down to the death of Anastasios in 518, but was later extended by Marcellinus to 534.

Prokopios of Caesarea

By far the most influential historian of the reign of Justinian, Prokopios was from

Caesarea in Palestine and served as an assessor, a legal advisor and personal secretary, to the general Belisarios during his early campaign against Persia, as well as during the reconquest of Africa and Italy. Prokopios appears to have parted ways with Belisarios during the early , at which point he is thought to have settled in Constantinople to produce his three major works, all written in Greek. Prokopios is the author of the Wars of the Emperor Justnian, more often referred to simply as the Wars, an eight book history of Justinian’s campaigns against Persia, Vandal , and Gothic Italy. The first edition of the Wars was published in 551/2 and was organized by theater of operations, with the first two books covering the Persian front, books three and four covering the

African theater, and books five through seven covering events in Italy. The eighth book of the Wars was published separately in 553 and covered events on all fronts, bringing them up to the winter of 552/3. The Wars remains the most complete extant military and political account of the reign of Justinian. Alongside the Wars, Prokopios wrote and may have circulated amongst his intimates a work known as the Secret History; it’s name in

Greek, the Anekdota, literally means ‘unpublished material.’ The Secret History is ostensibly meant to complete the narrative of the Wars by including details that were unsafe to publish during the lifetime of Justinian, but this does not account for all of its

22 material. The Secret History can be broadly divided into two parts, the first is an extended assassination of Belisarios, his wife Antonina, the empress Theodora, and the emperor Justinian. The second section of the Secret History focuses on administrative malfeasance by Justinian and his . As mentioned above, it is unclear to what extent the Secret History was circulated during Prokopios’ lifetime, but it appears to have been completed at roughly the same moment as the first seven books of the Wars in 551/2. Prokopios’ final work, which will not be discussed in this dissertation, is the Buildings, a survey of the construction projects undertaken by Justinian during his reign.

Ioannes Lydos

Ioannes Lydos was an imperial bureaucrat who worked in the office of the Praetorian

Prefect, the chief financial official of the eastern Roman empire, during the reign of

Justinian. He wrote four works in Greek of which we are aware. One of these, a history of

Justinian’s Persian wars up to 532, is no longer extant. Of the remaining three, two survive only in fragments, namely his On the Months and On Portents. His major surviving work, On the Magistracies of the Roman State, is a history of the development and corruption of the office of the Praetorian Prefect and is incomplete, ending suddenly in the middle of the third book. Nevertheless, the portions we have offer crucial insight into the functioning of the imperial bureaucracy under Justinian. While the publication dates for these works are not especially secure, On the Magistracies is generally assigned

23 to 550/1, roughly the same moment at which Prokopios published the first edition of his

Wars.

Jordanes

Of all the authors of the reign of Justinian, Jordanes might be the most unique. A self- proclaimed Goth (on his father’s ) and Roman who served on the staff of one of

Justinian’s Balkan generals, the Gunthigis Baza, Jordanes is the author of two extant works in Latin, the Getica and the Romana, both published c. 551, again at roughly the same moment as Lydos’ On the Magistracies and the first edition of

Prokopios’ Wars. The Getica is a history of the Gothic people, while the Romana is a survey of Roman history from creation through the reign of Justinian. Both works are framed as responses to requests from friends, either for a summary of Cassiodorus’ lost twelve-book history of the Goths (the Getica) or as a brief survey of all of Roman history

(the Romana). The two works are unusual in that they reference one another, and the

Getica is described as an offshoot of the project of the Romana. Neither work has traditionally been afforded much respect in the scholarship, the Getica having been viewed as derivative and valued primarily as a means of accessing Cassiodorus’ lost history, rather a work in its own right, while the Romana has been seen as a cursory and inelegant summary of the fragmentary fifth-century historian . Recently, however, the Getica has come to be viewed as a literary work in its own right, and both it and the Romana will be treated as such in this dissertation.

24

CHAPTER ONE: HISTORY AND ANXIETY IN THE AGE OF ANASTASIOS

A Roman Emperor for the Romans

On 10 April 491, , empress of the Romans and widow of the emperor Zenon, walked out of the palace and into the imperial box in the hippodrome of Constantinople.

There she addressed the gathered populace of New Rome and the soldiers of the praesental armies who had gathered to hear her speak. Flanked by a full imperial entourage, including the of Constantinople, the empress spoke with the populace.

Her words were carried to them through a clerk, their replies in chants repeated dozens of times with the volume and force of ten thousand voices. The matter under discussion was the occupancy of the highest office in the Roman world. The people, the army, the empress, the administration, and the church had come together that morning to discuss who would rule the last Rome.1

The emperor Zenon had died the night before after seventeen years on the .

His reign had been plagued by civil wars and he had sat by, a helpless witness, as the

Roman empire in the west faltered and then collapsed, never to rise again. At the time of his death, two barbarian warlords, Odoacer and Theoderic, were in contest for control of

1 For the political implications of the accession of Anastasios, see A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA, 2014) 106-117. For the reign of Anastasios, see M. Meier, Anastasios I: Die Entstehung des Byzantinischen Reiches (Stuttgart, 2009); F.K. Haarer, I: Politics and Empire in the Late Roman World (Cambridge, 2006).

25

Italy. Theoderic was ostensibly acting under imperial orders, but was for all intents and purposes seeking to establish himself as the independent , a goal he accomplished a few years later.2 Zenon had died childless, his only son, Leon II, had perished of illness at the start of his reign. Zenon had entered the imperial family through his marriage to Ariadne, the daughter of Leon I and mother of Leon II, and was never meant to be emperor. Leon I had named his grandson Leon II to the post, but when Leon

II died in 474 at the age of seven, his father Zenon inherited his throne.

Zenon was initially passed over for the office of emperor because he was by birth an Isaurian, a member of a remote tribe of hillsmen from Minor who, though surrounded on all sides by Roman territory for centuries, were never pacified by Rome and never considered Roman.3 His marriage to Ariadne and subsequent ascent to the throne had been a historical accident, the result of Leon I’s crippling military weakness after a disastrous attempt to save the western Roman empire by retaking Roman North

Africa from the under Geiseric.4 His armies broken, Leon I sought to tap the manpower of and succeeded in installing a powerful Isaurian faction at court. By the spring of 491, when Ariadne entered the imperial box in the hippodrome, the

Isaurians, led now by Zenon’s brother , had long since worn out their welcome.

2 For Theoderic and Ostrogothic Italy, see pp. 284ff.

3 For the Isaurians, see H. Elton, ‘The Nature of the Sixth­Century Isaurians’, in S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex (eds.) Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity ( 2000) 293­307; B.D. Shaw, ‘Bandit Highlands and Lowland Peace: The Mountains of Isauria-,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 33.2 (1990) 199-233; B.D. Shaw, ‘Bandit Highlands and Lowland Peace: The Mountains of Isauria-Cilicia (Continued),’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 33.3 (1990) 237-270.

4 For this campaign, see P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford, 2006) 399-407. 26

The people and soldiers gathered in the hippodrome cheered Ariadne, hailing her as augousta, which was traditional for an empress, and wishing her eternal victory, which was not. Ariadne, in turn, praised the people for their restraint and calm during the ongoing , remembering perhaps the and destruction caused by

Marcian’s putsch twelve years earlier. These pleasantries exchanged, the empress asked the people and soldiers of Constantinople to confer on her, the , and the of the city the authority to appoint the next emperor. The people granted her request, but not without condition: ‘let every good thing come to you, Roman, if nothing foreign is added to the race of the Romans.’5 The people would consider Ariadne’s choice, but only if she chose a Roman like herself. The Romans would not tolerate another Isaurian emperor.

Thus began the reign of Anastasios the son of Pompeios, the first emperor of the

Romans raised to that office after the fall of the Western Empire.6 He was selected by the court, approved by the people and the armies, and married to Ariadne two later.

Almost at once he faced the first challenge to his reign: a predictable uprising by the

Isaurians under Longinus. It was five years before Anastasios concluded his Isaurian War by demolishing the mountain strongholds of the Isaurians.7 The accession of Anastasios highlights how charged, popular, and politically relevant discussions of Roman identity

5 , 1.92 (R419): ὅλα τὰ καλὰ ἐπὶ σοῦ γένηται, Ῥωμαῖα, εἰ οὐδὲν ξένον αὔξει τὸ γένος τῶν Ῥωμαίων.

6 The name of Anastasios’ father is not certain, but Pompeios is a likely guess, A. Cameron, ‘The House of Anastasius,’ GRBS 19 (1978) 259-276 at 262-3.

7 Meier, Anastasios I, 75-83; Haarer, Anastasius I, 11-28.

27 were in late fifth and early sixth-century Constantinople. The problem for Anastasios and for the authors working during his reign was that, with Rome and Italy lost to the empire,

New Rome and her Romans needed a new way to conceptualize their Romanness; a new locus of Roman identity was required and the authors of Anastasios’ reign struggled to find it, not out of an abstract desire for a Roman history for Constantinople, but out of urgent political necessity. The Romans of the eastern Roman empire needed to be reassured of their own and their emperor’s Romanness. Some authors, like Zosimos, looked back to Old Rome, others, like Hesychios, sought to reinvent New Rome in the model of the Old, while still others, like Christodoros, sought to reconceptualize

Romanness in a Greek world. Anastasios, for his part, looked for a genetic link and his administration’s propaganda sought to associate him with Magnus, a figure of unimpeachable Roman credentials. Underlying all of these approaches was a fundamental question: what did it mean to be Roman in an empire without Rome? The answers were crafted with a common method: the creation of a new Roman history for New Rome.

Zosimos: Rome and Anti-Rome

The foundation and inauguration of Constantinople by Constantine in 324 and 330 respectively are among the most discussed events in late Roman historiography, and debates over the relative status, implications, and importance of Old and New Rome can be found in the sources throughout the fourth and fifth centuries.8 Given this background,

8 See L. Grig and G. Kelly (eds.), Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012); R. Van Dam, Rome and Constantinople: Rewriting Roman History during Late Antiquity (Waco, 2010); G. Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451 (, 1974), 19-29.

28 it is not surprising that the crisis of identity and confidence that followed the end of

Roman rule in the west often focused on the identity and destiny of the city of

Constantinople now that the Roman empire no longer included the city of Rome. The political separation of the empire from its original capital created a spectrum of new valences for the title of ‘Roman,’ which were thrown into greater confusion by

Justinian’s campaigns of reconquest beginning in 535. The stratification of Roman identity during this period is most clearly expressed in Prokopios’ account of the Gothic

War, in which we find Romans (the imperial army, composed largely of native Greek speakers along with Germanic and Hunnic auxiliaries) fighting to ‘liberate’ Romans (the inhabitants of Rome as well as other cities in Italy) in the shadow of the great achievements of the Romans (the ancient inhabitants of the city who created the empire).9

Against this tumultuous background, discussions of the city of Constantinople, whether literary, historical, topographical, or monumental, became de facto discussions of Roman identity, with all the attendant implications for political and cultural legitimacy.

Zosimos and Rome

Zosimos’ New History is an excellent starting point for understanding discussions of

Constantinople in the sixth century both because he introduces and foreshadows many elements of those discussions and because his intense focus on the city of Rome highlights the insecurities and conflicts that lay beneath those discussions. Zosimos is a writer of indeterminate period commonly assigned to the late fifth or early sixth century.

9 The role of Prokopios in this debate is discussed below.

29

An employee of the imperial bureacracy, he was a resident of Constantinople and one of the last vocal pagan authors of late antiquity.10 Zosimos opens his history with a strategic reframing of the history of Polybios:

It appeared proper to the Megalopolitan, in deciding to hand down to posterity the deeds of his own time that were worthy of remembrance, to show by means of the deeds themselves how the Romans, despite waging war on their neighbors for six hundred years following the founding of their city, did not acquire a great empire, but having subjugated to themselves some portion of Italy and, despite being deprived of it following the arrival of and the defeat at Cannae, when they saw their enemies pressing upon their very walls, they were raised to such a degree of fortune that in fewer than fifty-three years they won for themselves not only Italy but also all of and they had already brought the western Iberians under their control.11

Where Polybios’ history dealt with the rise of Rome’s empire (arche), shifting between various , in particular between the Punic and Macedonian wars, Zosimos reorients that story to focus on the city of Rome itself. For Zosimos, the core of Roman identity is not found in its empire, which he reports was both minimal and lost at the time of the

Second Punic War, but in the city itself. By beginning his narrative of Roman imperial

10 For Zosimos and his New History, see W. Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (New York, 2007) 107-114; W. Goffart, ‘, The First Historian of Rome’s Fall,’ The American Historical Review 76.2 (1971), 412-441; W. Kaegi, Byantium and the Decline of Rome (Princeton, 1968) 99-145. The closest work to a monograph on Zosimos is a collection of papers by Paschoud, F. Paschoud, Cinq Études sur Zosime (Paris, 1975).

11 Zos. 1.1.1: Πολυβίῳ τῷ Μεγαλοπολίτῃ, μνήμῃ παραδοῦναι τὰ καθ' ἑαυτὸν ἀξιόλογα τῶν ἔργων προελομένῳ, καλῶς ἔχειν ἐφάνη δι' αὐτῶν ἐπιδεῖξαι τῶν πράξεων ὅπως οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι μετὰ τὸν τῆς πόλεως οἰκισμὸν ἑξακοσίοις ἔτεσι τοῖς περιοίκοις προσπολεμήσαντες μεγάλην ἀρχὴν οὐκ ἐκτήσαντο, μέρος δέ τι τῆς Ἰταλίας ὑφ' ἑαυτοὺς ποιησάμενοι, καὶ τούτου μετὰ τὴν Ἀννίβα διάβασιν καὶ τὴν ἐν Κάνναις ἧτταν ἐκπεπτωκότες, αὐτοῖς δὲ τοῖς τείχεσι τοὺς πολεμίους ὁρῶντες ἐπικειμένους, εἰς τοσοῦτον μέγεθος ἤρθησαν τύχης ὥστε ἐν οὐδὲ ὅλοις τρισὶ καὶ πεντήκοντα ἔτεσιν μὴ μόνον Ἰταλίαν ἀλλὰ καὶ Λιβύην κατακτήσασθαι πᾶσαν, ἤδη δὲ καὶ τοὺς ἑσπερίους Ἴβηρας ὑφ' ἑαυτοὺς καταστῆσαι.

30 expansion at a moment when the Romans possessed only a single city, Zosimos not only emphasizes the remarkable nature of Roman expansion, but he also implies a definition of Roman identity predicated solely on reference to the city of Rome. Rome’s empire is secondary, so long as the city is held. Zosimos distorts the narrative of Polybios in order to enhance and highlight his focus on Rome rather than her empire. Roman imperial expansion began, in Zosimos’ telling, when the Carthaginians were ‘pressing upon

[Rome’s] very walls.’12 Readers of Polybios both modern and ancient will recognize this as an exaggeration. Hannibal famously failed to press his advantage after Cannae by declining to assault the walls of Rome,13 but Zosimos’ misrepresentation of Polybios redirects attention away from the empire (arche) of the Romans, which Polybios explicitly identifies as his subject, 14 and onto the city of Rome itself. It also foreshadows the of Rome by the Goths that Zosimos himself will recount, and so this slight distortion of Polybios further links the two histories thematically. Moreover, Zosimos uses the first line of his history to place Rome at the center of a cycle of expansion, decline, and renewal, a sequence that will reoccur throughout his history and which he used to structure his entire narrative.15

12 Zos. 1.1.1: αὐτοῖς δὲ τοῖς τείχεσι τοὺς πολεμίους ὁρῶντες ἐπικειμένους. For the relationship between Zosimos and Polybios, see F. Paschoud, ‘Zosime et Polybe,’ in Cinq Études sur Zosime (Paris, 1975), 184- 206.

13 Polyb. 3.118, on which see F.W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1957- 1979) .

14 Polyb. 1.1.5. on which see Walbank, Commentary on Polybius, 40.

15 About which more below.

31

Zosimos proceeds to flatten the arc of Roman history after Hannibal, reducing the staccato and haphazard Roman expansion reported by Polybios and others into an orderly narrative proceeding outward from the city of Rome:

In fewer than fifty-three years they won for themselves not only Italy but also all of Libya and they had already brought the western Iberians under their control. Then, aiming at more, they crossed the Ionian Gulf, conquered the , dismantled the Macedonian Empire, and, seizing hold of the man who at that time was ruling the Macedonians, they led him to Rome.16

The steady and orderly progression of empire Zosimos lays out here is reminiscent of the image, familiar from both documentaries and Hollywood movies, of Roman colors expanding smoothly across a map, effortlessly and homogenously incorporating new territory into the empire. Rome, meanwhile, remains at the center of this expansion, a point underscored by the progression of conquests. Zosimos ultimately brings his narrative back to its original starting point, concluding the tale of Roman expansion with the deportation of the last Antigonid king, , to Rome. Zosimos maintains focus on the city of Rome by deemphasizing Perseus at a grammatical level, omitting his name and not referring to him directly as a king. Instead, Perseus is mentioned through an awkward and deflating periphrasis, shifting attention away from his person and onto the city to which he was sent.

16 Zos. 1.1.1: ἐν οὐδὲ ὅλοις τρισὶ καὶ πεντήκοντα ἔτεσιν μὴ μόνον Ἰταλίαν ἀλλὰ καὶ Λιβύην κατακτήσασθαι πᾶσαν, ἤδη δὲ καὶ τοὺς ἑσπερίους Ἴβηρας ὑφ' ἑαυτοὺς καταστῆσαι, ἐπεὶ δὲ τοῦ πλείονος ἐφιέμενοι τὸν Ἰόνιον ἐπεραιώθησαν κόλπον, Ἑλλήνων τε ἐκράτησαν καὶ Μακεδόνας παρέλυσαν τῆς ἀρχῆς, αὐτόν τε ὃς τηνικαῦτα τούτων ἐβασίλευε ζωγρίᾳ ἑλόντες εἰς τὴν Ῥώμην ἀνήγαγον.

32

No Roman is named at any point in Zosimos’ brief narrative, the city of Rome stands in for all Roman characters and the deportation of Perseus marks the submission of

Greece not to a general of Rome, as a triumph might normally imply, but to the city itself.

Narrating imperial expansion inevitably draws attention away from the origin of that expansion and towards its margins; yet Zosimos’ decision to loop his narrative of Rome’s conquests back through Rome not only returns attention to the city, it also creates a cyclical in which expansion begins and ends at Rome. Zosimos highlights the discreteness of this first cycle of imperial expansion by resuming his narrative, after a comment on the remarkable nature of Rome’s success, not with Roman expansion into Asia, but with the rise and fall of , the Macedonian Empire, and the

Hellenistic Empires, which leads directly into his account of the fall of the Republic and rise of Augustus.17 In other words, the narrative of Zosimos’ opening lines is set apart from the main narrative of his first book. Given the placement of this narrative at the very opening of the history, its completeness, and its sequestration from the remainder of the historical narrative, the story of Rome’s expansion after Cannae must be understood as programmatic for Zosimos’ New History.

Zosimos uses Polybios to establish a normative narrative of Roman history in which the city of Rome remains the focal point of Roman imperialism. The extent to which Zosimos can be credited with meaningfully adopting the model of Polybios has been discussed before and the judgment was not to Zosimos’ benefit.18 However,

17 Zos. 1.2-5.

18 Inter alia, Paschoud, ‘Zosime et Polybe,’ 201-206.

33 insufficient attention has been paid to the way in which Zosimos is attempting to use

Polybios. Polybios was not merely a model to be directly copied, but rather a normative narrative template used to create expectations in contemporary readers and to condition their reactions to subsequent events in the narrative. The normative narrative Zosimos establishes in his own history is one of imperial failure and revival with a central role reserved for the city of Rome as both the source of Roman identity, because even without an empire Roman civilization was understood to exist while Rome was free, and the ultimate symbol of Roman imperial dominance.19

The model that Zosimos constructs in his opening lines is repeated twice more in his work, once in the first book of his history and again in the second. The first book of the New History covers all of Roman history from the founding of the city to the reign of

Diocletian, but as the excerpts cited above show, the level of detail varies. Zosimos’ historical coverage begins with little more than a list of territories conquered and, eventually, emperors, although greater detail is added beginning with the foundation of the Severan . While no reign is treated at length, the longest extant narratives in the first book cover emperors from the period of the third century crisis, among whom

Aurelian is especially prominent. The end of the first book of the history is obscured by the loss of eight leaves, a full quaternion, from the manuscript, covering the latter half of the reign of through the reign of . A similar lacuna obscures the ending

19 Zosimos has not traditionally been regarded as a historian of Roman revival, but rather as the first historian of Rome’s fall. I will address this issue further below, but for the moment it suffices to say that for all of his pessimism, Zosimos’ historical model is not hopeless.

34 of the history. Fortunately, Photios discussed Zosimos in his Bibliotheke and reports specifically on the contents of the first and sixth books of the history:

[Zosimos] begins, one might say, with Augustus, but runs through all of the emperors until Diocletian, barely reporting their public proclamations and succession. After Diocletian he divides his account of past emperors more broadly into five books. The first book accounts for those emperors from Augustus up to Diocletian, and he completes the sixth book with an accounting of precisely that time at which Alaric, then besieging Rome for the second time and with the populace in dire straits, broke the siege, and proclaimed their emperor.20

Photios is not specific as to what material on Diocletian’s reign was contained at the end of the first book, but the extant second book picks up with a digression on the Secular

Games and offers clues about where the division between the books takes place. The

Secular Games were a Roman festival reintroduced by Augustus, which derived their name from the fact that they were meant to be celebrated once per saeculum, the longest period of a human life which Zosimos places at one hundred and ten years.21 The extant portion of Zosimos’ second book begins in the middle of an explanation of the name of the games and the term saeculum, this context most likely places the passage near the beginning of the digression.22 At the end of the digression, Zosimos reports that ‘the

20 Phot. Bib. 98 (84B): Ἄρχεται μὲν τῆς ἱστορίας, ὡς ἄν τις εἴποι, ἀπὸ Αὐγούστου, ἐπιτρέχει δὲ πάντας τοὺς μέχρι Διοκλητιανοῦ, ψιλὴν ὥσπερ τὴν ἀνάρρησιν καὶ τὴν διαδοχὴν αὐτῶν ἀφηγούμενος. Ἀπὸ δὲ Διοκλητιανοῦ πλατύτερον περὶ τῶν βεβασιλευκότων διαλαμβάνει ἐν βιβλίοις πέντε. Τὸ γὰρ πρῶτον τοὺς μέχρι Διοκλητιανοῦ ἀπὸ Αὐγούστου ἀριθμεῖται. Καὶ πληροῖ τὴν ἕκτην βίβλον ἐν ἐκείνοις ἀπαρτιζομένην τοῖς χρόνοις ἐν οἷς Ἀλάριχος τὴν Ῥώμην τὸ δεύτερον πολιορκῶν καὶ τῶν ἐνοικούντων ἀπορουμένων, λύει τὴν πολιορκίαν, βασιλέα τούτοις Ἄτταλον ἀνειπών.

21 M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, of Rome: Volume 1, A History (Cambridge, 1998) 201-206.

22 Zos. 2.1.1.

35 festival was neglected after Diocletian laid aside the office of emperor,’23 and offers a calculation showing that the games ought to have been celebrated during the joint reign of Constantine and .24 When Zosimos returns to his main narrative, he begins with the appointment of new Caesars by Constantius and , indicating that the preceding narrative had left off either at or soon after Diocletian’s retirement.25 Because the digression on the looks forward to events not yet reported, namely the reign of Constantine and the decline of the empire after his neglect of the games, it is certainly part of a programmatic preface to the second book and the remainder of the history, which is chiefly concerned with the failures of imperial governance and policy that led to Alaric’s siege of Rome.

It should be noted that there is debate over the ending of Zosimos’ history. The sixth and final book of the work is significantly shorter than the other five and terminates at an inconclusive point in the narrative. However, Photios reports precisely this moment as the end of Zosimos’ account, indicating that the edition of Zosimos to which he had access ended at the same place as our own. Given Photios’ relative proximity to the time

Zosimos was writing, the problem has prompted speculation that Zosimos died with his work unfinished, an idea which is somewhat undermined by Photios’ assumption that the title Nea Historia indicated that this was the second edition of Zosimos’ work.26

23 Zos. 2.7.1: ἀμεληθείσης δὲ τῆς ἑορτῆς ἀποθεμένου Διοκλητιανοῦ τὴν βασιλείαν.

24 Zos. 2.7.2.

25 Zos. 2.8.1.

26 Phot. Bib. 98 (84B). Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, 108.

36

Operating under the assumption that the work is incomplete or unfinished, the problem of the original or intended end point is complicated by Zosimos’ own uncertain dates. He is now generally assigned to the late fifth or early sixth century primarily based on a reading of his comments on a tax instituted by Constantine and abolished by

Anastasios.27 However, this reading is an inference based on a pair of genitive absolute phrases with aorist participles28 and it is worth remembering that Zosimos at no point explicitly refers to the end of the tax. The case for placing Zosimos under Anastasios is therefore highly circumstantial. Nevertheless, we may, based on the degree to which his views accord with those of Justinian and other sixth century writers (as will be discussed below) place him within the Justinianic milieu regardless of whether he was contemporary with that emperor.29

In light of all that is uncertain about the conclusion of Zosimos’ history, any attempt to understand its structure must rely to an extent on supposition. In the discussion below, I will treat the New History as though it were a complete work because the historical cycles underlying the narrative are certainly present and reach a natural kind of completion in the extant text. Whether or not the entirety of the work as originally written or conceived preserved these structures throughout is ultimately impossible to know

27 Goffart, ‘Zosimus,’ 420-422; Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, 108.

28 Zos. 2.38.4: ἐπιμεινάσης γὰρ καὶ μετὰ Κωνσταντῖνον τῆς ἀπαιτήσεως ἐπὶ χρόνον συχνόν, ἐξαντλουμένου κατὰ βραχὺ τοῦ πλούτου τῶν πόλεων, ἔρημοι τῶν οἰκούντων αἱ πλεῖσται γεγόνασι.

29 Bjornlie argues the same on the basis of different evidence, especially the Chronicon of Marcellinus comes, S. Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge, 2013) 85-94.

37 given the state of the text, the lack of other , and the limited specificity of corroborating sources like Photios. However, the logical and thematic consistency between the observable cycles indicates that they were of central importance to the New

History regardless of whatever content may or may not be missing from the conclusion of the extant work.

The structure of the first two books is important because they allow us to discern two cycles in Zosimos’ history that fit the Polybian model provided by his opening lines and give us an indication that, for all his bemoaning the decline of the Roman state,

Zosimos’ outlook in his history is fundamentally optimistic. Zosimos has long been seen as a pessimist, a judgment that governs the way his history is interpreted and used by modern scholars. He is generally presented in terms that highlight ideas of decline, framing him as the last openly pagan author or the first historian of Rome’s decline and fall.30 All of these descriptions are true to an extent but rely on historical accident (our lack of other explicitly pagan authors from this period) and an incomplete reading of the text. From the first sentence of his history, Zosimos discusses the mutability of imperial fortunes, citing the complete loss of Rome’s Italian empire to Hannibal immediately prior to its expansion throughout , North Africa, and Greece. A similar narrative cycle structures the remainder of the first book which, after introducing several examples of empires that fell due to internal divisions (the Greeks, the empire of , the

Hellenistic Empires), Zosimos reports on the civil discords that nearly destroyed Rome in the third century only to end with the successful reassembly of the Roman empire under

30 Goffart, ‘Zosimus, The First Historian,’ 413 and 438-441; Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, 109.

38

Aurelian and Diocletian. While it is difficult to make completely compelling arguments concerning material we no longer have, the majority of this narrative arc is extant with only the period from Probus to Diocletian’s retirement missing, a period of about thirty years. Moreover, the subsequent narrative in book two confirms that the empire has been functionally reassembled. In addition, the digression on the Secular Games brings the discussion back to the city of Rome, which is inextricably linked to the games through the Zosimos provides. The city of Rome and the games are also granted divine validation by a Sibylline . The Secular Games can be celebrated only in Rome and although we do not know how Zosimos prefaced this digression, the return of the narrative to the city of Rome aligns with the model established at the opening of book one. The narrative arc of book one, like that of the opening sections of the work, is the story of imperial collapse and revival structured around the city of Rome.

After providing two historical examples of the ability of the Roman state to achieve stability and even expansion following a period of imperial decline, Zosimos begins the third and final cycle with his account of the Secular Games. As mentioned above, the games look forward to the reign of Constantine, and Zosimos begins to lay the groundwork for his account of that emperor at the close of his discussion of the Secular

Games. The narrative arc of the last five books of the history therefore begins at Rome with a discussion of the Secular Games and, as Photios makes clear, ends in the same city with a discussion of one of Alaric’s sieges in the fifth century. The overarching structure of these books, as well as the programmatic function of the digression on the Secular

Games, is made clear when Zosimos explicitly links the decline of the Roman empire, up

39 to and including his own lifetime, to the neglect of the Secular Games that began during the reign of Constantine:

While all of these things were completed in accordance with the rite, the empire of the Romans was protected and the Romans continued, even up to our time, to hold the entire inhabited world, so to speak, subject to themselves. But when the festival was neglected after Diocletian laid aside the office of emperor, the empire was immediately undermined and, unperceived, became completely barbarized, as events themselves showed us.31

Like the preceeding two cycles, this third and final cycle begins and ends at Rome with the Secular Games and Alaric’s siege respectively. The difference is that the third cycle is incomplete; the siege of Rome is not the scene of Roman imperial revival but rather the nadir of Roman fortunes. However, it closely parallels another low moment in Rome’s history, when the city was, at least according to Zosimos, isolated and besieged by

Hannibal in the aftermath of the defeat at Cannae. The incompleteness of this cycle begs the question of what happens next, and that is precisely the question Zosimos presumably means to pose to his readers. Of course, he also provides clues to the answer in the form of his comments on the Secular Games. It is the abandonment of these games, and the neglect of pagan religion more broadly, that has caused the decline of the empire. That empire remains recoverable, but it will require the Romans to reverse course and readopt their ancestral religion.

31 Zos. 2.7.1: τούτων ἁπάντων κατὰ θεσμὸν ἐπιτελουμένων ἐφυλάττετο μὲν ἡ Ῥωμαίων ἀρχή, καὶ διετέλεσαν τὴν καθ' ἡμᾶς πᾶσαν ὡς εἰπεῖν οἰκουμένην ὑφ' ἑαυτοὺς ἔχοντες· ἀμεληθείσης δὲ τῆς ἑορτῆς ἀποθεμένου Διοκλητιανοῦ τὴν βασιλείαν, ὑπερρύη κατὰ βραχὺ καὶ ἔλαθε κατὰ τὸ πλέον βαρβαρωθεῖσα, ὡς αὐτὰ ἡμῖν τὰ πράγματα ἔδειξεν.

40

Contemporary scholars have correctly identified the decline of the Roman empire as one of Zosimos’ chief topics of concern, but have failed to recognize that this decline is not inherently irreversible because it maps directly onto the cycle of imperial decline and resurgence set forth in the opening lines of the history and again in the core narrative of book one. The cause of Rome’s decline is the abandonment of traditional religious practices, in particular the Secular Games, but Zosimos has already indicated that such a decline may be arrested and reversed. In his discussion of Aurelian’s campaigns in book one, Zosimos pauses for a brief digression on the signs that foretold the eventual collapse of the :

It is fitting to relate the events that occurred prior to the collapse of the Palmyrenes, even if I appear to be composing my history at a run according to the program I wrote in my introduction, because just as Polybios recounted how the Romans gained their empire in a short time, I will tell how they [the Romans], through their wickedness, destroyed it in not much time. But I will report these things when I arrive at that portion of my history.32

Zosimos heavily signposts the episode he is about to report: the rejection of the

Palmyrenes by the gods. Zosimos refers once again to Polybios, which recalls the role of that author in the programmatic opening lines of the history. Moreover, Zosimos explicitly states that he is interrupting the running of his work to digress on the topic of the relationship between the Palmyrenes and the gods because of its importance.

32 Zos. 1.57.1-2: Ἄξιον <δὲ> τὰ συνενεχθέντα πρὸ τῆς [πρώτης] Παλμυρηνῶν καθαιρέσεως ἀφηγήσασθαι, εἰ καὶ τὴν ἱστορίαν ἐν ἐπιδρομῇ φαίνομαι ποιησάμενος διὰ τὴν εἰρημένην ἐν προοιμίῳ μοι πρόθεσιν· Πολυβίου γὰρ ὅπως ἐκτήσαντο Ῥωμαῖοι τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐν ὀλίγῳ χρόνῳ διεξελθόντος, ὅπως ἐν οὐ πολλῷ χρόνῳ σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν αὐτὴν διέφθειραν ἔρχομαι λέξων. Ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μέν, ἐπειδὰν ἐν ἐκείνῳ γένωμαι τῆς ἱστορίας τῷ μέρει.

41

Finally, this is the first time in the work that Zosimos explicitly states that his goal is to report on the decline of the Roman state, a topic he formulates only now and in contrast to Polybios. Zosimos acknowledges here the partition of his history between the first book, his current narrative (the third-century crisis), and the other books of the history by indicating that he has not yet reached his discussion of the reasons for the decline of the empire.

After giving his reader so many reasons to pay attention, in particular by exciting their interest in the looming decline of the Roman empire, Zosimos proceeds to report the various signs given to the Palmyrenes by the gods that foretold the demise of their empire. These warnings take the form of a prophecy and an . The prophecy came from an oracle in a of who rebuked the Palmyrenes for inquiring about their chances for seizing the eastern Roman empire.33 The omen occurred when

Aphrodite rejected the current and past offerings the Palmyrenes had customarily thrown into a pond near her temple.34 In both cases, the Palmyrenes are not reported to have done anything to offend the in question, although the oracle does chastise them for being the ‘harassers of the glorious race of the immortals,’35 instead Zosimos attributes the divine rejection of the Palmyrenes to the favor with which the gods viewed Rome:

This was the sort of goodwill the divinity had for the Romans so long as divine was preserved, but when I come to those times in which it

33 Zos. 1.57.4.

34 Zos. 1.58.3.

35 Zos. 1.57.4: φύτλης ἀθανάτων ἐρικυδέος ἀλγυντῆρες.

42

came about that the empire of the Romans quickly became barbarized into something small, and even this was destroyed, at that time I will present the causes of its misfortune and will correlate them, as best I am able, with the which foretold the events.36

Zosimos draws a contrast between the fate of the Palmyrenes, whom the gods abandoned through no fault of their own, and the Romans, who willfully abandoned the proper worship of the gods. His statement about the eventual destruction of the empire corresponds closely to the language he uses (at 2.7.1) to describe the consequences of neglecting the Secular Games, in particular the idea that the empire was barbarized, likely a reference to the foreignness of Christianity.

The contrast between the Palmyrenes and Romans emphasizes the distinctions between the two major periods that Zosimos’ history covers, namely the pre-Christian period, in which it was possible for the Romans to recover their empire even after disastrous losses, and the post-Christian period, in which the empire became something to itself and quickly collapsed. More important, however, is the way in which the

Palmyrene episode highlights a key feature of Roman decline: it is the result of a choice.

Like the decision not to celebrate the Secular Games described in book two, Zosimos makes it clear that the collapse of the Roman empire was the direct result of the choice to abandon traditional pagan religion. Zosimos even alludes to the fact that the gods specifically warned the Romans, through oracles, of the consequences of their actions.37

36 Zos. 1.58.4: Ἡ μὲν οὖν εἰς Ῥωμαίους εὐμένεια τοῦ θείου τῆς ἱερᾶς ἁγιστείας φυλαττομένης τοιαύτη· ἐπειδὰν δὲ εἰς ἐκείνους ἀφίκωμαι τοὺς χρόνους ἐν οἷς ἡ Ῥωμαίων ἀρχὴ κατὰ βραχὺ βαρβαρωθεῖσα εἰς ὀλίγον τι, καὶ αὐτὸ διαφθαρέν, περιέστη, τηνικαῦτα καὶ τὰς αἰτίας παραστήσω τοῦ δυστυχήματος, καὶ τοὺς χρησμοὺς ὡς ἂν οἷός τε ὦ παραθήσομαι τοὺς τὰ συνενεχθέντα μηνύσαντας.

37 In his quotation of the Sybiline Oracles, Zos. 2.6. 43

The logical conclusion of this line of argument is that the decline of the empire is reversible, if the Romans reverse their choice and embrace traditional religious ceremonies, like the Secular Games. Zosimos does not present the destruction of the empire as the final word on Roman civilization, in fact he has already reported that Rome accomplished more after its collapse during the than it had in six centuries and this passage is itself placed in the midst of his account of the revival of the empire during the third century. The situation is far from hopeless, but the key to the future of the empire is the city of Rome, the only city in which the Secular Games and other traditional rites may be performed.

The first line and first book of Zosimos’ history both act as test cases or proofs of concept for his approach to history in general by demonstrating Rome’s ability to recover from devastating losses, so long as proper religious practices are maintained. The structure of the second cycle parallels Zosimos’ reworking of Polybios’ narrative of

Roman expansion; Zosimos begins with Augustus and the effects of on the administration of Rome before moving his narrative outward only to return once again to

Rome for a lengthy discussion of the Secular Games, which are tied to the city by both an etiological and a prophecy. Again, the same pattern is followed in the remaining books of the history, whose structural distinction from the first book Zosimos himself acknowledges, with the narrative expanding only to once again focus on the city of Rome during Alaric’s siege. Unfortunately, Photios’ description is ambiguous about the exact

44 ending point of the history,38 but it seems likely under the circumstances that the work ended with Alaric’s famously reluctant in 410. In any case, Photios does make it clear that the history at least covers Alaric’s second siege of Rome and the promotion of the puppet emperor Attalus. No matter the exact end point temporally,

Zosimos’ narrative ends thematically where he picked up from Polybios, with enemies besieging the walls of Rome. It was perhaps this symmetry that prompted Zosimos to end his account with Alaric—assuming the work is not unfinished—rather than Odoacer’s deposition of in 476.

Each of Zosimos’ cycles begins and ends at Rome (the siege after Cannae pairs with the deportation of Perseus, the rise of Augustus with the Secular Games, and the

Secular Games with Alaric’s siege of Rome), a feature which is certainly deliberate and likely reflects the tension between the subject of the New History and the circumstances of its composition. Zosimos’ dates are uncertain, but he is generally assigned to the late fifth or early sixth century, after the collapse of Roman rule in the west. Moreover, he was, as best we can gather from the details provided by our one extant manuscript, a retired member of the imperial administration operating out of Constantinople. Put differently, Zosimos was engaged in the project of empire on behalf of a Roman state that, for the first time in its history, did not control Rome, whatever polite were told regarding Odoacer and Theoderic.39 Despite this reality and the overtly morose

38 Treadgold argues that the history was meant to extend to the death of Zenon or Anastasios, though there is little evidence to suppor that claim, Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, 113.

39 For a more favorable view of Theoderic as a Roman ruler, see J. Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (Cambridge, 2014) 63-91.

45 of his work, Zosimos’ view of Roman history can be seen as optimistic because none of the factors he identifies as leading to Rome’s decline, including the marginalization of the , the abandonment of pagan practice, and the neglect of the Secular Games, is necessarily a permanent state of affairs. Simply put, if Zosimos’ arguments were accepted, then Roman fortunes declined not because fate conspired against Rome, but because the Romans neglected their political and religious duties, a point Zosimos makes in his programmatic discussion of the fall of the Palmyrene Empire. Zosimos presents

Rome’s decline as a reversible process and even provides, in his rushed first book, two examples of how similar declines had been arrested and reversed. This argument about the empire’s potential for recovery allows Zosimos, despite the fact that he was writing in

Constantinople and had seen the end of Roman rule in the west, to view Elder Rome as the once and future center of the Roman empire and the wellspring of Roman identity.

The image of Zosimos so far presented is a significant departure from existing scholarship on the author. For most scholars, Zosimos is unambiguously the first historian of Rome’s decline and fall.40 The problem with this view is that while Zosimos talks at length about Roman decline, he does not posit a definitive or irreversible Roman fall. This is a modern idea that has been read into his text. After all, how could Zosimos reasonably discuss the fall of the Roman empire while living in that very empire?

Nevertheless, scholars such as Goffart and Kaegi have viewed Zosimos value to the intellectual history of the period as deriving primarily from his supposed

40 Kaegi, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome, 99; Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, 109 and 113; Goffart, ‘Zosimos, The First Historian,’ 413.

46 acknowledgement of Rome’s fall.41 Goffart even goes so far as to suggest that Zosimos proves that modern historians are mistaken in emphasizing the continuity between the eastern Roman empire before and after the fall of the west, drawing on passages from

Ioannes Lydos and Justinian’s laws to support this claim.42 As future chapters will show,

Lydos and Justinian had complex relationships with their Roman past(s), but their default assumption was one of continuity.43 Likewise, Zosimos did not view himself as existing in a post-Roman state and the idea that he did, as well as the reading of his work as fundamentally pessimistic, derives primarily from an unwarranted focus on Zosimos’ second programmatic passage, placed at the end of his account of the oracles offered to the Palmyrenes, at the expense of the opening of his history.

While it is true that Zosimos frequently refers to the destruction of the empire, generally with the verb diaphtheiro, this does not necessarily correspond to our conception of the ‘fall’ of an empire. The phrase ‘the decline and fall of the Roman empire,’ especially after Gibbon, conveys a sense of complete erasure not only of a state’s imperial holdings, but also of its political institutions and culture. When Zosimos speaks of the ruin or destruction of Rome’s empire, he is speaking solely of Rome’s imperial holdings, as is clear from his first line in which he recounts how Rome gained its

41 According to Kaegi ‘[Zosimos’] shallow, inconsistent, and superstitious arguments indicate how intellectually impoverished eastern paganism had become by the year 500. Nevertheless, the New History is the last and most highly developed eastern pagan interpretation of Roman history, and therefore marks the of pagan historical apologetics.’ Kaegi, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome, 101.

42 Goffart, ‘Zosimos, The First Historian,’ 440-1.

43 Though they still recognized that the political system in the western Roman empire had collapsed, so we should not accept the that such an event is a scholarly invention, for which see G. Bowersock, ‘The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome,’ Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49 (1996) 29-43

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Mediterranean empire after losing its previous Italian empire entirely. Zosimos gives no indication that there is an essential difference between Roman civilization before and after the , nor is the state that emerges under Diocletian identified as being any less Roman than what came before, at least in the passages that survive. This continuity is, in fact, essential to Zosimos’ argument about the pernicious legacy of

Constantine and the role of his reforms, religious and administrative, in the decline of

Roman fortunes and the loss of Roman imperial territories. In order to make

Constantine’s crimes stand out, Zosimos relies on the assumption that the Roman state has been the same since the time of Augustus, who adopted the monarchy and revived the

Secular Games.

Regardless of whether we view Zosimos’ outlook in the New History as optimistic or pessimistic, the fact remains that he presents the city of Rome as an essential component of Roman identity. The fate of both the empire and Roman civilization more broadly is tied up in the city through divinely mandated , as well as the proven ability of the empire to weather challenges so long as Rome remains. As we will see below, the importance of Rome in Zosimos’ historical model creates problems for the identity and standing of New Rome and, by implication, the Roman identity of the empire

(eastern or western) after 476. While there is no evidence that Zosimos would have viewed the Roman empire as having ‘fallen’ at the time of the final expulsion of the last emperor from the city in 476 (assuming he had written down to that point), there can be no doubt, given the logic of his historical analysis, that he would have prioritized the recovery of Rome and felt that an essential component of Roman identity, as well as a

48 potential bulwark for Roman fortunes, had been lost along with the city. We can see in

Zosimos’ prioritization of Rome a precursor to the attitudes of Justinian and Prokopios in their discussions of the reconquest of Italy.44 Although these later authors framed the debate in different terms, a central question for both was the role of Rome in the sixth- century Roman empire. Zosimos, as we have seen, was the first of our extant historians to grapple with this question.

Zosimos and Constantinople

Zosimos chose to build the structure and content of his history around the city of Rome, granting it a level of prominence rivaled by no other city or character in his history and making it indispensable to any potential Roman revival through its monopoly on the

Secular Games. Yet his history also covers the foundation of Constantinople and he chooses to describe that event at some length. As with most accounts of Constantinople’s foundation, Zosimos’ version is closely connected to his depiction of Constantine.

Zosimos divides his discussion of Constantine into two parts: the first is a military and political summary of his career up until the death of Licinius, which is surprisingly positive at times,45 and the second is an account of his actions as emperor covering the remainder of his reign, which is overwhelmingly negative. Scholars have traditionally regarded this as an incoherent picture, but it has a kind of logic to it: Constantine in

44 These attitudes are a point of contact between Zosimos and the emperor Justinian. For another such point of contact, see the discussion of Novel 24 ( of ) below, pp. 122ff.

45 As with Constantine’s campaign against Licinius, which is based on classical models, D. Krallis, ‘Greek Glory, Constantinian : Praxagoras’ Athenian Agenda in Zoismos New History?’ JLA 7.1 (2014) 110-130 at 112-120.

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Zosimos can be presented positively and as victorious before his conversion to

Christianity, but after it he is always presented negatively. Zosimos’ account takes several liberties, including ignoring the foundation of Constantinople in 324 in favor of the dedication of the city in 330, in order to construct a narrative that links the creation of the new city to Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.46 According to Zosimos,

Constantine executed his son and second wife Fausta because Fausta, after being rebuked in her amorous advances by Crispus, claimed that he had assaulted her.47 After the death of Crispus, and the complaints lodged by Constantine’s mother Helena, the emperor likewise put Fausta to death by locking her in an overheated bathing chamber.

Subsequently, Constantine searched for a means by which he could cleanse himself of these crimes:

Because he had overseen these things [the murders] himself, and moreover because he had disregarded his oaths, he went to the priests seeking purification for his . When the priests told him that no manner of purification had been handed down capable of cleansing such great impieties, a certain Egyptian [or a man named Aigyptios] who had come to Rome from Spain and become acquainted with the women in the palace met with Constantine and assured him that the doctrine of the Christians was able to wipe out his entire ; and he held out this promise, that the

46 F. Paschoud, ‘Zosime 2,29 et la version paienne de la conversion de Constantin,’ in Cinq Études sur Zosime (Paris, 1975) 24-62. For the pagan Constantine, see F. Paschoud, ‘Un altro Constantino: la testimonianza della storiografia profana,’ in Costantino I : enciclopedia costantiniana figura e l'immagine dell'imperatore del cosidetto editto di Milano 313-2013 (Rome, 2013) 259-272.

47 See T. Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion, and Power in the Later Roman Empire (Chichester, 2011) 144-150; D. Woods, ‘On the Death of the Empress Fausta,’ Greece and Rome 45.1 (1998) 70-86; G. Fowden, ‘The Last Days of Constantine: Oppositional Versions and their Influence,’ JRS 84 (1994) 146- 170 at 155-158 and 163-165.

50

impious, when they had converted to that doctrine, would immediately be brought out of all sin.48

Zosimos’ account deliberately sets out to undermine the mainstream Christian narrative of Constantine’s conversion found in the works of writers such as Eusebios, Sokrates, and . Instead of Christianity being responsible for Constantine’s military success, an appealing association for both parties given the importance of military victory in imperial ideologies, all of Constantine’s campaigns are placed squarely in the pagan phase of his life.49 In place of military prowess, Christianity is associated with sordid and murderous domestic intrigue. There was a longstanding tradition in ancient writing that associated domestic disorder with tyranny and effeminacy, beginning with Herodotos who ended his history with a description of the domestic disorders suffered by Xerxes after the Battle of .50 The association between tyranny, ineffectual rule, and domestic disorder continued into the sixth century, as is clear from the works of

Prokopios.51 Zosimos’ account is therefore the thematic inversion of the mainstream

Christian narrative of Constantine’s conversion.

48 Zos. 2.29.3: Ταῦτα συνεπιστάμενος ἑαυτῷ, καὶ προσέτι γε ὅρκων καταφρονήσεις, προσῄει τοῖς ἱερεῦσι καθάρσια τῶν ἡμαρτημένων αἰτῶν· εἰπόντων δὲ ὡς οὐ παραδέδοται καθαρμοῦ τρόπος δυσσεβήματα τηλικαῦτα καθῆραι δυνάμενος, Αἰγύπτιός τις ἐξ Ἰβηρίας εἰς τὴν Ῥώμην ἐλθὼν καὶ ταῖς εἰς τὰ βασίλεια γυναιξὶν συνήθης γενόμενος, ἐντυχὼν τῷ Κωνσταντίνῳ πάσης ἁμαρτάδος ἀναιρετικὴν εἶναι τὴν τῶν Χριστιανῶν διεβεβαιώσατο δόξαν καὶ τοῦτο ἔχειν ἐπάγγελμα, τὸ τοὺς ἀσεβεῖς μεταλαμβάνοντας αὐτῆς πάσης ἁμαρτίας ἔξω παραχρῆμα καθίστασθαι.

49 M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal rulership in late antiquity, Byzantium, and the early medieval West (Cambridge, 1986) 35-79.

50 Herod. 9.108-113.

51 Prokopios also referenced this scene in his Wars, see A. Kaldellis, ‘Prokopios’ Persian War: A Thematic and Literary Analysis,’ in R. Macrides (ed.) History as Literature in Byzantium (Burlington, 2010) 253-273 51

Scholars have long noted, often as evidence of its unreliability, the parallels between the story of Fausta’s failed affair with Crispus and the myth of Phaedra and

Hippolytos.52 What has so far gone unnoticed is the way in which this episode contributes to Zosimos’ account of the foundation of Constantinople and the casting of Constantine in the role of the refugee-founder, a common archetype that includes figures such as

Orestes, Dido, Diomedes, and Aeneas, although Constantine morally inverts this type of figure. Of these previous models, Constantine most closely resembles a reverse Aeneas, going from Rome back to , where Consantine attempts to found a city before abandoning the site in favor of Byzantion.53 However, the immediate cause of

Constantine’s is not war (Aeneas), domestic intrigue (Diomedes and Dido), or his unholy crime (Orestes)—though all of those a role in his story—rather Constantine is driven into a form of exile by the disapproval of the senate and people of Rome resulting from his new religious affiliation:

When an ancestral festival occurred according to which it was necessary for the army to go up to the Capitoline and complete the customary rituals, Constantine, fearing the soldiers, took part in the festival. But sent an apparition that viciously reproached his ascent to the Capitoline and Constantine, standing apart from the holy ritual, roused the senate and people to . Because he was not able to endure the slanders of the

at 259-262; M. Kruse ‘The Speech of the Armenians in Procopius: Justinian’s Foreign Policy and the Transition between the Books of the Wars,’ CQ, 63 (2013), 866-881 at 852-856.

52 Check Paschoud’s Bude.

53 Zos. 2.30.1.

52

whole population, so to speak, he sought a city to be a counter-weight for Rome, where it was necessary for him to erect an imperial capital.54

Zosimos’ account of the foundation of Constantinople is a long concatenation of causes and effects that ultimately lead to the symbolic banishment of Constantine from Rome, a sentence severe enough that the emperor was compelled (Zosimos uses the verb δέω) to found a new palace and, by implication, a new capital. Constantine’s banishment has strong political connotations as Zosimos makes clear that it was the senate and people of

Rome whose disapproval drove Constantine from the city. In other words, it is precisely those institutions upon which legitimate Roman government was understood to be based that forced Constantine to flee Rome, a fact that calls into question both the legitimacy and Romanness of the new city.

Zosimos also attacks the Romanness of Constantinople and Constantine through the contrast that he establishes between Christianity and traditional Roman religion. It should be remembered that a major feature of the decline of the empire in Zosimos’ history is the process of barbarization, which he associates with religious change during his programmatic discussions of the fall of the Palmyrene Empire and the Secular Games.

There are certainly other facets to this barbarization, literally the process of becoming foreign, such as the Germanic migrations Zosimos reports on in later books. But the abandonment of traditional religion is his central concern. It is worth noting, then, that

54 Zos. 2.29.5-30.1: Τῆς δὲ πατρίου καταλαβούσης ἑορτῆς, καθ' ἣν ἀνάγκη τὸ στρατόπεδον ἦν εἰς τὸ Καπιτώλιον ἀνιέναι καὶ τὰ νενομισμένα πληροῦν, δεδιὼς τοὺς στρατιώτας ὁ Κωνσταντῖνος ἐκοινώνησε τῆς ἑορτῆς· ἐπιπέμψαντος δὲ αὐτῷ φάσμα τοῦ Αἰγυπτίου τὴν εἰς τὸ Καπιτώλιον ἄνοδον ὀνειδίζον ἀνέδην, τῆς ἱερᾶς ἁγιστείας ἀποστατήσας, εἰς μῖσος τὴν γερουσίαν καὶ τὸν δῆμον ἀνέστησεν. Οὐκ ἐνεγκὼν δὲ τὰς παρὰ πάντων ὡς εἰπεῖν βλασφημίας πόλιν ἀντίρροπον τῆς Ῥώμης ἐζήτει, καθ' ἣν αὐτὸν ἔδει βασίλεια καταστήσασθαι.

53

Zosimos offers insight into the identity of the man who swayed Constantine to

Christianity; he is ‘a certain Aegyptios,’ an ambiguous title that is either an ethnonym or a name derived from an ethnonym. In either case, he is associated with a distant, eastern province that had an established reputation for religious oddity and, by the time of

Zosimos’ writing, militant Christianity.55 The tension in the story of Constantine’s flight from Rome is provided by the competing interests of an unidentified ‘ancestral festival’ and the pressure exerted by a man, explicitly identified as a foreigner, hawking a foreign religion. Constantine’s decision to yield to foreign pressure, which sets into motion the foundation of Constantinople, results from a convergence of personal failings.

Constantine was too foolish to see through Fausta’s lie, too cruel to deal justly with either

Crispus or Fausta, too cowardly to accept the consequences of his decisions, and too vulnerable to foreign charlatans, all of which led to his embrace of Christianity. This is precisely the sort of danger Zosimos anticipates in his brief discussion of the transition from Republic to Empire in book one:

It escaped the Romans’ notice that by handing over the entire administration to the judgment of that one man [Augustus] they were throwing dice for the hopes of all men and entrusting the danger of so great an empire to the enterprise and authority of a single man.56

55 It is widely suspected that Hosius of Cordoba is the ‘Aegyptios’ of Zosimos’ account.

56 Zos. 1.5.2: καὶ τῇ τούτου γνώμῃ τὴν πᾶσαν διοίκησιν ἐπιτρέψαντες ἔλαθον ἑαυτοὺς κύβον ἀναρρίψαντες ἐπὶ ταῖς πάντων ἀνθρώπων ἐλπίσιν καὶ ἑνὸς ἀνδρὸς ὁρμῇ τε καὶ ἐξουσίᾳ τοσαύτης ἀρχῆς καταπιστεύσαντες κίνδυνον.

54

Although this passage refers specifically to Augustus, it is part of a broader discussion of the perils of monarchy, which highlights the danger of entrusting the fate of the empire to a single man.57 Constantine perfectly demonstrates this danger, announced at the opening of the work, by allowing his personal failings to begin the process by which, in Zosimos’ account, the entire empire is barbarized, baptized, and destroyed.

Zosimos further underscores his questions about the legitimacy and Rommanness of Constantine and his New Rome by highlighting the correspondences between

Constantine and Aeneas. Aeneas’ primary in the is pius a term that refers explicitly to his reverence for and obedience to the pagan gods whose worship

Constantine had mocked and abandoned. Constantine on the other hand is precisely the opposite of pius: according to Zosimos he was an uncommitted pagan who ‘still made use of the ancestral rites, not out of honor but out of necessity.’58 His fear of the gods did not restrain him from the murders of his son (born of his first wife) and his second wife, characters whose relationship to Constantine exactly parallel those of and

Lavinia to Aeneas. Both Ascanius and play crucial roles in the establishment not of the city of Rome as such, but of the , the gens Romana, and therefore

Roman identity. Where Aeneas repeatedly sacrificed personal desires, in obedience to the gods, in order to give Ascanius his kingdom, Constantine’s irreverence allows him to not only murder his analogous relation Crispus, but to then abandon traditional religion entirely in search of easy forgiveness. Additionally, Zosimos depicts Constantine’s flight

57 F. Paschoud, ‘La Digression Antimonarchique du Préambule de l’<>,’ in Cinq Études sur Zosime (Paris, 1975), 1-23.

58 Zos. 2.29.1: ἐχρῆτο δὲ ἔτι καὶ τοῖς πατρίοις ἱεροῖς, οὐ τιμῆς ἕνεκα μᾶλλον ἢ χρείας.

55 from Rome as the inverse of Aeneas’ journey, beginning in Italy and sailing back to

Troy, before eventually settling on Byzantium. Constantinople, in Zosimos’ telling, truly was the city of Constantine, but not in a good way: its creation was directly caused by the emperor’s domestic, , and religious failings and aimed to create a source of imperial legitimacy to rival the senate and people of Rome, a counterbalancing (ἀντίρροπον) city complete with its own permanent imperial residence. Zosimos’ portrayal of Constantine as an anti-Aeneas, an impius Constantinus, further underscores the contrast between the legitimate Roman capital and its distortion on the .

The idea of Constantinople as a counterpart to Rome is not unique to Zosimos, but the specific of the new city being used to balance out the old as if on a set of scales merits consideration, especially in light of Zosimos’ subsequent commentary.

The metaphor of the scales establishes an antagonistic, zero-sum relationship between the two cities, in which the greatness that accrues to New Rome comes at the expense of Old

Rome. The image of the scales also recalls ’ famous weighing of fates in the , which he uses to determine the outcome of a contest between the Achaians and Trojans, and, more famously, the outcome of the duel between and .59 Just as the lives of heroes, and by extension to fate of Troy itself, hangs in the balance in the Iliad, so too does the fate of the Roman empire depend on the balance between Old and New

Rome. This mortal, zero-sum dynamic lends a bitter edge to Zosimos’ description of

Constantine’s construction projects in Constantinople. Zosimos’ account highlights the pagan nature of public space in Constantinople, pointing out that the temple of the

59 Hom. Il. 8.69-71 and 22.209-212.

56

Dioskouroi was incorporated into the Hippodrome along with a tripod bearing the figure of Apollo, and also that Constantine built two , one to and one to the

Fortune () of Rome.60 Zosimos is willing to admit the impressiveness of some of these structures, but the relationship that he sets out between Old and New Rome makes even this praise double-edged because the fortunes of the two cities are inversely linked.

By embellishing Constantinople, Constantine impoverishes Rome.61

Despite these pagan elements, Constantinople continues to lack what Zosimos presents as the most important aspect of traditional pagan religion, at least in terms of the long-term survival of the Roman empire: religious ceremonies. This emphasis is obvious in his discussion of the Secular Games, themselves a pagan festival, but Zosimos goes further in his formulation, linking the utility of the games to proper observation of the established rite (thesmos). In other words, festivals were essential to the proper practice of pagan religion, but their utility depended on correct performance. For the Secular

Games, adherence to established custom required that they be celebrated at Old Rome; whatever its pagan adornments, New Rome could not act as a substitute. Likewise,

Zosimos’ programmatic statement during the Palmyrene episode focuses on the preservation of divine ritual (hiera agisteia), while Constantine’s abandonment of traditional religion comes to a head during an ‘ancestral festival’ (patrios heorte).

Zosimos’ clear and consistent focus in the New History is on religious ceremony, which

60 Zos. 2.31.1-2. See also, Dagron, Naissance, 297-347 and 40-45; P. Stephenson, The Serpent Column (Forthcoming).

61 This may be understood as a pagan counterpart to Jerome’s famous claim that Constantine adorned Constantinople with the nudity of other cities.

57 required active participation on the part of the emperor and his subjects. The presence and incorporation of pagan elements into public structures in Constantinople only serves to underscore Constantine’s failure to adopt the more meaningful and, in Zosimos’ telling, prophylactic ceremonies of Roman religion. In such a framework, there is a bitter in Constantine’s construction of a temple to the Fortune of Rome: his city was, by its very nature, antagonistic to the city of Rome’s good fortune, while his failure to promote or establish traditional religious ceremonies was equally poisonous to the health of the Roman state.

Following his account of the foundation of Constantinople, Zosimos proceeds to briefly cover the remainder of Constantine’s reign, and his account is mostly composed of a series of criticisms of Constantine’s military and administrative policies, as well as ad hominem attacks on Constantine’s laziness and cowardice. Zosimos’ ultimate judgment of Constantine is briefly stated and predictably bleak: ‘to speak plainly,

Constantine began and planted the seed of the destruction of the empire which has continued up to the present day.’62

After devoting a single sentence to the appointment of Constantine’s heirs,

Zosimos proceeds to spend two chapters outlining the future of the city of

Constantinople. This survey functions as a parallel narrative to the account of Roman decline that occupies the remainder of Zosimos’ history because the growth of

Constantinople, as Zosimos himself makes clear, comes at the expense of Rome. The

62 Zos. 2.34.2: καὶ ἁπλῶς εἰπεῖν τῆς ἄχρι τοῦδε τῶν πραγμάτων ἀπωλείας αὐτὸς τὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ τὰ σπέρματα δέδωκε. Once again it should be noted that Zosimos’ formulation does not posit a decisive Roman fall, merely a continued destruction.

58 foundation of the city, along with the neglect of the Secular Games, administrative malfeasance, military incompetence, and moral turpitude, is yet another aspect of Rome’s decline set in motion by Constantine:

Constantine increased the size of Constantinople to that of an exceedingly great city with the result that many of the emperors after him chose the city, which had gathered in itself a superfluous crowd, as their residence.63

Zosimos continues to trace the expansion of the city through the construction of the

Theodosian land walls, the reclamation of waterfront, and the expansion of the populace, which he accentuates with complaints about building practices64 and overcrowding that are reminiscent of longstanding tropes in Greek and Roman poetry.65 All of these comments provide indications of Constantinople’s rising importance and, by extension, the declining importance of its counterweight, the city of Rome. By framing his discussion of the fate of Constantinople in terms of the history of the empire following

Constantine’s death and the rise of his successors, Zosimos is able to simultaneously explore the fate of Constantinople and, by extension, of Rome, and lay the blame for those future events on the actions of Constantine. After all, if Constantine had not devoted so much energy to the embellishment of Constantinople, future emperors might not have chosen to live there at the expense of Rome and the focus of the empire might

63 Zos. 2.35.1: ηὔξησε τὴν Κωνσταντινούπολιν εἰς μέγεθος πόλεως σφόδρα μεγίστης, ὥστε καὶ τῶν μετ' αὐτὸν αὐτοκρατόρων τοὺς πολλοὺς τὴν οἴκησιν ἑλομένους τὴν ἐν αὐτῇ πλῆθος ὑπὲρ τὴν χρείαν συναγαγεῖν.

64 Cf, CJ 8.10.

65 Cf. Theokritos, Idyll 15, , 2.3, and , 3.

59 not have shifted east. Because the city of Rome is essential to both Zosimos’ conception of Roman identity and his model of Roman imperial success, the move to Constantinople, a city without appropriate festivals and whose founding was an inversion of Rome’s, inevitably contributed to the abandonment of traditional pagan religion, the process of barbarization, and ultimately the failure of the western Roman empire.

Zosimos’ condemnation of Constantine is diachronic. Constantine was not, in

Zosimos’ telling, immediately responsible for the fall of Rome, a case that would have been difficult to make given the evidence, but he was the origin of all the processes and trends that culminated in Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. Constantine’s founding of

Constantinople is in effect the unfounding of Rome, an implication conveyed by the inverted parallels between Aeneas and Constantine. In order to drive this point home,

Zosimos adduces an oracle that presents Constantinople as a festering boil:

For a savage, festering wound will come over the side of the land It will swell greatly and, when it suddenly bursts, it will flow with blood.66

Clearly, Zosimos loathes the city of Constantinople and the shift in imperial policies and priorities he believes it represents. Yet, Zosimos’ conceptual model of Constantinople’s function in Roman history requires that the city be more than just a festering wound or product of imperial sin. In order for Constantinople to damage Rome it must fulfill the role of counterweight that Constantine conceived for it. In other words, Zosimos cannot

66 Zos. 2.37.1: τρηχὺ γὰρ ἠπείρου πλευρὰς ἐπινίσεται ἕλκος, / καὶ μέγ' ἀνοιδήσει, ταχὺ δὲ ῥαγὲν αἱμοροήσει.

60 portray Constantinople, and by extension Constantine, as a villain in the story of Roman decline unless the city thrives.

Zosimos’ loathing of Constantinople is balanced by occasional admissions that some features of the city were truly remarkable. The palace, he admits, was ‘not much inferior to that of Rome’67 and Constantine ‘adorned the hippodrome beautifully in every particular.’68 Moreover, looking forward to his own time, Zosimos wonders at the lack of a prophecy foretelling Constantinople’s rise despite the fact that ‘the city of the

Byzantines has increased to such a degree that no other city can rival its prosperity or magnitude.’69 Although Zosimos uses this problem to introduce the less-than-flattering prophecy quoted above, the comment, like the others, reflects Constantinople’s sixth- century reality as a powerful and adorned imperial city. The tension between sorrow over the decline of Rome and grudging respect for the success of Constantinople runs throughout Zosimos’ account of Constantine’s city and facilitates his particular model of the relationship between Old and New Rome.

Both Zosimos’ ambivalence toward Constantinople and his attempt to clarify its relationship to Rome are features that reappear throughout sixth-century literature. They reflect a fundamental problem that historically inclined writers of the period were forced to confront: (New) Rome, and the eastern Roman world in general, no longer controlled

(Old) Rome. Traditionalists, such as Zosimos, saw the replacement of Rome by

67 Zos. 2.31.1: οὐ πολλῷ <τῶν> τῆς Ῥώμης ἐλάττονα.

68 Zos. 2.31.1: τὸν ἱππόδρομον εἰς ἅπαν ἐξήσκησε κάλλος.

69 Zos. 2.36.1: Καί μοι πολλάκις ἐπῆλθε θαυμάσαι πῶς εἰς τοσοῦτο τῆς Βυζαντίων πόλεως ηὐξημένης ὡς μηδεμίαν ἄλλην εἰς εὐδαιμονίαν ἢ μέγεθος αὐτῇ παραβάλλεσθαι.

61

Constantinople as an evil, but even he was unable or unwilling to deny that the new capital was a great city. Others authors, as we will see below, took different approaches, but in each case, the struggle to conceptualize Roman identity in the post-Rome era often crystallized in debates concerning the history of the cities of Rome and Constantinople.

Hesychios of Miletos and the Greek Rome

Zosimos’ hostility to Constantinople was predicated on the belief that the city of Rome held a unique place in the Roman world as a source of both Roman identity and Roman imperial success. Constantinople was by nature and (according to Zosimos) by design

Rome’s rival, a new and foreign usurper of Rome’s rights as the mother of empire. Yet, as mentioned above, this attitude contrasted with Zosimos’ own circumstances as a resident of Constantinople, former employee of the imperial administration, and citizen of the eastern Roman empire. It is not surprising that writers of the reign of Justinian did not adopt Zosimos’ hostility to New Rome. The relative statuses of the two cities remained an issue, especially in light of the disappearance of the western empire, as did the problem of Rome’s political separation from the remaining Roman empire in the east, but explicit contrasts were generally eschewed. In fact, for many authors, in particular those writing under Anastasios or early in the reign of Justinian, the problem with

Constantinople was not whether or not the city was authentically Roman, but rather how to reconcile its Roman identity with the more immediate and largely Greek cultural context in which it existed. In no author is this more evident than Hesychios of Miletos who, perhaps in response to Zosimos’ framing of Rome and Constantinople as thesis and

62 antithesis (or similar formulations that may have been current in late fifth-century or early sixth-century Constantinople), offered a that bolstered Constantinople’s

Roman bona , while simultaneously acknowledging the centrality of Old Rome in the construction of Roman identity and creating a parallel Greek history for the new

Roman capital.

Like Zosimos, the study of Hesychios is rendered difficult by the state of his extant writings.70 Where Zosimos’ New History appears to be largely intact with a single major lacuna and a problematic final book, Hesychios’ works survive only in fragments and in descriptions by later witnesses such as Photios and the Souda. Despite these limitations, we know a fair amount about Hesychios’ life, especially if we accept that he is the Hesychios, son of Hesychios whose name appears in a series of fifth or sixth- century inscriptions found at Miletos.71 Hesychios’ primary work, and the only work from which an extended fragment survives in the form of a patria for Constantinople, was his Roman and General History covering the period from the reign of the Assyrian king Belos to the death of the emperor Anastasios.72 Photios reports that Hesychios was also the author of another work, perhaps a continuation of his history, covering the reign of Justin and the early years of Justinian.73 Given this information we can assign

70 For the extant fragments of Hesychios with commentary, see BNJ 390. For his Patria, see Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historians, 270-278; A. Kaldellis, ‘The of Hesychios the Illoustrios of Miletos,’ GRBS 45 (2005) 381-403; G. Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire: études sur le recueil des “Patria” (Paris, 1984) 21-29.

71 BNJ 390, T 3-5.

72 Phot. Bib. 69 (34A-B).

73 According to Photios, Hesychios ended his history of Justinian because of his over his son’s death. Not to discount a father’s sorrow, but the inclusion of this information in the history itself, as well as the 63

Hesychios to the early sixth century with the end of his writing career taking place sometime after Justinian’s ascension in 527, most likely before the beginning of

Justinian’s campaigns in Italy.74

Accepting an early sixth-century date for Hesychios places him at a transitional point between the writings of Zosimos and the majority of our sources for the reign of

Justinian, which were largely published in the 540s and 550s. Hesychios does not appear to share the morose disposition of Zosimos, especially regarding the fate of the city of

Rome. Nor was Hesychios writing in the wake of, and therefore in response to, the

Roman reconquest of Italy. Hesychios’ Patria of Constantinople was produced at a moment when the loss of Rome could be viewed without the apocalyptic implications found in Zosimos or in the light of the destruction caused by the . Instead, the relative security of the early sixth century allowed another problem to come into focus, one which would only be exacerbated by Justinian’s imperial projects in the west: the Romanness of the eastern empire. The problem Hesychios faced and attempted to address in the Patria was a crisis of identity rather than empire.

subsequent publication of the work, suggests that it was part of a recusatio excusing Hesychios from continuing to write the history of a living emperor. Phot. Bib. 69 (34B): Καὶ τὸ λοιπὸν ὁ συγγραφεὺς ἐπεσχέθη, θανάτῳ τοῦ παιδὸς Ἰωάννου τὴν ψυχὴν καιρίαν βληθεὶς καὶ τῆς πρὸς τὸ γράφειν ὁρμῆς ἐκκοπείς.

74 Kaldellis has suggested that we can narrow his dates further based on correspondences between the temporal scheme of his history and that found in Ioannes Lydos’ On the Magistracies, whose composition dates to the 540s, which would provide a ante quem for the first edition of his history, Kaldellis, ‘The Works and Days of Hesychios,’ 382-383 and 393-395. Even if this evidence is not accepted, the endpoint of both the original history and the work on Justin and Justinian suggests that Hesychios was active primarily in the early sixth century and did not outlive Justinian. We may postulate that his Patria of Constantinople predates Justinian’s campaigns in Italy, which began in 535.

64

The Patria takes the form of a history of Constantinople from its founding as the city of Byzantion through its rededication and embellishment by Constantine. The Patria opens with a discussion of the relationship between Rome and Constantinople:

When three hundred and sixty-two years had passed in elder Rome after the monarchy of Augustus and the affairs of that city had already reached their limit, Constantine, son of Constantius, took up the scepters and raised up a new Rome, ordering that it be judged equal to the first. And in this way it happened that this city [Byzantion], which had already been subject to and kings and which had often been governed as an aristocracy and democracy, at last achieved its preordained greatness.75

The distinctive feature of Hesychios’ mini-history of Constantinople, especially when compared to Zosimos’ digression on the same topic, is the way in which he diffuses the potential tension between Rome and Constantinople. Hesychios opens his history of

Constantinople at Rome, but rather than focus on the personality of Constantine, he calls attention to the history of Rome and that city’s arrival at some natural limit (peras). The nature of this limit is not explicitly defined, but both a temporal and territorial limit in ca.

325 can be ruled out; temporally, the city of Rome continued to exist and function as a

Roman capital for more than a century after the foundation of Constantinople, and, territorially, the boundaries of the empire did not increase noticeably in the interim nor was there significant expansion after the foundation of Constantinople. The only logical

75 Hesych. Patr. 1: Δύο καὶ ἑξήκοντα καὶ τριακοσίων ἀπὸ τῆς Αὐγούστου Καίσαρος μοναρχίας διεληλυθότων ἐνιαυτῶν τῇ πρεσβυτέρᾳ Ῥώμῃ καὶ τῶν πραγμάτων αὐτῆς ἤδη πρὸς πέρας ἀφιγμένων Κωνσταντῖνος ὁ Κωνσταντιόυ παῖς ἐπιλαβόμενος τῶν σκήπτρων τὴν νέαν ἀνίστησι Ῥώμην ἴσην αὐτὴν τῇ πρώτῃ χρηματίζειν προστάξας. Ἤδη μὲν γὰρ καὶ τυράννοις καὶ βασιλεῦσι χρησαμένην πολλάκις ἀριστοκρατίας τε καὶ δημοκρατίας πολιτευσαμένην τρόπῳ τέλος ἐπὶ τὸ προκείμενον <συνέβη> ἐξενηνοχέναι μέγεθος.

65 limit the city of Rome could have reached was on its abstracted greatness (megethos), a conclusion supported by Hesychios’ use of the same term to refer to the growth of

Constantinople. Hesychios in no way indicates that the greatness of Rome shrinks or is threatened by the greatness of Constantinople, the transition between the capitals is instead presented as the conclusion of one task (the glorification of Rome) and the assumption of another (the glorification of Constantinople). The goal of the new undertaking, Hesychios makes clear, is not to supplant or outshine Rome, but rather to equal it. The founding of Constantinople also fits an established model from the Greek world: the founding of a colony by a , an event which was often tied to the limitations of the mother city. The relationship Hesychios posits not only takes Rome out of competition with Constantinople, it also makes the foundation, and subsequent greatness, of Constantinople an extension of Rome’s greatness.76

Hesychios goes beyond diffusing tension and creates a relationship between

Rome and Constantinople that actively reinforces the status of both cities by establishing parallels between episodes and features of Rome’s history and the history of Byzantion.

These resonances give the history of Byzantion, and by extension Constantinople, a

Roman shape despite their strictly Greek content. By incorporating famous episodes from

Roman history into the Patria Hesychios implicitly acknowledges the importance of that history for establishing Roman identity. In other words, the allusions to Rome’s legendary past serve not only to make Byzantion appear more Roman, they also confirm the status of Rome’s past as the definitive source of Roman identity.

76 Cf. Thuc. 1.38.

66

Romanizing the History of Byzantion

Hesychios’ embrace of Old Rome in the Patria is neither innocent nor an affectation, but part of a strategy for crafting a Greek, pagan, and pre-imperial identity for Constantinople without undermining the city’s Roman identity. For a work that is concerned, by its own admission, with the story of how Byzantion realized its destiny as the equal of Rome, the actual content of the Patria has very little to do with Rome or the Romans. Of the forty- two sections in the surviving Patria, the first thirty-four contain no references to Rome or the Romans aside from those quoted above. Moreover, the chronology of the Patria is uneven. It begins several generations before the and continues until roughly two generations after Phillip II’s siege of Byzantion only to skip over a period of about four hundred years, resuming with Severus’ siege of the city in 196.77 It may be argued that this narrative gap is not original but the result of a subsequent recension. However, even if this were the case, it would be surprising if the later editor of the work, who preserved trivial details such as a description of the bovine statue that the Athenian general Chares dedicated to his mistress, was unable to find a single episode or detail worth preserving in four centuries of narrative covering a period that included the city’s incorporation into the empires of Lysimachos, the Antigonids, and Rome.78

The surprising absence of Rome from the explicit narrative of the Patria is complemented by the emphatically Greek associations that Hesychios constructs for the

77 These four centuries are given a single section, which will be discussed below.

78 Hesych. Patr. 30.

67 city. In particular, Hesychios goes out of his way to situate Byzantion’s legendary history in the context of the Trojan War. In antiquity Byzantion was widely understood to have been founded by Megarian colonists, but Hesychios systematically undermines this tradition in order to identify the original inhabitants of the city as Argives.79 Hesychios opens his discussion of the founding of Byzantion by the Argive and Megarian traditions at odds with one another using a men/de construction and distancing himself from both traditions by reporting the claims of others (3). Despite the ostensible equality this gives the two accounts, the Argive account is twice as long, calls on the sacred authority of the Pythian oracle, and includes an etiological myth for the naming of the

Boukalia, all of which serve to enhance its legitimacy (4). The Megarian account, on the other hand, is given a single sentence, is undermined by an editorial comment saying that the Megarians are ‘telling stories,’ and is further undermined by a third account that includes neither the Argives nor the Megarians (5).80 Hesychios’ preferred story is evident from this presentation of the two accounts. The Argive account is given primacy of place, a more elaborate narrative, as well as the oracular and etiological trappings of traditional colony. The Megarian story, on the other hand, is presented as blandly as possible and not for lack of a more robust tradition for, as mentioned above, the Megarian origin of Byzantion was widely accepted in antiquity. The structure of this discussion allows Hesychios to present himself as a neutral arbiter who is equally dismissive of both

79 BNJ 390 F7, n. 1.

80 Hesych. Patr. 5: οὗπερ τὴν προσηγορίαν μυθεύουσι τῆι πόλει προστεθῆναι. 68 traditions, and when he sets the record straight in the subsequent lines he does so having given the impression of impartiality while quietly endorsing the Argive tradition.

Hesychios begins his more ‘plausible’ account with the daughter of Inachos, whom he explicitly identifies as the king of the Argives (6).81 After briefly covering the story of Io’s abduction, transformation, and torment by , Hesychios reports that, while she was being driven mad by Hera, Io paused in Thrace to give birth to Keroessa, who in turn was impregnated by and gave birth to Byzas, the founder of

Byzantium (6-9). Hesychios’ story elevates the foundation of Byzantion from a traditional Greek colonial narrative, in which a group of citizens set out to found a new city under the direction of an oracle, to the level of myth.82 More importantly, the inclusion of a legendary story such as that of Io in a work of history recalls the of

Herodotos, in whose account Io also played an important role: Herodotos identifies the rape of Io as the starting point for all hostilities between the Greeks and Persians, at least from the Persian perspective.83 Herodotos places the rape of Io at the beginning of a series of abductions that eventually culminated in the Trojan War. Hesychios would certainly have been familiar with the Histories of Herodotos and his revisions to the myth of Io in a historical work would have encouraged similarly educated readers to draw comparisons. In this context, Hesychios’ desire to associate Byzantion with the Argives

81 Hesych. Patr. 6: Οἱ μὲν οὖν διαφόροις ἐχρήσαντο λόγοις, ἡμεῖς δὲ πιθανὴν τὴν ἱστορίαν τοῖς ἐντυγχάνειν ἐθέλουσιν παραστῆσαι βουλόμενοι ἐκ τῆς Ἰνάχου θυγατρὸς Ἰοῦς τὴν ἀρχὴν προσφόρως ποιούμεθα. Ἰνάχου γὰρ τοῦ Ἀργείων βασιλέως γέγονε θυγάτηρ Ἰώ.

82 Cf. the foundation of Kyrene in Herod. 4.150-158.

83 Herod. 1.1-2.

69 takes on a new aspect because while the Megarians are not mentioned in the Iliad as having sent men to fight at Troy, the Argives are.84 The leader of the eighty ships from

Argos was Diomedes, whose horses are referenced later in the Patria (37), and who reportedly stole the Palladion, the source of Troy’s protection, during the course of the war.85 Hesychios’ narrative for the founding of Byzantion associates the city and its people with the Achaians of the Trojan War, whom the ancients understood to be the

Greeks, even though did not use the term ‘Greek.’86

The associations Hesychios establishes between the founding of Byzantion and the Achaians of the Trojan War are supplemented and confirmed during the course of his subsequent narrative. Throughout the Patria, the city, in particular its topography, is repeatedly associated with Greek figures from the Trojan War, while not a single Trojan hero is ever mentioned. This is a surprising feature in a text that is intent on proving the

Romanness of Byzantion, especially considering that Aeneas attempted to found a city in

Thrace, near Byzantion, before being rebuffed by the spirit of Polydoros.87 The Greek references begin with a headland of the Bosporos which Hesychios reports was named

Chrysopolis after the child of Agamemnon and Chryseis, who was fleeing Clytemnestra in search of Iphigeneia (11). Similarly, Byzas built altars to Achilles and Ajax in the

Strategion, Byzantion’s version of the Campus (16). In the course of the Patria

84 Hom. Il. 2.559-68.

85 Ver. Aen. 2.162-70, cf. Prok. Wars 5.15.9-14.

86 Thuc. 1.3.3-4.

87 Vergil. Aeneid. 3.13ff.

70 areas in and around the city are given monuments to or stories involving the hero

Amphiaraos (16), the Achaian seer Kalchas (21), (33), Herakles (14, 37), and

Diomedes (37). Meanwhile, even the explicit mention of the Troadisian portico is granted no explanation of the name or associated mythology (39).88 Hesychios goes to great lengths to ensure that the city of Byzantion and its environs are conceived of as existing not only in a Greek context, but in a heroic, anti-Trojan Greek context. Of all the heroes mentioned, only Jason and Amphiaraos were not involved in a siege of Troy. However,

Jason was responsible for Medea’s departure from , an event which Herodotos incorporated into his list of disagreements between Greeks and Persians, while

Amphiaraos was a king of Argos, making him a logical figure to be memorialized in an ethnically Argive city.89 Hesychios uses the division between the two sides of the Trojan

War to create an insurmountable distinction between Byzantion and Rome, which in turn allows Byzantion and Constantinople to be something more than Rome’s younger sibling.

New Rome is the Achaian counterpart to the Trojan (Elder) Rome.

For Hesychios, Rome is a Trojan city, Byzantion is a Greek city, but both are

Roman cities. The touchstone of Roman identity in the Patria is not a city’s topography, but the shape of its history. Scholars have long noted the striking similarities between the events reported in the Patria and the legendary history of Rome, in particular the

88 R. Janin, Constantinople Byzantine: développement urbain et répertoire topographique (Paris, 1950), 95- 96.

89 Herodotos. 1.2.

71 correspondences between the figures of Romulus and Byzas.90 None of these similarities are explicitly identified by Hesychios, but their density in an account as brief as the

Patria as well as their consistent one-upmanship of the Roman originals leaves no doubt that they were included in order to make Byzantion appear not only Roman, but even better than Rome when judged on Roman terms. The effect of these stories is to counterbalance the Greek identity Hesychios crafts through the city’s topography and associated with a Roman historical identity. The legendary history of

Byzantion prepares the city to become Constantinople, the Greek Roman capital of a

Greek Roman empire.

The correspondences between the history of Rome and that of Byzantion begin with Hesychios’ account of Io. Aeneas, like Io, was driven from his home by Hera/, and he eventually established the family line that produced Romulus, just as Byzas was descended from Io.91 Romulus and Byzas are obviously parallel figures not only in their capacity as founders, but also in their genealogies. Romulus is a distant relation of

Venus/ and the son of /, both second-order Olympians, but Byzas is the grandson of Zeus and son of Poseidon, both of whom belong to the first generation of

Olympians. The directness of Byzas’ descent and the higher status of his divine ancestors allow Byzas to compete favorably with his Roman counterpart. Byzas’ divine genealogy is the first in a series of competitive improvements on Roman legend that Hesychios inserts into his history. The next example of this competition comes when an eagle

90 There are many such correspondences, G. Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451 (Paris, 1974) 14-19; Kaldellis, ‘Works and Days of Hesychios,’ 395-398; BNJ 390 F7, Commentary.

91 Io also appears in the Aeneid in a depiction on ’ shield, Ver. Aen. 7.789-792. 72 snatches a sacrifice from Byzas and deposits it on the future site of Byzantion (11), an event which is similar to the bird used to determine the original site of Rome. However, in Byzas’ story, the bird is an eagle, traditionally associated with Zeus.92 Having determined the site of the city, Byzas begins to build the walls with the help of Poseidon and Apollo (12). This detail links Byzantion indirectly to

Troy, whose walls were famously impenetrable and built by the same two gods, and sets up a contrast between the walls Romulus built for Rome and those the gods built for

Byzantion.93 The reference to Troy recalls the existence of another wall, that built by the

Achaians, which was not given the blessing of Poseidon or Apollo, and which those gods tore down after the end of the Trojan War.94 The walls of Byzantion permanently fulfill the function of the Achaian wall at Troy, providing the victorious Achaians with a permanent, divinely sanctioned city across from the . Meanwhile, the reference to

Poseidon and Apollo implicitly links Byzantion to Troy and creates a favorable contrast between its walls, behind which the Roman state continued to function in Hesychios’ time, and those of Rome, which had failed to protect the city.

Despite the many parallels between Romulus and Byzas there is one major feature of Rome’s founding that has no corresponding episode in the Patria, the murder of

Remus. Scholars have assumed that the figure of Strombos, a hostile general leading an army of Skythians against Byzantion who is explicitly identified as the (at least half-)

92 cf. Pind. Pyth. 1 and Call. Hymn 1.

93 Hom. Il. 7.451-453 and 21.441-457.

94 Hom. Il. 12.3-18.

73 brother of Byzas, was meant to correspond to Remus.95 However, Strombos is a problematic parallel for Remus. Unlike Remus, who was Romulus’ twin and had been raised alongside him from infancy, Strombos does not enter the narrative until after the city of Byzantion is founded (20). The two traditions surrounding Remus’ death place his murder either during the disagreement about the location of Rome or shortly after

Romulus begins to build its walls.96 Both of these events have analogs in the Patria, but

Strombos is never mentioned in reference to either the building of the wall or the selection of the site for the city. The association of Remus’ death with the founding of

Rome was crucial to the ancient understanding of its significance; the murder of Remus was Rome’s and an etiology for the Roman propensity for civil strife.97 By itself, the absence of Strombos from these earlier founding scenes invites a contrast between the polluted foundation of Rome and the divinely assisted foundation of

Byzantion. The contrast is enhanced by the fact that Hesychios never reports any direct conflict between Byzas and Strombos. When Strombos enters the narrative, he is leading a group of Skythians to attack Byzantion, which is in turn being assisted by a variety of other Greeks (20). Among these allies is Dineos, the ruler of Chalkedon, the area directly across the Bosporus, whose arrival at Byzantion, Hesychios records, coincided with the death of Byzas (22). The verb used to report Byzas’ death is metallasso, a word

95 BNJ 390 F7 n. 20-21; Janin, Constantinople, 11.

96 Livy, 1.7.1-3.

97 Cf. Hor. Epod. 7.17-20. See also R.M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy: Books 1-5 (Oxford, 1965) 54.

74 conspicuously devoid of violent connotations.98 Dineos is quickly chosen as to replace Byzas, but Strombos and his Skythians are never mentioned again. Strombos and his disappearing army are made all the more suspicious by the fact that he is not attested in any other Greek source.99 It appears that Hesychios invented the figure of Strombos and inserted him into the conclusion of Byzas’s life. Hesychios may have had many reasons for inventing Strombos, but one effect of his presence is to highlight the fact that

Byzantion was founded without and that its founder avoided ever having to confront his brother in combat.

Another long noticed parallel between Roman history and the Patria takes place during the siege of the city by Phillip II of Macedon in 340-339 BC.100 Hesychios reports that, on a moonless night, the Byzantines would have lost their city ‘if some had not been their ally and caused dogs all over the city to bark.’101 This episode strongly resembles the story of Juno’s geese who, after the dogs had failed to notice a Gallic attack, alerted the Romans to the danger, allowing Marcus Manlius to preserve the

Capitoline.102 In addition to being a famous episode from Rome’s early history, this event

98 Hesych. Patr. 22: μὴ δυνηθεὶς προσορμῆσαι τῇ πόλει ἄρτι τοῦ βασιλέως αὐτῶν Βύζαντος μεταλλάξαντος καὶ τοῦ δήμου παντὸς ἐν ἀγωνίᾳ τυγχάνοντος πρὸς τὸν καλούμενον Ἀνάπλουν ἀφίκετο.

99 A search of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae returned only results for homonymous Achaian hero in the Iliad.

100 The parallel was first noticed by Diodorus, Diod. 16.17-2-3. For the siege of Byzantion by , see N.G.L. Hammond, Philip of Macedon (Baltimore, 1994) 133-135.

101 Hesych. Patr. 27: εἰ μή τις αὐτοῖς τοῦ θείου γέγονε συμμαχία τοὺς κατὰ τὴν πόλιν κύνας πρὸς ὑλακὴν ἀναστήσαντος.

102 Livy, 5.47.

75 was also used as an etiology for the Supplicia Canum, an event during which geese were carried in procession as heroes while dogs were tortured and killed.103 What has not yet been noticed is that the Byzantine version of this story improves upon the original in two major respects. First, the dogs of Byzantion fulfill their proper function as guardians and detect the attack; the fate of the city is not left up to geese. Second, while the geese saved the Capitoline, the dogs of Byzantion saved the entire city and, in Hesychios’ telling, set the stage for the Byzantines to humiliate Phillip (27). Once again, Hesychios is writing the history of Byzantion in a Roman mold, but improving upon the record of the early

Romans.

Hesychios makes clear in his introduction to the Patria that the greatness of

Constantinople is distinct from that of Rome; Rome had already reached its predetermined limit before Constantine set out to create a new capital. This does not, however, mean that Hesychios viewed the two cities as equals. Throughout the Patria

Hesychios describes Byzantion as a better version of Rome, freed in particular from the pollution of fratricide and put on solid footing by the gods themselves. We can detect in

Hesychios’ constant improvements upon the Roman record a desire to validate or explain the success of Constantinople and the eastern Roman empire in the years after 476. But this goal is balanced against two other major concerns, the first of which is making

Byzantion a Greek city in a Greek world, one whose early history neither involved nor needed the intervention of Rome. The second countervailing consideration for Hesychios

103 This festival was celebrated yearly on the third of , H.H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (London, 1981) 170. It should be noted that Ioannes Lydos also references this episode in his discussion of the Prefect of the Night’s Watch, discussed at pp. 144ff.

76 is the importance of being Roman. For all of his attempts to make Byzantion and

Constantinople appear greater than Rome, the mother city of the Roman empire remains the inescapable font of Roman identity. The very structure of the competition Hesychios creates between the two cities reinforces the authoritative Romanness of Old Rome by asking the reader to consider which city is better at being Roman based on the model established by Rome.

Hesychios’ formulation is fascinating in its own right, but when inserted into its sixth-century context it illuminates a broader conversation taking place among a variety of authors beginning at the turn of the century and continuing at least until the end of

Justinian’s reign. Comparing Hesychios’ discussion of Rome and Constantinople to that of Zosimos, we find both authors concerned with many of the same issues, in particular the fall of the western empire, the status of the empire’s two capitals, and the fundamental question of what it means to be Roman.

Hesychios and the Greek Roman Empire

Hesychios bases the distinctiveness of Byzantion on its associations with Greek history, a move which implies that he sees a distinction between the city of Rome and the Greek world. The origin of this divide, according to the Patria, dates back at least to the Trojan

War when Greek heroes battled the Trojans, who would in turn become Romans. Where

Zosimos conceptualized the empire as divided between pagans and Christians or Romans and barbarians, Hesychios instead posits a Greek and Trojan divide. As in Zosimos,

Constantinople is different from Rome, but that distinctiveness is not presented

77 negatively. Hesychios’ focus on the Greek/Trojan divide allows him to construct a narrative that agrees with many of Zosimos’ core sentiments, in particular on the nature of Roman imperial success and the importance of pagan religion. The first of these topics situates Hesychios firmly inside the intellectual context of the sixth century (as discussed in subsequent chapters), while the second provides evidence for an association between that context and an appreciation, not necessarily religious, for elements of pagan Greek culture.

Although Hesychios’ history largely ignores the period of the Roman Republic, skipping the four hundred years following the death of Phillip II of Macedon and picking up with Severus’ siege of Byzantion, the author offers a brief summary of the intervening centuries.

But it happened then [after the death of the last strategos] that the Byzantines lived at different times under , democracies, and even tyrannies. But when the empire of the Romans, by means of the authority of the , overthrew every power and enslaved the tribes of the Greeks, the Byzantines likewise came to obey it.104

The focus in this passage, as is appropriate for the Patria, remains solely on the city of

Byzantion, and Hesychios makes of point of reiterating the various forms of government which administered the city during the intervening years despite his failure to give the reader a single detail about the actions of those or their effects on the city.

104 Hesych. Patr. 35: Ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μὲν καὶ ἀριστοκρατουμένων καὶ δημοκρατουμένων τῶν Βυζαντίων, ἔτι δὲ καὶ τυραννουμένων κατὰ διαφόρους συμβέβηκε χρόνους. Ὡς δὲ τῇ τῶν ὑπάτων ἐπικρατείᾳ ἡ Ῥωμαίων ἀρχὴ πάσας ὑπερεβάλετο τὰς δυναστείας, κατεδούλωσε δὲ καὶ τὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἔθνη, εἰκότως αὐτῇ καὶ Βυζάντιοι πειθόμενοι διετέλουν.

78

As mentioned above, even if we suspect that Hesychios’ original Patria has been epitomized, and that possibility must be acknowledged, the sheer number of years that are being glossed over in a single sentence make it likely that this particular summary was in the original work. Additionally, the phrasing in this passage closely resembles the opening of the Patria, in which Hesychios stated that Byzantion achieved its full measure of greatness as Constantinople only after it had been ruled by tyrants and kings and governed as a democracy and aristocracy. Of these four forms of political leadership, all but the kings are mentioned in the summary of the period after Phillip II. The implication is that Hesychios’ narrative has already covered the governance of Byzantion by kings, a clear indication that the reader was right to understand the seven strategoi of Byzantion as parallels for the seven kings of Rome. The other three forms of government, meanwhile, correspond to variations in the that took place during the same period.

Having reminded the reader of the parallels he has developed between Roman and

Byzantine history, Hesychios proceeds with a brief description of the expansion of the

Roman empire and, despite the brevity of his account, pauses to mention that the empire of the Romans grew because of the consuls. The insertion of this comment into an account as compressed as this calls attention to the sentiment, as does its placement immediately after a subtle reminder that the narrative has just finished describing the period analogous to the rule of the kings at Rome. In Rome, the rule of the kings was followed by the rule of the consuls, and Hesychios is able to achieve a similar effect for

Byzantion by compressing his narrative, even though a much larger period of time

79 separated the last of the strategoi and the incorporation of the city into the Roman empire. Hesychios’ narrative of the expansion of the empire into Greece is surprisingly violent; the major political powers in the Greek world are ‘overthrown’ and the Greek tribes ‘enslaved.’ The subjection of Byzantion, on the other hand, is presented more mildly as a form of obedience. Hesychios uses the verb to describe the submission of the Byzantines and thereby situates the act in the traditional distinction in Greek thought between persuasion and violent force (bia). Because the Byzantines were persuaded, rather than overthrown and enslaved, the reader is meant to understand that their submission was voluntary, or at least not the result of the same violent compulsion that affected the rest of the Greek world. This small detail creates a unique status for

Byzantion inside the Greek context Hesychios has constructed for it in the Patria.

Byzantion, alone among Greek cities, is not a slave to Rome, but some species of partner.

Hesychios adds one more ambiguous detail to his account of Byzantion’s incorporation into the Roman empire by inserting the feminine dative singular reflexive pronoun (αὐτῇ) to complete the meaning of the participle derived from peitho. This pronoun could refer to either the empire (arche) of the Romans or the authority

(epikrateia) of the consuls. The ambiguity of this phrasing sets up the next passage in the

Patria which resumes the historical narrative with the Emperor Severus’ siege:

80

But when, after some time, Severus ruled Rome, these men [the Byzantines] honored the hope of Niger, who was at that time ruling the east as a , and dared to come to grips with the emperor.105

The story of Severus’ siege of Byzantion in 196 contains the violence that is absent from

Hesychios’ original account of the city’s incorporation into the empire.106 The phrase

‘come to grips with’ is most often used of close engagements between armies in the field and, although clearly used metaphorically here, introduces the idea of a direct struggle between Severus and the Byzantines. Severus is the first Roman emperor mentioned in the narrative of the Patria and his appearance coincides with civil unrest and conflict, in other words the end of the Byzantines’ willing submission to Rome. Once again,

Hesychios is using his abbreviated narrative to create telling juxtapositions, in this case suggesting a resolution to the ambiguity of the previous passage: to whom or what had the Byzantines submitted? If the Byzantines had originally submitted to the empire of the

Romans, then their rebellion against Severus in favor of Niger is left without an explanation. If, however, their submission was to the authority of the consuls, then the

Byzantine rebellion against the emperor is consistent with the previous narrative; due to the compression of the narrative, the end of the consulship in the Patria coincides with the end of Byzantine cooperation with Rome. The idea that Byzantion submitted not to an empire but to the authority of the consuls has another useful implication for Hesychios’

105 Hesych. Patr. 36: Ἐπειδὴ δὲ μετά τινας χρόνους Σεβήρου βασιλεύσαντος τῆς Ῥώμης αὐτοὶ τὴν τοῦ τυραννήσαντος τῶν ἑῴων Νίγρου προτιμήσαντες ἐλπίδα εἰς χεῖρας ἐλθεῖν ἐτόλμησαν πρὸς τὸν αὐτοκράτορα.

106 For the siege of Byzantion, see A. Birley, : The African Emperor (New Haven, 1989) 108-120.

81 narrative: it creates yet another resonance between New and Old Rome. Hesychios describes Byzantion as the only Greek city not to be enslaved but to be ruled, like Rome itself, by the authority of the consuls. In his brief account of the period between the death of the last strategos and Severus’ siege, Hesychios implies the existence of a Greek counterpart to the Roman Republic, a Greek ‘time of the consuls’.

Hesychios’ narrative transition from the period of the strategoi to the period of the emperors lacks meaningful historical detail, but reveals the author’s view of a major shift in Roman history. Like the authors discussed in chapter three, Hesychios presents the consulship as the engine of Roman imperial expansion and implicitly questions the authority of the imperial office by associating it with civil discord. Zosimos, Jordanes,

Lydos, and Prokopios all echo and develop similar ideas in their works, while Justinian repeatedly attempts to bolster the legitimacy of the imperial office, often at the expense of the consulship, in the Novels.107 Our understanding of Hesychios’ ideas about the consulship and the imperial office is limited by the loss of the remainder of his writings, but what information does survive in the Patria suggests that we may place him in the intellectual mainstream of the sixth century. This in turn has implications for our understanding of his formulation of a unique identity for Byzantion and by extension

Constantinople. Hesychios’ use of Roman parallels to structure an otherwise exclusively

Greek history bolsters the Roman identity of sixth-century Constantinople while simultaneously granting the city a unique cultural identity. When taken in conjunction with the general lack of Roman history in the Patria, the implication is that the city of

107 See the discussions in chapters two and three below.

82

Constantinople, and by extension the Roman empire it governs, constitutes a Greek Rome and Greek Roman empire that is distinct from the Trojan Rome and Trojan Roman empire that had collapsed in the west. Hesychios’ formulation of Constantinopolitan history not only synthesizes the histories of Old and New Rome, it also uncouples their destinies, allowing and accounting for the continued survival of a distinct, but no less

Roman, empire in the years after 476.

Christodoros of Koptos and the Cultural Identity of New Rome

Hesychios was not the only author of the early sixth century to struggle with the relationship between the Roman identity of the eastern empire and its largely Greek cultural background. The same issues are present in the corpus of Christodoros of

Koptos, a Greek hexameter poet whose sole surviving work is descriptively titled the

Ekphrasis on the Statues of the Zeuxippos Baths.108 Whereas Zosimos and Hesychios present radically different models of the relationship between Old and New Rome, both authors accept that capital/imperial cities are a key component of Roman identity. In particular, both Zosimos and Hesychios consider the physical space of Rome and

Constantinople to be fundamental to their functions as Roman capitals and loci of

Romanness. The shared focus on urban space necessarily constrains the discussions of

Roman identity in both Zosimos and Hesychios, focusing attention on the history and

108 For Christodoros, see BNJ 283; A. Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros on the Statues of the Zeuxippos Baths: A New Reading of the Ekphrasis,’ GRBS 47 (2007) 361-383; S. Bassett, ‘Historiae Custos: Sculpture and Tradition in the Baths of the Zeuxippos,’ AJA 100.3 (1996) 491-506; R. Stupperich, ‘Das Statuenprogramm in den Zeuxippos-Thermen: Überlegungen zur Beschreibung durch Christodoros von Koptos,’ Istanbuler Mitteilungen 32 (1982) 210-235.

83 topography of the two capitals, especially Constantinople. But unlike Zosimos and

Hesychios, Christodoros does not focalize his discussion on the cities of Rome and

Constantinople, instead he is constrained by the topic of his poem, and in all likelihood by the commission which generated it, to discuss a collection of statues, albeit a collection situated in the heart of imperial Constantinople. Despite his largely preselected material, Christodoros is able to use the major figures from the history and mythology of the ancient Mediterranean found in the Zeuxippos collection to establish contemporary eastern Roman identity within a larger scheme of the useable pasts of the Mediterranean.

Central to his program, as I will argue, is the deprivileging of Italian Roman identity and the promotion of Greek Roman identity.

Unlike Zosimos’ New History and Hesychios’ Patria, there are no textual problems with Christodoros’ Ekphrasis; it comes down to us intact as the second book of the Greek Anthology. Outside of the Ekphrasis, which contains no information about its author save a rhetorical claim to be the son of Homer, we know Christodoros solely through his entry in the Souda and Ioannes Lydos’ brief mention that he authored a work titled On the Disciples of the Great Proklos.109 From the Souda we learn that

Christodoros was a prolific poet with a pronounced interest in cities. His lost works include a twelve-book Patria of Constantinople, a twenty-five book Patria of

Thessalonike, and additional patria for Nakle, Miletos, Tralles, and .110 His

109 Lyd. Mag. 3.26. L.M. Cavero, Poems in Context: Greek Poetry in the Egyptian , 200-600 (Berlin, 2008) 31-33.

110 BNJ 283 T1, Commentary; P. Janiszewski, The Missing Link: Greek Pagan Historiography in the Second Half of the Third Century and in the Fourth Century AD (Warsaw 2006).

84 only works, aside from the Ekphrasis itself, that did not have a city as their subject were a six-book Isaurika, which celebrated the emperor Anastasios’ victory over the Isaurian rebels in 498, and his aforementioned work on the disciples of Proklos.111 It has also been suggested that he is the author of the epigram Anastasios inscribed on the Chalke Gate to celebrate his Isaurian triumph.112 The quantity and thematic consistency of Christodoros’ corpus supports Cameron’s argument that he was a member of an itinerant school of poets operating out of Egypt, while his Isaurika, along with elements of his Ekphrasis and the Chalke inscription, suggest that he had close ties to, or was at least frequently employed by, the court of Anastasius.113 In any event, he was a vocal supporter of

Anastasios’ regime, in particular after the defeat of the Isaurians.

The Ekphrasis itself is a hexameter poem of four hundred and sixteen lines that describes a series of statues located in the Zeuxippos baths in central Constantinople, between the northeastern corner of the hippodrome and the Chalke Gate.114 The baths themselves allegedly date to the Emperor Severus’ embellishment of Byzantion following his defeat of in 196, and they were subsequently adorned, likely by

Constantine, with statues of uncertain provenance.115 We know nothing of the organization or display of the statues other than that some, but not all, of the statue bases

111 Souda, s.v. ‘Christodoros’ (Adler 525).

112 B. Croke, ‘Poetry and Propaganda: Anastasius as Pompey,’ GRBS 48 (2009) 447-466 at 448-449.

113 A. Cameron, ‘Wandering Poets,’ 480-481 and 489; Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros,’ 377-381.

114 For the Zeuxippos Baths, see W. Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon zur Topographie : Byzantion, Konstantinupolis, bis zum Beginn des 17 jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1997) 51-52.

115 Hesychios reports that the name Zeuxippos was derived from Herakles’ taming of Diomedes’ horses, Hesych, Patr. 37.

85 were labelled.116 To date, most discussions of Christodoros have focused on his value as a witness to the material culture of turn-of-the-century Constantinople, and what discussion there has been of his literary agenda has generally focused on his use of Trojan figures and the degree to which his poem advances a traditional Romano-Trojan ideology.117

More recently, Kaldellis has elucidated the competitive relationship Christodoros establishes between poetry and sculpture, and proposed that his poetic agenda was more closely tied to the author’s own aggrandizement and the court of Anastasios than to any

Romano-Trojan ideology.118 Kaldellis’ arguments are convincing, but do not account for several of the text’s salient features, in particular the selectiveness of Christodoros’ discussions of Trojan heroes and his use of archaic ethnonyms in his discussions of ancient Greeks and Romans, both of which have important implications for his poetic agenda and the view of Roman identity reflected in his poem.

116 S. Casson, D. Talbot Rice, and D. F. Hudson, Second Report upon the Excavations Carried Out in and near the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 1928 (London 1929) 18–21; S. Basset, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge, 2004) 160-185.

117 In recent support of this traditional ideology, see H. Saradi-Mendelovici, ‘The Myth of Troy: Statuary and Byzantine mystification of an obsessive symbol,’ Troia 14 (Forthcoming); and S. Bassett, Urban Image, 53-55. For skepticism on the same subject, see S. Bassett, ‘Historiae Custos: Sculpture and Tradition in the Baths of the Zeuxippos,’ AJA 100.3 (1996) 491-506 at 503-504; Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros,’ 372-373.

118 Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros,’ 362ff.

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Deiphobos in Christodoros’ Poetic Agenda

It has been argued that the inclusion of Trojan figures in the Ekphrasis is evidence of the development of a standard Romano-Trojan civic ideology comparable to that of Vergil.119

Christodoros was certainly familiar with Vergil and even included the poet of the Aeneid in the Ekphrasis (a point to which we will return below). Far from following in Vergil’s footsteps, however, Christodoros undermines the Trojan tradition developed in the

Aeneid by revising established , downplaying famous heroes, and focusing on the climactic moment of Trojan defeat rather than looking forward to the foundation of Rome in Italy. The focus on the fall of Troy is so prevalent that Kaldellis has appropriately termed these scenes in the Ekphrasis an ‘Ilioupersis in bronze.’120

Christodoros’ reinterpretation of the Trojans begins in the opening lines of the

Ekphrasis, which describe a statue of the Trojan hero Deiphobos (at least according to

Christodoros, we do not know if the statue was labelled). In a collection of statues that includes several prominent Trojans, most notably Aeneas, Deiphobos is an unlikely character with whom to begin the Ekphrasis. A minor, though recurring, figure in the

Iliad, Deiphobos is perhaps best remembered as the hero impersonates in order to halt Hector’s flight around the city in Iliad 22. In other words, Deiphobos is conspicuously absent from his own most prominent appearance in the Homeric corpus.

According to post-Homeric traditions, Deiphobos was the second husband of Helen,

119 Even Bassett’s rejection of the Romano-Trojan focus is based in part on the number of Trojan statues present in the collection, rather than the content of Christodoros’ description, Bassett, ‘Sculpture and Tradition,’ 503-4.

120 Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros,’ 372.

87 having married the Spartan queen after the death of Paris, an event that prompted the defection of his brother Helenos to the Achaians.121 It is not until Vergil’s Aeneid that we find Deiphobos presented as an important, albeit deceased, figure. Aeneas is approached by Deiphobos’ mutilated shade during his journey to the in Aeneid 6.

According to Deiphobos’ ghost, the Trojan hero was betrayed by Helen, who hid his arms and secretly let Menelaus and into his bedroom. Surprised by the two

Achaians, Deiphobos was killed and his corpse desecrated, accounting for his frightful appearance in the underworld.122 In the Iliad he is only the guise of Athena, while in the

Aeneid he is a ghost, yet it is with this figure of absence that Christodoros chooses to begin the Ekphrasis.

Christodoros begins by presenting a radically different version of Deiphobos’ death than that found in Vergil:

First Deiphobos,123 on a well-carved base he stood, daring, armed, a mighty hero just as he was when with raging Menelaus he came face-to-face while his house was plundered. He stood in every way like a man advancing: at an angle in good order, squaring his back and leaning forward in rage he gathered his piercing strength. He swept the light of his eyes as if guarding against the assault of hostile men. In his left hand he held out a broad shield, in his right he held high a sword. His raging hand was poised

121 His death is also given an extended description in Quintus of , Quint. Smyrn. 12.354-373.

122 Ver. Aen. 6.494-534.

123 Deiphobos was a son of and Hekabe and the second Trojan husband of Helen. He was killed during the sack of Troy. In the Aeneid, Vergil reports that he was ambushed by Menelaus and Odysseus after Helen had hidden his weapons and armor.

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to drive the weapon into the flesh of his opponent… but nature did not make bronze obedient to his rage.124

The first two lines of Christodoros’ description are generic boilerplate, a series of adjectives that might equally apply to any number of statues in the Zeuxippos. Beginning in line three, however, Christodoros inserts the statue into a specific moment in the

Trojan Cycle: the sack of Troy. According to Christodoros’ account, Deiphobos faces only Menelaus, while Helen and Odysseus have been removed from the scene, and, far from lying naked and helpless in bed, Deiphobos is armed and armored, meeting his opponent in good order. The dishonorable slaughter of Deiphobos in the Aeneid is, in the

Ekphrasis, transformed into a duel between Helen’s rightful husband and a man whose adultery could not even claim, as Paris’ did, the sanction of a god.125 The pathetic and sympathetic Deiphobos of the Aeneid has been supplanted by a morally compromised in an equitable struggle for his life.

Christodoros does not describe Deiphobos’ death in the Ekphrasis, opting instead to transition from his narrative account back into a literal description of the statue just before the climactic moment of the confrontation. This arresting transition is achieved through a play on words in the closing line of the description of Deiphobos. The bronze

124 Christod, Ek. 1-12: Δηΐφοβος μὲν πρῶτος ἐυγλύπτῳ ἐπὶ βωμῷ / ἵστατο, τολμήεις, κεκορυθμένος, ὄβριμος ἥρως, / τοῖος ἐών, οἷός περ ἐπορνυμένῳ Μενελάῳ / περθομένων ἤντησεν ἑῶν προπάροιθε μελάθρων. : ἵστατο δὲ προβιβῶντι πανείκελος· εὖ δ' ἐπὶ κόσμῳ / δόχμιος ἦν, μανίῃ δὲ κεκυφότα νῶτα συνέλκων / δριμὺ μένος ξυνάγειρεν· ἕλισσε δὲ φέγγος ὀπωπῆς, / οἷά τε δυσμενέων μερόπων πεφυλαγμένος ὁρμήν. / λαιῇ μὲν σάκος εὐρὺ προΐσχετο, δεξιτερῇ δὲ / φάσγανον ὑψόσ' ἄειρεν· ἔμελλε δὲ μαινομένη χεὶρ / ἀνέρος ἀντιβίοιο κατὰ χροὸς ἆορ ἐλάσσαι· / ἀλλ' οὐ χαλκὸν ἔθηκε φύσις πειθήμονα λύσσῃ.

125 Cf. Aphrodite’s speech to Helen, Hom. Il. 3.414-417.

89 that is not obedient to Deiphobos’ will refers both to his sword, which never struck the fatal blow he sought, and the statue itself which, by virtue of its immobility, has trapped

Deiphobos (at least according to Christodoros’ account) in the moment before his defeat and death. By leaving the statue trapped in this narrative moment, Christodoros places

Deiphobos in a position that foreshadows his defeat and death while simultaneously denying him the of a noble death or the sympathy of a desecrated corpse, as in

Vergil. The transition from Christodoros’ imagined narrative back to his description of the physical appearance of the statue, on the other hand, highlights the difference between the mundane appearance of the statue, emphasized by the generic language

Christodoros employs in the first two lines of the poem, and the excitement and dynamism imparted by Christodoros’ narrative. The contest between poetry and sculpture is at the core of Christodoros’ poetic agenda in the Ekphrasis, and it is not coincidental that its introduction is closely tied to his revision of traditional Romano-Trojan mythology. Statues without narrative are unable to innovate, their static nature rendering them subject to the narrative or understanding supplied by the viewer. The statues of the

Zeuxippos, if left to themselves, would inevitably support and confirm the normative

Romano-Trojan narrative. It is only through poetry, and the intervention of Christodoros as the poet, that these statues are able to revise this tradition. Christodoros’ mythological revisionism therefore goes hand-in-hand with his assertion of poetry’s superiority to the

‘silent bronze.’

The opening epigram has one additional implication when read against the Aeneid

(a reading invited by Christodoros through his epigram on the statue of statue of Vergil,

90 discussed below): it effectively annuls Deiphobos’ curse. In Aeneid 6, the same book in which Vergil presents the account of Deiphobos’ death that Christodoros contradicts in the Ekphrasis, Deiphobos concludes his story by asking the gods to curse the Greeks:

‘Gods, if I ask with a pious mouth, then repay the Greeks with the same sort of punishment.’126 The Greeks to whom he refers are the Achaians, but the use of the term

Graeci is deliberately ambiguous.127 Vergil uses several names for the Achaians at Troy in the Aeneid that would have avoided confusion between the Achaians and the historical inhabitants of Greece and Rome’s Greek . By using a term that conflates the

Achaians with historical Greeks, Vergil here emphasizes the contemporary resonance of

Deiphobos’ curse and constructs an etiology for the Roman conquest of Greece, an event that is foreshadowed during the parade of Roman heroes later in Aeneid 6.128

The of Rome’s conquest and administration of Greece is implicit in ’ description of Rome’s dominion under Augustus, but explicit in his unnamed description of Lucius Mummius and Lucius Aemillius Paullus:

That man [Mummius] proceeding to the high Capitoline in triumph over will drive a chariot as a conquerer accompanied by the fallen trophies of the Achaians. That man [Paullus] will overthrow Argos and Agamemnon’s Mycenae and the Aeacidae, the family of Achilles, mighty in arms,

126 Ver. Aen. 6.529-30: di, talia Grais / instaurate, pio si poenas ore reposco.

127 The word Grais is a poetic dative and ablative plural of Graecus.

128 For the Roman conception of the conquest of Greece, see S. Dmitriev, The Greek Slogan of Freedom and Early Roman Politics in Greece (Oxford, 2011); M. Lavan, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 2013).

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avenging Trojan ancestors and ’s desecrated temples.129

Once again, Vergil is conflating the Achaians of the Trojan War with historical Greeks by linking the sack of Corinth in 146 BC to the Achaians and the defeat of the last

Antigonid king Perseus in 168 BC to Agamemnon, Achilles, and Locrian Ajax. These connections transform the conquest of Greece into the culmination of Deiphobos’ curse, a fitting revenge taken upon the descendants of the Achaians at Troy. The curse and parade of conquerors underscores the differences between the Greeks and Romans, emphasizing an ethnic and genetic divide upon which the distinctiveness of the Roman claim to empire is predicated. Christodoros’ account of Deiphobos unravels the anti-Greek agenda of

Aeneid 6 by invalidating the of Deiphobos’ conditional statement. If the of the Ekphrasis accepts Christodoros’ account of Deiphobos’ death, then the Deiphobos of the Aeneid does not speak with pious lips, his curse is invalidated, and the justification for the Roman domination of Greece falls apart. Through this intertextual interaction

Christodoros defuses Virgilian Romano-Trojan ideology, specifically dismantling the

Virgilian justification for Rome’s conquest of and superiority over Greece. By rewriting

Deiphobos’ death in a way that undermines the rationale for Trojan dominance,

Christodoros begins the process of rewriting the relationship between the Latin-speaking

Romans of the recently fallen western Roman empire and the Greek-speaking Romans of an eastern Roman empire still grappling with the implications of the fall of the city of

Rome.

129 Ver. Aen. 6.836-840: ille triumphata Capitolia ad alta Corintho / uictor aget currum caesis insignis Achiuis. / eruet ille Argos Agamemnoniasque Mycenas / ipsumque Aeaciden, genus armipotentis Achilli, / ultus auos Troiae templa et temerata Mineruae.

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While Deiphobos’ statue opens the Ekphrasis, Vergil’s statue closes it. The choice to pair a hero famous primarily for his single appearance in the Aeneid with the author of that same work in the two most emphatic positions of any poem is a clear signal to the audience that the Ekphrasis is responding to Vergil. Moreover, Christodoros’ description of Vergil is designed to invite comparison between the two poets, a comparison that Christodoros has arranged to his own advantage. While it is true that

Vergil is called ‘another Homer’ in his statue-epigram, the statue immediately preceding him, that of the minor poet Homer of Byzantion, is likewise called ‘another Homer.’ This pairing effectively makes Vergil ‘another other Homer,’ a startling demotion for the poet of the Aeneid, and establishes a parallel between Vergil and Homer of Byzantion. Both poets are also closely associated with cities, which also happen to be the only two cities recognized as capitals of the Roman empire in the sixth century: Rome (Vergil) and

Byzantion/Constantinople (the ‘other’ Homer). However, the precise relationship between the men and their cities varies. Homer of Byzantion is described as having

‘adorned his Byzantine fatherland with his words,’ while ‘the ancestral echo of the raised [Vergil] to be another Homer for Rome.’130 This phrasing grants agency to Homer of Byzantion, but strips it from Vergil grammatically and subtly implies that his reputation for being ‘another Homer’ is just as flimsy as that of Homer of Byzantion, a result not of merit but of the ‘ancestral echo’ of Rome.

130 Christod. Ek. 413: κοσμήσας ἐπέεσσιν ἑὴν Βυζαντίδα πάτρην, and 415-416: ὅν ποτε Ῥώμης Θυβριὰς ἄλλον Ὅμηρον ἀνέτρεφε πάτριος ἠχώ.

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The phrase ‘ancestral echo’ is both ambiguous and rare. In fact, it appears in only one other place in the extant Greek corpus: Nonnos’ Dionysiaka.131 Nonnos, it happens, was a fellow member of the Egyptian school of ‘wandering poets’ first identified by Alan

Cameron, and was a rough contemporary of Christodoros.132 Nonnos uses the phrase to describe Zeus’ forceful restraint of Dionysios during the latter god’s contest with

Poseidon over the maiden Beroe. The echo in question in the Dionysiaka is the ringing sound produced by Zeus’ salpinx, a form of war trumpet.133 This comparison supports the subordination of Vergil to the agency of Rome by making Vergil’s poetic success dependent upon the military success of the Roman empire. The likeliest reading of the passage is therefore as a slight to Vergil whose status as ‘another Homer’ was not merited by his poetry but achieved through the greatness of his topic, the city of Rome. Vergil’s poetic reputation is little more than the reflected, or echoed, glory of Rome. More to the point, if the intertext with Nonnos is accepted, then the implication is that it was specifically Rome’s military force, metaphorically encoded in the sounding of Zeus’ warhorn, that granted Vergil his status. The idea that Vergil’s status has been artificially inflated by the success of Roman arms accords well with the implication of Deiphobos’ statue: Vergil’s Aeneid provided divine sanction for Rome’s empire, specifically her

131 For Nonnos and his place in the literature and culture of late antiquity, see A. Cameron, ‘Poets and Pagans in Byzantine Egypt,’ in R. Bagnall (ed.) Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700 (Cambridge, 2007) 21-46; F. Hadjittofi, ‘Nonnus’ Unclassical Epic: Imaginary in the Dionysiaca,’ in C. Kelly, R. Flower, and S. Williams (eds.) Unclassical Traditions, Volume 2: Perspectives from East and West in Late Antiquity (Cambridge 2010) 29-42; W. Liebeschuetz, ‘The Use of Pagan Mythology in the Christians Empire, with particular reference to the Dionysiaca of Nonnus,’ in P. Allen and E. Jeffreys (eds.) The Sixth Century, End or Beginning? (Brisbane, 1996) 75-91.

132 Cameron, ‘Wandering Poets,’ 470-471.

133 Nonnos, Dionysiaka 43.378-380.

94 empire in Greece, and in turn Vergil’s status as a poet was assured by the success of

Rome’s empire.

Independent of any intertextual relationship with Nonnos, Christodoros’ description of Vergil clearly erodes the status of Rome’s national poet and national epic.

Christodoros embarrasses Vergil in part to enhance his own standing—elsewhere in the

Ekphrasis he claims Homer as his father, a move that supersedes any claim that Vergil himself might have to Homer’s legacy—but that is not his primary goal.134 Vergil is simply a convenient poetic stand-in for the normative matrix of Romano-Trojan associations that an audience of Romans in the sixth century east would have brought to their viewing of the Zeuxippos collection. In order for Christodoros to set himself apart as a poet and prove the superiority of poetry over sculpture, it was essential that he construct narratives or interpretations of the collection that innovated meaningfully within the existing tradition. It is possible Vergil presented himself as a target for

Christodoros’ project because his statue was labelled and therefore his inclusion in the

Ekphrasis unavoidable. It is, however, equally likely that Christodoros simply found too tempting to pass up the opportunity to challenge the Latin-speaking poetic godfather of

Rome’s imperial (and anti-Greek) ideology in the symbolic heart of the Greek-speaking capital of the eastern Roman empire at a moment of broad political and cultural reflection on the nature and parameters of Romanness. In either case, the terms in which

Christodoros structures the debate highlight a common of insecurity: Rome’s historical military dominance, which both gained it dominion over the Greek-speaking

134 Christod. Ek. 319. 95 peoples of the east and allowed Vergil’s reputation to outstrip his poetic accomplishments.

The Fall of Troy: Roman Identity without Trojan Roots

Christodoros alters the traditional Romano-Trojan narrative less through loud and explicit revision and more through careful editing and selective emphasis. With the exception of

Deiphobos, Christodoros never contradicts the established traditions concerning the

Trojans mentioned in the Ekphrasis; instead, he curtails their stories, bringing them to a close with the fall of the city rather than the foundation of Rome, a point he underscores through emphasis on their connection to their homeland. It is a measure of how established the normative Romano-Trojan narrative is even today that readers of Vergil do not generally balk at the idea of one of history’s most powerful and enduring polities tracing its origins to a defeated people. Yet that is exactly what the Trojans were in

Roman mythology: a group of people whose failure to defend their homeland led to their conquest of the entire Mediterranean. The Trojans were exceptional not only for their privileged role in the construction of Roman identity but also for their unique status in history (and mythology) as the people who snatched sine fine from the jaws of catastrophic failure.135 It is precisely this Trojan exceptionalism that Christodoros attempts to undermine by creating a coherent metanarrative of the fall of Troy in the

Ekphrasis, a narrative that emphasizes the finality of Troy’s end and its military

135 On the cultural status of Troy, see A. Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford, 2003).

96 helplessness while refusing to acknowledge the traditions that granted the Trojan nation a rebirth in Italy.

Christodoros’ rejection of Trojan exceptionalism is achieved as much through what is said as what is left unsaid. Despite spending twelve lines on a minor figure like

Deiphobos, whom he emphatically places at the opening of his poem and who died at

Troy after a short-lived claim on Helen, Christodoros spares just over four lines for

Aeneas:

‘Be gracious shield-wielding offshoot of the Trojan land, be gracious, shining Aeneas, counselor of the Trojans. Wise reverence infuses your eyes, breathing splendor and announcing the wondrous family of golden Aphrodite.136

Christodoros makes no mention of Aeneas’ role in creating the Roman people or transferring the Trojan nation to Italy. In fact Christodoros creates no narrative for

Aeneas at all, opting instead to embellish the sculpture by positing a family resemblance between Aeneas and his mother Aphrodite. By refusing to associate Aeneas with the foundation of Rome or any other narrative in which he might appear, Christodoros effectively cuts the Trojans off from their redemption in Italy, focusing attention on their disaster in Troy. The emphasis on his parentage directs attention backward through time

(parental relationships being necessarily genitive rather than progenitive), rather than on his progeny (which included Caesar and Augustus, a major feature of the parade of

136 Christod. Ek. 143-147: Ἵλαθι, γαίης / Τρωιάδος βλάστημα σακεσπάλον, ἵλαθι, λάμπων / Αἰνεία Τρώων βουληφόρε· σαῖς γὰρ ὀπωπαῖς / ἀγλαΐης πνείουσα σοφὴ περιλείβεται αἰδώς, / θέσκελον ἀγγέλλουσα γένος χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης.

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Roman heroes in Aeneid 6), and, because the connection is based on appearance, it fails to grant the statue the dignity of a meaningful narrative. According to the aesthetic logic of the Ekphrasis, this failure to add a narrative leaves Aeneas at the mercy of an inferior medium, marginalizing him along with his untold story of Trojan rebirth in Italy.

Aeneas is further marginalized by the placement of his description shortly before, but separate from, the cluster of statues that Christodoros most closely associates with the fall of Troy. The statues that constitute the Ilioupersis in bronze include both Achaian and Trojan figures, but the Trojans are overwhelmingly female and situated by

Christodoros in moments of lament. The first of these figures is Kreousa, Aeneas’ first wife, whose appearance at the beginning of the sequence is thereby linked to

Christodoros’ description of Aeneas’ statue. Christodoros places Kreousa at the precise moment of Troy’s fall: ‘In this way she wept and the bride’s brazen tears were an / omen that her nurse had been won by the spear of Ares: / Ilium had been taken by the shield- bearing Argives.’137 This is the first point in the Ekphrasis at which the Trojan homeland is referred to as a nurse (tithene), but the metaphor will recur in several subsequent descriptions. The metaphor calls attention to the bonds between the Trojans and their original homeland in the east at the expense of their adopted homeland, which Kreousa in any case never saw, in Italy. Like the parental relationship stressed in the description of

Aeneas’ statue, the metaphor of Ilium-as-Nurse is fundamentally backward looking, and it is noteworthy that Kreousa’s narrative identifies her as Aeneas’ wife, but, as per the

137 Christod. Ek. 152-154: οἷά τε μυρομένη· τὰ δὲ χάλκεα δάκρυα νύμφης / Ἄρεϊ δουρίκτητον ἐμαντεύοντο τιθήνην, / Ἴλιον Ἀργείοισιν ἐελμένον ἀσπιδιώταις.

98 backward-looking description of Aeneas, makes no mention of her son Ascanius, who looks to the future.

Just as Kreousa’ statue recalls the description of Aeneas, the statue that immediately follows Kreousa, Helenos, recalls the description of Deiphobos:

Nor did Helenos cease his raging, pitiless to his fatherland he appeared to be stirring his wrath still. He was holding, in his right hand, a saucer for and I think that he was prophesying good things for the Argives, but asking the gods to the final omens for his nurse.138

Helenos was a Trojan and the brother Deiphobos. The brothers had a falling out over who would wed Helen following the death of Paris, and, after Deiphobos won Helen’s hand,

Helenos defected to the Achaians and began actively working against his native city. In

Christodoros’ description, we find a strong emphasis on Helenos’ , an action that necessarily calls attention to the betrayed party, in this case his native land of Troy. The attention his defection draws to Troy is supplemented by two explicit mentions of his relationship to his homeland in this five-line description of his statue. Troy is called not only Helenos’ nurse but also his fatherland (patris), both relationships that are backward- looking on the model of Aeneas’ descent from Aphrodite. The description of Helenos emphasizes the finality of Troy’s fall, already implicit from the absence of any narrative of Trojan migration to Italy, through the phrase ‘final omens’ (panustata semata). The

138 Christod. Ek. 155-159: Οὔθ' Ἕλενος κοτέων ἀπεπαύετο· πατρίδι νηλὴς / φαίνετο δινεύων ἔτι που χόλον. ἦν μὲν ἀείρων / δεξιτερῇ φιάλην ἐπιλοίβιον· ὡς δοκέω δέ, / ἐσθλὰ μὲν Ἀργείοις μαντεύετο, κὰδ δὲ τιθήνης / ἀθανάτοις ἠρᾶτο πανύστατα σήματα φαίνειν.

99 use of the superlative implies an ultimate finality to the fall of Troy, situating the event at the end of Trojan mythology rather than the beginning of Roman mythistory and once again creating a divide or rupture between the Trojans and the Romans.

In the statues that follow Kreousa and Helenos, the finality of Troy’s fall and the emphasis on the close ties the Trojans have with their native Ilion precludes the audience from viewing them as wandering , a feature which is helped by the poet’s refusal to mention or allude to their lives after the fall of the city. Immediately following Helenos is a sequence of statues of Greek heroes which are paired with female Trojans. This pairing is enhanced through explicit references, such as when the statue of Menelaos is said to be looking at Helen or that of Phyrros at Polyxena, or by transitions between subjects midway through a line, a feature which links the description of Odysseus to that of

Hekabe.139 The decision to describe the statues of the female Trojans amidst descriptions of the triumphant male Achaian heroes reinforces the specific temporality of these statues, once again situating them at the moment of Troy’s demise. The fact that only

Trojan women are described recalls the fact that the Trojan race had been effectively ended by the extermination of the male population. It moreover raises the specter of sexual violence, which underscores both the conquest of Troy and reminds the audience that, if the Trojan race did not end at Troy, then the Greeks too can make a strong claim to Trojan descent through the children that they fathered on the females slaves they brought back from Ilion. A measure of Christodoros’ intent in these passages can be

139 For Menelaos looking at Helen and Pyrrhos at Polyxena, see Christod. Ek. 167 and 196. For the transition between Odysseus and Hekabe, see Christod. Ek.175.

100 gleaned from his description of the statue of Andromache. The statue he describes gives no outward sign of being linked to the fall of Troy, and Andromache is not depicted as mourning. Nevertheless, Christodoros raises the topic of Troy’s fall by temporally situating the statue at a moment before the death of Hector: ‘[Andromache] did not let slip her mournful weeping, so I think that / Hector, he of the glancing helm, had not yet fallen in war, / nor had the overbearing sons of the shield-bearing Achaians / yet completely plundered her Dardanian nurse.’140 So great is Christodoros’ emphasis on the fall of Troy, that even a statue of a happy Andromache is still defined by the death of her husband and fall of her adopted city.

Although Christodoros does not develop a temporally linear narrative in this sequence of statues—he does not tell a linear ‘story’ (Helenos’ defection post-dates the death of Hector and therefore the statue of Andromache)—the descriptions of both

Helenos and Andromache place the sack of Troy at a point in the future, while the following four statues (Menelaos, Helen, Odysseus, and Hekabe) are explicitly placed at the moment of Achaian triumph. The fall of Troy is in turn followed by a description of

Pyrrhos and Polyxena, in particular the latter’s execution on the grave of Achilles, an event that followed the actual sack of the city. The four statues placed at the moment of

Troy’s fall are arranged in pairs, Menelaos with Helen and Odysseus with Hekabe. Both

Menelaos and Odysseus are explicitly said to be rejoicing over their victory, Menelaos because he has regained Helen, but Odysseus is ‘gloating because he had destroyed Troy

140 Christod. Ek. 161-164: οὔτι γόον σταλάουσα πολύστονον· ὡς γὰρ ὀίω, / οὔπω ἐνὶ πτολέμῳ κορυθαίολος ἤριπεν Ἕκτωρ, / οὐδὲ φερεσσακέων ὑπερήνορες υἷες Ἀχαιῶν / Δαρδανίην ξύμπασαν ἐληίσσαντο τιθήνην.

101 utterly with his twisted plots.’141 Menelaos’ delight in Helen corresponds to the poet’s description of her statue as being beautiful enough to inspire attraction in the viewer. This is one of the few moments in the Ekphrasis at which Christodoros credits sculpture, but only to set up the critique that follows in the pairing between Odysseus and Hekabe.

Where Menelaos’ joy can be understood as somewhat positive, Odysseus’ is unambiguously cruel. It is not enough for Odysseus to have been personally responsible for the fall of Troy, the destruction of the city must be ‘utter’ or ‘complete’ (pas). Just as

Menelaos’ joy is confirmed by reference to another statue, so too is Odysseus’ joy linked to the description of Hekabe.

Hekabe is an unexpectedly major figure in the Ekphrasis. At fourteen and a half lines, her description is one of the longest in the collection (Menelaos, Helen, and

Odysseus are given a total of ten and a half lines, Deiphobos twelve), and she is further singled out by being addressed by the poet in the second person and having her description begin in the middle of a line. Chrisodoros uses Hekabe to fulfil the setup established in his description of Helen and chastise sculpture for its decision to trap

Hekabe in a moment of grief and suffering: ‘the bronze does not end your suffering: sculpture,142 / the breathless art, did not pity you and hold back the deadly frenzy. / So you stand here still shedding tears.’143 The description of Hekabe’s statue also acts as a gloss on the utter destruction that gives Odysseus’ statue so much joy: ‘I believe that /

141 Christod. Ek.174-175: Τροίην γὰρ ἐγήθεε πᾶσαν ὀλέσσας / ᾗσι δολοφροσύνῃσι.

142 Christodoros uses the word techne to refer to the art of sculpture throughout the Ekphrasis.

143 Christod. Ek.178-180: οὐδέ σε χαλκὸς ἔπαυσεν ὀιζύος, οὐδέ σε τέχνη / ἄπνοος οἰκτείρασα δυσαλθέος ἔσχεθε λύσσης, / ἀλλ' ἔτι δάκρυ χέουσα παρίστασαι

102 you no longer mourn for the fate of unhappy Hector or suffering / Andromache’s heavy grief, but for your fallen / fatherland.’144 Christodoros’ interpretation of Hekabe’s statue bypasses obvious moments of lament, including her lament over the body of Hector described at the close of Iliad 24, in order to focus attention on the broader and more abstract pain of the loss of her fatherland. The mention of Hector once again reminds the reader of the extermination of the male population of Troy, while the reference to

Hekabe’s fatherland continues the attempt to both localize and terminate the Trojan race in the Troad.

The statues so far described, together with those of Kassandra, Pyrrhos, and

Polyxena, create a coherent metanarrative of the fall of Troy that emphasizes the finality of its end while refusing to acknowledge the traditions that granted the Trojan nation a rebirth in Italy. Christodoros is so committed to emphasizing the fall of Troy, that he inserts it into almost all of his descriptions of Trojan heroes. We may doubt that the statues by themselves would have led any viewer to this interpretation; it has been projected by the poet onto the collection. The most striking example of this comes in his description of the statues of Panthous, Thymoetes, Lampon, and Klytios, the Trojans elders who observe and comment upon Helen’s first appearance on the wall of Troy in

Iliad 3. We may even be justifiably skeptical that the statues being described in fact depicted these men as they are exceedingly minor figures in the Iliad. Nevertheless,

144 Christod. Ek.180-183: ὡς δὲ δοκεύω, / οὐκέτι δυστήνου μόρον Ἕκτορος οὐδὲ ταλαίνης / Ἀνδρομάχης βαρὺ πένθος ὀδύρεαι, ἀλλὰ πεσοῦσαν / πατρίδα σήν.

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Christodoros uses these four statues to once again reenact the fall of Troy, this time as a series of emotional responses from the elders of the city:

There was Panthous,145 counselor of the Trojans. He had not yet ceased to direct his terrible wisdom against the warlike Argives. Thymoetes146 held back the tangled plan of the elders, constrained by a sea of speechlessness. He resembled a man casting about to devise some plan for the Trojans. Lampon could be seen in the form of a grieving man. He no longer had it in his mind to bring forth a plan to save the broken Trojans from the rolling roar of battle. Helpless Klytios was placed there. He held both his hands together, fingers interlocked, heralds of his silent grief.147

The elders of Troy progress both emotionally and temporally from active engagement with a war they feel can be won (Panthous) to confusion and desperation (Thymoetes), helplessness and surrender (Lampon), and finally grief (Klytios). Once again we see the hallmarks of Christodoros’ discussion of the Trojans: an emphasis on the older generation, a narrative focus on the fall and destruction of the city, and a failure to acknowledge the possibility of a future for the Trojans. The function of these elders in the

Ekphrasis inverts the role they play in the teichoskopia of Iliad 3. In the Iliad, the elders look backwards to the origins of the Trojan War, but in the Ekphrasis they look forward to the end of their city. The cumulative effect of these Trojan narratives is the sequestration of Trojan identity in mythical times; the Romans are no more Trojans than

145 Panthous was an elder of Troy who, along with the next three figures (Thymoetes, Lampon, and Klytios), was present at Helen’s first appearance on the walls in Iliad 3.

146 An elder of Troy and seer, he prophesied that Paris would cause the destruction of Troy.

147 Christod. Ek.246-255.

104 the Athenians are Achaians. It is an indication of the importance Christodoros places on isolating the Trojans from the Romans that he maintains such a consistent approach in a poem like the Ekphrasis, whose the contents were not entirely in his control.

A Greek Rome

Christodoros uses his descriptions of Trojan figures to reorient the mythistorical narrative of Troy in such a way that it becomes the culminating of the Trojan people, rather than a beginning point for the Romans. This narrative shift complements another noteworthy feature of his Ekphrasis: his use of archaic ethnonyms to designate different peoples in the ancient world. Christodoros’ Ekphrasis creates a world without Romans,

Athenians, or Peloponnesians, but filled instead with Ausones, Cecropians, and

Pelopians. In fact, the word ‘Roman’ never appears in the Ekphrasis, even in descriptions of figures such as and Pompey Magnus. Deprived of their Trojan heritage and Roman appellation, these figures simply blend into the larger context of the

Ekphrasis: an ecumenical array of figures from a variety of traditions, tribes, and professions who are linked by their common appearance in the Zeuxippos collection. An important result of the deprivileging of the Romanness of the ‘Ausones’ is the creation of a Greco-Roman milieu in which no one group may claim primacy based on heritage. In such a context, the value and esteem granted a particular group or city depends solely on their achievements, allowing Christodoros to present the implicit competition between the (recently fallen) Latin-speaking western Roman empire and Greek-speaking eastern

Roman empire on terms favorable to the status of Constantinople and her empire.

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Christodoros begins this process by contrasting the intellectual achievements of Greek literature with the violence of the Trojan tradition.

As discussed above, Christodoros’ description of Deiphobos robs the hero of the sympathy his vicious death earns him in the Aeneid, but the description also emphasizes the frenzy of the narrative moment in which Christodoros places him. The bronze has trapped Deiphobos in a moment of violence, when he has come face-to-face with ‘raging’

Menelaos and is himself ‘leaning forward in rage.’ Even the closing word of the description, which cements the pun with which Christodoros introduces the competition between poetry and sculpture, is Deiphobos’ ‘rage’ (lysse). The focus on the frenzy and violence in Deiphobos’ narrative makes the transition to the second statue in the

Ekphrasis, of the Athenian (in Christodoros’ terminology Cecropian) orator Aischines, especially jarring: ‘The Cecropian gleams, the flower of thoughtful persuasion.’148

Besides playing into a longstanding distinction in Greek thought between force and persuasion, the description of Aischines sets the Greek figure at odds with the violence and disaster of Deiphobos. Aischines is enhanced and Deiphobos diminished by the contrast between the two figures, and the credit is registered in favor of the Greek tradition at the expense of the Romano-Trojan tradition.

The figures that follow Aischines are, for the most part, famous Greek writers from a wide variety of genres including Attic oratory (), philosophy

(), tragedy (), (), and lyric (Simonides). The parade of great writers at the opening of the Ekphrasis functions as a survey of Greek literature

148 Christod. Ek.13: Κεκροπίδης δ' ἤστραπτε, νοήμονος ἄνθεμα Πειθοῦς.

106 that both implicitly situates Christodoros in the tradition, a point made explicit in his description of Homer, and establishes a thematically coherent unit analogous to the

Ilioupersis discussed above. Against the background of Deiphobos’ statue, which created an implicit contrast between Trojans and Achaians (i.e., Greeks), the catalogue of writers establishes the Greek claim to superiority in learning in contrast to Trojan violence (and unsuccessful violence at that), an effect that is enhanced by the coherent grouping of these figures and that anticipates Christodoros’ dismissal of Vergil’s greatness as the result of an ‘ancestral echo.’

The thematic grouping of figures is a common tactic of the Ekphrasis and adds further evidence that Christodoros did not arrange his poem according to the physical positioning of the statues in the Zeuxippos. Moreover, it grants him a tool for emphasizing or deemphasizing particular statues. The semantic flexibility granted by these thematic units is particularly noteworthy in the description of the first Ausonian in the collection: Julius Caesar.

Nearby shone Julius Caesar, who once crowned Rome with the countless ox-hide shields of her enemies. He was raising the grim-faced on his shoulder and exulted, carrying the in his right hand, as befitted the man called another young Zeus by the Ausonians.149

The placement of Caesar in the poem is designed to undermine both his significance as a historical figure and the remarkable iconography of his statue. To begin with, Caesar is

149 Christod. Ek. 92-96: Καῖσαρ δ' ἐγγὺς ἔλαμπεν Ἰούλιος, ὅς ποτε Ῥώμην / ἀντιβίων ἔστεψεν ἀμετρήτοισι βοείαις. / αἰγίδα μὲν βλοσυρῶπιν ἐπωμαδὸν ἦεν ἀείρων, / δεξιτερῇ δὲ κεραυνὸν ἀγάλλετο χειρὶ κομίζων / οἷα Ζεὺς νέος ἄλλος ἐν Αὐσονίοισιν ἀκούων.

107 the first Ausonian mentioned in the poem and widely separated from the other three figures (, Pompey, and Vergil) who are clustered at the end of the Ekphrasis.

Caesar is therefore an isolated Ausonian in a poem already populated with Trojans,

Ascrans, Achaians, Cecropians, and Emathians. The toponym stands out as both an reference and because it attenuates Caesar’s Romanness, despite the fact that he was an inhabitant of the city of Rome. The attenuation of Caesar’s Roman identity contrasts sharply with Caesar’s longstanding status as the Trojano-Roman par excellence by virtue of his putative relationship with Aeneas and, by extension, /Aphrodite.

Not only does Christodoros fail to explicitly grant Caesar the status of ‘Roman,’ he does not even explicitly call him an Ausonian, stating simply that the Ausones called him

‘another young Zeus.’ By shifting Caesar’s affiliation from Roman to Ausonian,

Christodoros effectively redirects the associations of the traditional Romano-Trojan narrative away from Roman identity and towards Ausonian identity, recasting the narrative instead as Trojano-Ausonian and depriving it of its normative place in the construction of Roman identity. In addition to his isolation, Caesar’s prestige is undermined by his immediate predecessors in the Ekphrasis. The two figures who precede Caesar are Chryses, the suppliant father of Iliad 1 whose prayer to Apollo set the disastrous narrative of the epic in motion, and , the Athenian statesman whose megalomaniacal tendencies were a source of disaster both for his city and himself.150 To the extent that statues near Caesar have thematic coherence it is as figures whose careers presaged disaster for those around them.

150 W.R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, 1984) 158-168. 108

The ominous association between Caesar and two figures whose careers precipitated calamities is at odds with the figure following Caesar: Plato. As with the

Greeks who followed Deiphobos, Plato reintroduces the contrast between Trojan/Roman violence and Greek learning. His description likewise deflates the iconography of

Caesar’s statue. Christodoros describes Caesar’s deific depiction as fitting because it accords with what was said about Caesar by mortals, Plato, on the other hand, is described on the authority of the poet himself as ‘godlike,’ the man ‘who revealed the hidden paths of the god-made virtues.’151 The poet’s authority to pass judgment on divine figures is buttressed, and the distinctiveness of Caesar’s appearance further marginalized, by the statues surrounding this group of figures. The two statues that precede Alcibiades are of Apollo and Aphrodite, the two that follow are of Aphrodite (again) and

Hermaphroditus. At no point in these descriptions does Christodoros make reference to

Caesar’s supposed relationship with Aphrodite despite having three closely grouped opportunities. The description of actual gods, moreover, deflates the appearance of

Caesar as Zeus, expanding on the effect of Plato’s description to reveal Caesar’s claims to divinity as mere posturing, a status awarded by mortals. Like Vergil, Caesar’s status is conferred rather than earned.

In terms of narrative, Caesar is given only a brief comment on the many victories he won over Rome’s enemies, but the specifics of the description belie Christodoros’ praise. Christodoros describes Caesar as metaphorically surrounding or crowning the city

151 Christod. Ek. 97-98: Εἱστήκει δὲ Πλάτων θεοείκελος, ὁ πρὶν Ἀθήναις / δείξας κρυπτὰ κέλευθα θεοκράντων ἀρετάων.

109 of Rome with shields. The image of the city created by this metaphor both localizes

Caesar’s accomplishments and presents his conquests in terms of defensive . The metaphor of the shields also carries a darker implication because the verb strepho literally means to surround. In other words, the metaphor could be taken to indicate a siege of

Rome, with the shields of enemies (whose shields is never specified) serving as a metonymy for Caesar’s soldiers. Following this reading, Christodoros’ description is not a celebration of Caesar’s military victories, but a reminder of the costs of his , a reading that would have been supported by Caesar’s grouping with Alcibiades and

Chryses and would compare unfavorably to the reign of Anastasios who spent years fighting a civil war against Isaurian rebels, a war which was celebrated in Christodoros’ lost Isaurika.152 Both potential readings of the metaphor are supported by corresponding features found in Christodoros’ description of the statue of Pompey Magnus later in the

Ekphrasis.

The statue of Pompey is unique in the Ekphrasis because it contains the poem’s only developed reference to the contemporary world: a mention of the emperor

Anastasios’ claim to be descended from Pompey and the fact that both men conducted campaigns against the Isaurians.153 The depiction of Pompey in the Ekphrasis is at odds with that of Caesar, an antagonism that was likely intended for members of Christodoros’

152 The Isaurians were not, as a rule, considered to be Romans.

153 Cameron, ‘House of Anastasios,’ 259-263. The only other allusion to the contemporary world is Christodoros’ reference to Homer as ‘my father,’ Christod. Ek. 320. For the identification of this Anastasios with the emperor and not his nephew as well as the other evidence for Anastasios attempt to promote this association during his reign, see Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros,’ 377-381.

110 audience who would be familiar with the civil war the two men waged for control of

Rome:

Pompey, the foremost man among the victorious Ausonians, the shining monument of the Isaurian-slaying triumphs, was treading underfoot Isaurian swords, showing that he dragged the neck of Mt. Tauros like a slave under the yoke, bound by Nike’s unbroken chain. It was that man, a light to all, who gave rise to the holy line of the emperor Anastasios. This my blameless, sceptered king proved to all by slaying the tribes of the Isaurian land with his arms.154

Pompey’s competition with Caesar is spelled out at the beginning of the account. In a poem in which only four men are given the appellation Ausonian (Caesar, Apuleius,

Pompey, and Vergil), naming Pompey the ‘foremost’ among these and explicitly narrowing the field of competition to military conquest pulls the generals into direct competition. The two figures are further linked by the complementarity of their conquered spoils. Where Caesar is described as surrounding or crowning Rome with shields, Pompey is said to be treading upon the swords of his enemies. The complementarity of their war prizes develops their competition on terms favorable to

Pompey. Not only does his scene lack the potential menace of Caesar’s statue, it actively

154 Christod. Ek. 398-406: Καὶ πρόμος εὐκαμάτων Πομπήιος Αὐσονιήων, / φαιδρὸν ἰσαυροφόνων κειμήλιον ἠνορεάων, / στειβομένας ὑπὸ ποσσὶν Ἰσαυρίδας εἶχε μαχαίρας / σημαίνων, ὅτι δοῦλον ὑπὸ ζυγὸν αὐχένα Ταύρου / εἴρυσεν ἀρρήκτῳ πεπεδημένον ἅμματι Νίκης· / κεῖνος ἀνήρ, ὃς πᾶσιν ἔην φάος, ὃς βασιλῆος / ἠγαθέην ἐφύτευσεν Ἀναστασίοιο γενέθλην. / τοῦτο δὲ πᾶσιν ἔδειξεν ἐμὸς σκηπτοῦχος ἀμύμων / δῃώσας σακέεσσιν Ἰσαυρίδος ἔθνεα γαίης.

111 imitates a prominent feature of imperial iconography in late antiquity: the calcatio colli or ritual trampling of enemies.155

The calcatio was a standard feature of ancient triumphs and the implication of the scene Christodoros presents is that the statue of Pompey is narratively situated in a moment of literal triumph. The triumphal scene is completed by the image of the victorious general parading the region he conquered, in this case the perennial redoubt of

Isaurian rebels, Mount , bound in chains. The semantic universe of the was deeply concerned with the representation of conquered territories through the parade of and spoils, allowing the triumph to function as a metaphorical annexation of conquered territory.156 Christodoros embraces this tradition but, by virtue of poetic license, is able to present the metaphor directly rather than through a description of a full triumphal procession (this is yet another way poetry is shown to be superior to visual media in the Ekphrasis).

Pompey’s triumph, in fact the entire description of Pompey’s statue in the

Ekphrasis is designed to allow Christodoros to introduce praise of Anastasios. The description of Pompey’s triumph is transferred intact to Anastasios through the genealogical connection and the parallel between the two men that Christodoros establishes on the basis of their common victories in Isaurian campaigns. Thus the description of Pompey is functionally transformed into a description of Anastasios. The

155 For the imitation of the calcatio colli as well as a survey of depictions of Anastasios’ Isaurian triumph, see Croke, ‘Poetry and Propaganda,’ 447-446.

156 I. Östenberg, Staging the World: Spoils, Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession, (Oxford, 2009) 283-292.

112 parallel between the two men culminates in the revelation of their familial connection, which is one of only two descending family relationships mentioned in the Ekphrasis despite the fact that several of the figures described, such as Achilles and Pyrrhos or

Amphiaraos and Alcmaon, were father and son.157 Christodoros’ pointed failure to acknowledge the connection between Rome and Troy allows the unexpected (and relatively recent) relationship between Pompey and Anastasios to supersede the expected, but never admitted, relationship between the Trojans and Romans, in particular that between Aphrodite, Aeneas, and Caesar.

Christodoros’ audience may also have been aware that Caesar came from a family, while Pompey was the son of a provincial Italian novus homo.

Christodoros’ quiet suppression of the Trojan heritage of Rome not only denies Caesar his divine descent, it also undermines the importance of his status as a patrician.

Likewise, the term Ausonian, by referring to the entire populace of Italy and not just the inhabitants of Rome, is able to occlude the class differences between these two men.

Under these circumstances, the Romanness of Pompey, and by extension of Anastasios, is able to compete on equal footing with that of Caesar, especially given Pompey’s superior, or at least more emphatically presented, victories in war.

Christodoros’ description of Pompey does more than just show that Pompey was superior to Caesar or that Anastasios was a true Roman, it radically redefines the boundaries of Romanness in order to assert the validity of the Roman identity of the

157 The other such relationship is the metaphorical relationship between Christodoros and Homer, discussed below.

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Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire and incorporate the Greek literary tradition into that identity. The Ekphrasis concludes in a crescendo of major Greek literary figures, a

Greek canon in bronze that includes Homer, Thucydides, Herodotos, , , and and mirrors the procession of Greek writers that followed the description of Deiphobos. Christodoros even makes a point of transforming a statue of the prophet

Alcmaon into a statue of the lyric poet Alcman in order to maintain the literary of this grouping.158 Instead of Deiphobos’ belligerent fury, this second sequence of Greek authors is juxtaposed with the victorious and pacifying victories of Pompey and

Anastasios. Pompey, whose Roman credentials are unimpeachable, supports Anastasios’ claim to the same based on shared success. The same logic applies to the Greek authors whose statues fill the Ekphrasis, their success as authors legitimizes their incorporation into a Greek Roman corpus. In the world of the Ekphrasis no one group or city can claim an a priori superiority in Romanness based on their heritage or tradition. Ausonians and

Cecropians compete for their Roman identities on equal footing and the competition is judged on achievement rather than family. Anastasios is allowed to claim Pompey as his ancestor based on his conquest of Isauria, just as Christodoros claims Homer as his father based on his works.

158 This is a part of Christodoros’ performance of learnedness, a major component of his poem, Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros,’ 373-377. This transformation is also a stark indication of Christodoro’s ability and willingness to control the contents of the Ekphrasis even in the presence of identifying inscriptions.

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Urban Space and Imperial Propaganda

Although the Ekphrasis is not focused on urban space in the same way as the New

History or Hesychios’ Patria, its rhetorical and literary effects are intimately connected with the space it describes. As mentioned above, the Zeuxippos baths, prior to their destruction in the Nika Revolt of 532, were located as the semantic heart of

Constantinople. Positioned between the hippodrome and the palace, the baths occupied a space between the imperial sphere, represented by the imperial residence (which also served as the seat of the imperial administration), and the popular sphere, represented by the hippodrome, the assembly point for the people of Constantinople. The ideology communicated by the baths, especially its statues, therefore existed at the intersection of public and imperial space in New Rome.

Given this placement, Christodoros’ reimagining of the identities and implications of the statue collection in the Zeuxippos becomes an attempt to reimagine the topography of late antique Constantinople. Instead of being a shrine to Rome’s Trojan roots or a disorganized assemblage of classical statuary, Christodoros transforms the collection (and by extension the Zeuxippos itself) into a statement of Roman identity that plays off of existing elements of Anastasian propaganda. Just as Anastasios’ regime sought to legitimize itself by claiming inheritance of Pompey’s romanitas, so too Christodoros seeks to legitimize Constantinople’s Greek heritage as a species of romanitas parallel, but in no way inferior, to that of the Trojan heritage of Old Rome.

Christodoros therefore occupies the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from his (rough) contemporary Zosimos. Zosimos saw Old Rome as the only legitimate font of

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Roman identity by virtue of its exclusive relationship with traditional Roman religious practice. Hesychios occupied a middle ground and attempted to transform Byzantion into

New Rome by giving the city a pseudo-Roman history. Hesychios was willing to assert

Constantinople’s equality with Rome, but only in terms that ultimately reinforced Rome’s claim to primacy in discussions of Roman identity. By reconceptualizing the Zeuxippos collection as an assertion of the equality of Greek Rome on Greek terms, Christodoros encourages his readers to view the Zeuxippos as a to Constantinople’s Greek cultural heritage and its Roman identity without conceding anything to Old Rome. Just as

Augustus used the so-called house of Romulus on the as proof of Roman identity and a reminder of his imperial legitimacy, so too Christodoros transforms the Zeuxippos collection into a monument that legitimized the practice of Roman politics in Greek

Rome. The placement of this reminder at the intersection of popular and imperial government in the heart of political Constantinople allowed it function as reservoir of identity for both emperor and people. Anastasios was the emperor of the eastern Roman empire, the Greek-speaking empire of Constantinople, therefore he was also unequivocally a Roman emperor for the Romans.

Anastasios and the Greek Rome

No citizen of the eastern Roman empire ever doubted that he was Roman. They called themselves Romans, were governed by the emperor ‘of the Romans,’ and were with few exceptions Roman citizens of equal legal standing to their western counterparts. The interest in Roman identity that appears in the works of Zosimos, Hesychios, and

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Christodoros does not reflect insecurity about the Romanness of the Eastern Empire, but rather an interrogation of the parameters and distinctiveness of eastern, Greek-speaking

Romanness, a question which rose to the forefront of political and intellectual life in the eastern empire following the fall of Rome, the death of Zenon, and the rebellion of the

Isaurian faction at court. Eastern Romanness, while never questioned, suffered from a notable lack of explicit ideological foundations. Centuries of literature and political messaging had constructed a robust system for validating the Romanness of the city of

Rome, populating its literature and history with usable pasts from which it was possible to conceptualize the present in normative Roman terms. After Augustus, these usable pasts often made reference to the Trojan descent of the Latin people. Vergil’s Aeneid and the opening of Livy’s are two prominent examples of the ways in which these mythistorical narratives could be adapted to specific literary and political agendas and together they demonstrate the utility of the Trojano-Roman narrative in conceptualizing Romanness.

The challenge for the writers, artists, and emperors of New Rome after 476 was to construct a new set of usable pasts and normative mythistorical Roman narratives that did not import the problems of a fallen Old Rome. Zosimos, confronted with this task, took the view that it was impossible; Romanness came from Rome, therefore the empire was doomed to fail so long as it lacked its religious heartland. To an extent, Zosimos’ historical formulation was correct. Even when they retook Rome in the and 540s, the Romans of the east did not reestablish the city as a center of empire, much less revive its ancient pagan festivals. By the age of Justinian, a new formulation was in the works

117 and Rome was fast becoming a historical footnote in the history of its empire. In contrast to Zosimos, Hesychios postulated two Romes linked by a shared antiquity and formed in a similar matrix of pressures and events. The weakness in Hesychios’ history, and it is possible, even likely, that this was addressed elsewhere in his corpus, was how to account for the divergent trajectories of the two Romes. While Hesychios, at least as he survives, fails to answer that question, Christodoros provides a clear response. For Christodoros, the different fates of Old and New Rome came down to their respective cultures. Old

Rome arose from the remnants of a broken and defeated people, but New Rome arose from the victors and was bolstered by the contributions of great thinkers and great , like Anastasios. Old and New Rome were the of the Roman world and neither was inherently more Roman than the other. The proof of New Rome’s Roman identity was not to be found in ancient stories, but in historical and contemporary events.

The survival and success of New Rome thereby became proof of eastern Romanness.

Despite the responses of these authors, debates over what it meant to be Roman did not abate between the death of Anastasios and the reign of Justinian. In fact,

Justinian’s policies threw the problem into even sharper as his Roman armies campaigned through the cradle of Roman civilization. The Italian campaigns launched by

Justinian elevated the demand for new narratives of Romanness from the level of propaganda to that of policy. As Justinian’s early successes gave way to the frustrations and failures of the 540s and 550s, the issue became ever more acute, especially when it came to accounting for the different fates of the two Romes. After all, if Old Rome could

118 fall, it was not difficult to imagine, in the midst of plagues, foreign invasion, and military collapse, that New Rome might suffer the fate of her elder sister.

CHAPTER TWO: ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM AND REPUBLICAN HISTORY IN THE AGE OF JUSTINIAN

The Roman Republic in the Sixth Century

The Romans never forgot the Republic. Even after centuries of imperial rule, the period of the consuls, as they generally called the era from the expulsion of the kings to the reign of Augustus, remained a crucial component of Roman identity. Under the principate, emperors went to great lengths to make themselves appear to be the natural outgrowths of the mutable constitutional offices of the Republic. Although the need to appear to function as Republican magistrates declined with time, coming to a decisive end with the military emperors of the third century, the Republic remained a vital component of

Roman history and identity. In particular, it was well known that Rome’s growth from city-state to master of the Mediterranean and took place largely under the rule of the consuls. For an imperial system that predicated its authority on military triumph,1 the Republic was a model and a challenge, a perpetual reminder that Rome’s success was not inextricably tied to the office of the emperor.

1 M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Tirumphal Rulership in the late antiquity, Byzantium, and the early medieval West (Cambridge, 1986) 35-79.

119

When the western Roman empire fell in the fifth century, the eastern empire, at least as far as our limited sources tell us, experienced a crisis of confidence and identity.

For some, like the militantly pagan Zosimos, the fall of the west was the inevitable consequence of new religions and the enervating dynamics of imperial rule. For such authors, the pagan Roman Republic became the Ur-myth of Roman identity and the only viable model for a successful Roman state.2 For eastern emperors, the end of Roman authority in the west appears to have motivated a move towards imperial rhetoric that embraced the Republic as the standard of Roman identity and as a source of validating authority. As discussed above, the emperor Anastasios (r. 491-518) came to power amidst demands for a ‘true Roman,’ and claimed for himself descent from Pompey the Great. Meanwhile, contemporary poets described at length the stable of Republican and mythical Roman heroes whose statues decorated the Zeuxippos. It is difficult to tell with the limited sources we have whether the Republic loomed large in Anastasios’ imperial self-presentation, or if his ancestry was a minor footnote in a larger program. We are likewise at a loss for the reign of Justin, though it is possible that this native Latin speaker found his path to the impeial office smoothed by his bona fides as a western

Roman. It is not until the ballooning of the historical record during the reign of Justinian that we are able to see a coherent program of imperial Republican rhetoric, one which is hinted at in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but which is more fully developed, under the oversight of Tribonian, in Justinian’s Novels.3

2 Zosimos’ views are discussed in the previous chapter at pp. 28ff.

3 For history and authority in Justinian’s Codex, see C. Pazdernik, ‘Justinianic Ideology and the Power of the Past,’ in M. Maas (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2005) 185-212 120

Our sources do not allow us to know how much of Justinian’s use of Republican history was traditional. Whatever prefatory material was once attached to Roman law is almost entirely lost, obliterated by time or the editors of the Theodosian Code.4 The inscriptional evidence is likewise scarce, attested only by rare and remarkable survivals such as Diocletian’s Price Edict. Whether a unique phenomenon or iteration on an established practice, Justinian’s use of the Republic in the Novels is closely tied to his contemporary circumstances, especially to the remarkable series of conquests he achieved in the first half of his reign. Justinians uses his Novels as a space for the construction of usable and useful Romans pasts which both establish evaluative criteria favorable to the emperor’s proven accomplishments and situate proposed projects in a supportive historical context. In the Novels, Justinian is attempting to reshape the past according to the needs of the present.

It is one of the great of the study of the sixth century that the emperor often associated with the Byzantinization of the Roman empire, its purported shift from

Classical to and Medieval supersitition, made such an effort to promote himself as a Republican figure and to frame both his conquests and reforms in the idiom of Republican history. The responses he set off show that in the sixth century the Republic was not an . Despite all of the ways in which contemporaries could and did respond to Justinian’s rhetoric, they often chose to confront the emperor on

at 198-205. For the relationship between the emperors and their legal officials during previous centuries, see T. Honoré, Emperors and (London, 1981).

4 For the Theodosian Code, see J. Matthews, Laying Down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven, 2000).

121 his own terms, to refute the legitimacy of his actions by refuting his formulation of

Roman history. The Republic was disputed ideological ground in the sixth century, and

Roman history was both the field and the weapon of this conflict. The focus on Roman history in Justinian’s Novels and the works of his contemporaries is an indication not only of the importance of that period in the construction of contemporary Roman identity, but also of the role of history in the political and intellectual world of sixth-century

Constantinople.

Novel 24 and the Trajectory of Empire

On 18 May 535, the Emperor Justinian promulgated three laws concerning the provincial administrations of Pisidia, Lykaonia, and Thrace.5 These were the first in a series of reforms of the eastern empire introduced in the course of the following year.6 The spring of 535 was an exciting moment in Justinian’s reign. His general Belisarios had, in 533-

534, reconquered North Africa with unexpected ease, while in 534 Justinian’s legal commission published the second edition of the Codex, completing its revision of Roman law.7 Following these successes, Justinian had dispatched to North Africa the

5 The Christian context of these novels is discussed by M. Maas, John Lydus: Antiquarianism and Politics in the Age of Justinian (New York, 1992), 45-8; idem, ‘Roman History and Christian Ideology in Justinianic Reform Legislation’, DOP 40 (1986), 17-31.

6 The last of the reform novels is dated 1 536: Just. Nov. 103.Ep (499.39-40). All discussion of the Novels will be based on the Greek text unless otherwise noted. The Greek text would have had the widest audience in the eastern Roman empire of the sixth century, and moreover more clearly presents the verbal parallels between the text of the laws and the content of contemporary authors, who, with a few notable exceptions, published in Greek.

7 For Justinian’s legal reforms, see T. Honoré, Tribonian, (Ithaca, 1978); C. Pazdernik ‘Justinianic Ideology,’ 185-212.

122 previous winter with orders to sail to in the spring before moving on to Italy;

Justinian had begun his campaign to reconquer the Roman homeland from the

Ostrogoths.

It was at this point, in the midst of what Honoré called the ‘age of hope,’ that

Justinian and his advisers chose to reform the administration of the eastern provinces.8

The readership of these laws is somewhat uncertain, but, dealing as they did with high posts in the imperial administration, they would certainly have been read closely by ambitious members of the senate and officials serving in the provinces, as well as by numerous bureaucrats and secretaries such as Ioannes Lydos, Jordanes, and Prokopios.9

Given the intended audience, as well as the unrest that reform might generate in a conservative society rife with special interests, it is no surprise that Justinian and his legal advisors sought to justify the necessity of the reforms enacted in these laws.10 What is surprising is the way in which they went about it: crafting a historical narrative of Roman success predicated on the offices of the Roman Republic.

Although the first three reform novels were published on the same day, they have an internal order, with Novel 24, concerning the province of Pisidia, explicitly identified as the first.11 Justinian’s official voice, ghost-written here by Tribonian,12 begins this

8 Honoré, Tribonian, 17.

9 For Lydos and the law, see J. Caimi, Burocrazia e Diritto nel De Magistratibus di Giovanni Lido (, 1984). For Prokopios’ legal background and its influence on his history, see G. Greatrex, ‘Lawyers and Historians in Late Antiquity,’ in R. Mathisen (ed.), Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2001) 148-161.

10 For the interaction between landed interests and the Roman government, see P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006) 149-176.

11 Just. Nov. 24.1 (190.24-5). 123

Novel not with a discussion of Pisidia, or even the administration of the provinces, but a historical interpretation of Rome’s rise to empire:

We believe that the ancient Romans would never have been able to assemble so large a politeia from small, even trivial, beginnings and afterwards to have taken hold of and won for themselves the entirety of the inhabited world, so to speak, if they had not appeared more august by sending more senior magistrates into their provinces and granted them authority over both arms and laws, and if they had not had men who were competent and distinguished in both fields.13

Justinian here assumes the persona of a critical historian, rather than the solicitous father- figure we find in many of his other laws.14 The subject Justinian has been investigating is the original rise of the Roman empire from small beginnings in Italy to the world empire it claimed to be at its height. One source of Rome’s success, Justinian argues, was its use of senior magistracies, in particular the , whose name Justinian attributes to their

‘going before all others and establishing the battle line,’ as well as organizing military exercises and giving judgments concerning the law.15 This lexical antiquarian flourish both supports Justinian’s claim to learnedness and draws attention to the two elements

12 Honoré, Tribonian, 117-38.

13 Just. Nov. 24.Pr (189.7-15): Καὶ τοὺς πάλαι Ῥωμαίους πεπιστεύκαμεν οὐκ ἆν ποτε δυνηθῆναι τοσαύτην πολιτείαν ἐκ μικρῶν καὶ ἐλαχίστων ἀρχῶν συστήσασθαι καὶ πᾶσαν ἐξ αὐτῆς τὴν οἰκουμένην, ὡς εἰπεῖν, προσλαβεῖν τε καὶ καταστήσασθαι, εἰ μὴ μείζοσιν ἄρχουσιν ἐν ταῖς ἐπαρχίαις πεμπομένοις σεμνότεροί τε ἐντεῦθεν ἐφάνησαν καὶ παρέσχον αὐτοῖς ἐξουσίαν ὅπλων τε καὶ νόμων, καὶ πρὸς ἑκάτερον εἶχον αὐτοὺς ἐπιτηδείους τε καὶ ἀξιοχρέους καθεστῶτας.

14 C. Pazdernik, ‘Justinianic Ideology,’ 191.

15 Just. Nov.24.1 (189.15-9): οὓς δὴ καὶ πραίτωρας ἐκάλουν ἐκ τοῦ πρὸ τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων ἰέναι καὶ παρατάττεσθαι ταύτην αὐτοῖς δόντες τὴν προσηγορίαν, ἐπιτρέψαντές τε αὐτοῖς καὶ τὰ πολεμικὰ διοικεῖν καὶ τὰ περὶ τῶν νόμων γράφειν. For the history of the praetorship, see T.C. Brennan, The Praetorship in the Roman Republic, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2000).

124 that make up not only the praetor’s power, but also Justinian’s own. Arms and laws are designated the special provinces of the praetor, but a reader in 535 would recognize that they were now those of the emperor himself. The conquest of Africa, the codification of the laws, and the invasion of Sicily gave ample evidence of Justinian’s expertise in both fields, albeit through talented subordinates. Justinian therefore predicates his rhetorical authority in the Novel on his research and his own record as emperor.

By drawing attention to his own special talents alongside those of the ancient praetors, Justinian creates a parallel between his office and the one he is restoring. This parallel is enhanced by the statement that opens the law: the Romans would never have gained their empire if not for the office that combined authority over laws and arms. The negative phrasing allows Justinian to make a specific claim. The praetors may not have been the only factor that contributed to Rome’s rise, but they were an indispensable one.

The claim also establishes a principle that is at the heart of Justinian’s reform legislation and the imperial administration’s talking points in 535: restoration. By associating himself and his office with the ancient praetors, Justinian creates a parallel between the original expansion of the Roman empire, and his current campaigns to restore it to its ancient boundaries.

Justinian positions himself as a restorer not only of political boundaries, but also of the administration, stating that he is reintroducing the praetorship ‘because we were reflecting upon [the origins of Roman success], leading antiquity back into the politeia

125 with a greater flowering, and exalting the name of the Romans.’16 Justinian here makes the terms of his restoration clear. He is not content with reestablishing the ancient Roman state; he is going to restore antiquity with ‘a greater flowering’ (μετὰ μείζονος ἄνθους).

This metaphor is significant not only because it elevates Justinian’s works above those of the ancient Romans, but also because it links his law with the authority of the natural world. Novel 24 was published in mid-May. The coincidence of spring, highlighted by

Justinian’s flower metaphor, with the start of the Italian campaigns and the theme of restoration all serve to emphasize the renewal, or re-blossoming, of the Roman world after a period of decline.

The phrase ‘greater blossom’ would have had another meaning for some readers.

The words used for ‘blossom’ in the laws are flos (Lat.) and anthos (Gr.), the depersonalized versions of and Anthousa which were the names of the goddesses who represented the of Rome and Constantinople respectively and served in addition as their sacred names.17 While depersonalized, the use of flos/anthos is peculiar enough to attract notice, as is the fact that the words are found only four other times in the Novels, and only in laws published between 535 and 536 reforming the administrations of provinces.18 The term, then, was closely linked to the rhetoric of the reforms Justinian enacted during this period. Given the context of its first appearance, it

16 Just. Nov.24.1 (189.26-8): Ταῦτα ἐννοοῦντες ἡμεῖς, καὶ τὴν παλαιότητα πάλιν μετὰ μείζονος ἄνθους εἰς τὴν πολιτείαν ἐπαναγαγόντες καὶ τὸ Ῥωμαίων σεμνύναντες ὄνομα.

17 Lyd. Months, 4.30, 4.73, and 4.75; G. Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451 (Paris, 1974) 44-45.

18 Aside from Novel 24, the term occurs in Novel 28, 29, 30, and 103. Novel 28 and 29 were published on 16 535, Novel 30 on 17 536, and Novel 103 on 1 July 536.

126 seems that Justinian is attempting to insert a reference to his ambitions in the west, an attempt made possible by widespread contemporary interest in the history of both the sacred names and their associated festivals.19

The specific use of flos/anthos in Novel 24 (quoted above) points to an interest in the city of Rome. The blossoms are referred to as maior and meizon respectively, words which perhaps resonated in the broader discussion of the relative roles of Rome and

Constantinople in the late Roman world. The use of the word meizon to refer to elder

Rome goes back at least as far as Libanios, who uses it obliquely when comparing

Antioch to the empire’s other capitals.20 The term megas was still associated with Rome in the sixth century; Prokopios records a letter, purportedly sent to by Belisarios on the occasion of Totila’s , that attempted to dissuade the Gothic king from demolishing the city. This letter repeatedly uses words related to megas to make its case, calling Rome ‘the greatest’ (μεγίστη) city in the world, reflecting on its unrivalled greatness (μεγέθος), and claiming that its destruction would be a ‘great crime’ (ἀδίκημα

μέγα).21

Given the contemporary association between Rome and ‘the greater,’ the scholarly interest in the names of Rome, the worship of Flora/Anthousa in the sixth century, and the restriction of the words flos and anthos to the provincial reform novels published between 535 and 536, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest that

19 Lyd. Months, 4.30, 4.73, and 4.75; Malalas, 322.88; Chron. Pasch. 52.18.

20 Lib. Or. 11.270; J. Crow, ‘Water and Late Antique Constantinople’, in L. Grig and G. Kelly (edd.) Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012) 116-35 at 116-7.

21 Prok. Wars 7.22.8-16. The letter to Totila is discussed in detail below, see pp. 269ff.

127

Justinian is here alluding to the city of Rome. Moreover, Justinian’s claim about the

‘greater blossom’ is followed immediately by his claim to be ‘exalting the name of the

Romans.’ The text of the law forces the reader to consider the subject of names alongside this puzzling reference to a flower, specifically ‘the greater’ flower.

The political situation in Italy in the months prior to the publication of Novel 24 likewise supports reading ‘greater blossom’ as an allusion to Rome.22 Amalasuintha, the

Gothic queen-regent in Italy, had opened negotiations with Justinian in 534 when her son became ill.23 She had initially promised to hand Italy over to the emperor, but reneged on the agreement, crowning her disgraced cousin in 534.24 Theodahad imprisoned Amalasuintha that winter and Justinian responded by ordering his ambassador

Peter the Patrician to make private and public statements in support of the queen.25 These statements failed to protect Amalasuintha, who was murdered on 30 April 535, eighteen days before the promulgation of Novel 24, provoking the invasion of Sicily. While news of Amalasuintha’ death may not have reached Constantinople by 18 May 535, regaining

Rome was an active (though still covert) imperial project when the law was drafted.

Understanding Rome as the ‘greater blossom’ makes Justinian’s somewhat awkward phrase, ‘leading antiquity back into the politeia with a greater blossom,’

22 E.K. Chrysos, ‘Die Amaler-Herrschaft in Italien und das Imperium Romanum: Der Vertragsentwurf des Jahres 535’, Byz. 51 (1981) 430-74.

23 For Amalasuintha, see PLRE 2.65 (Amalasuintha).

24 Prok. Wars 5.3.28 and 5.4.1-11. For Theodahad, see PLRE 2.1067-1068 (Theodahadus).

25 Prok. Wars 5.4.22. For , see PLRE 3b.994-998 (Petrus 6).

128 intelligible. He claims to be restoring the ancient status of the Roman empire, most notably by reconquering its ancient capital.

Novel 24 also marks Justinian’s first use of the term oikoumene in the Novels.26

The term, which refers to the entirety of the inhabited world, had a long history in discussions of the rise and dominance of the Roman empire, beginning with Polybios

(about whom more below). The word draws attention to the extent of the Roman empire in the period before its collapse in the west and, under other circumstances, might have been a source of embarrassment to an imperial system that controlled only half of that territory. However, in 535 it reminds the reader of Justinian’s accomplishments and ambitions rather than his shortcomings, indicating that his goal is to retake all of the territory formerly held by the Romans.

It is in terms of the Roman rise to dominance over the oikoumene that Justinian defines the role of the praetors, arguing that they made two significant contributions to that expansion:

A great deal of law derives from the edicts of praetors, and there were many praetors; some conquered and administered Sicily, some the island of , others Spain and still others conquered and administered other lands and seas.27

26 The term also appears in Novel 40, 109, and 132, published in 534/5, 541, and 545 respectively. The date of Novel 40 differs in the Greek (18 May 536) and Latin (18 May 535) text. In either case, Novel 24 contains one of the first uses of the term in the Novels.

27 Just. Nov. 24.Pr (189.21-5): καὶ πολὺς νόμος ἐκ τῆς τῶν πραιτώρων ἐξεχέθη φωνῆς, πολλοί τε πραίτωρες οἱ μὲν Σικελίαν οἱ δὲ Σαρδὼ τὴν νῆσον οἱ δὲ Ἱσπανίαν οἱ δὲ ἄλλην κατεκτήσαντό τε καὶ διῳκήσαντο θάλαττάν τε καὶ γῆν.

129

The statement about the praetors’ contributions to the development of Roman law is true, but far more interesting are the areas of praetorian administration that Justinian chooses as examples: Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. These three territories are also linked to the beginnings of the Roman empire and the origins of the praetorship in the Digest. Quoting from the jurist Pomponius on the topic of the origin of laws and all the magistracies, the

Digest states that ‘when Sardinia had been taken, and soon Sicily, and then Spain, and finally the province of Narbonensis, praetors were created for each place, as many provinces as came under [Roman] authority.’28 The use of Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain in the Novel, combined with the exclusion of Narbonensis, points to the origins of the

Roman empire in the first two (fought against , which occupied the same territory in North Africa that Justinian had just reconquered), the first of which gave

Rome Sicily and Sardinia, the second of which gave her Spain.

By referencing the very first provinces brought under Roman control, Justinian not only continues his display of learnedness, upon which he has based his claim to authority in this Novel, but also narrows the parameters of the parallel he is drawing between ancient and contemporary Roman expansions. Justinian uses Sicily, Sardinia and

Spain to indicate that his own expansion is still in its earliest phases and that it will be accomplished through military force. Specifically, he had taken Sardinia and was in the process of taking Sicily, leaving only the conquest of Spain to be accomplished. Rome

28 Just. Dig. 1.2.32: Capta deinde Sardinia, mox , item , deinde Narbonensi provincia totidem praetores , quot provinciae in dicionem venerant, creati sunt, partim qui urbanis rebus, partim qui provincialibus praeessent.

130 herself is excluded from the historical parallel, but is indicated through the reference to the ‘greater blossom.’

The allusion to the Punic Wars, along with thematic and linguistic parallels, link

Justinian’s discussion of Roman history in Novel 24 to the history of Polybios and, through Polybios, to the related discussion of Rome’s trajectory in Zosimos’ New

History. At a basic level, Justinian’s depiction of Roman expansion, focusing on the smallness of the city of Rome and its rise to dominance over the entire Mediterranean, closely mirrors Polybios’ description of his subject in the opening lines of his history:

Which man now living is so stupid and lazy that he would not wish to understand how and with what type of government (politeia) it happened that in fewer than fifty-three years a single empire, that of the Romans, came to rule virtually the entire inhabited world (oikoumene).29

Polybios’ history, like Novel 24, is concerned with the phenomenon of Roman expansion as a function of its politeia. Polybios, in his discussion of the Roman constitution, attributes the success of the Roman state to its unique balance of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements in government.30 Justinian’s formulation ignores this template, for obvious reasons, and focuses instead on the magistracies of the state. In doing so, Justinian’s laws are responding to objections such as those raised by Zosimos,

29 Polyb. 1.1.5: τίς γὰρ οὕτως ὑπάρχει φαῦλος ἢ ῥᾴθυμος ἀνθρώπων ὃς οὐκ ἂν βούλοιτο γνῶναι πῶς καὶ τίνι γένει πολιτείας ἐπικρατηθέντα σχεδὸν ἅπαντα τὰ κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην οὐχ ὅλοις πεντήκοντα καὶ τρισὶν ἔτεσιν ὑπὸ μίαν ἀρχὴν ἔπεσε τὴν Ῥωμαίων.

30 Polyb. 6.18.

131 who used Polybios’ history as a framework for understanding the decline and fall of the

Roman empire.

Zosimos and the Context of Novel 24

As discussed in chapter one, Zosimos’ New History was written at the end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century and may be an unfinished work, presumably due to the author’s death.31 Zosimos makes two explicit references to Polybius in his work, the first of which comes in the opening lines:32

It appeared proper to Polybios the Megalopolitan, in deciding to hand down to posterity the deeds of his own time that were worthy of remembrance, to show by means of the deeds themselves how the Romans, despite waging war on their neighbors for six hundred years following the founding of their city, did not acquire a great empire, but having subjugated to themselves some portion of Italy and, despite being deprived of it following the arrival of Hannibal and the defeat at Cannae, when they saw their enemies pressing upon their very walls, they were raised to such a degree of fortune that in fewer than fifty-three years they won for themselves not only Italy but also all of Libya and they had already brought the western Iberians under their control.33

31 W. Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (New York, 2007), 108.

32 This passage is also discussed in chapter one, see pp. 28ff.

33 Zos. 1.1.1: Πολυβίῳ τῷ Μεγαλοπολίτῃ, μνήμῃ παραδοῦναι τὰ καθ' ἑαυτὸν ἀξιόλογα τῶν ἔργων προελομένῳ, καλῶς ἔχειν ἐφάνη δι' αὐτῶν ἐπιδεῖξαι τῶν πράξεων ὅπως οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι μετὰ τὸν τῆς πόλεως οἰκισμὸν ἑξακοσίοις ἔτεσι τοῖς περιοίκοις προσπολεμήσαντες μεγάλην ἀρχὴν οὐκ ἐκτήσαντο, μέρος δέ τι τῆς Ἰταλίας ὑφ' ἑαυτοὺς ποιησάμενοι, καὶ τούτου μετὰ τὴν Ἀννίβα διάβασιν καὶ τὴν ἐν Κάνναις ἧτταν ἐκπεπτωκότες, αὐτοῖς δὲ τοῖς τείχεσι τοὺς πολεμίους ὁρῶντες ἐπικειμένους, εἰς τοσοῦτον μέγεθος ἤρθησαν τύχης ὥστε ἐν οὐδὲ ὅλοις τρισὶ καὶ πεντήκοντα ἔτεσιν μὴ μόνον Ἰταλίαν ἀλλὰ καὶ Λιβύην κατακτήσασθαι πᾶσαν, ἤδη δὲ καὶ τοὺς ἑσπερίους Ἴβηρας ὑφ' ἑαυτοὺς καταστῆσαι.

132

For Zosimos, Polybios is the historian of Rome’s rise and he himself is now the self- appointed historian of its fall. Zosimos ties himself to Polybios by making Roman success contingent on its form of government: ‘so long as affairs were watched over by the aristocracy, [the Romans] continued to add to their empire every year because the consuls competed eagerly to surpass one another in virtues.’34 Zosimos alters Polybios’ formulation by making the consuls a part of the aristocracy and linking imperial expansion not with competent administrators, but with the struggle for glory among the senatorial .

Administration does play a role in Zosimos’ discussion of the problems caused by monarchical rule: it becomes a conduit for the projection of the emperor’s own failings.

Discussing the reign of Augustus, Zosimos highlights a major problem with monarchical regimes:

[The ancient Romans] failed to notice that by entrusting the whole government to the judgment of that man they had gambled with the hopes of all men, entrusting the danger of this sort of empire to the initiative and ability of a single man.35

34 Zos. 1.5.2: ἕως μὲν ὅτε τὰ τῆς ἀριστοκρατίας ἐφυλάττετο, προστιθέντες ἔτους ἑκάστου τῇ ἀρχῇ διετέλουν, τῶν ὑπάτων ὑπερβαλέσθαι ταῖς ἀρεταῖς ἀλλήλους φιλονεικούντων.

35 Zos. 1.5.2: καὶ τῇ τούτου γνώμῃ τὴν πᾶσαν διοίκησιν ἐπιτρέψαντες ἔλαθον ἑαυτοὺς κύβον ἀναρρίψαντες ἐπὶ ταῖς πάντων ἀνθρώπων ἐλπίσιν καὶ ἑνὸς ἀνδρὸς ὁρμῇ τε καὶ ἐξουσίᾳ τοσαύτης ἀρχῆς καταπιστεύσαντες κίνδυνον.

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The efficiency of monarchical rule depends on the talents of a single man.36 In the Roman world, especially in the later empire, the talents of the emperor were supplemented by a large bureaucracy, in which Zosimos himself had served.37 The fundamental problem with the bureaucracy under a monarch is, according to Zosimos, the preference shown to flatterers (κόλακες), who are rewarded at the expense of the moderate (οἵ ἐπιεικεῖς).38

The results of such administrative corruption are telling: the cities are filled with sedition and disturbances, civil and military affairs are handed over to greedy officials, and the efficacy of the armies is ruined.39 Zosimos is thought to have died about a quarter century before Justinian took the throne, but his critiques of the imperial administration are echoed in a number of works from the age of Justinian, including the emperor’s own

Novels.40

36 See also, F. Paschoud, ‘La Digression Antimonarchique du Préambule de l’<>,’ in Cinq Études sur Zosime (Paris, 1975) 1-23; A. Kaldellis, ‘Republican Theory and Political Dissidence in Ioannes Lydos,’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 29 (2005) 1-16.

37 Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians, 108.

38 uses this term as code for a ‘pagan gentleman,’ P. Athanassiadi, Damascius: The Philosophical History (, 1999), 146n.120.

39 Zos. 1.5.4: Οἵ τε γὰρ κόλακες παρὰ τούτου δωρεῶν καὶ τιμῶν ἀξιούμενοι τῶν μεγίστων ἀρχῶν ἐπιβαίνουσιν, οἵ τε ἐπιεικεῖς καὶ ἀπράγμονες μὴ τὸν αὐτὸν ἐκείνοις αἱρούμενοι βίον εἰκότως σχετλιάζουσιν οὐ τῶν αὐτῶν ἀπολαύοντες, ὥστε ἐκ τούτου τὰς μὲν πόλεις στάσεων πληροῦσθαι καὶ ταραχῶν, τὰ δὲ πολιτικὰ καὶ στρατιωτικὰ κέρδους ἥττοσιν ἄρχουσιν ἐκδιδόμενα καὶ τὸν ἐν εἰρήνῃ βίον λυπηρὸν καὶ ὀδυνηρὸν τοῖς χαριεστέροις ποιεῖν καὶ τῶν στρατιωτῶν τὴν ἐν τοῖς πολέμοις προθυμίαν ἐκλύειν.

40 Zosimos’ thematic affinity with the sixth century has been noticed before, S. Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge, 2013) 85-94.

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Justinian admits, in a Novel published on 15 April 535, that his officials have become corrupt because they need to recoup their investments after purchasing offices.41

In Novel 24, Justinian forbids the Justinianic praetor of Pisidia from purchasing his office, increases his official salary, and orders him to keep his hands clean.42 The emperor’s rapacious officials were a popular topic among contemporary writers; in particular, Ioannes the Cappadocian’s depredations are reported by Lydos and

Prokopios.43 Likewise, the decline of the military under Justinian is a major topic in the

Anonymous Dialogue on Political Science, a philosophical dialogue on the model of

Plato or Cicero,44 while the dismissal of the limitanei is a sore point for Prokopios in his

Secret History,45 as is the rise of seditions in the cities in the form of conflict between the

Blues and .46 Prokopios even goes so far as to link administrative corruption with imperial failure, citing the disaffection in Italy that resulted from the depredations of the logothetai.47 Zosimos’ objections to imperial rule were common enough that we can find

41 Just. Nov.8.Pr (64.10ff). See also A. Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia, 2004), 150-1599.

42 Just. Nov.24.1 (190.14-5).

43 Lyd. Mag. 3.57-8, 62, 65; Prok. SH. 23.14; Prok. Wars 1.24.12-15 and 1.25.8-10.

44 For the Anonymous Dialogue on Political Science, see P. Bell, ‘Introduction,’ in Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian: Agapetus, Advice to the Emperor; Dialogue on Political Science; Paul the Silentiary, Description of (Liverpool, 2010) 49-78. For the role of philosophy in political thinking in late antiquity, see D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2003).

45 For the genre of the Secret History, see A. Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (London, 1985), 57-61; A. Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea, 142-50; idem, ‘The Date and Structure of Prokopios’ Secret History and his Projected Work on Church History,’ GRBS 49 (2009) 585-616.

46 Prok. SH. 24.12-14 and 7.

47 Prok. SH. 18.13-15, 24.9-11; Prok. Wars 7.1.28-33. 135 contemporary conversations on the topic from the beginning of the sixth century until at least the 550s.

It is not immediately clear from the opening of Zosimos’ work that he is the historian of Rome’s decline. That announcement comes slightly later in the first book, and is distinguished by a second reference to Polybios: ‘just as Polybios has recorded how the Romans won for themselves an empire in a short time, I will recount how they, in not much time, ruined it with their wickedness.’48 As was discussed in chapter one,

Zosimos places this statement in his account of the fall of the Palmyrene empire. The moment is apt because the trajectory of the Palmyrenes imitates, albeit in a shorter period, that of the Romans. Prior to their defeat, the Palmyrenes receive dismal and abusive oracles from Apollo, while a temple to Aphrodite actively rejects their sacrifices, both past and present.49 The breakdown in the relationship between the Palmyrenes and the gods was evidence of imminent imperial decline. Zosimus argues that a similar breakdown in religion was the cause of the Roman collapse, but notes a significant difference between the two cases: the Palmyrenes were abandoned by the gods, but the

Romans chose to abandon the gods, adopting instead a new and foreign religion.50

48 Zos. 1.57.1: Πολυβίου γὰρ ὅπως ἐκτήσαντο Ῥωμαῖοι τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐν ὀλίγῳ χρόνῳ διεξελθόντος, ὅπως ἐν οὐ πολλῷ χρόνῳ σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν αὐτὴν διέφθειραν ἔρχομαι λέξων.

49 Zos. 1.57.2-58.3.

50 Zos. 1.58.4.

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Jordanes and Novel 24: An Alternate Trajectory

Zosimus was not the only author to complain of Roman decline and frame it in terms of the Republic. Jordanes’ Romana, published around 551 in Constantinople, also discusses the overall trajectory of the empire.51 Jordanes’ history is an ambigious work; it resembles an epitome in length, a chronicle in style, and a classicizing history in its use of allusion and intertext. Jordanes himself calls the Romana an adbreviatione chronicorum at the beginning of his Getica, which is itself framed as a digression from the Romana, linking the texts in a unique way. Neverthless, the Romana is explicit in its goals; the work is addressed to Vigilius, who asked Jordanes for a summary of Roman history.

Jordanes agrees to undertake the project and defines his topic in this way:

You wish to understand the disasters of the current world, either how it began or what has persisted even up to our own time, and I have explained this. You add, moreover, that I, having selected the small blossoms from the works of our ancestors, should present to you briefly how the Roman respublica seized, held, and subjugated virtually the entire world, and how it even now continues to do so in appearance.52

51 Goffart linked Zosimus, the Novels, and Jordanes, arguing that Jordanes was attempting to adapt Zosimus’ narrative for a Christian context, W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550- 800): Jordanes, , , and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988), 54-57. The majority of recent literary scholarship on Jordanes has focused on the Getica rather than the Romana. See especially B. Swain, ‘Jordanes and : A Case Study of Intertextuality in the Getica,’ CQ 60 (2010), 243-9 at 243-5; C. Whately, ‘Jordanes, the Battle of the Catalaunian , and Constantinople’, Dialogues d’histoire ancienne supplément 8 (2013), 65-78. For a more complete assessment of Jordanes as an author and historian, see now B. Swain, Empire of Hope and Tragedy: Jordanes and the Invention of Roman-Gothic History, Dissertation (The Ohio State University, 2014).

52 Jord. Rom. 1-2: enim praesentis mundi erumnas cognuscere aut quando coepit vel quid ad nos usque perpessus est, edoceri. addes praeterea, ut tibi, quomodo Romana res publica coepit et tenuit totumque pene mundum subegit et hactenus vel imaginariae teneat, ex dictis maiorum floscula carpens breviter referam.

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Jordanes’ approach to Roman history is a neat inversion of Justinian’s. Instead of seeing a Roman world on the rebound, poised to reassume its ancient shape, Jordanes sees a

Roman empire in decline and focuses his project on explaining that decline. Jordanes responds to Justinian’s discussion of Roman revival by invoking the same fundamental question: how did the Romans achieve dominance over almost the entire world? His history also takes aim at Justinian’s claim to have restored, or to have begun the restoration of, the former empire by calling that restoration appearance rather than reality.

After his address to Vigilius, Jordanes begins his history of Rome with the same formulation Justinian uses in his description of the praetors: ‘the Romans, as Iamblichos says, made the world their own through the use of arms and laws: whatever they arranged with arms, they preserved with laws.’53 Although he does not extend this analysis through the rest of his work (at least not explicitly), the comment clearly echoes the rhetoric of

Justinian’s Novels. Likewise, when recounting the beginnings of Justinian’s Italian campaigns, Jordanes refers to Belisarios as the ‘tamer of the Carthaginians (Poenorum domitor).’54 The word he uses refers not to the contemporary inhabitants of Carthage, but to the Phoenician enemies of Rome in the Punic Wars. This usage stands out because

Jordanes has discussed the reconquest of Africa just a few lines before and there correctly identified the enemy as the Vandals. In fact, Jordanes mentions the Vandals in the same sentence he uses Poenorum domitor, reporting that Belisarius displayed the treasures of the Vandals in his triumph. The title Poenorum domitor is poetic and striking, and it

53 Jord. Rom. 6.

54 Jord. Rom. 368. 138 indicates the same moment in Roman history, the Punic Wars, which Justinian invoked in his reforms.55 The connection is further confirmed by Jordanes’ use of the term Poenus in his account of the Punic Wars.56

The title Poenorum domitor ties the character of Belisarios to Justinian’s reform program while the general’s other tie him to the Republic. During his account of

Belisarius’ defeat of the Goths, Jordanes repeatedly refers to him as , even though the term of his consulship expired in 535.57 Only two other figures are named consuls in Jordanes’ narrative after the death of Crassus: Theoderic and , both

Goths.58 For both the consulship is mentioned incidentally, while for Belisarios it becomes a standard title, marking him out as a Republican figure. Moreover, Jordanes grants Belisarios traditional Republican titles for his victories, Vandalicus and Geticus, setting Belisarios up as a Republican for Justinian, who in fact took both of those names in his official titulature.59 Jordanes transfers the glory and the titles to Belisarios, while transferring Belisarios back to the Republic.

The Vergilian echoes in the title Poenorum domitor also call attention to the similarities between Belisarios’ campaigns and the travels of Aeneas. Both men begin in

55 Vergil uses ‘equum domitor’ to translate the Homeric epithet ἱππόδαμος. See Verg. Aen. 7.189, 7.651, 7.691, 9.523, 12.128 and 12.550, cf. Hom. Il. 24.804. For Jordanes’ use of Vergilian allusions, see Swain, ‘Jordanes and Virgil’, 246-9, and Whately, ‘Jordanes’, 70-1.

56 Jord. Rom. 165 and 166 inter alia.

57 Jord. Rom. 373, 377, and 378.

58 Jord. Rom. 348-9 and 361. For Theoderic, see PLRE 2.1077-1084 (Fl Theodericus 7). For Vitalian, see PLRE 2.1171-1176 (Vitalianus 2).

59 Jord. Rom. 377.

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Asia, by Troy, sail to Africa, spend time at Carthage, and move from Africa to Italy.

Moreover, the goal of both men is to establish the Roman state in Italy.60 In Belisarios’ case, he is re-founding Rome and the necessity of this re-founding is emphasized by

Jordanes in his description of the Rome Belisarios finds upon his arrival:

The consul Belisarios entered the Roman city [Romanam urbem] and was received by that populace which had once been Roman and by the senate (although that name had already been all but buried along with its virtue).61

Although not unheard-of in , the formulation Romana urbs is rare and a striking substitution for the expected , which Jordanes uses elsewhere in his narrative.62 The usage is not affectation, but part of Jordanes’ attack on the Roman identity of the inhabitants and government of Rome in the sixth century. Jordanes breaks the citizens of Rome into two categories: the senate and people. The people he calls ‘once

Roman,’ but he reserves greater disdain for the senate which he says had, for all intents and purposes, been buried by this point, along with its virtue. His choice of words is deliberate; by referring to buried virtue Jordanes is referencing the tombs of famous

Romans that dominated the urban landscape of ancient Rome. It is worth noting that

Prokopios points to these same monuments, in the letter to Totila recounted in his Wars,

60 The story of Aeneas and his Trojans is also behind Jordanes’ depiction of the Gothic migrations in the Getica, Swain, ‘Jordanes and Virgil’, 247 and 249.

61 Jord. Rom. 373: consul Belisarius Romanam urbem ingressus est exceptusque ab illo populo quondam Romano et senatu iam pene ipso nomine cum virtute sepulto.

62 See especially his description of the founding of the city, Jord. Rom. 87 and 94.

140 as signs of the greatness of Rome.63 Jordanes is making the opposite point but to similar effect. The Romans have lost their romanitas and even the senate, which was responsible for the expansion of the Roman state, has lost the virtue that previously defined it. The

‘greater bloom’ Justinian had hoped to add to his empire is, in Jordanes’ telling, a degenerate imitation of Rome, undead, and sharing only the name of its predecessor and barely that.

Jordanes concludes his history by taking aim directly at Justinian and the idea of

Roman revival that Justinian proposed in his laws. After reviewing the difficult peace in newly conquered Africa, the ongoing conflicts in Italy, and the campaigns against the

Persians, Jordanes reports:

These are the disasters of the Roman respublica besides the daily presence of the , , and Sclavini. If anyone wishes to know about these things, let him review the and the consular list without revulsion and discover that the respublica of our time is worthy of a tragedy. And let him know from where it arose, how it grew…or rather how it subdued all lands to itself and how it lost them again on account of its ignorant rulers.64

Jordanes’ recommendations for further reading are a series of responses to Justinian’s policies that call into question the emperor’s claims of a Republic-inspired restoration.

Leaving aside the obvious (and daring) claim that the Romans lost their empire through

63 Prok. Wars 7.22.11-12.

64 Jord. Rom. 388: Hi sunt casus Romanae rei publicae preter instantia cottidiana Bulgarum, Antium, et Sclavinorum. que si quis scire cupit, annale consulumque seriem revolvat sine fastidio repperietque dignam nostri temporis rem publicam tragydiae. scietque unde orta, quomodo aucta, qualiterve sibi cunctas terras subdiderit et quomodo iterum eas ab ignaris rectoribus amiserit.

141 the incompetence of their rulers, Jordanes uses his closing passage to imply the disintegration not only of the empire but also of Roman history. He begins his conclusion with the verb revolvo, which literally refers to rewinding a scroll and, in the context of his history, traveling back through time to when the state of the respublica was not material fit for tragedy. Even more pointed is Jordanes’ mention of the consular lists. Writing in the 550s, Jordanes would have been aware that the consulship had been a dead institution since 541, in fact this likely accounts for his fixation on Belisarios’ consulship, as he was the last man of proven merit to hold the post.65 Jordanes’ recommendation is a reminder that consular history has ended. This is important for two reasons. First, consular years were used to date all of Roman history after the expulsion of the kings, so the end of that office was, in some sense, the end of Roman history. Justinian himself was responsible for both the end of the consulship as a post and the supplanting of its role in Roman timekeeping with the regnal years of the emperor.66 Second, by calling attention to the end of the consulship, Jordanes heightens the tension inherent in the term respublica because the consulship was, for many late antique authors including Justinian, the defining office of the Republic and its most important survival. The period of the

Republic was the period in which Rome gained her empire. By focusing on the end of

Republican timekeeping, and by extension of Republican history, Jordanes is divorcing

Justinian’s reign from the period the emperor invoked in Novel 24. Moreover, if

65 Prok. Wars 8.21.2-3.

66 Just. Nov. 47.Pr (283.1ff). 142 magistrates played a key role in the rise of Rome, as Justinian claims, then the irony of his abolishing the highest magistracy of the Roman state cannot be overstated.

Finally, Jordanes makes the claim that the current state of the empire is fit material for tragedy. This statement is not, as it might be in English, simply a poetic way of referring to the sorry state of the empire, but a technical reference to Athenian tragedy.

Readers might recall Aristotle’s criteria for , Aristotle describes the ideal tragic as:67

The sort of man who is neither exceptional in his virtue and justice nor falls into misfortune on account of his evil or hatefulness, but on account of a mistake (hamartia), and is one of those who has a great reputation and good fortune.68

The Roman empire, at its height, certainly met the qualifications for reputation and fortune, which raises the question: What, in Jordanes’ formulation, is the hamartia of the

Roman empire? Jordanes explicitly points to the incompetence of the rulers of Rome. The phrase used here, ignarus rector, is meaningful. Jordanes avoids the terms we would expect if he were referring solely to the imperial office (, augustus, etc.) and instead uses a term that could refer to a whole range of leaders, including magistrates and emperors. Moreover, the adjective ignarus links the hamartia of Rome to its both linguistically and semantically. According to Aristotle, the anagnorisis is the

67 For Aristotle on Greek , see D. Munteanu, Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge, 2012) 70-140.

68 Arist. Poet. 13 (1453a): ἔστι δὲ τοιοῦτος ὁ μήτε ἀρετῇ διαφέρων καὶ δικαιοσύνῃ μήτε διὰ κακίαν καὶ μοχθηρίαν μεταβάλλων εἰς τὴν δυστυχίαν ἀλλὰ δι' ἁμαρτίαν τινά, τῶν ἐν μεγάλῃ δόξῃ ὄντων καὶ εὐτυχίᾳ.

143 moment at which the hero of a tragedy appreciates the reality of his or her situation, generally in regard to some personal relationship.69 Jordanes’ history is the anagnorisis of the tragedy of the Roman empire and the realization that it has been led astray by its rulers. Aristotle argues that the effect of the anagnorisis is the creation of either friendship or hostility based on the truth perceived.70 Rome’s rulers, in Jordanes’ telling, are revealed to be the enemies of Rome’s success.71

The Romana combines several traditions of historical writing, epic poetry, and

Aristotelian literary analysis in order to generate a coherent historical narrative that inverts the historical reasoning of Novel 24. In doing so, Jordanes mirrors the wider discussion of Republican history, and particularly Republican offices, in which it is participating. The coherence of the debate presented by Justinian (through Tribonian),

Zosimos, and Jordanes, as well as the broad interest in similar questions apparent in a variety of works from the sixth century, demonstrate a broad contemporary interest in the causes of Rome’s successes and failures. This coherence also has implications for the audience of these works because authors must have expected that some readers would be able to link their works back to the broader debate. In the case of Jordanes, such readers would have been expected to associate his discussion with Novel 24 and perhaps even with one or more of the works of Zosimos, Prokopios, Lydos, and the Dialogue on

69 Arist. Poet. 11 (1452a).

70 Arist. Poet. 11 (1452a).

71 This is in contrast to Goffart’s argument that, though downbeat, the Romana is not critical of Justinian, Goffart, Narrators, 57-8.

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Political Science.72 The extent and interconnectedness of the discussions taking place in the sixth century is evidence for the existence of a coherent intellecual movement concerned with understanding and representing the historical causes of Rome’s success in order to comment upon contemporary political issues.

Novel 13: Administrative Corruption and Urban Reform

In developing the rhetoric for the reorganization of the eastern provinces in 535,

Tribonian predicated Justinian’s authority on research into the magistracies of the ancient

Romans, that is on his knowledge of the history of the praetorship. This rhetorical approach allowed Tribonian to associate Justinian with the explosive expansion of the

Roman Republic after the Second Punic War. The posture of erudite restorer was an effective method for burying the lede and postponing a discussion of other motivating factors, in particular brigandage, corruption, and administrative infighting, which were also addressed by these laws. A similar approach characterizes the rhetoric of Novel 13

(Praetor of the Plebs), which Justinian promulgated on 15 535. The law reconstituted the post of the prefect of the watch (praefectus vigilum) as the ‘praetor of the people’ (praetor plebis), raising the standing and authority of the office in the process.73 Like the reforms of the eastern provinces, Justinian justifies his actions in

Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) by promoting his authentic Roman identity at the expense

72 Some of these authors may have had direct contact, A. Kaldellis, ‘Identifying Dissident Circles in Sixth- Century Byzantium: The Friendship of Prokopios and Ioannes Lydos,’ Florilegium 21 (2004) 1-17.

73 For the praefectus vigilum in the Roman world, see C.J. Fuhrmann, Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration, and Public Order (Oxford, 2012) 56-58.

145 of his subjects and arguing that Constantinople ought to be governed by magistrates that paralleled, and superseded, the ancient offices of consul and plebeian . Both tracks of Justinian’s argument were challenged by contemporary authors who responded to his history, his discussion of Roman identity, and his formulation of the relationship between

Rome and Constantinople. In particular, Ioannes Lydos and Prokopios wrote responses, both direct and indirect, to the rhetoric of Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) that variously opposed, modified, and expanded upon the emperor’s rhetoric.

Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) contains within itself the narrative of the emperor’s discovery, investigation, and correction of the office of the praefectus vigilum.

Justinian begins by indicating that the corruption of the office’s name first called his attention to the problem:

We do not know how the name of magistrates of the watch (agrypnia), which was distinguished and famous among the ancient Romans, has assumed a different name and rank. For our native language called these men the praefecti vigilum, entrusting these men with command over the watchmen and the men who leave nothing uninvestigated. We do not know for what reason the language of the Greeks calls these men the of the nights, as if, so it seems, they take up their office when the sun sets and lay it aside when the sun rises.74

74 Novel 13.Pr (99.19-28): Τὸ τῶν λαμπροτάτων τῆς ἀγρυπνίας ἀρχόντων ὄνομα, σεμνόν τε καὶ τοῖς πάλαι Ῥωμαίοις γνωριμώτατον ὄν, οὐκ ἴσμεν ὅπως εἰς ἀλλοίαν μετέστη προσηγορίαν καὶ τάξιν. ἡ μὲν γὰρ πάτριος ἡμῶν φωνὴ praefectos vigilum αὐτοὺς ἐκάλεσε, τῇ τῶν ἀγρυπνούντων καὶ οὐδὲν ἀνερεύνητον καταλιμπανόντων ἀνθρώπων ἀρχῇ τούτους ἐπιστήσασα. ἡ δέ γε Ἑλλήνων φωνὴ οὐκ ἴσμεν ὅθεν ἐπάρχους αὐτοὺς ἐκάλεσε τῶν νυκτῶν, ὥσπερ ἀναγκαῖον ὂν ἡλίου μὲν ὡς ἔοικε δύνοντος ἐξανίστασθαι τὴν ἀρχήν, παύεσθαι δὲ ἀνίσχοντος.

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The law opens by establishing a thematic connection between the office under discussion and the persona Justinian has been cultivating in his laws.75 Justinian identifies the praefecti vigilum as the prefects of the agrypnia, a term that literally means sleeplessness and was a watchword in Justinian’s imperial self-representation. The earliest evidence for

Justinian’s sleepless persona is an inscription in the church of Ss. Sergios and Bacchos in the mid-520’s.76 The term is most often found, however, in the laws, where reference to

Justinian’s sleeplessness appears as early as 534, in the Institutes, and as late as 541.77

Contemporary readers of the Novels would therefore have been sensitized to key words such as agrypnia, which is used throughout the Novels to translate the Latin vigiliae. The mention of sleeplessness at the beginning of Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) therefore serves as a reminder of the emperor’s own sleeplessness, which is evident from his attention to a relatively trivial matter like the misnaming of an office by his subjects. The use of the term agrypnia likewise establishes the correct Greek translation of the Latin word vigiles, which is itself germane to the law.

The opening of Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) creates a rhetorical divide between the emperor and his Greek-speaking subjects in Constantinople, as well as, by extension, the predominantly Greek-speaking empire he ruled. The problem Justinian identifies is not that the Latin name has changed or that the office has been demoted, but that the

Greek language, through its speakers, has corrupted the perception of the office by

75 B. Croke ‘Justinian the ‘Sleepless Emperor,’ Byzantina Australiensia 17 (2010) 103-8, at 106.

76 B. Croke, ‘Justinian, Theodoros, and the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus,’ DOP 60 (2006) 25-63.

77 Croke, ‘Sleepless’, 103-8 at 105 and 105n.19.

147 erroneously mistranslating vigiles as ‘nights.’ This framing of the problem grants the

Latin language primacy at the expense of Greek and aligns Justinian with the more authoritative, and more traditionally Roman, Latin side of this linguistic divide. When

Justinian calls Latin ‘our native language,’ he is not only claiming it as the ancestral language of the Roman empire, but also as his own native tongue, leveraging his provincial origins (he was born in Latin-speaking Illyricum) to enhance his credentials as a ‘true’ Roman, one who is qualified to both detect and correct errors brought about by the inferior Romanness of his subjects.

The linguistic divide Justinian lays out in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) mirrors the contemporary reality of the Roman state, specifically the linguistic divide between the eastern and (what had been) the western Roman empire. Justinian’s Novels and Zosimos’

New History demonstrate an awareness of and a discomfort with the implications of the fall of the western empire. Justinian defused the question of Roman decline in Novel 24 by both promising to restore Rome to the empire (through his allusion to the ‘greater flower’) and reframing the trajectory of Roman fortunes, aligning his reign with the expansion of the Republican empire. By foregrounding questions of language and Roman identity in Novel 13(Praetor of the Plebs), Justinian calls attention back to this issue and implicates the Greek-speaking Romans of the east in the process of imperial decline.

Justinian argues throughout the Novels that the health of the empire is inextricably tied to the health of its magistracies, which implies that the corruption of the name and corresponding neglect of the office of praefectus vigilum has broad implications for the health of the empire as a whole. Justinian plays the restorer by virtue of his superior

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Latinity, a reflection of his superior Romanness, and thereby situates himself on the traditional, western side of the linguistic divide. He is thereby distancing himself from the process of Roman decline, complementing his attempt to associate himself with a new imperial trajectory in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia), which was published just five months earlier.

Justinian incorporates his reform of the office of praefectus vigilum into the program of Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and the other provincial reform Novels through the title he grants the restored office: praetor plebis, praetor of the people. Justinian explicitly cites his provincial reform laws in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), stating that

‘the laws make clear how revered the name of praetor is and how its standing is not far from the consulship.’78 This is an internal reference to the status laid out for praetors in

Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia), which was the model for all the other praetorships created in 535, and is noteworthy not only because it suggests a coherent rhetorical strategy for both Novel 13 and 24, but also because it assumes the existence of a readership that is familiar with both. This clue offers valuable insight into the ways in which Justinian and his legal team expected the Novels to be read. They assumed that at least some readers would be familiar with most or all of these laws and could grasp internal cross-references and allusions.

The newly constituted praetor of the people is explicitly paired in the discussion with another office, that of praetor urbis, or urban praetor. The urban praetor was the

78 Novel 13.1.1 (100.31-4): Τὸ δὲ τοῦ πραίτωρος ὅπως ἐστὶ σεμνόν, ὅπως οὐ πόρρω καθέστηκεν ὑπατείας, ὅπως ἐγγύτατα τοῦ νόμου τέτακται, δηλοῦσιν οἱ νόμοι.

149 head of the senate of Constantinople and tenure of that office conferred the highest rank available in that body.79 Justinian makes clear that the praetor of the people will hold a lower rank than the urban praetor, but frees the praetor of the people from oversight by the urban praetor. He then goes on to elaborate a system in which the two offices will work together to provide a coherent and comprehensive administration for the city of

Constantinople:

Just as the ancient consuls led the great (megiste) senate and the of the plebs held the reins of the people, in this way let the praetors of the senate do the things we mentioned before and let the praetors of the people assist the good order of the people and provide for their benefit.80

By paralleling the urban and plebeian praetors with the office of the consul and that of the plebeian tribune, Justinian is once again situating his reforms in the historical context of the Roman Republic. His rhetoric likewise has a geographical element: the megiste of the Novel clearly refers to the senate of Rome, which, I have argued, had long associations with the word megas in late antiquity and the sixth century.81 Justinian is therefore reforming his current capital on the model of Republican Rome, a step which implicitly acknowledges Rome’s superiority to Constantinople as a Roman capital. The fact that Justinian needs, and is able, to reform the administration of the city to make it

79 This was confirmed and formalized by Justinian in 537, Novel 62.2.

80 Novel 13.1.1 (100.35-101.3): καὶ ὥσπερ τὸ παλαιὸν ὕπατοί τε ἦσαν οἱ τῆς μεγίστης ἐξάρχοντες βουλῆς δήμαρχοί τε οἱ τὸν δῆμον ἡνιοχοῦντες, οὕτω δὴ καὶ νῦν ἔστωσαν πραίτωρες μὲν συγκλήτου οἱ τὰ ἔμπροσθεν ἡμῖν εἰρημένα πράττοντες, πραίτωρες δὲ τῶν δήμων οἱ τῆς εὐταξίας αὐτῶν ἀντιλαμβανόμενοι καὶ τοῦ συμφέροντος αὐτοῖς προνοοῦντες.

81 For more see the section on Novel 24, pp. 122ff.

150 follow a traditional Roman model raises questions about the Roman identity of both the city and its inhabitants. This question is echoed by Justinian in the opening of the Novel, where he distinguishes himself from his subjects on the basis of language. By creating this rhetorical distance from his subjects and their Roman identity, Justinian is also creating a need for his own services as an agent of restoration. This rhetorical strategy is enhanced by the political context of the autumn of 535. By basing his reforms in

Constantinople on a Republican model, Justinian is continuing the Republican associations that he established in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and making a subtle reference to his campaigns in the west. Justinian claims to be giving his empire a true

Roman capital by reforming Constantinople, but these reforms anticipate the return of

Rome, the true Roman capital, to the empire. Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) simultaneously advertises Justinian’s restoration of the west and the east, and acts as a preview of the political changes Justinian was expecting in the not-too-distant future.

Justinian bases his reform of the prefect of the nights on Republican offices because it furthers his rhetorical agenda, but his history of the tribunate is otherwise a complete fiction invented to serve the rhetorical purposes of this Novel. In praising the plebeian tribunate, Justinian is reversing several centuries of thought on the sources of order and disorder in the Roman Republic and misconstruing the purpose of the office.

Justinian claims the plebeian tribune was assigned to look after the good order of the people, in his words ‘to hold their reins.’ According to Roman tradition, however, the plebeian tribune was created after a plebeian secession in order to secure greater political

151 authority for the and offset the power of the (patrician) consuls.82 The adversarial, and at times hostile, relationship between these two offices was traditionally identified as a leading cause of the fall of the Republic, particularly by , who begins his account of the civil wars with the creation of the tribunate.83

The historical role of the tribune is not the only place where Justinian diverges from received wisdom. By modeling the authority of the plebeian praetor on that of the plebeian tribune, Justinian is also ignoring the major role tribunician powers played in constructing the authority of the imperial office. Augustus’ Res Gestae make clear that the potestas tribuniciae was a core component of imperial authority.84 This association lasted at least as late as the reign of Theodosius II, who claimed tribunicia potestas on his coinage.85 Justinian’s argument in favor of his reforms to the office of the prefect of the watch is supported by his claim to a superior understanding of traditional Roman offices, which in turn is based on his Latinity and research. Ironically, the formulation he produces is radically untraditional, ignoring both the historical role of the tribunate in civil disorders and in the formulation of imperial authority.

Fact-Checking the Emperor: Lydos’ Response to Novel 13

82 A. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford, 1999), 121-8.

83 Appian. Civil War. 1.1.

84 Augustus mentions his tribunician powers five times in the Res Gestae, often using it, along with the consulship, as a Republican alternative to regnal years: Res Gestae, 4, 6, 10, 15. For the Res Gestae, see A.E. Cooley, Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge, 2009).

85 D. Kienast, Römische Kaisertabelle: Grundzüge einer römischen Kaiserchronologie (Büttelborn, 2004), 40n164.

152

Justinian’s revisionism did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries, in particular Ioannes

Lydos, in his work On the Magistracies of the Roman State, directly contradicts

Justinian’s history of the prefect of the watch.86 To highlight the ironies of his tacit correction of Justinian, Lydos adopts the rhetoric of Justinian’s Novels in this work, arguing for the importance of the traditional magistracies of the Roman empire, in particular the . For Lydos, like Justinian, the names of offices encode and reflect their reasons for existing, inextricably binding their proper administration to a sound understanding of their names and histories. Throughout On the

Magistracies Lydos highlights the tension between Justinianic rhetoric and reality by offering his own histories of many of the same offices Justinian reformed. That Lydos is going out of his way to argue against Justinian is evident from the fact that he bothered to include the historically minor post of prefect of the watch in his list of the oldest, and therefore most important, magistracies of the Roman state. Moreover, Lydos places the office in an emphatic position at the end of the second book of his work. In his discussion, Lydos deliberately contradicts and undermines every argument Justinian lays out in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), beginning with the name of the office, which he calls…the prefect of the nights.

Lydos traces the prefect of the nights, which he claims is the ninth institution created after the kingship, to the sack of Rome by the (whom Lydos

86 For the reception of Justinian’s laws in Lydos’ De Magistratibus, see Caimi, Burocrazia.

153 misidentifies as the ) in 387 BC.87 According to Lydos, the prefect of the nights was specifically created in response to the Gallic entry into the city at night, making the name both descriptive and appropriate.88 Lydos’ version of events therefore contradicts that of Justinian, who mocks the idea that the authority of the prefect of the watch would be restricted to the night. Lydos goes on to quote the jurist Paulus who, in Lydos’ translation, referred to the predecessors of the prefects of the watch, the triumvirs, as the

‘night men’ (nykterinoi). The use of Paulus is significant as he was among the jurists included in Justinian’s Digest of Roman law, meaning that his information and opinions had received official sanction from the emperor himself. Moreover, the lines Lydos quotes are, though he does not point this out, taken directly from the Digest itself. They are the opening lines of the section on the praefectus vigilum:

Among the more ancient Romans, the triumvirs were in charge of defending against fires and these men were called the nocturnals (nocturni) from that time because they kept the watch.89

Lydos is quoting Justinian’s officially sanctioned legal authorities against the emperor, highlighting the hypocrisy of his attack on the association between the praefectus vigilum and the night. Moreover, the section Lydos quotes is not the most explicit mention of an

87 This event is the climax of the fifth book of Livy, see Livy, 5.34-50. For the Senones, see R.M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy: Books 1-5 (Oxford, 1965) 709-710; V. Kruta, ‘Les Sénons de l'Adriatique d'après l'archéologie (Prolégomènes),’ Études celtiques 18 (1981) 7-38.

88 Lyd. Mag. 1.50.

89 Just. Dig. 1.15.1: Apud vetustiores incendiis arcendis triumviri praeerant, qui ab eo quod excubias agebant nocturni dicti sunt.

154 association between the praefectus vigilum and the night: that mention comes a few lines later when Paulus states that ‘it should be known that the praefectus vigilum is responsible for keeping watch through the entire night.’90 Lydos has already demonstrated his knowledge of the Digest, so it is reasonable to assume he was familiar with the remainder of the passage he began quoting. The second, unquoted passage adds to Lydos’ critique by making it clear not only that these prefects were called ‘nocturnal’ but also that their authority was in fact circumscribed by the setting and rising of the sun, an idea Justinian specifically mocks in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs). It is also worth noting, again, that Lydos expected some portion of his audience to be familiar enough with the Digest to recognize that he was not quoting the entire entry, and that there was more ironic information in the text that followed. Like Justinian, Lydos’ assumptions indicate the existence of (or at least his belief in the existence of) a group of readers intimately familiar with Roman law.

Lydos’ response to Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) challenges Justinian’s authority by exposing his ignorance of, or contempt for, the legal system that he himself put in place. Lydos then goes a step further and attacks Justinian’s rhetorical justification for his reform of the office: the corruption of the post by a false name. In the process,

Lydos calls into question the basis of Justinian’s insight into the problems plaguing the office: Justinian’s Latinity, and by extension his superior Romanness. In his description of the modern incarnation of the office of praefectus vigilum, Lydos mentions that, even in his own time, the citizens of Constantinople summon the prefects by shouting ‘omnes

90 Just. Dig. 1.15.3.3: Sciendum est autem praefectum vigilum per totam noctem vigilare debere…

155 collegiati, concurrite’ in the ‘ancestral tongue of the Romans (τῇ πατρίῳ Ῥωμαίων

φωνῇ).91 This phrase recalls Justinian’s reference to ‘our ancestral tongue’ in the preface to Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), and challenges the implicit assertion that the emperor has an exceptional knowledge of the Latin language in contrast to his Greek subjects. The

Greek citizens of Constantinople, from whom Justinian is attempting to distinguish himself in the Novel, are revealed to retain a greater Latinity than the emperor would have his readers believe. Moreover, Lydos promotes the Latinity of the

Constantinopolitans over that of the emperor by arguing that their phrase, ossified remnant though it may be, preserves accurate information about the original nature of the office, namely that the praefecti vigilum were members of a college rather than holders of a single office with command over several subordinates.

Inverting the Party Line: Prokopios and Novel 13

Lydos’ history of the praefectus vigilum is a point-by-point refutation of the counterpart history given in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), targeting both the accuracy of Justinian’s information and the rhetorical basis of his authority in the Novel. A complementary attack is made by Prokopios, who focuses not on the rhetoric, but on the real-world consequences of Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs).92 In his Secret History, Prokopios

91 Lyd. Mag. 1.50: οἱ τυχὸν ἐπικαίρως ἐξ αὐτῶν εὑρισκόμενοι βοῶντες τῇ πατρίῳ Ῥωμαίων φωνῇ ‘omnes collegiati ,’ οἷον εἰπεῖν, ‘πάντες ἑταῖροι συνδράμετε.’

92 The complementary nature of Prokopios and Lydos’ critiques might not be coincidence. Kaldellis has argued that they were members of the same literary circle and may have been familiar with one another’s works, Kaldellis, ‘Identifying Dissident Circles,’ 3-4.

156 identifies the prefect of the people as an entirely new office, created at the expense of both tradition and the authority of the urban praetor:

And as if the existing magistracies that had long been established were not sufficient for his purposes, he devised two more to add to the state, even though the magistracy in charge of the city populace (ἡ τῷ δήμῳ ἐφεστῶσα ἀρχή) had previously handled all criminal accusations.93

The two new magistracies Prokopios goes on to identify are the praetor of the people and the quaesitor, and he claims that Justinian invented them in order to increase the ranks of the informers and to have an excuse to innocent people.94 Although this hyperbole is a standard feature of the Secret History, the of Justinian as the destroyer of his own people takes on special poignancy in this case because Prokopios claims that the praetor of the people made of point of sorting through recovered property in order to offer the emperor choice items.95 This ‘perpetual source of priceless goods,’ as Prokopios dubs it, parallels the abuses that, by Justinian’s own admission, took place under the old office of the prefect of the watch. In the section of Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) given over to the actual reform of the office, Justinian admits that under the old system officers of the prefect used their positions to extort protection money from criminals. Justinian frames his discussion of these abuses within a narrative of imperial investigation:

93 Prok. SH. 20.7, trans Kaldellis.

94 Prok. SH. 20.7.

95 Prok. SH. 20.10-11.

157

We have learned of the wicked arrangements of these men in contradiction of their duties, and we are speaking of the investigators of robberies, the doers of good works, cutpurses, and the rest of the crowd, each of whom it is more fitting to punish rather than allow them to live in such a way. For the status of the investigators of robberies is of such a sort that they do nothing for the sake of the good, but only according to the following manner: when they discover thieves they hunt for some profit from them for themselves and for their superiors.96

Again we see Justinian presenting himself as a tireless investigator, not only of the

Roman past but of this own officials, whose corruption must be restrained for the good of the populace. Prokopios’ account of the actual functioning of the new praetor of the people alludes to this narrative established in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs) and casts

Justinian in the role of the investigators he is chastising. Instead of correcting the abuses of these investigators, Justinian is extorting protection money from his own officials, rather than from thieves, in the form of ‘unclaimed’ property that had in turn been stolen from honest citizens. By casting Justinian in the role of a corrupt investigator, Prokopios is subjecting the emperor to the same judgment the emperor originally passed on these officials: he is more worthy of punishment than life. This of Justinian also serves to reinforce the sinister interpretation of Justinian’s tireless investigations and innovations that runs throughout the Secret History. Justinian is not tirelessly searching for wrongs to make right, but for abuses to imitate and franchise.

96 Novel 13.4 (102.35-103.4): Μεμαθήκαμεν δὲ αὐτοῖς πρὸς ὑπουργίαν εἶναι τάγματα πονηρά, φαμὲν δὲ λῃστογνώστας τε καὶ βενεφικιαλίους καὶ βαλαντιοτόμους καὶ ἕτερον πλῆθος, ὧν ἕκαστον προσῆκόν ἐστι κεκολάσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ τοιαῦτα βιοῦν. οὐδὲ γὰρ τὸ τῶν λῃστογνωστῶν τοῦτο τοιοῦτόν ἐστιν ὡς ἐπ' ἀγαθῷ τι πράττειν, ἀλλ' ἐπὶ τούτῳ μόνον γινώσκουσι τοὺς κλέπτας, ἐφ' ᾧ τι κέρδος ἑαυτοῖς τε καὶ τοῖς ἄρχουσιν αὐτῶν θηρᾶν.

158

Prokopios goes on to level one more charge against the praetor of the people, as well as the urban praetor and quaesitor, namely that Justinian, at some point, removed the distinctions between their jurisdictions and encouraged them to ‘compete with each other to see who could destroy more people in the shortest time.’97 The verb Prokopios uses is

ἐπιστέλλω, which Kaldellis suggests could refer to a Novel that is no longer extant.98

Whether or not there was ever an official pronouncement to this effect, the charge is an appropriate inversion of Justinian’s Republican model in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), but one that ironically corresponds more closely with the standard narrative of the late

Republic. Justinian, according to Prokopios, is forcing the urban praetor and the praetor of the people to compete with one another (ἐρίζω) in their abuse of the populace.

Because Justinian aligned these offices with the consuls and plebeian tribunes respectively, his order in effect corrects his previous, and unhistorical, model of civic harmony, replacing it with a vision of strife and contention whose effect is the ruin of the people, and by extension the state. All of these features may be found in the opening chapters of Appian’s Civil Wars and are linked explicitly to the struggle between the consuls and tribunes. Prokopios is therefore, like Lydos, correcting Justinian’s historical revisionism while maintaining the emperor’s rhetoric in order to underscore both the importance of proper history and the illegitimacy (or criminality) of the emperor’s reforms.

97 Prok. SH. 20.13, trans. Kaldellis.

98 A. Kaldellis, The Secret History and Related Texts (Indianapolis, 2010) 91n18.

159

The Precedents for Novel 13

In addition to the criticisms of Justinian’s reforms that are found in the works of Lydos and Prokopios, precedents can be found for the emperor’s formulation in earlier authors.

Writing two centuries earlier, parallels the offices of urban praetor and prefect of the watch/praetor of the people as well as their respective roles in controlling different segments of the populace. It is worth revisiting this discussion because it provides a clear precedent for Justinian’s model of divided government in the context of the establishment of the imperial regime under Augustus as well as a precedent for the political use of historical memory.99

Dio wrote and published his Roman History in the early third century after years of serving in the imperial administrations of the Severan emperors. By the time he finished, Dio’s work covered events from Aeneas up through the reign of Alexander

Severus, but the history has not been preserved intact and large groups of books are missing, though fragments and later summaries do survive. Among the sections of the

Roman History that survive intact are books fifty through fifty-six, which contain Dio’s account of the reign of Augustus, beginning with his victory at . Dio’s fifty- second book is given over to a discussion among Augustus, Maecenas, and about the future of the Roman state and whether or not Augustus should retain sole rule.100 The discussion takes the form of two speeches, one by Agrippa in favor of

99 Fergus Millar’s work remains the standard volume on Dio, F. Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford, 1964) 102-18. See below for the passage in Dio.

100 On this debate, see E. Adler, ‘Cassius Dio’s Agrippa-Maecenas Debate: An Operational Code Analysis,’ The American Journal of Philology 133.3 (2012) 477-520; P. McKechnie, ‘Cassius Dio’s Speech of Agrippa: A Realistic Alternative to Imperial Government?’ Greece & Rome 28.2 (1981) 150-155; D. 160 restoring the Republic—Dio uses the word demokratia but earlier references to the

‘senate and people’ (ἡ γερουσία καὶ ὁ δῆμος) make the meaning clear101—and the other by Maecenas advocating that Augustus maintain his monarchy (monarchia).

The constitutional discussion that occupies book fifty-two is framed in the terms and arguments that are found in classical authors such as Herodotos and Plato, situating it in a long tradition of Greek constitutional discussions that included Polybios, among others. Agrippa’s argument is an ethical one: he argues that a monarchy is deleterious to the quality of men a state produces, as well as to the ethical and moral well-being of the monarch himself. Maecenas, on the other hand, avoids all such considerations and discusses the pragmatics of power and the impossibility of stepping down from sole rule.

Not content to make his case in the abstract, Maecenas proceeds to lay out for Augustus a system of imperial government that is explicitly designed to, among other things, maintain control over the senators, , and people, while giving the latter two groups opportunities for advancement and service. The central balancing act of this program is maintaining the appearance of Republican offices, while stripping them of any powers that might threaten Augustus. Maecenas also advocates an end to elections, arguing that the emperor should appoint men to all offices himself:

You yourself should choose all of these [officeholders], and you should not appoint any of them in consultation with the assembly or people, because they

Fishwick, ‘Dio and Maecenas: The Emperor and the Ruler Cult,’ 44.3 (1990) 267-275; A. Gowing, The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio (Ann Arbor, 1992).

101 Dio, 52.1.

161

will form factions (stasiazō), nor in consultation with the senate, because they will be ambitious.102

Maecenas’ suggestions align closely with the policies enacted in Novel 13 (Praetor of the

Plebs), in particular the conception of the consuls and tribunes, and by extension the urban praetor and the praetor of the people, as tools for governing their respective segments of society.103 The emphasis on direct imperial appointment also links this discussion to the sixth century: one of Justinian’s major reforms was the requirement that future praetors of the people not begin to exercise their authority until they received the of their office from the emperor.104

Maecenas mentions both the prefect of the city (poliarchos) and the prefect of the watch in his advice to Augustus, and uses both offices to elaborate his scheme for maintaining political control under a monarchy. The prefect of the city is to be placed in charge of the day-to-day operations of the city, superseding the authority of the consuls, and function as the head of the legal system, reviewing appeals and presiding over capital cases.105 The prefect of the city is a direct imperial appointee sitting at the top of the two major fields of endeavor permitted to the senators and knights, the and

102 Dio, 52.20.3: αὐτὸς μέντοι σὺ πάντας αὐτοὺς αἱροῦ, καὶ μήτε ἐπὶ τῷ πλήθει ἢ καὶ τῷ δήμῳ ἔτι τινὰ αὐτῶν ποιήσῃ, στασιάσουσι γάρ, μήτε ἐπὶ τῷ συνεδρίῳ, διασπουδάσονται γάρ.

103 It is important to note that this does not contradict the historical formulation of authors such as Appian because this episode is set after the conclusion of the civil wars and concerns the future administration of these offices.

104 Just. Nov. 13.3 (102.1-6).

105 Dio, 52.21.1-2.

162 the courts, making the office an obvious check on the power of the two highest strata of

Republican society.

The role of the prefect of the watch is less explicit. Maecenas mentions, in a discussion of the administration of the , that ‘one of the foremost knights, after those mentioned above, should be appointed prefect of the watch

(nyktophylax) for a set term, and another should be put in charge of the grain supply and the rest of the markets.’106 Although Maecenas does not explicitly indicate that these posts are meant to control the population, they are certainly meant to be part of the broader regime he is imagining, one that aims to control both the people and the senate.

The intent behind the office of the prefect of the watch can be gleaned from its context; the prefect of the watch is mentioned as an afterthought in a discussion of how to arrange the command structure and business of the Praetorian Guard. Given that the guard was concerned both with the emperor’s personal safety and maintaining order in Rome (not always distinct), the prefect of the watch must be understood to contribute to the good order of the urban population. This impression is reinforced by the pairing of the prefect with the in charge of the grain supply and the markets, the two fields in which the average resident of Rome would most often interact with the imperial government and the major tool through which the government could influence the populace. The prefect of the watch is discussed in the context of offices and institutions that would bolster the emperor’s ability to regulate and restrain the urban population, strongly

106 Dio, 52.24.6: νυκτοφύλαξ δὲ ἕτερος, καὶ ἐπὶ τοῦ σίτου τῆς τε ἀγορᾶς τῆς λοιπῆς ἕτερος ἔκ τε τῶν ἱππέων τῶν πρώτων μετ' ἐκείνους καὶ ἐς τακτὸν χρόνον ἀποδεικνύσθωσαν.

163 suggesting that, like Justinian, Maecenas understood the office as a check on the populace.

Although Dio (through Maecenas) provides a potential model for Justinian’s division of responsibility between a chief civilian administrator—in Dio’s narrative the prefect of the city but in Justinian’s time the urban praetor—and the prefect of the watch, his discussion does not explain Justinian’s willingness to divorce the imperial office from the tribunate. Justinian’s historical and constitutional revisionism undermined any attempt to frame the emperor or his authority in Republican terms or view the empire as an extension of the Republican government. Justinian makes this view of Roman history explicit in Novel 47 (On Dating), promulgated on 31 August 537, when he breaks Roman history into three periods, the first beginning with Aeneas, the second with Romulus and

Remus, and the third with Caesar.107 This periodization of Roman history not only obliterates the Republic as a distinct period or governmental form, it also normalizes monarchy by creating a direct relationship between the emperors and the monarchical

Roman founders. It is not a coincidence that Novel 47 (On Dating) is the law that removed the consuls from their privileged place in Roman timekeeping.108 By conceptualizing the period of the Republic as something utterly distinct from contemporary Roman politics, Justinian emphasizes and valorizes his reforms; his reforms are not mere restorations of existing offices, but a broad reconceptualization of

107 Just. Nov. 47.Pr. (283.12-284.3). This Novel is discussed further in the next chapter, pp. 171ff.

108 Discussed also in the section on Novel 24, pp. 122ff. 164 the structure and function of the city administration that bridges the tremendous gap between the current empire, in particular Constantinople, and Republican Rome.

By overstating the degree and foreignness of his reforms, Justinian draws further attention to his attempt to model contemporary Constantinople on Republican Rome. The added scrutiny invites the question of why he would be so concerned with promoting this association. The answer is to be found in Justinian’s foreign policy, which was in 535 concerned primarily with Italy. The emperor was engaged in negotiations with the Amal court over the surrender of the peninsula, and, as a failsafe and negotiating tactic, he had ordered Belisarius’ conquest of Sicily, which could (and would) serve as the springboard for an invasion of Italy in the spring of 536. Faced with the return of the city of Rome to the Roman empire, Justinian was eager to cement his capital’s Roman credentials and call attention to his imminent success. The period of the Republic was well-suited to this task because contemporary Rome was just as temporally and politically divorced from the

Republic as Constantinople. This distance gave Justinian the opportunity to remind his reader of the importance of Rome as the cradle of empire and bolster the Roman credentials of Constantinople in the face of the return of the ancient capital; although

‘greater’ Rome was returning to the empire, Justinian had made New Rome more Roman than the original. Both agendas reflected well on the emperor and accorded with the rhetorical focus of his laws in 535 by reinforcing his depiction of himself as a restorer of both offices and empires.

165

Laws, Histories, and Offices

Justinian’s attempts at writing history were focused around his desire to coopt the historical legitimacy of the Roman Republic in order to clothe his administration in a mantle of traditional Romanness. That this was a coherent program meant to build upon itself is evident from the thematic consistency of the Novels and their internal references to one another. Justinian, or at least Tribonian, intended for the histories laid out in the

Novels, especially the administrative reform Novels, to function as a coherent, if not complete, history of the Roman state. The creation of such a corpus was an invitation to contemporary authors to read and respond to Justinian’s laws as though they were a text, an invitation that was accepted by most of the major authors of the period.

The defining feature of these responses is not their hostility to Justinian and his regime, but their decision to engage the emperor on his own terms, whether they were fact-checking the emperor’s history against his own pronouncements, as was the case with Lydos and Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), or inverting the logic of Roman revival, as Jordanes did with Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia). This phenomenon demonstrates that

Justinian and his legal team had accurately gauged contemporary interest in issues of

Roman history, in particular the history of the Republic, a conclusion confirmed by the close correspondences between the ways in which Justinian and Zosimos framed the issue of Roman success and failure. Justinian and Tribonian had their finger on the pulse of the intellectual scene in Constantinople in the sixth century and used the Novels to insert the emperor into contemporary debates in an attempt to bend the development of historical memory in a direction favorable to the emperor’s policies. This attempt

166 ultimately failed because it galvanized Justinian’s critics and inspired them to impose on their works the burden of responding to the emperor. The similarities between these responses indicate not only the creation of a specific social memory shared among

Jordanes, Prokopios, and Lydos, but also a coherent attempt by a social and intellectual movement to deauthorize Justinian’s official historical narrative.

At the heart of the debate Justinian inspired lay Roman history and its utility for understanding and framing the sixth century. The notion that our understanding of the present is shaped by our understanding of the past is not a modern invention, but was a deeply felt conviction among the authors of the sixth century who contested the emperor’s history precisely because it did not fit with their experiences of their present or their perceptions of their emperor. It is not a coincidence that Jordanes, Lydos, and

Prokopios all published their works at roughly the same time, in the early 550s, or that they chose to respond to laws published fifteen years before, laws written during the ‘age of hope.’ Justinian had reconfigured Roman history to support his attempts to reconquer the western Roman empire and the apparent failure of his policies in the 540s and early

550s demanded a response from the historians of the sixth century. Although these responses varied according to the models and intentions of the individual authors, they shared a general agreement that Justinian’s Roman history was wrong and could not go unchallenged.

167

CHAPTER THREE: CONSULAR HISTORY IN THE AGE OF JUSTINIAN

Killing the Consulship

For all of Justinian’s Republican posturing, there remained one insoluble problem with an emperor valorizing the period of the Republic: the role of the consulship. Although governmental authority was widely distributed among various offices in the Republic, the consulship was, and more importantly was remembered to be, the chief executive office, holding broad authority over the conduct of foreign policy and acting as one of the preeminent civil authorities in the city of Rome.1 By the sixth century, however, the role of the consul had shifted considerably in both function and prestige. Under the Republic the consulship was the highest office in government aside from exceptional posts such as the ; it was the end of the cursus honorum. In the sixth century, the consulship was ranked below several other posts, especially the urban prefect, who served as the president of the senate of Constantinople, and the rank was ranked below a variety of other titles including patrician.2 The same was not true of the consulship in the last days of Roman rule in the west. In Rome and Ravenna the

1 For the domestic power of the Republican consulship, see F.P. Polo, The Consul at Rome: The Civil Functions of the Consuls in the Roman Republic (Cambridge, 2011). For the consulship in late antiquity, see R. Bagnall, Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta, 1987).

2 G. Dagron, Naissance d’une capital: Constantinople et ses institutions de330 à 451 (Paris, 1974) 226-239 and 283-286.

168 consulship was often awarded to powerful generals who effectively ruled in the name of weak emperors.3

In this context, the office posed clear problems to Justinian’s rhetorical agenda in the Novels. The challenge for Tribonian and his legal team was to craft a rhetorical approach that could access the authority of the Republic without creating tension between the consulship and the office of emperor. One imagines the need for such a solution became more intense following the tremendous successes and consulship of Belisarios, whose consular procession through Constantinople in of 534 involved the distribution of Vandal treasures to the people of the city and is even called a triumph

(thriambos) by Prokopios.4

Justinian employed a strategy of marginalization throughout the 530s to reduce the prominence of the consulship. He either stripped away or minimized the few official functions it still served, elmininating it as the standard form of Roman timekeeping and regulating the amount consuls could spend in the games and processsions with which they began and ended their tenures in office.5 Not satisfied with this, the emperor allowed the office to lapse after 541 and eventually, in a distant echo of Augustus’ treatment of the office, absorbed it into his imperial titulature. Justinian justified his treatment of the consulship by directly confronting the overlap between its historical duties and imperial authority. In Justinian’s telling, the consuls, along with all the other organs of the Roman

3 Famous examples include Aetius under Valentinian III (discussed at length in chapter four) and Constantius III under .

4 Prok. Wars 4.9.15. This passages is discussed further below.

5 See Novel 47 (On Dating) and Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures), both discussed further below.

169 state, yielded their authorities to the emperor,6 but were in any case deviations from the standard, monarchical pattern of Roman history.7 For Justinian, the sixth-century consulship was a useless vestige of a relatively unimportant office.

The backlash against Justinian’s consular reforms was widespread. Prokopios,

Jordanes, and Lydos all attacked both the rhetoric and content of Justinian’s laws. Once again, they chose to do so on the emperor’s terms, refuting his rhetoric rather than offering their own systematic approach to the relationship between their own time and the

Republic. Yet the consulship, both because of its historic importance and the contemporary career of Belisarios, generated a more coherent conversation than the offices discussed in chapter two. We see in all three of these authors an overlap in their conceptions of the office and the perceptions of Justinian implied by their responses. This is most likely evidence of a much broader conversation about the end of the consulship than our surviving sources allow us to see, but it certainly indicates that these three authors belonged to a coherent social and intellectual movement that was operating in

Constantinople by the early 550s.

The dramatic response to the end of the consulship evident in our sources is to be expected. The consulship was the definitive office of the Republican period, it was, as

Lydos makes a point of arguing, the one truly unique Roman political invention.8 It was an essential component of Roman identity and, historically, the handmaiden of Roman

6 Just. Nov. 62.Pr (332.23-8), discussed below.

7 Just. Nov. 47.Pr (283.21-284.3), discussed below.

8 Lyd. Mag. 1.32 (48.2-7).

170 military achievement. The authors of the sixth century were keenly aware of the extent to which Justinian was altering the boundaries, offices, and functions of the Roman state.

The demotion and end of the consulship provided an event around which to and discuss contemporary anxieties about the nature and direction of Roman government in the sixth century.

Justinian’s Consular Novels

In Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), Justinian’s legal team appealed to the rhetorical authority of the Roman Republic in order to establish the emperor’s credibility as the restorer of Rome’s imperial fortunes. This rhetorical approach was predicated on the resurrection or restructuring of Republican offices to act as symbols of a return to the period of Roman imperial expansion. While this approach was effective when discussing offices such as the praetor or tribune, it was incompatible with the most prominent Republican survival in Justinian’s Rome, the consulship. Unlike other offices, the consulship had a continuous history stretching back, at least in theory, to the deposition of the kings and establishment of the Republic in the sixth century BC.

Moreover, the consulship still functioned as a high civilian office in the sixth century AD, and its associated rank, consularis, occupied a prominent position in the court hierarchy.9

Yet the office presented a problem. The majority of Rome’s territorial expansion, as

Zosimos was quick to point out, took place during the Republic under the consuls. The

9 A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284-602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1964) 528-530.

171 post was also synonymous with Roman history itself as, until the reign of Justinian, documents were dated by consular years.10 Moreover, as Anthony Kaldellis has recently argued, ancient authors did not periodize Roman history in the same way as modern scholars, separating the period of ‘the Republic’ from that of ‘the Empire.’11 To the

Romans, both ‘the Republic’ and ‘the Empire’ were equally understood as the respublica

Romana, while the imperium Romanum was a product of ‘the Republic.’12 What we now refer to as ‘the Republic’ was generally conceptualized as ‘the period of the consuls’ by ancient authors, using the chief executive office synonymously with the form of government. Finally, the consulship was the definitive office of the Republican period, and therefore could not be restored to its actual historical function without dismantling the imperial system, nor could it be restored to its ‘hallmark’ status without raising uncomfortable questions about the authority of that system.

Tribonian and the rest of Justinian’s legal team can be seen to be grappling with the problem of the consulship as early as 535, during the reorganization of the administration of the eastern provinces. In Novel 25 (Praetor of Lykaonia), published on

18 May 535 along with Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and Novel 26 (Praetor of Thrace),

Justinian discusses the newly created office of the Praetor of Lykaonia. Internal references indicate that this law was the second of the three Novels promulgated that day,

10 A feature alluded to by Jordanes in his Romana, see the discussion in chapter one, pp. 122ff.

11 A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA, 2015) 22-27.

12 For other systems of dating, see R.W. Burgess and M. Kulikowski, of Time: The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD (Turnhout, 2013).

172 and it takes up the question of the relationship between the praetorship and the consulship:

It is therefore just to equip [Lykaonia] with a magistrate [i.e., a praetor] distinguished by the ancient symbols of Roman rank; to combine into a single office those magistracies now governing the province, both the one holding what we call the political magistracy and the one that has been placed in charge of arms; and to adorn this office with the title of praetor, for this name is the patrimony (patrion) of the Roman empire and administered the great (megiste)13 city of the Romans even before the consuls.14

Justinian implicitly promotes the praetorship over the consulship by adducing its greater antiquity. This temporal sidelining of the status of the consulship sets the tone for most of

Justinian’s subsequent references to the consulship, especially those of 537. The claim of superior antiquity also bifurcates the logic of Justinian’s rhetoric of renewal. As we saw, in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia), the name of praetor was chosen because of its special association with arms and laws, but also because of its connection to the original expansion of the Roman empire outside of Italy in the First and Second Punic Wars.

These events took place during a ‘golden age’ of the Republic, when the consulship was unequivocally the most important office in the Roman state and was deeply implicated in the expansion of the empire. Justinian’s decision to renew the office of praetor rather than

13 Once again, there is an association between the city of Rome and the adjective megas.

14 Just. Nov. 25.Pr (196.13-21): Δίκαιον τοίνυν ἂν εἴη καὶ αὐτὴν ἀρχῇ κατακοσμῆσαι τὰ παλαιὰ τῆς Ῥωμαϊκῆς τάξεως ἐπιγραφομένῃ σύμβολα, καὶ τοὺς νῦν αὐτῆς ἡγουμένους, τόν τε ἄρχοντα φαμὲν τὴν πολιτικὴν ἀρχὴν τόν τε ἐφεστῶτα τοῖς ὅπλοις, εἰς ἕν τι συναγαγεῖν καὶ τῇ τοῦ πραίτωρος κοσμῆσαι προσηγορίᾳ. ὄνομα γὰρ τοῦτο πάτριον τῇ Ῥωμαίων ἀρχῇ καὶ πρόγε αὐτῶν τῶν ὑπάτων κατὰ τὴν μεγάλην τῶν Ῥωμαίων πολιτευσάμενον πόλιν.

173 the consulship (which likewise had a long tradition of legal and military authority) is justified, in Novel 25 (Lykaonia), by its even deeper antiquity, which is said to stretch back to a moment when the city of Rome was administered by praetors, but not consuls.

The temporal logic is strained. In Novel 24 (Pisidia) praetors are preferred over consuls because of their function during a period when the consuls were serving superior and parallel functions, but in Novel 25 (Lykaonia) they are preferred because of their origin in a period prior to the origin of the consulship.

It is not surprising, given the ideological problems that the historical consulship could pose to an emperor, that Justinian and his legal team would seek to bypass the office. However, in bypassing the more famous and senior office of consul in favor of the praetorship, the legal team set themselves at odds with the ideology of Republican renewal upon which these reforms were based. The resulting attempt to resolve this conflict required a confusing appeal to two different periods of time, one for a successful precedent for expansion and the other for the authority of antiquity. This tension can be somewhat explained by the contemporary importance of the consulship as a civilian office: Justinian did not (yet) wish to demote or denigrate the existing office of consul any more than he wished to return to that office, with its strong Republican connotations, military and legal authority. The solution Justinian’s administration eventually hit upon was to rewrite Roman history without the consulship.

Although laws published between 18 May 535 and 537 mention the consulship, it is only in order to explain the origin of the term .15 The next major discussion

15 As in Just. Nov. 30.5 (227.19ff). 174 of the office comes in Novel 62 (Concerning Senators), dated 1 February 537 and surviving only in Latin, in which Justinian for the first time explicitly addresses the constitutional transition from Republic to Empire:

In the most ancient times the authority () of the shone forth with such force of power (potestas) that by means of the governance being conducted both at home and abroad, the entire world was subjected to the Roman yoke, Roman jurisdiction reached not only to the rising and setting of the sun but even to both sides of the globe, and everything was conducted by the common counsel of the senate. But after the legal authority () of the people and the senate was transferred to the imperial for the sake of the happiness of the respublica, it came about that those men, whom they themselves chose and placed in charge of the administration, carried out everything which the voice of the emperor enjoined on them.16

Justinian’s account of the transition from Republic to Empire is studiously vague, referring only to a transfer of the legal authority (ius) of the Senate and People to the

‘.’ The vagueness obscures the reality of the political transition from

Republic to empire, specifically Augustus’ use of the existing powers of several magistracies, including the consulship, to establish the imperial office. The resulting image of the Republic, the Principate, and the nature of Roman political authority is therefore skewed to suit the ideology of the Novels. By positing the existence of a unified legal authority (ius) which was held in common by the senate and people, Justinian is

16 Novel 62 survives only in Latin. Just. Nov. 62.Pr (332.23-8): Antiquissimus temporibus Romani senatus auctoritas tanto vigore potestatis effulsit, ut eius gubernatione domi forique habita iugo Romano omnis mundus subiceretur, non solum ad ortus solis et occasus, sed etiam in utrumque latus orbis terrae Romana dicione propagata: communi etenim senatus consilio omnia agebantur. Postea vero quam ad maiestatem imperatoriam ius populi Romani et senatus felicitate reipublicae translatum est, evenit ut ii, quos ipsi elegerint et administrationibus praeposuerint, omnia facerent quae imperialis eis iniunxisset.

175 able to depict the imperial office as legally holding total control over the Roman state, rather than an amalgam of powers modeled on specific offices. Moreover, this approach forestalls any discussion of particular magistracies, allowing Justinian to overlook the distinctive functions of offices such as the consulship and to claim for himself both the implicit support of the senate and people and universal legal authority. Put differently, rather than defining imperial authority as a collection of definite legal rights, Justinian asserts that the legal rights of the Republican magistracies were slivers of the complete legal authority held by the senate and people, an authority which passed to the emperors in toto. Justinian’s formulation grants the emperor complete legal authority and fits neatly into the imperial ideology developed in the Novels, an ideology predicated on the combination of legal and military authority. The preface to Novel 62 (Concerning

Senators) articulates only the legal half of this authority, while the military half is taken up in Novel 105, which is discussed below.

Although a reluctance to engage with the historical importance of the consulship is evident in Justinian’s pronouncements to this point, the most drastic attack on the status of the consulship was not made until 31 August 537, in Novel 47 (On Dating).

Novel 47 is concerned with the dating of official documents, and it orders that henceforth all official documents take as their primary chronological indicator the regnal years of the emperor, rather than the cycle or the name of the consuls. In laying out his justification for this change, Justinian identifies both the need for greater clarity and the historical imperative of monarchy:

176

For if anyone were to look back at the oldest of all things and the very beginnings of our state (politeuma),17 he will find that Aeneas, the Trojan king, began our politeia, and after him we are called Aeneadae; if he should then consider the second beginning, the one on account of which the Roman name shines among men, he will find that Romulus and Numa set themselves up as kings during this period, the first founding the city, the second ordering and arranging it according to laws; and then if he were to grasp the third beginning of the imperial office, he will find great Caesar, august18 Augustus, and the politeia, the one that is now prevailing (may it be immortal), proceeding from those times. It is therefore unnatural that on contracts, all those made in courts and those made generally, on which there is some indication of time, the imperial office not be first among these.19

Justinian establishes a timeline of Roman history based around three epochal moments: the foundation of the Latin people by Aeneas, the establishment of Rome and its laws by

Romulus and Numa, and the establishment of the imperial office by Julius Caesar and

Augustus. Absent from this chronology is any mention of the period of the Republic, whose existence is only implied by its terminus in the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. By denying epochal status to the expulsion of the kings by Brutus, which constituted a fundamental historical turning point in all Roman historiography, Justinian erases the period of the consuls (the entirety of what we call ‘the Republic’) from Roman history.

17 The Latin version uses respublica making clear politeuma is interchangeable with politeia.

18 The awkwardness of this phrase results from the fact that the Greek is the traditional translation of the Latin augustus.

19 Just. Nov. 47.Pr (283.21-284.3): εἰ γάρ τις ἀπίδοι πρὸς τὰ παλαιότατα πάντων καὶ ἀρχαῖα τοῦ πολιτεύματος, Αἰνείας ἡμῖν ὁ Τρὼς ὁ βασιλεὺς τῆς πολιτείας ἐξάρχει, Αἰνεάδαι τε ἡμεῖς ἐξ ἐκείνου καλούμεθα· εἴτε τις καὶ εἰς τὰς δευτέρας ἀρχὰς θεωρήσειε τὰς ἐξ οὗ καθαρῶς τὸ ῥωμαϊκὸν ὄνομα παρ' ἀνθρώποις ἐξέλαμψε, βασιλεῖς αὐτὰς κατεστήσαντο Ῥωμύλος τε καὶ Νουμᾶς, ὁ μὲν τὴν πόλιν οἰκοδομήσας, ὁ δὲ αὐτὴν νόμοις τάξας τε καὶ κατακοσμήσας· εἴτε καὶ τὰ τρίτα προοίμια λάβοι τις τῆς βασιλείας, τὸν Καίσαρα τὸν μέγαν καὶ Αὔγουστον τὸν σεβαστὸν καὶ οὕτω τὴν πολιτείαν ἡμῖν ἐξευρήσει τὴν νῦν δὴ ταύτην κρατοῦσαν (εἴη δὲ ἀθάνατος) ἐξ ἐκείνων προϊοῦσαν. ἔστιν οὖν ἄτοπον ἐν τοῖς συμβολαίοις καὶ τοῖς ἐν δικαστηρίοις πραττομένοις καὶ ἁπλῶς ἐν ἅπασιν, ἐν οἷς <ἂν> μνήμη τις γένηται χρόνου, μὴ τὴν βασιλείαν ἡγεῖσθαι τούτων.

177

His vision of Roman history is exclusively monarchical, despite his acknowledgement in

Novel 62 (Concerning Senators) that imperial authority rests on the legal authority of the senate and people. Moreover, this periodization advances the proximate goals of Novel 47

(On Dating) by undermining the implicit premises behind consular dating, namely that the establishment of the consulship marked a new, and salutary, form of Roman government, and that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the Roman state of the sixth century AD was the same respublica that had been established in the sixth century BC.

Instead, in Justinian’s telling, the Republic (implicitly) becomes a deviation from the older, and therefore more authoritative, tradition of Roman kingship. The fact that the

Republic reverted into monarchy only supports this normative view.

Whereas most Roman historiography saw the senate and people as the mainstays of the Roman political tradition, and struggled to explain the imperial system from that standpoint (or problematize it as a deviation), in this Novel Justinian turns this order on its head: the Roman tradition was one of monarchy. Justinian’s formulation enables his move to eradicate consular timekeeping, a move that would be further bolstered by the emperor’s refusal to appoint new consuls after 541. However, this logic conflicts with his formulation of Roman renewal in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and Novel 13 (Praetor of the People). By denying the legitimacy of the Republic as a distinct period in Roman history, Justinian is also denying himself access to the rhetorical model of Republican expansion. While the emperor was certainly not constrained to follow a single rhetorical strategy throughout all of his Novels, the consistency of his rhetoric across his provincial and urban reform Novels, as well as the coherence of the responses of contemporary

178 authors, both point to the Novels being conceived of and read as a corpus, at least during the years Tribonian was quaestor. The shift in rhetorical strategies is therefore noteworthy, and it is not coincidental that it appears in a law dealing with the vexed question of the consulship in Justinian’s program of Roman renewal.

A key to understanding Justinian’s rhetorical shift is to be found in his epochal approach to Roman history. Like that of other authors, Justinian’s Roman history centers on foundational moments, first of the Roman people themselves, whom he pointedly calls

Aeneadae20 rather than or (a term the emperor himself endorsed in his

Institutes21), then of their city and its laws, and finally of the kingship or monarchy, in which tradition he himself is situated. The common themes linking these events are the establishment and legitimization of monarchical rule (basileia), both of which have clear parallels to Justinian’s depiction of his own reign. In the first place, Aeneas is remarkable because he first established the Roman presence in Italy by merging his Trojan followers with the Latins. Likewise, Justinian could claim to have reintroduced the Romans to Italy through Belisarios’ invasion. Indeed, this is precisely the claim he appears to have been making in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia). Justinian had also, like Aeneas and Romulus, attached his name to his foundations by labelling all of his new offices as Justinianic, including the Justinianic Praetor and the Justinianic Proconsul. A reader of the laws familiar with the provincial reform legislation would be likely to catch this parallel between the emperor and Aeneas, and all readers would have been likely to question the

20 This name is used throughout the Aeneid to refer to Aeneas and his followers.

21 Just. Inst. 1.2.2: sic enim et ius quo populus Romanus utitur ius civile Romanorum appellamus, vel ius Quiritium, quo Quirites utuntur; Romani enim a Quirino Quirites appellantur.

179 label of Aeneadae, an uncommon and poetic way of referring to the Roman people.

Justinian’s reference to Aeneas therefore calls attention to his own accomplishments, imbues them with the authority of ancient precedent, and promotes them above that precedent. This rhetorical strategy was likewise used in both Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and 13 (Urban Praetor).

Justinian’s discussion of Romulus and Numa functions similarly. Justinian identifies two major accomplishments, one for each king: Romulus settled the city, Numa gave it laws. This brief sketch of their respective careers is interesting both for what it includes and what it leaves out. No mention, for instance, is made of the name Romulus was said to have left to the Romans after his deification as , Quirites, an altogether more common appellation than Aeneadae. Instead, Romulus and Numa are jointly credited with promoting the ‘Roman name,’ a phrase that fails to acknowledge the source of the name, which derived from Romulus through the city Roma. Likewise,

Numa’s establishment of laws is mentioned, but not his perhaps better known establishment of Roman religion through the founding of priesthoods and festivals.

Like Romulus, Justinian had given the Romans Rome, an achievement that was anticipated in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) but accomplished by August 537, though

Rome was ironically under siege at the time the law was published. Like Numa, Justinian could claim to have established an entirely new system of law both through the legal codification completed in 534 (the Corpus) and in his continued legal pronouncements, of which Novel 47 (On Dating) was itself an example. Moreover, by the very nature of the comparison, Justinian is calling attention to the fact that he has rivalled the

180 accomplishments of two legendary kings and founders; he is both a modern Romulus and a modern Numa. The effect is to once again assert his superiority by both invoking and subordinating the achievements of antiquity, while omitting mention of the period that might challenge his personal primacy within Roman history.

The final epoch in Justinian’s formulation also matches his achievements favorably with those of two earlier Roman figures, Caesar and Augustus. The attention, however, is drawn completely away from Caesar and Augustus by the focus on the contemporary state of the politeia and its future, introduced by Justinian’s optative prayer for its immortality. The second temporal leap (from Augustus to the present) calls attention, once again, to Justinian’s achievements rather than those of the figures he is ostensibly praising. The focus on Justinian continues through the end of the preface, where the emperor states that for the reasons mentioned, by which he means both the precedent for monarchical periodization and the achievements which validate his inclusion on the list of epochal monarchs, it is inappropriate for the emperor’s name not to take precedence in dating.

The irony of Justinian’s argument is that his reform of Roman timekeeping is epochal, but not for the reasons he claims. For the first time since the deposition of the kings, official Roman time would, by law, be measured primarily by something other than consular years. It is therefore the consulship which permits Justinian to be the epoch-making emperor he is declaring himself to be. Justinian establishes himself at the beginning of a new epoch in Roman timekeeping, and therefore of Roman history. He claims to merit the position based on the proven superiority of his achievements

181 compared to the other epochal figures he mentions in the preface, but in fact it is the office he is displacing that grants the reform significance. The preface to Novel 47 (On

Dating) is a rhetorical masterstroke, simultaneously omitting the consulship from Roman history and denying its place in Roman timekeeping, all the while predicating Justinian’s own claim to epochal status on that very erasure of the consulship from Roman time.

Honoré has famously claimed that Justinian was all too aware that he was living in the age of Justinian.22 It would perhaps be more accurate to say, based on the evidence of

Novel 47, that Justinian, through Tribonian, was attempting to convince the readership of the Novels in 537 that they too were living in the age of Justinian.

Justinian’s final law on the consulship, Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures), was promulgated on 28 December 537. The content and timing of this law are suggestive.

Traditionally, consuls took up their office on 1 January of each year, and although the consulship had been reduced to a largely ceremonial office, it retained several expensive duties, including the distribution of largesse to the populace and the staging of various entertainments at both the beginning and end of the consular term. Novel 105 was published just prior to the beginning of the consular term in 538 and set down strict limits on the expenditures a consul could make on both the shows and largesse he offered in office. Coming a mere three days before the beginning of the consular term, it is difficult not to see this law as a direct grant to the next holder of consulship, who just happened to be John the Cappadocian, Justinian’s famously avaricious and spendthrift praetorian

22 T. Honoré. Tribonian (Ithaca, 1978) 16.

182 prefect, who advised him on all fiscal matters and was probably the motive force behind many of the emperor’s initiatives, perhaps including this one.23

If the timing of the reform and the identity of the beneficiary were not suggestive enough, the Novel can also be placed within a larger context of Justinian financially rewarding loyal subordinates. Shortly before issuing Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures), in either late November or December of the same year24 Justinian had published Novel 75

(Appeals from Sicily), which directed that all judicial appeals from newly reconquered

Sicily be directed to the quaestor Tribonian rather than the senate or any other magistrate.25 The law constituted a special exemption to the normal powers of the praetorship that had been instituted in Sicily.26 Like the Cappadocian, Tribonian was a famously corrupt and talented subordinate, and the redirection of the legal fees (not to mention potential bribes) of this rich province to the quaestor’s court could have produced significant financial gain, especially for an unscrupulous bureaucrat.27 John and

Tribonian both belonged to the ranks of the new men Justinian had brought with him into the administration of the empire. They both had risen through the administration based on

23 PLRE 3a.627-635 (Fl. Ioannes 11). John was a phenomenally unpopular figure in the sixth century, in particular with Ioannes Lydos. For Lydos on the Cappadocian and the role of the praetorian prefect in the sixth century, see C. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2004) 68-89. For the social and economic dimensions of the resentement of the Cappadocian, see P. Bell, Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management, and Mediation (Oxford, 2013) 88-93.

24 The precise date is lost due to a lacuna in the manuscript. The law is dated to December, but because of the vagaries of Roman dating, it is possible that the law was published several days before the first of that month.

25 This Novel is discussed further in chapter four, pp. 261ff.

26 Just. Nov. 75 (378.1-25). This Novel is identical to Just. Nov. 104 (500.1-25).

27 Prok. Wars 1.25.2.

183 their talent and utility to the emperor and had fallen from at the same moment, during the early days of the Nika Revolt in 532, when Justinian sacked them in a failed attempt to mollify the opposition.28 John was returned to power rather quickly and is attested in office by 18 October 532, while Tribonian’s restoration is first attested on 3

January 535.29 Given the common trajectories of the two men and the temporal proximity of Novels 105 (Consular Expenditures) and 75 (Appeals from Sicily), it appears likely that Justinian chose the winter of 537 to reward these talented and loyal subordinates.30

Whatever its proximate motivations, Justinian’s reform to the consulship came at the end of a year during which the office had clearly been on the mind of his legal team.

Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) offered an excellent opportunity for Tribonian to settle, once and for all, Justinian’s official position on the office of the consul. The key discussion comes in the preface to the Novel:

The name and business of the consulship were conceived by the ancient Romans for the exigency of wars by means of the votes which the shared structure of the government (politeia) gave to them by a show of hands. For straightaway they divided out the provinces in which the Romans were at war, and on account of these received the . But later, when time had transferred the conduct of war and the making of peace to the authority of the most pious emperors, the importance of the consuls became solely a matter of competition in honors, and they did not exceed that which was moderate and established or appropriate measure.31

28 For a survey of the , see G. Greatrex, ‘The Nika Riot: A Reappraisal,’ JHS 117 (1997) 60-86.

29 PLRE 3a.628 (Ioannes11) and PLRE 3b.1338 (Tribonianus 1)

30 It is worth noting that, by virtue of his post as quaestor, Tribonian would have overseen the composition of both Novels 105 and 75.

31 Just. Nov. 105.Pr (500.30-40): Τὸ τῆς ὑπατείας ὄνομά τε καὶ πρᾶγμα τοῖς μὲν πάλαι Ῥωμαίοις πρὸς τὴν τῶν πολέμων ἐπενοήθη χρείαν, κἀν ταῖς ψήφοις, ἃς αὐτοῖς ἐπὶ τῇ χειροτονίᾳ τὸ κοινὸν ἐδίδου 184

Justinian is once again studiously vague about the process by which the authority of the consuls passed to the emperor. He is also disingenuous about the nature of the authority granted to the consulship under the Republic, arguing that the post was devised solely as a military position and one whose authority was restricted to the provinces, as evidenced by the association between provincial command and the fasces, as if the consuls were glorified provincial . The consuls in fact had extensive civil authority.32 By limiting consular authority to the power over war and peace, Justinian establishes the superiority of his own office, whose name, at least in Latin, designated military authority.

It is telling here that the Greek text of the Novel refers to the emperors not with the term or any of its cognates, which the reader might expect after the discussion of the monarchy in Novel 47 (On Dating). Instead, Justinian opts for the term , which was often used to translate the Latin ,33 (designating in Greek the sole possessor of a form of authority) and as a more literal translation of imperator than basileus.34 This word choice bolsters Justinian’s claim that the emperors have absorbed the military authority of the consuls by emphasizing the emperor’s military rather than constitutional

τῆς πολιτείας σχῆμα, διελάγχανον [γὰρ] εὐθὺς τὰς ἐπαρχίας ἐν αἷς Ῥωμαίοις πόλεμος ἦν, καὶ κατ' αὐτὰς ἐκληροῦντο τὰς ῥάβδους· ὕστερον δὲ ὁ χρόνος εἰς τὴν τῶν εὐσεβεστάτων αὐτοκρατόρων μεταστήσας τὸ πολεμεῖν τε καὶ εἰρήνην ἄγειν ἐξουσίαν εἰς φιλοτιμίαν μόνην τὸ πρᾶγμα τοῖς ὑπάτοις μετέστησε καὶ ταύτην σώφρονα καὶ τεταγμένην καὶ τὸ μέτρον οὐκ ἐκβαίνουσαν.

32 See F.P. Polo, The Consul at Rome: The Civil Functions of the Consuls in the Roman Republic (New York, 2011).

33 Especially in Polybios, see 3.86.7 inter alia. For the title autokrator verus that of basileus, see H. Mason, Greek Terms for Roman Institutions: A Lexicon and Analysis (Toronto, 1974) 118-121.

34 The distinction between autokrator and basileus appears in Lydos’ treatment of kingship in his On the Magistracies, discussed below.

185 authority. The effect is more pronounced in the Greek text, where the substitution of autokrator for the expected basileus attracts more notice.

The exclusion of civil duties from his summary of the consulship allows Justinian to present the office as truly vestigial. After all, if the consuls had only ever been military figures, and they no longer played any role in military affairs, then we could believe the emperor when he said that the office’s sole purpose was as a mark of status, a game of philotimia played by members of the senate of Constantinople. However, coming in the same year as Novel 47 (On Dating) and 62 (Concerning Senators), and in the wake of the comments made two years earlier in Novel 25 (Praetor of Lykaonia), these claims must be viewed with suspicion. Following the appointment of John the Cappadocian to the consulship in 538, Justinian would appoint only three more consuls in the remaining twenty-seven years of his reign. The last of these men, Anicius Basilius, served in 541, after which the consulship was absorbed into Justinian’s official titulature.35 The consulship was on its way out, and Justinian’s consistent attempts to marginalize the office point to this being a deliberate strategy inspired, most likely, by the same concerns that motivated the demotion of the consulship in favor of the praetorship in 535.

In Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures), Justinian’s marginalization of the consulship is immediately used to justify a further reduction in the prestige of the office, but in the guise of preserving it for posterity. Justinian argues that the same philotimia that serves as the office’s sole raison d’être is also an existential threat to the office, as

35 Basilius was a westerner, a refugee from the Amal court, and a scion of the western branch of the Anicii, one of the most prominent families in the empire. The chief figure of the eastern branch of the Anicii during Justinian’s reign was Anicia Juliana. For Basilius, see PLRE 3a.174-175 (Fl. Albinus Basilius 3).

186 consuls have gone beyond all moderation in the expenditures that they make to fulfill their duties.

Therefore we perceive that the name of the consuls is in danger of perishing, the name which has for a long time, approaching almost a thousand years, flourished together with the republic (poltieia) of the Romans. On account of this, we believe it is necessary to constrain the matter and, trimming its excess to a comprehensible measure, to reduce the financial burden of the consulship, in order that it persist continuously for the Romans, and begin to be accessible to all good men whom we judge worthy of such an honor.36

Justinian positions himself as the savior of an important, albeit only antiquarian, Roman institution, whose long history and vaguely implied benefit to future generations merit consideration. He does this by significantly reducing the amount a consul may spend on his public benefactions, which in turn reduced the impact of the office on the civic life of

Constantinople. In order to save the office from its own profligacy, Justinian is legislatively restricting it to a smaller role in the one area in which it is still relevant.

Justinian leaves the consular expenditures up to the consul in only one field, the money scattered to the people, but even here he not only prohibits the scattering of gold

(reserving that for the emperor), but also specifies which low denomination coins may be scattered.37 These restrictions are not merely further evidence of Justinian’s well-attested

36 Just. Nov. 105.Pr (501.5-13): ἐπειδὴ τοίνυν ὁρῶμεν κινδυνεῦον διαπεσεῖν τὸ τῶν ὑπάτων ὄνομα, ὅπερ ἐκ χρόνων οὕτω μακρῶν καὶ εἰς χιλιοστὸν σύνεγγυς ἔτος ἐλθὸν τῇ τῶν Ῥωμαίων συνήκμασε πολιτείᾳ, διὰ τοῦτο ᾠήθημεν χρῆναι τὸ πρᾶγμα περιστεῖλαι, καὶ τὴν ἀμετρίαν τούτου περικόψαντες εἰς εὐσύνοπτον <μέτρον> τὴν ὑπατικὴν συστεῖλαι δαπάνην, ὅπως ὂν διηνεκὴς μείνῃ Ῥωμαίοις, ἅπασι δὲ τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ἀνδράσιν ὑπάρχῃ βατὴ οὓς τῆς τοιαύτης ἡμεῖς ἀξίους εἶναι τιμῆς ἐγκρίναιμεν.

37 Just. Nov. 105.2.1 (503.21-504.14).

187 proclivity for micromanagement; they create logistical hurdles for any consul wishing to give the populace a great deal of money in this manner. Given the nature of the Roman monetary economy, a consul would have no easy way to amass large amounts of silver in these particular denominations, not to mention the difficulty of securing and transporting significant sums in small denomination coins. The effect, then, is to ensure that even where the consul is given the latitude, he is physically incapable of spending lavishly.

Justinian’s reforms to the consulship effectively serve as a demotion of the office, making it more difficult for future candidates to stand out in the performance of the few civil functions still under the consul’s purview. While this might have been welcome news to John the Cappadocian, who could take office on 1 January 538 with imperially mandated austerity, it fundamentally contradicts Justinian’s repeated claim to be restoring the ancient offices of the Roman state and, through them, the state itself. Justinian buries this contradiction by presenting himself as the savior of the very office he has set out to marginalize and, in the process of saving it, further marginalizing it. It is particularly ironic that in his assertions of the importance of the office, Justinian stresses the name of the post and the duration of its existence. The nearly thousand years the emperor claims the office has existed are the same nearly thousand years for which consular names had been the basis of the official dating of the Roman state. Moreover, by stressing the antiquity of the office Justinian undermines his argument favoring the praetors for their greater antiquity; one would think that a millennium was antiquity enough. Having stripped the consulship of its role in Roman history, its importance to the development of the Roman political system, and its use in Roman timekeeping, Justinian’s reforms of 537

188 had rhetorically demolished the office. As a final irony, Justinian absorbs the only concession he was willing to grant the consulship (its importance to the conduct of foreign wars) into his own imperial titulature, reenacting in a limited way the historical role of consular authority in establishing the imperial office. Whether this is a sly acknowledgement of the disingenuousness of his argument or a final squeezing of rhetorical legitimacy from the dying post is left up to the reader to decide.

In attacking the consulship, Justinian was taking aim at the most prominent

Republican survival of the sixth century. His method of attack was designed to undercut precisely the sort of criticisms Zosimos levelled against the imperial system in his New

History. Zosimos, as discussed above, argued that the great strength of the Republican system lay in the competition between senators, especially between the consuls, for status and reputation. In Zosimos’ telling, ‘so long as affairs were watched over by the aristocracy, [the Romans] continued to add to their empire every year because the consuls competed eagerly (philoneikeo) to surpass one another in virtues.’38 The verb Zosimos uses, philoneikeo, represents a more aggressive form of the idea conveyed by the word philotimia, which Justinian uses to dismiss the current office of consul in Novel 105

(Consular Expenditures). Justinian’s comment is in fact a direct parody of the idea put forward by Zosimos, one that reduces the salutary rivalry of the Republican consuls to the unsavory, trophy-hunting competitiveness of stay-at-home magistrates. The correspondence in both language and topic between the New History and Novel 105

38 Zos. 1.5.2: ἕως μὲν ὅτε τὰ τῆς ἀριστοκρατίας ἐφυλάττετο, προστιθέντες ἔτους ἑκάστου τῇ ἀρχῇ διετέλουν, τῶν ὑπάτων ὑπερβαλέσθαι ταῖς ἀρεταῖς ἀλλήλους φιλονεικούντων.

189

(Consular Expenditures) is sufficiently close to suggest that Justinian may have been responding, if not to Zosimos himself, then to arguments that other contemporaries presented in similar terms, even down to word choice. In other words, Justinian was likely responding to a broad intellectual movement of which Zosimos was one representative.

Justinian’s discussions of the consulship also respond to the periodization of

Roman history laid out, although less systematically, in the New History. According to

Zosimos, all Roman history before Cannae was a wasted prelude to the explosive growth of the empire during and after the Second Punic War. The transition from Republic to empire is presented as epoch-making, not, as Justinian argued, because it reasserted the monarchical basis of the Roman state, but because it eradicated the dynamics that allowed the Romans to win their empire. Justinian’s periodization is designed to undercut precisely this sort of argument by subordinating the period of the Republic to the rule of the kings and treating Roman expansion as a secondary detail to Romulus and Numa’s establishment of the political and legal basis for monarchy.

Prokopios on the Consulship

Responses to Justinian’s consular rhetoric were varied and often focused on particular aspects of the emperor’s reforms.39 The range and extent of discussions of the consulship in the sixth century indicates the importance Justinian’s contemporaries attached to the office as well as its usefulness for formulating and critiquing an imperial ideology built

39 Jordanes’ response to the end of consular dating is discussed above, pp. 122ff.

190 on historical premises. Prokopios uses the character of Belisarios to focalize his discussion of the consulship in the Wars; the general’s consulship of 535 is the only one

Prokopios discusses at any length.40 Prokopios is particularly concerned with Novel 105

(Consular Expenditures), which he discusses in both the Wars and Secret History. We will examine these in turn.

In the Wars, Prokopios places his discussion of the law at the end of his account of the conquest of Sicily. After pacifying the island in 535, Belisarios laid down the consulship in Syracuse on 31 December:

At that time it happened that Belisarios met with a piece of good luck that surpasses description. For having taken up the consulship as an honor for his defeat of the Vandals and still holding the office, after he had annexed the whole of Sicily, he marched into Syracuse on the last day of his consulship while being loudly applauded by the army and the and throwing gold coins to all. This event, however, was not purposefully arranged by him, but some chance (tyche) happened to allow the man who had recovered the whole island to process into Syracuse on that day and to lay down the office of the consuls and become an ex-consul there and not, as was customary, in the senate house of Byzantion. In this way Belisarios happened to be fortunate.41

40 Prokopios also mentions that the following men were consuls, but does not discuss their consulships: Appius Caecus the censor responsible for the Via (Wars 5.14.6), Theoderic (6.6.16), Justinus the son of Germanos (7.32.15), and Cethegus, called Gothigos by Prokopios, a western consul at the court of Justinian (7.35.10).

41 Prok. Wars 5.5.17-19: τῷ δὲ Βελισαρίῳ τότε κρεῖσσον λόγου εὐτύχημα ξυνηνέχθη γενέσθαι. τῆς γὰρ ὑπατείας λαβὼν τὸ ἀξίωμα ἐπὶ τῷ Βανδίλους νενικηκέναι, ταύτης ἔτι ἐχόμενος, ἐπειδὴ παρεστήσατο Σικελίαν ὅλην, τῇ τῆς ὑπατείας ὑστάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ἐς τὰς Συρακούσας εἰσήλασε, πρός τε τοῦ στρατοπέδου καὶ Σικελιωτῶν κροτούμενος ἐς τὰ μάλιστα καὶ νόμισμα χρυσοῦ ῥίπτων ἅπασιν. οὐκ ἐξεπίτηδες μέντοι αὐτῷ πεποίηται τοῦτο, ἀλλά τις τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ ξυνέβη τύχη πᾶσαν ἀνασωσαμένῳ τὴν νῆσον Ῥωμαίοις ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐς τὰς Συρακούσας ἐσεληλακέναι, τήν τε τῶν ὑπάτων ἀρχὴν, οὐχ ᾗπερ εἰώθει ἐν τῷ Βυζαντίου βουλευτηρίῳ, ἀλλ' ἐνταῦθα καταθεμένῳ ἐξ ὑπάτων γενέσθαι. Βελισαρίῳ μὲν οὖν οὕτω δὴ εὐημερῆσαι ξυνέτυχεν.

191

Prokopios goes to great lengths to make this scene innocuous, stressing repeatedly that this event was a coincidence and a result of chance (tyche). However, these repeated assurances also draw the reader’s attention to the passage, as does the repeated claim that this was a piece of good luck. For an audience familiar with Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures), the attention Prokopios directs to this event would likely focus on the key detail of Belisarios’ entry: the scattering of gold coins to the people of Syracuse and his troops.

The dramatic date of Belisarios’ entry into Syracuse is 31 December 535, at which point Belisarios was legally permitted to distribute gold coins in the traditional manner at the end of his consulship. However, by the time the Wars was published in

550/1, such distributions had been illegal for thirteen years, and the consulship itself had been gone, absorbed into Justinian’s titulature, for about a decade. These changes would have been widely noticed, not only by readers of the Novels, but also by the citizens of

Constantinople. The shift from gold to silver coinage would have been visible to anyone watching consular processions after 537, and the reduced largesse distributed by the consuls would have been noted not only by those receiving the money (about whom more below), but also by a wide range of merchants whose customers did not have the amount of surplus money they had come to expect.42 Put differently, the reduction of a substantial biannual subsidy would have had a depressive effect on the economy of Constantinople, one that would have been widely felt. It is therefore likely that a broad cross-section of

42 Prokopios mentions these consequences in his Secret History, discussed below.

192

Prokopios’ readers in 550/1 would have latched onto this particular detail, even if they had not read the Novels.

Those readers of the Wars who were also familiar with the Novels would be in a position to note not only the traditional largesse of Belisarios’ procession, but also the ways in which Prokopios tailored this scene to form a point-by-point refutation of the logic of Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures), as well as a counternarrative designed to flip the ideology of the Novels on its head.

Prokopios frames his account with two statements that stress that the event was a stroke of good luck for Belisarios, a claim that runs counter to Justinian’s assertion that the consulship had become a burden to its holders. Prokopios also specifically says in the opening of the scene that Belisarios’ good luck ‘surpassed descripion,’ a hint to the reader that the full import of the scene is not being spelled out. This hint also focuses attention on the precise nature of Belisarios’ good luck. What is it that makes him so unbelievably lucky? Certainly his successful conquest of Sicily, coming so soon after his defeat of the Vandals in Africa, was a tremendous achievement, but Prokopios belies the importance of these events by relegating them to a participial construction and a subordinate clause. The main thrust of the sentence describing Belisarios’ entry focuses on three details: the location of the procession, the scattering of gold, and the last day of the consulship. The location of the procession at Syracuse is unlikely to be the key detail as Prokopios does not offer any further description of the city. The scattering of gold is a more likely candidate because it calls attention to the fact that Belisarios was the last consul who was allowed to perform this traditional action. However, the true nature of

193

Belisarios’ good luck is found in Prokopios’ description of the timing of Belisarios’ procession, in the phrase ‘τῇ τῆς ὑπατείας ὑστάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ.’ While this phrase is often translated as ‘on the last day of his consulship,’ (and may have been read that way by a part of Prokopios’ audience in 550/1) there is no possessive construction, meaning that the literal translation is ‘on the last day of the consulship.’ A reader, alerted by

Prokopios’ use of good luck to frame the episode and aware of the subsequent history of the office, would have been able to discern that Belisarios’ good fortune was to be the last true consul of Rome, the final holder of an office whose history went back more than a thousand years, and which would subsequently be humiliated and then absorbed by

Justinian. Belisarios was, moreover, the last consul to hold office before the reforms of

Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures). The specific mention that Belisarios scattered gold coins supports this reading by calling attention to one of the most visible and significant changes in Justinian’s reforms, one that Prokopios discusses more fully in his Secret

History (discussed below).

Prokopios uses Belicarios’ entry into Syracuse not only to accuse Justinian of destroying the consulship, but also to directly attack his reasons for doing so. In the preface to Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures), Justinian argued that the consulship was no longer a useful institution because its role in ‘the conduct of war and the making of peace’ had been ceded to the emperor. Belisarios’ entry into Syracuse comes at the end of the fifth chapter in the first book of the . The first four chapters of the Gothic

War are devoted primarily to an account of Justinian’s failed attempts to exploit the divisions of the Amal court in order to secure control of Italy. The emperor’s attempts to

194 gain Italy through failed and he sent Belisarios to make an attempt on Sicily as a prelude to the invasion of Italy. Chapter five is taken up entirely by an account of the consul Belisarios invading the island, receiving the surrender of all but one of its cities

(the making of peace), and conducting the successful siege of (the conduct of war). The juxtaposition of these events creates a stark contrast between Belisarios and

Justinian, whose diplomacy failed and who had sent Belisarios to fight the war for him while he remained in Constantinople. The reader may also take Belisarios’ career in

Sicily as further evidence of his good fortune: Belisarios was afforded an opportunity to end his consulship performing the traditional role of a consul as a military conquerer.

Prokopios goes further and calls attention to the fact that Belisarios was awarded the consulship for his previous conquest of Vandal Africa, setting his conquest of Sicily in a broader context of military success. Prokopios even uses a verbal parallel with Novel

105 (Consular Expenditures) to cement the comparison, giving Belisarios the title

‘strategos autokrator’ to indicate his supreme command over the expedition.43 By using the term ‘strategos autokrator,’ Prokopios is depriving Justinian, whom he consistently refers to as basileus throughout the Wars, of the title the emperor claimed for himself in precisely the passage of Novel 105 in which he described the ceding of control over war and peace to the emperors, opting instead to give Belisarios that title at the beginning of his account of the conquest of Sicily, in which the consul demonstrates his control over

43 Prok. Wars 5.5.4

195 both of those spheres.44 The term autokrator also functions as a Thucydidean imitation, as discussed by Charles Pazdernik, but that function does not impede its resonance with

Justinian’s imperial rhetoric.45

The cession of control over war and peace was only half of Justinian’s justification for reforming the consulship in Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures). The other half of the argument focused on the crippling financial burden the office placed on its recipients. Prokopios’ description of Belisarios’ procession refutes this argument as well by making it clear that Belisarios was able to fulfill the obligation even while on campaign. The logistics of Belisarios’ largesse merit consideration. The consul was distributing gold at the end of a year of campaigning on the far side of the Mediterranean from Constantinople. Prokopios is silent as to the source of Belisarios’ gold and it is unclear if it was taken from the general’s share of the loot from Palermo (the only city that may have been sacked during the Sicilian campaign), diverted from the war chest the emperor provided for the expedition, or brought for this purpose by Belisarios from the east. By refusing to comment on the source of the gold for the procession, Prokopios implicitly denies that there were any logistical or financial burdens associated with it.

Belisarios’ largesse therefore raises the question, if a general on campaign is able to fulfill the financial obligations of his office without any apparent difficulty, how crippling could the financial burden actually have been?

44 For Prokopios’ depiction of Belisarios on campaign, see C. Pazdernik, ‘Xenophon’s Hellenica in Procopius’ Wars: Pharnabazus and Belisarius,’ GRBS 46 (2006) 175-206; idem, ‘Procopius and Thucydides on the Labors of War: Belisarius and Brasidas in the Field,’ TAPA 130 (2000) 149-187.

45 Pazdernik, ‘Procopius and Thucydides,’ .

196

The question of how the distribution of consular largesse would be financed is explicitly taken up earlier in Prokopios’ narrative, during his account of Belisarios’ triumph in 534 and subsequent assumption of the consulship. This earlier account supports and complements Prokopios’ arguments against Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures) in the description of Belisarios’ entry into Syracuse. Prokopios presents the consulship as a natural extension of Belisarios’ triumph, a fitting reward for his exemplary military service. Emphasizing the link between military service and the consulship would by itself be sufficient to further Prokopios’ critique of Novel 105

(Consular Expenditures), but he immediately proceeds to an account of Belisarios’ distribution of largesse at the beginning of his consulship:

A little later [after the triumph over ] another triumph was celebrated by Belisarios according to the ancient custom. For it happened that he advanced among the consuls and was both carried by prisoners and, while riding in the Curile chair, threw to the people the very spoils of the Vandal war. For the people carried away the silver plate, golden girdles, and a very great amount of the Vandal wealth on account of the consulship of Belisarios, and it seemed for a time that something which was no longer customary was being revived.46

According to Prokopios, Belisarios’ distributions during his inaugural consular procession were financed by the spoils of the Vandal campaign. The author clearly approves of this model of financing, even going so far as to say that the manner in which

46 Prok. Wars 4.9.15: Ὀλίγῳ δὲ ὕστερον Βελισαρίῳ καὶ ὁ θρίαμβος κατὰ δὴ τὸν παλαιὸν νόμον ξυνετελέσθη. ἐς ὑπάτους γὰρ προελθόντι οἱ ξυνέπεσε φέρεσθαί τε πρὸς τῶν αἰχμαλώτων καὶ ἐν τῷ δίφρῳ ὀχουμένῳ τῷ δήμῳ ῥιπτεῖν αὐτὰ δὴ ἐκεῖνα τοῦ Βανδίλων πολέμου τὰ λάφυρα. τά τε γὰρ ἀργυρώματα καὶ ζώνας χρυσᾶς καὶ ἄλλου πλούτου Βανδιλικοῦ πολύ τι χρῆμα ἐκ τῆς Βελισαρίου ὑπατείας ὁ δῆμος ἥρπασε, καί τι τῶν οὐκ εἰωθότων ἀνανεοῦσθαι τῷ χρόνῳ ἔδοξε.

197 the people got hold of a share of this conquered wealth made it appear, for a time, that an ancient custom was coming back into use. This comment must be read against Prokopios’ lament for the dissolution of the office in the Secret History as well as against the image of imperial renewal Justinian constructed in his Novels. Belisarios’ consulship was, for

Prokopios, a brief return to a proper system of Roman government in which the consul provided for the people not through taxation (as is implicit in the imperial subsidization of consular processions mentioned in the Secret History), but through personal wealth acquired through conquests abroad. Unlike Justinian’s claimed restoration of Republican institutions, which Prokopios viewed as a rhetorical cover for the eradication of traditional offices and the creation of new avenues for financial exploitation, Belisarios’ restoration of the consulship was authentically traditional and beneficial to the people.47

Prokopios is therefore not only arguing against the specific rationale for Novel 105

(Consular Expenditures) with his presentation of Belisarios’ consular processions, he is contesting the rhetoric of Justinian’s entire reform program by holding up Belisarios’ consulship as an example of restoration done properly. It is no coincidence that Prokopios makes a point of tying Belsiarios’ consulship directly to both of the major reconquests that took place during Justinian’s reign; he is targeting precisely the evidence Justinian adduces in the reform Novels to legitimize his imperial model of Republican restoration.

The effect of Prokopios’ critique of Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) is heightened by two ironic circumstances which would have been clear to politically observant members of his readership. The first is that Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures)

47 Prok. SH. 11.1-2 and 20.7-12.

198 was published in 537, after an additional two years of successful campaigning in Italy by

Belisarios. The second is that the next man to hold the office, John the Cappadocian

(whom Prokopios never calls consul), lacked any military experience and would most likely not have been overly burdened by a traditional consulship, especially if Prokopios’ account of his corruption and is believed.48

The full effect of Prokopios’ oblique criticisms of Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures) is to frustrate and reverse the narratives Justinian used to justify his reforms. In doing so Prokopios constructs a counternarrative in which the emperor enacted a number of damaging and unnecessary reforms whose effect was the functional end of a venerable and important Roman office. This model of Justinian’s meddlesomeness and innovation undermining the success of the empire is a fixture of

Prokopios’ critique in the Secret History, as is the inversion of Justinian’s own rhetoric, often the rhetoric in the Novels.49

Prokopios also takes up the topic of Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) in the

Secret History, focusing not on the historical implications of the law, but rather on its immediate effects upon the people of Constantinople.

Two consuls were appointed every year for the Romans, one in Rome and the other in Constantinople. Whoever was called to this honor would spend more than twenty centenaria for the state, getting a little from his estate and the majority from the emperor. This money was raised for the others whom I mentioned before [city merchants] and for those who were

48 Prok. Wars 1.25.3.

49 The best example being Prokopios’ reworking of Justinian’s famed sleeplessness. See, B. Croke, ‘Justinian the ‘Sleepless Emperor,’ Byzantina Australiensia 17 (2010) 103-8

199

more lacking a livelihood. This money was for the most part paid primarily to those who worked on the stage and who always put on all of the shows in the city. After Justinian succeeded to the kingship (basileia) these things were no longer done at the customary times. At first, a consul was appointed for the Romans only at long intervals, but in the end they did not even see the matter in dreams. In fact, afterwards human affairs were oppressed continuously by such , both because the emperor no longer supplied the accustomed things to his subjects and because he was robbing them of the thing they already at every turn and in every conceivable way.50

Prokopios’ description in the Secret History is clearly a reference to Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures), but one that focuses on the financial responsibilities the consul undertook in addition to scattering gold, specifically the financing of public shows. The fact that this account does not overlap at all with Prokopios’ discussion of Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures) in the Wars indicates that this discussion should be read as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, his account in the Wars. The two discussions remain linked, however, because the Secret History continues the inversion introduced in the

Wars by questioning Justinian’s stated rationale for reforming the consulship. In Novel

105 (Consular Expenditures), Justinian claimed that the expense of the consulship had become a burden on the prospective holders of the office, but Prokopios tells us that it was the emperor who found the expenditures crippling because he was expected to

50 Prok. SH. 26.12-15: ὕπατοι Ῥωμαίων ἀνὰ πᾶν ἔτος ἐγινέσθην δύο, ἅτερος μὲν ἐν Ῥώμῃ, ὁ δὲ δὴ ἕτερος ἐν Βυζαντίῳ. ὅστις δὲ εἰς τὴν τιμὴν ἐκαλεῖτο ταύτην πλέον ἢ κεντηνάρια χρυσοῦ εἴκοσιν ἐς τὴν πολιτείαν ἀναλοῦν ἔμελλεν, ὀλίγα μὲν οἰκεῖα, τὰ δὲ πλεῖστα πρὸς βασιλέως κεκομισμένος. ταῦτά τε τὰ χρήματα ἔς τε τοὺς ἄλλους, ὧνπερ ἐμνήσθην, καὶ ἐς τῶν βίων τοὺς ἀπορωτέρους ἐκ τοῦ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον φερόμενα καὶ διαφερόντως ἐς τοὺς ἐπὶ σκηνῆς ἅπαντα τὰ πράγματα ἐς ἀεὶ τῇ πόλει ἀνίστη. ἐξ οὗ δὲ Ἰουστινιανὸς τὴν βασιλείαν παρέλαβεν, οὐκέτι καιροῖς τοῖς καθήκουσι ταῦτα ἐπράσσετο· ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν <πρῶτα> πολλοῦ Ῥωμαίοις ὕπατος καθίστατο χρόνου, τελευτῶντες δὲ οὐδὲ ὄναρ τὸ πρᾶγμα ἑώρων, ἐξ οὗ δὴ πενίᾳ τινὶ ἐνδελεχέστατα ἐσφίγγετο τὰ ἀνθρώπεια, τὰ μὲν εἰωθότα <τοῦ βασιλέως> οὐκέτι τοῖς ὑπηκόοις παρεχομένου, τὰ δὲ ὑπάρχοντα τρόποις ἅπασι πανταχόθεν ἀφαιρουμένου.

200 furnish a majority of the money. Prokopios’ accusation not only further undermines

Justinian’s rationale for reform, it also turns the logic of Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures) back onto the imperial office. If financial burdens were reason enough to demote the consulship because that office no longer served a useful military function, then what are the implications of the emperor’s inability to meet his financial obligations while outsourcing his military campaigns to a consular general? The law also confirms the reading of Belisarios’ entry into Syracuse taking place on ‘the last day of the consulship’ by describing the gradual petering out of the office under Justinian.

Despite its implications for the imperial office, Prokopios’ discussion of Novel

105 (Consular Expenditures) in the Secret History is primarily focused on the plight of the urban poor and the local merchants and performers who were the economic casualties of Justinian’s reform. The contrast between the emperor’s stinginess and the suffering of his subjects is amplified by Belisarios’ generosity in Sicily; he scattered coins to people who had only recently come into his authority, while Justinian was denying sustenance to his own people. Once again, Prokopios’ account makes Belisarios look more like a legitimate emperor than Justinian.

Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) is not the only consular law Prokopios references in the Wars. When describing Belisarios’ return to Constantinople after his recall from Italy in 540, Prokopios attacks the formalized senatorial hierarchy Justinian lays out in Novel 62 (Concerning Senators):

Belisarios was first among all the Romans in dignity, though some of them had been enrolled before him among the patricians and had actually 201

ascended to the seat of the consuls. But even so they all yielded first place to him, being ashamed in view of his achievements (arete) to cite the law and claim the right that it conferred, and this pleased the emperor greatly.51

Prokopios’ description of Belisarios’ reception is a direct attack on the regulation of status set out in Novel 47 (Concerning Senators). The senators of Constantinople are simply too ashamed by Belisarios’ superior achievements to question his superior status.

Prokopios reports that Justinian, far from being angry, was pleased by this open flouting of his own law. Belisarios’ reception simultaneously points out the absurdity of attempting to legally regulate social status, especially in a collegial body, and serves as a proof-of-concept for a model of aristocratic or consular competition of the type imagined by Zosimos in the New History and mocked by Justinian in Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures). If even the emperor was gratified by the illegal respect accorded

Belisarios by his fellow senators, who are in turn motivated by their own shame at his superior arete, then the fundamental components necessary for a political system predicated on competition remain in effect. The useless philotimia Justinian dismisses in

Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) is revealed to be Zosimos’ philonikeia lacking an appropriate outlet.

The close correspondences between the Novels and the works of Zosimos and

Prokopios do not necessarily mean that they were all familiar with one another’s work,

51 Prok. Wars 8.21.2-3 (trans. Kaldellis): ἦν τε τῷ ἀξιώματι πρῶτος ὁ Βελισάριος Ῥωμαίων ἁπάντων, καίτοι τινὲς αὐτῶν πρότεροι ἀνάγραπτοί τε ἐς πατρικίους γεγόνασι καὶ ἐς αὐτὸν ἀναβεβήκεσαν τῶν ὑπάτων τὸν δίφρον. ἀλλὰ καὶ ὣς αὐτῷ τῶν πρωτείων ἐξίσταντο πάντες, αἰσχυνόμενοι κατὰ τῆς ἀρετῆς τῷ νόμῳ χρῆσθαι καὶ τὸ ἀπ' αὐτοῦ δικαίωμα περιβάλλεσθαι. ταῦτά τε βασιλέα κομιδῆ ἤρεσκεν.

202 although it is at least feasible that Prokopios was familiar with the New History and he was certainly familiar with the Novels. What these correspondences show are the major fault lines in a contemporary debate over the nature of Roman governance in the sixth century, and they testify to the duration and breadth of that discussion, which stretched from the turn of the sixth century (if we accept Zosimos’ traditional dating) until at least the early 550’s. It is worth remembering that there is almost no other period of antiquity, the late Republic being a notable exception, in which it is possible to so clearly reconstruct both sides of a series of contemporary political debates, especially when the emperor himself is a participant.

The Consulship in Jordanes’ Romana

Belisarios’ career and consulship stand out in the sixth century. Of all the men who held the consulship under Justinian, he was the only one aside from Justin (the son of

Germanos and cousin of Justin II), who had any military experience, much less a distinguished record of foreign conquests. It is not surprising then that Prokopios chose to focus his discussion of the consulship under Justinian on Belisarios, nor that other authors did the same. In particular, Jordanes, as discussed above, focused on Belsiarios’ consulship, associating the general with that office more than any other imperial-era figure in his Romana. However, Belisarios was not the only imperial-era consul mentioned by Jordanes, he also identifies Theoderic, Vitalian, and Justin (the son of

Germanos) by that office. In order to understand the significance of this association it is necessary to understand the role of those characters in Jordanes’ histories.

203

The Gothic king Theoderic was an important figure for Jordanes’ corpus.52 Being both a Goth and the founder of the Gothic kingdom in Italy, Theoderic looms large in

Jordanes’ Getica and his appearance in the Romana is not surprising, given Jordanes’ interest in identifying the causes of the current ruinous state of the empire and his accounts of Justinian’s costly wars in Italy. Theoderic’s consulship is mentioned twice, first as a sign of his rapprochement with Zenon and again during the account of his campaign against Odoacer.53 The first mention is especially suggestive:

However, Theoderic, enticed by the courtesy of the emperor Zenon, went to Constantinople, where he was made magister militum praesentalis and celebrated the triumph of a consul ordinarius at public expense.54

Jordanes immediately proceeds to recount Theoderic’s dispatch to the west, where he is entrusted by Zenon with the task of administering the western empire on the emperor’s behalf.55 There are noteworthy parallels between this narrative and the career of

Belisarios. Like Theoderic, Belisarios celebrated a triumph (534) and was made consul

(535) just prior to being sent west to conquer Italy. Unlike Belisarios, however,

52 For Theoderic in Jordanes’ corpus, see B. Swain, Empire of Hope and Tragedy: Jordanes and the Invention of Roman-Gothic History, Dissertation (The Ohio State University, 2014). For Theoderic and Ostrogothic Italy, see J. Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford, 1993); J. O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (New York, 2008) 107-174; J. Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (Cambridge, 2014); P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (Cambridge, 1997).

53 Jord. Rom. 348 and 349, respectively.

54 Jord. Rom. 348: Theodoricus vero Augusti humanitate pellectus Constantinopolim venit, ubi magister militum praesentis effectus consulis ordinarii triumphum ex publico dono peregit.

55 For the legal status of Theoderic in the west, see A.H.M. Jones, ‘The Constitutional Position of Odoacer and Theoderic,’ JRS 52 (1962) 126-130.

204

Theoderic’s victory was quick, or at least briefly reported: ‘Rejoicing, the king of the nations and Theoderic sought Italy and took Odoacer, after he had been exhausted by great battles, into his custody during the surrender of Ravenna.’56 The phrase ‘sought Italy’ (Italiam petiit) is an intentional echo of the Aeneid, in which the phrase is repeated several times, especially in the discussion of Aeneas’ fate by Venus and Juno at the beginning of book 10, in which both goddesses use the phrase.57 Like

Aeneas, Theoderic is charged with seeking Italy and founding a new kingdom. So there exists a three-way parallel between Aeneas, Theoderic, and Belisarios, with the historical generals distinguished by their consulships and charged with founding or refounding

Italy.

In addition to being modeled on Aeneas as a founder of the Roman people,

Theoderic is also held up as an idealized imperial figure. When reporting the nature of the assignment given to Theoderic by Zenon, Jordanes reports that the emperor ‘ordered

[Theoderic] to the area of Italy and entrusted to him the Roman people and senate.’58

Jordanes specifically uses the formula senatus populusque Romanus in this passage, a phrase that is used throughout Roman historiography as shorthand for the Roman state, though it tends to refer to earlier periods in Roman history. Theoderic is being entrusted not with control of Italy, but with the legacy of Republican Rome. Not only does this account emphasize the continuity of Roman government in Italy, it also makes Theoderic

56 Jord. Rom. 349: obansque rex gentium et consul Romanus Theodoricus Italiam petiit magnisque proeliis fatigatum Odoacrum Ravenna in deditione suscepit.

57 Ver. Aen. 1.553-4, 3.253, 3.364, 10.32, 10.67.

58 Jord. Rom. 348: ad partes eum Italiae mandans, Romanum illi populum senatumque commendat.

205 an obvious rival and comparandus for the emperor. The remainder of Theoderic’s life is covered only briefly in the Romana, but Jordanes does report that after the death of

Odoacer, whom we are told was assassinated in the palace, ‘[Theoderic] continued his kingship over his own people and his principate over the Roman people prudently and peacefully for thirty years.’59 Again, the terminology Jordanes employs sets Theoderic up as an imperial foil for the eastern emperors by giving him the title of , which harks back to Augustus himself. Jordanes portrays Theoderic as an excellent emperor, ruling wisely and balancing his role as princeps of the Romans and king of the Goths.

This is in marked contrast to the account of the eastern court that immediately follows the brief account of Theoderic’s reign, in which Jordanes details Zenon’s against

Ariadne, the rebellion of , Zenon’s civil wars, the accession of Anastasios, the second Isaurian rebellion, the rebellion of Vitalian (discussed further below), the accession of , Justin’s purges, the murder of Vitalian, the accession of Justinian, the battles at and Kallinikon (the latter a Roman defeat), the Nika Revolt, and the conquest of North Africa. This long list of events, many of which are clearly presented as shameful or disastrous, in particular the military failures and court intrigues, is bookended by a reference to Theoderic’s death.60 Jordanes calls attention to the fact that all of these misfortunes occurred during the uninterrupted years of peaceful Gothic rule in

Italy. In Jordanes’ Romana, no news is good news and the eventfulness of the late fifth century and early sixth century in the eastern Roman empire is indicative of

59 Jord. Rom. 349: regnum sui et Romani populi principatum prudenter et pacifice per triginta annos continuit.

60 Jord. Rom. 367.

206 governmental failures. Jordanes’ Theoderic, on the other hand, a Gothic consul, king, and princeps, proves to be a better Roman emperor than any of his eastern Roman contemporaries.

Jordanes’ positive portrayal of Theoderic and his reign is a point of contact between the Romana and Prokopios’ Wars. Like Jordanes, Prokopios specifically mentions that Theoderic was a consul and gives a similar, though more detailed, account of the Goth’s early career.61 A more striking similarity is found in Prokopios’ assessment of Theoderic’s constitutional position:

Theoderic did not think it proper to usurp either the appearance or name of the emperor of the Romans, and instead spent his life being called rex, for this is how the barbarians have traditionally called their leaders. Nevertheless, in governing his subjects he assumed all the qualities which are fitting for one who is an emperor in nature.62

Like Jordanes, Prokopios makes Theoderic the image of an ideal emperor, and goes on to praise him at length for his respect for the laws, his ability to fend off foreign barbarians, and his ability to maintain broad support among the populace, all of which are qualities

Justinian is criticized for lacking in the Secret History. Jordanes and Prokopios’ shared respect for Theoderic and use of him as an idealized imperial figure may indicate that the two men were familiar with one another’s work. If the two men were unknown to one

61 Prok. Wars 5.1.9.

62 Prok. Wars 5.1.26: καὶ βασιλέως μὲν τοῦ Ῥωμαίων οὔτε τοῦ σχήματος οὔτε τοῦ ὀνόματος ἐπιβατεῦσαι ἠξίωσεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ῥὴξ διεβίου καλούμενος (οὕτω γὰρ σφῶν τοὺς ἡγεμόνας καλεῖν οἱ βάρβαροι νενομίκασι), τῶν μέντοι κατηκόων τῶν αὑτοῦ προὔστη ξύμπαντα περιβαλλόμενος ὅσα τῷ φύσει βασιλεῖ ἥρμοσται.

207 another, their shared opinion of the Gothic king indicates that Theoderic was being widely discussed as a model ruler in sixth-century Constantinople. In either case, the correspondence provides further evidence for the existence of a broadly coherent debate over the nature of imperial authority in the sixth century, one in which Theoderic and his consular status were salient.

The next imperial-era figure Jordanes identifies as a consul is Vitalian.63 Vitalian is a critical, if understudied, figure in the history of the late fifth and early sixth centuries.

A Roman general of barbarian extraction, Vitalian commanded the Roman armies in

Thrace under Anastasios until he raised the flag of revolt in 513 ostensibly in response to

Anastasios’ support for Miaphysite Christian doctrine, but the inciting incident was

Anastasios’ failure to provide supplies for his . Vitalian and his forces launched an abortive attack on Constantinople in 514, but subsequently remained quiescent, if independent, until the death of Anastasios in 518. At that point, the strongly

Chalcedonian emperor Justin, uncle of Justinian, reconciled with Vitalian and appointed him magister militum of the praesental armies. Vitalian was subsequently made consul ordinarius in 520, only to be assassinated in the palace in the same year.64 Despite

Vitalian’s gruesome end, his nephew Ioannes was an important general under

Belisarios.65

63 PLRE 2.1171-1176 (Vitalianus 2).

64 For the precise dating of the death of Vitalian, see A. Cameron, ‘The Death of Vitalian (520 A.D.),’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 48 (1982) 93-94.

65 PLRE 3a.652-661 (Ioannes 46).

208

In his narrative, Jordanes makes the conflict between Anastasius and Vitalian the chief misfortune of that emperor’s reign, elevating it above the Isaurian rebellions and various other civil and foreign campaigns:

But there was something more deserving of sorrow: [Anastasios] drew out the civil war against his last servant, Vitalian the Scythian, for six years. And if indeed Vitalian approached many of the suburbs of the royal city with 60,000 soldiers in roughly the third year [of the civil war] and sacked them for the sake of riches and spoils, he was hostile to the emperor and not the respublica.66

Jordanes makes Vitalian a in his history by excusing his questionable actions, namely his raid on the suburbs of Constantinople. He accomplishes this by making clear that Vitalian was not opposed to the respublica but only to the emperor. This comment is, in itself, interesting because it makes clear that Jordanes did not understand the imperial office to be synonymous with the state, making it possible for someone to oppose the emperor, even violently, without making himself an enemy of Rome. Justinian articulates the opposite view in Novel 47 (On Dating), in which he explicitly identifies the imperial office with the politeia/respublica which was founded by Caesar and Augustus. As argued above, Jordanes was familiar at least with the effects of Novel 47 (On Dating) as he attacks its consequences for the end of the consular time in the Romana. His desire to divorce the imperial office from the respublica suggests that he was familiar with the text of the law, as do the implications of this statement for his history.

66 Jord. Rom. 357: sed et quod plus fuit dolendum, contra ultimum suum famulum Vitalianum de Scythiam per sex annos civile bellum extraxit. is si quidem Vitalianus cum LX milibus armatorum tertio pene non rei publicae sed regi infestus accedens multa suborbana regiae urbis praedis spoliisque adtrivit.

209

If the emperor and the respublica are not synonymous, then it is possible for the emperor to be an enemy of the respublica. Vitalian and Anastasios were engaged in a military struggle for control over the respublica. If Vitalian was not an enemy of the respublica, then it stands to reason that his opponent must be. This is how Jordanes depicts Anastasios, who is criticized explicitly for his heretical beliefs, meaning his miaphysite Christianity. 67 Jordanes emphasizes that the emperor’s repeated failures against Vitalian were a direct result of his heterodoxy by focusing at (relative) length on

Anastasios’ inability to defeat the general.68 The contrast between the noble Vitalian and the heretical Anastasios creates the expectation that the rebellious general will be vindicated or redeemed by the emperor Justin, a Chalcedonian. This expectation is reinforced by the first chapter on Justin’s reign, in which the new emperor is described as punishing his political opponents. Immediately following this, Jordanes reports the fate of

Vitalian:

[Justin] struck an alliance with Vitalian and, when he had summoned [Vitalian] to himself, he made him magister militum praesentalis and a consul ordinarius. Later, when Justin again held this man [Vitalian] in suspicion, he killed him by having him gouged with sixteen wounds in the palace along with his bodyguards Celerianus and Paulus.69

67 Jord. Rom. 359.

68 Jord. Rom. 358.

69 Jord. Rom. 361: foedusque cum Vitaliano percussit et ad se evocitum magistrum militum praesentis et consulem ordinarium fecit: quem rursus in suspicionem habens facti prioris XVI vulneribus in palatio cum Celeriano et Paulo satellitibus effosum peremit.

210

The initial promise of reconciliation, highlighted by Vitalian’s appointment as consul, leads the reader to expect that the next section of Justin’s reign will be characterized by the rewarding of loyal followers. However, the narrative quickly turns against Vitalian who is viciously hacked to death in the palace (in Jordanes’ account the wounds are literally dug into his body), based on mere suspicion. The narrative then proceeds, without further comment, to Justinian’s elevation as co-ruler. At no point is there any indication that Vitalian has lost the support of Jordanes, or that he has become an enemy of the respublica. Jordanes does not comment on the validity of Justin’s suspicions and, in the absence of direct comment, the reader is forced to rely on the information already provided, all of which identifies Vitalian with the interests of the respublica. The assassination of Vitalian therefore functions as a comment on the reign of Justin, whose eight years as emperor are recorded in the Romana on a timeline of executions and exiles, and marks the new emperor, and by extension his appointed heir Justinian, as an enemy of the respublica.

The consulships of Theoderic and Vitalian are linked at several levels in the

Romana. To begin with, both men are identified as Goths, Theoderic directly and Vitalian through his identity as a Scythian, a term Jordanes uses for the Goths in his Getica. The two figures are also defined in opposition to ‘bad’ rulers, Odoacer and Anastasios respectively, and their opposition to these figures is presented as representing the best interests of the respublica. The careers of Theoderic and Vitalian diverge in their relationship to imperial power. The career of Theoderic establishes a model for a subordinate to successfully carry out the orders of a reigning emperor and, like Aeneas,

211 found a new kingdom in Italy. Vitalian, on the other hand, raises the possibility that the emperor can be an enemy of the respublica, an idea which resurfaces in the conclusion of the Romana when Jordanes blames negligent leaders (ignari rectores) for the contemporary misfortunes of the state.70 Despite their differences, both consulships, as well as that of Belisarios, contradict the historical narrative of Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures). Theoderic and Vitalian are highly competent generals, and Theoderic in particular is singled out as an accomplished lawgiver for his establishment of the Gothic court in Italy.71 In addition, both men are independent operators working at the behest, but not under the control, of the emperor, and, in the case of Vitalian, openly flouting an emperor’s authority. Through a deliberate use of the consular title, Jordanes offers an implicit counternarrative to Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) in the Romana. Instead of being a feeble and vestigial office, the consulship is instead shown to act as both a surrogate for (Theoderic) and rival to (Vitalian) imperial authority. Moreover, Jordanes’ portrayal of Vitalian creates an association between a champion of the respublica and the consulship, one which Belisarios’ career in the Romana confirms.72

Jordanes challenges the historical narrative of Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) not only through the details that he provides about the three imperial consuls he mentions, but also with the placement of that information. Justinian’s basic contention in

Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) is that the consulship is on the decline. In Jordanes’

70 See chapter two, pp. 122ff.

71 Jord. Rom. 349.

72 For Belisarios’ consulship in the Romana, see chapter two, pp. 122ff.

212 narrative, however, the fifth and sixth centuries witness a resurgence of the consulship.

The only consuls mentioned since Crassus are all found within that brief period and the narrative is constructed in such a way that, after Theoderic is appointed consul, there is always at least one living consular figure in the narrative. In fact, the consulship of

Belisarios is mentioned immediately before the death of Theoderic, a placement that calls attention to the parallels between the careers of the two men, which are further highlighted by the Virgilian allusions found in both accounts.

Jordanes uses the parallels between Theoderic and Belisarios, as well as his description of Vitalian’s rebellion, to create a set of expectations for the consulship at the end of the Romana. Belisarios, more than any other figure in the history, is identified by his consulship, an office which Jordanes has constructed as independent of, if not hostile to, the imperial government. Belisarios, however, fails to deliver on the promise of his predecessors despite the decay evident in the Senate and People of Rome.73 He neither supplants imperial authority in Italy, as Theoderic did, nor rebels against Justinian after the model of Vitalian. Jordanes calls attention to this fact when he summarizes the situation in the west immediately prior to Belisarios’ recall in 540: ‘And thus in a short space of time, the Emperor Justinian, by means of his most faithful consul, subjected two kingdoms and two respublicae to his authority.’74 This is a loaded passage. To begin with, the emphasis on Belisarios’ faithfulness invites comparison to the independence of

Theoderic and rebellion of Vitalian, both of which remind us that the consulship in this

73 Jord. Rom. 373, also discussed in chapter two, pp. 122ff.

74 Jord. Rom. 375: sicque intra pauci temporis spatium Iustinianus imperator per fidelissimum consulem duo regna duasque res publicas suae dicioni subegit.

213 period represented a legitimate threat to imperial authority, at least in the Romana.

Moreover, the implication of the superlative is that the other consuls appointed by

Justinian, who are never mentioned aside from a brief reference to the consular status of

Justin the son of Germanos,75 either would not have been or were not as loyal. This has interesting implications for men such as John the Cappadocian, who served as consul and could be counted among the ignari rectores Jordanes attacks in his conclusion.

The main thrust of Jordanes’ statement can be found in his curious repetition when he states that Justinian conquered two kingdoms and two respublicae. The problem with this description is that neither the Vandal nor Gothic kingdom is ever explicitly described as a respublica. Unlike the Vandal kingdom, however, the Gothic kingdom under Theoderic is clearly presented in Roman political terms as the ‘Senate and People of Rome’ while Theoderic is styled a princeps, a term with both Republican and imperial connotations. Moreover, the respublica most recently mentioned in the narrative is the eastern empire, which Jordanes brings up only to defend the rebellion of Vitalian. As argued above, Vitalian’s rebellion is presented as being against Anastasios, not the respublica, implying that Anastasios was himself opposed to, or at least distinguished from, the respublica. This association is later transferred to Justin through his assassination of Vitalian, an event which is reported immediately before his elevation of

Justinian to the position of co-emperor. While the term respublica is sometimes used in other Latin authors to refer simply to a state, Roman or foreign, it is never used that way in the Romana. Moreover, there is a previous mention of dual respublicae in the history.

75 Jord. Rom. 376.

214

Jordanes frames the division of the empire by in similar terms:

‘[Theodosius] handed over each of the two peaceful respublicae to one of his two sons.’76

These same two respublicae, the Eastern and western Roman empires, should be understood in Jordanes’ comment about Belisarios. Jordanes is therefore reporting two separate sets of accomplishments, Justinian conquered two kingdoms, those of the

Vandals and Goths, as well as two respublicae, the western and eastern Roman empires, through his ‘most faithful’ consul. Belisarios’ failure to rebel against Justinian’s authority makes the general complicit in subjecting both east and west to the rule of Justinian. The implication, then, is that Justinian served as emperor at the pleasure of Belisarios. The balance of power between the office of emperor and consul is inverted, creating a similar effect to that seen in Prokopios’ treatment of Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures).

Jordanes must therefore be added to the list of sixth century authors concerned with the fate of the consulship. In addition, his strategies for subverting Justinian’s narrative of consular decline as well as his lionization of the consuls place him squarely in the rhetorical tradition of Prokopios and Zosimos. He is further linked to Prokopios by his praise for the reign of Theoderic and his focus on Theoderic’s consular status. Once again, we see the coherence of the discussion of the consulship and Roman governance in the sixth century.

76 Jord. Rom. 318: utramque rem publicam utrisque filiis quietam relinquens.

215

Lydos and the Consulship: The Missing Magistracy

In addition to Jordanes and Prokopios, Ioannes Lydos also responds to Justinian’s consular Novels in his work On the Magistracies. However, Lydos does not respond, as we might reasonably expect in a work dedicated to the major magistracies of the Roman state, in a single coherent discussion of the consulship. It should be noted that Lydos’

Magistacies is an incomplete work, so it is possible that the consulship is discussed more coherently in the missing sections, perhaps on the occasion of John the Cappadocian’s tenure of the office in 538, but it is nevertheless striking that, in the surviving portions of the work, Lydos never gives the consulship the same focused discussion that he devotes to a number of other offices, including relatively minor ones such as the praefectus vigilum.77 The omission of the consulship is noteworthy because Lydos claims to be giving a history of the magistracies of the Roman state from the beginning, starting with the Praetorian Prefecture, which he identifies as the post of commander

(hipparchos), and continuing through other major Republican offices, such as the dictatorship, tribunate, quaestorship, and praetorship. Why would Lydos write a history of the major magistracies of the Roman state and largely ignore the most important magistracy of the Republican period? The omission becomes even more confusing in light of Lydos’ opening passage on the periodization of Roman history, in which he refers to the Republic as the ‘years of the consuls.’78 The consulship for Lydos is therefore the defining office of the period from the expulsion of the kings until the

77 Discussed above in reference to Novel 13 (Praetor of the People), see chapter two, pp. 144ff..

78 Lyd. Mag. 1.2 (10.14): οἱ δὲ τῶν ὑπάτων ἄχρι Καίσαρος τοῦ πρώτου ἐνιαυτοὶ.

216 dictatorship of Julius Caesar and yet it still does not merit significant discussion. In spite of this apparent ambivalence and independent of any discussion of the consulship that may have occurred in the lost portions of the Magistracies, it remains possible to see

Lydos responding to the ideas and rhetoric of Justinian’s consular Novels in the

Magistracies.

Lydos begins the Magistracies by refuting and attacking the periodization of

Roman history established by Novel 47 (On Dating). Like Justinian, Lydos begins with

Aeneas:

It occurred to me as I was undertaking to enumerate the magistracies of the politeia of the Romans that it is important to give a preface to my account beginning from the oldest and most honored man of all. This man was Aeneas, who on account of his beauty and force of both spirit and body was thought to be the son of someone greater than exists among men.79

At first glance, this passage appears to signal Lydos’ acceptance of Justinian’s periodization, as he is beginning with Aeneas. However, the choice to begin with Aeneas is framed as an afterthought, something ancillary to the main focus of the history, which instantly sets this account at odds with Novel 47 (On Dating), in which Aeneas is both an epochal and foundational figure. The implication of Lydos’ statement is that Aeneas contributed nothing to the development of the Roman politeia, making it impossible for him to serve as a meaningful precedent for Roman political institutions, including the

79 Lyd. Mag. 1.1 (10.1-7): Ἐγχειροῦντί μοι περὶ τῶν ἀρχῶν τῆς Ῥωμαίων πολιτείας διαλαμβάνειν ἀξιόλογον εἶναι παρέστη προοίμιον δοῦναι τῷ λόγῳ ἀπὸ τοῦ πρεσβυτάτου καὶ τιμιωτάτου πάντων. Αἰνείας δὲ ἦν οὗτος, ὁ διὰ κάλλος καὶ ῥώμην ψυχῆς τε καὶ σώματος κρείττονος ἢ κατὰ ἀνθρώπους εἶναι νομισθεὶς υἱός.

217 office of emperor. Lydos underscores Aeneas’ unimportance by identifying the grounds on which he is memorable: the beauty and force of his spirit and body. In other words,

Aeneas is remarkable because of his good looks and personality rather than his importance as a constitutional precedent.80 Lydos goes a step further and makes explicit reference to the stories of Aeneas’ divine parentage, reclaiming the Trojan hero as a pagan figure and predicating his importance to the Roman state on his perceived, if not factual, descent from the pagan gods. By emphasizing Aeneas’ associations with pagan religious beliefs, Lydos makes him a toxic figure to the polemically Christian Justinian.

Nor is it likely that this is mere coincidence, especially given that the hero of the latter of half of the Magistracies, the praetorian prefect Phokas, was forced to commit on charges of backsliding into pagan belief.81

Lydos proceeds to lay out his periodization of Roman history,82 which is broken into five sections: Aeneas to Romulus, the rule of the kings, the period of the consuls, the period from Caesar to Constantine, and finally the period from the death of Constantine to the death of Anastasius. Notably lacking from this division is the period from the accession of Justin I to the time of the work’s publication. This period is, of course,

80 It is also possible that Lydos is here echoing the description of Aeneas’ statue in Christodoros’ Ekphrasis, see the discussion in chapter one, pp. 83ff. We know Lydos was familiar with Christodoros’ corpus as he specifically mentions Christodoros’ work On the Disciples of the Great Proklos. Lydos’ opening chronology (discussed below) has also been linked to chronology of Hesychios’ Patria of Constantinople, A. Kaldellis, ‘The Works and Days of Hesychios the Illoustrios of Miletos,’ GRBS 45 (2005) 381-403 at 382-383 and 393-395.

81 PLRE 2.881-882 ( 5). For Phokas’ paganism and his work as praetorian prefect, in partiuclar his administration of the building of the Hagia Sophia, see A. Kaldellis, ‘The Making of Hagia Sophia and the Last Pagans of New Rome,’ JLA 6.2 (2013) 347-366.

82 Lyd. Mag. 1.2 (10.8-27).

218 implied, but the fact that Lydos does not include it explicitly in his timeline of Roman history implies that there is something distinct about his own period while simultaneously divorcing it from any historical precedents. By minimizing the importance of Aeneas and separating the reign of Justin and Justinian from the rest of Roman history, Lydos effectively dismantles the periodization Justinian laid out in Novel 47 (On Dating) and by extension Justinian’s reframing of Roman history as a succession of monarchical governments.

Lydos’ periodization also engages with Justinian’s monarchical periodization on a conceptual level. The rationale of Lydos’ periodization, leaving aside Aeneas who is introduced as an unimportant addendum, is the office in control of the state. The first meaningful period is that of the kings (Lydos makes a point of transliterating reges into

Greek), while the next is that of the consuls, followed by two periods for the emperors.83

This is a more traditional schema for Roman history, although Lydos’ division of the period of the emperors between those before Constantine and those from Constantine to

Anastasius is unusual. This division is explained by a fundamental shift in the nature of the politeia which took place under Constantine: the founding of Constantinople, which

Lydos highlights by giving the city an independent dating.84

Furthermore, Lydos makes clear that he is responding to another, ostensibly inaccurate dating system in the final lines of the second chapter of his work, when he

83 The period of the emperors begins with Caesar despite the fact that he was never legally an emperor. However, Lydos clearly considers him the first emperor, as he later makes clear. Lyd. Mag. 1.4 (14.4-14) and 2.1-3 (82.1-84.28).

84 Lyd. Mag. 1.2 (10.19-21).

219 states, ‘now that these things have been established by us according to the truth, it is fitting, as I have said, to enumerate the magistracies of the state in our time.’85 Lydos’ claim here is very specific. He does not claim that he has accurately calculated the time since Aeneas, which would anyway be untenable given his ambivalence about the dating of the period from Aeneas to Romulus and from Caesar to Constantine.86 Instead, he claims that the information has been laid out, literally ‘placed,’ ‘according to the truth.’

Lydos’ word choice eschews anything that might lead his reader to believe that the issue at stake is the accurate calculation of dates; rather it is the placement of the different periods, and by extension the rationale for their selection, that must be understood.

Lydos’ truth claim, therefore, implies that he is responding to someone who has crafted a false periodization for Roman history. As shown above, Lydos was intimately familiar with both the Novels and the Corpus Iuris Civilis, even to the point of being able to quote the Digest against the Novels.87 While Lydos may well be responding to several different schemes for the periodization of Roman history, contemporary or otherwise, his familiarity with Justinian’s laws suggests that the periodization of Novel 47 (On Dating) is one of his targets. This conclusion is further supported by the way he structures his periodization to marginalize Aeneas and exclude Justinian, both moves that directly undermine the periodization of Novel 47 (On Dating).

85 Lyd. Mag. 1.2 (10.25-7): τούτων οὕτως ἡμῖν σὺν ἀληθείᾳ τεθέντων, καιρός ἐστιν περὶ τῶν ἀρχῶν, ὡς εἴρηται, τοῦ καθ' ἡμᾶς διαλαβεῖν πολιτεύματος.

86 Lyd. Mag. 1.2 (10.8-12) and 1.2 (10.14-15).

87 In the discussion of the praefectus vigilum, see pp. 144ff.

220

The final sentence of the second chapter also subtly redefines the topic of Lydos’ work. At the beginning of the Magistracies he claims that he had undertaken to

‘enumerate the magistracies of the politeia of the Romans,’ whereas in the final sentence of the second chapter he says that he will now proceed to ‘enumerate the magistracies of the state in our time.’ Though this is a small addition, it may offer an explanation for the absence of the consulship from Lydos’ work. While the precise date of the Magistracies remains uncertain, internal references and Lydos’ own retirement in 551/2, which he discusses in the work, indicate that it was not published prior to the 550s and likely the latter half of the decade.88 In any case, even the earliest date would make the

Magistracies contemporary with Prokopios and Jordanes, which grants the work the same perspective on the demise of the consulship afforded to those authors. By adding the phrase καθ' ἡμᾶς to the statement of his topic, Lydos offers a potential explanation for his neglect of the consulship: the office no longer exists, and therefore is not included in his work. While it is possible that the consulship is discussed in the missing portions of the work, it is by no means certain and, in either case, a later discussion of the office would not change the effect of its omission from Lydos’ discussion of the foundations of the major Roman magistracies.

After establishing a periodization in opposition to that of Justinian in Novel 47

(On Dating), Lydos takes up the question of the distinction between kingship, tyranny, and the office of the emperor. In the course of this discussion, Lydos draws clear

88 A. Bandy, John Lydus: On the Magistracies of the Roman State (Philadelphia 1983) xxvi-xxviii, and M. Maas. John Lydus and the Roman Past: Antiquarianism and politics in the age of Justinian (New York 1992) 7-8.

221 distinctions between the office held by Romulus and that held by Justinian, an argument that serves to further undermine the connection Justinian attempts to draw between himself and other Roman monarchs in Novel 47 (On Dating).

The name of the magistracy of these men [Romulus and Remus], which the Italians call regium, is a form of tyranny, for the name regium is not indicative of lawful Roman kingship, as some men have claimed. For this reason, [the name regium] has not been used since the expulsion of the reges even when the Romans are ruled by kings.89

Where Justinian attempts to align himself with Romulus and Aeneas through the political institution of monarchy, Lydos’ more nuanced approach to the various forms of monarchical rule argues against such a connection. Moreover, the fact that he bases his distinction on the quality of lawfulness makes any association between the current imperial system and the kingship of Romulus undesirable. Lydos subsequently defines the three forms of monarchy as lawful kingship, tyranny, and the office of the emperor.

The first two offices are defined by their source of authority and their relationship with established custom. Lawful kings, Lydos claims, are chosen by their subjects, make a point not to overturn established laws, and take decisions in consultation with the best men (aristoi) in the state.90 Tyrants on the other hand make decisions independent of any advice and have no respect for established law.91 What is surprising about this

89 Lyd. Mag. 1.3 (10.30-12.2): ὄνομα δὲ τῆς ἀρχῆς αὐτῶν, ὃ Ἰταλοὶ λέγουσι ῥήγιον, οἷον τυραννικόν· οὐδὲ γὰρ βασιλείας Ῥωμαϊκῆς ἐννόμου ἐστὶ σημαντικόν, ὥς τινες ὑπολαμβάνουσιν, τὸ ῥήγιον ὄνομα· ὅθεν οὐκέτι μετὰ τὴν ἐκβολὴν τῶν ῥηγῶν παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις καίτοι βασιλευομένοις ἐχρημάτισεν.

90 Lyd. Mag. 1.3 (12.4-12).

91 Lyd. Mag. 1.3 (12.14-8). 222 formulation is that one would expect the office of emperor to oscillate between these two forms, rather than be defined separately. Lydos’ formulation of tyranny is precisely the image of Justinian found in the Secret History: an emperor overturning established custom in consultation with no one, driven by a mad desire to innovate.92 Moreover, idealized representations of the imperial office going back at least to Pliny’s Panegyricus, emphasize the emperor’s consultation with the senate and his submission to the laws.93

There are likewise models for this in late antiquity, such as Ammianus’ report that the emperor fined himself ten (Roman) pounds of gold for usurping consular prerogatives during a manumission ceremony on 1 January 362.94

In his description of lawful kingship, Lydos inserts one of his many literary references, this one to ’ Aias:

A king is one who because he has first been placed on a solid basis (bathran), which is also like a foundation, by the votes of his subjects, gains a greater fortune than the others. Sophocles spoke of Aias in this way, that he held the base of sea-girt Salamis.95

The quote is taken from the opening of the first choral ode in the Aias, immediately

92 This may not be coincidence as there is evidence suggesting that Lydos and Prokopios were familiar with one another’s work, see A. Kaldellis, ‘Identifying Dissident Circles in Sixth-Century Byzantium: The Friendship of Prokopios and Ioannes Lydos,’ Florilegium 21 (2004) 1-17.

93 Pliny, Pan. 64-65, 76-77, 93. The relationship between the emperor and the law had a long and complicated history in Roman thought, for which see A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA, 2015) 62-88.

94 Amm. Marc. 22.7.2.

95 Lyd. Mag. 1.3 (12.4-7): βασιλεύς ἐστιν ὁ τῶν ἑαυτοῦ ὑπηκόων πρῶτος ψήφῳ ἐπιλελεγμένος ἐπὶ βάθραν τινὰ ὥσπερ καὶ κρηπῖδα, τύχης κρείττονος ὑπὲρ τοὺς ἄλλους λαχών· ὡς Σοφοκλῆς περὶ Αἴαντος εἶπεν ἔχειν αὐτὸν βάθραν τῆς ἀγχιάλου Σαλαμῖνος.

223 following the first appearance of the gleefully murderous and deluded Aias. The chorus in the Aias is composed of sailors from Salamis, a sampling of the men upon whom Aias’ royal power rests at home and the basis of his authority at Troy. The chorus is mostly devoted to a summary of Aias’ nocturnal sally against the Achaian leaders, which was deflected onto their flocks, but the precise passage Lydos is referencing deals with the relationship between the sailors and their king:

Child of Telamon, holding the base of sea-girt and doubly-washed Salamis, I rejoice when you do well. But whenever the raging blow of Zeus or the slanderous speech of the Danaans attacks you, I cower greatly and am put to flight like the eye of a winged dove.96

Lydos is directing his reader to a passage that emphasizes the intertwined fortunes of ruler and ruled. This idea has clear implications in Lydos’ political scheme, namely that a lawful king aligns his interests with those of his people in such a way that their successes and failures become shared. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is the vote, which serves to provide the basis for legal royal authority. The theme of the relationship between the ruler and ruled appears once more in the choral ode, after a discussion of the rumors which have spread through the Achaian camp about Aias’ mad rampage:

You cannot miss when attacking great , but if anyone should say these sorts of things about me, he would not be convincing. slithers toward the powerful man, but minor men without great men are a feeble

96 Soph. Aias 134-40: Τελαμώνιε παῖ, τῆς ἀμφιρύτου / Σαλαμῖνος ἔχων βάθρον ἀγχιάλου, / σὲ μὲν εὖ πράσσοντ' ἐπιχαίρω· / σὲ δ' ὅταν πληγὴ Διὸς ἢ ζαμενὴς / λόγος ἐκ Δαναῶν κακόθρους ἐπιβῇ, / μέγαν ὄκνον ἔχω καὶ πεφόβημαι / πτηνῆς ὡς ὄμμα πελείας.

224

defense for a tower. The minor man should be made noble (aristos) by great men, and the great man raised up by lesser men.97

Aias’ sailors understand their relationship with their king as reciprocal. Their role is to exalt him and his, in turn, is to ennoble them. The position of king, as the sailors define it, is an inherently treacherous one, in which the ruler is called upon to be a defender of his people, but his very prominence makes him a target of envy, against which his subjects can offer only a poor defense. The one-sided nature of this relationship is highlighted by the metaphor of the tower. The word used, pyrgos, refers to a defensive tower of the type found in city walls. The idea that a tower, which is itself a defensive structure, could require further defense is incongruent with the purpose of such a structure. The final assertion by the sailors, that great men have a duty to make lesser men better and that lesser men must in turn exalt great men, is in essence the model of elected kingship

Lydos described in the Magistracies. Lawful kings are secure in their power and assured of a good foundation because they are being held upright by lesser men. It is noteworthy that this model of elected executive authority which is held above, but also dependent on,

‘lesser’ men accurately describes the political system of the Republic, especially the office of consul which most closely mirrors the executive function of the kingship.98 The implications of this similarity will be discussed further below.

97 Soph. Aias 154-61: Τῶν γὰρ μεγάλων ψυχῶν ἱεὶς / οὐκ ἂν ἁμάρτοις· κατὰ δ' ἄν τις ἐμοῦ / τοιαῦτα λέγων οὐκ ἂν πείθοι· / πρὸς γὰρ τὸν ἔχονθ' ὁ φθόνος ἕρπει· / καίτοι σμικροὶ μεγάλων χωρὶς / σφαλερὸν πύργου ῥῦμα πέλονται· / μετὰ γὰρ μεγάλων βαιὸς ἄριστ' ἄν, / καὶ μέγας ὀρθοῖθ' ὑπὸ μικροτέρων·

98 See especially K. J. Holkeskamp, Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research, trans. H. Heitmann-Gordon (Princeton, 2010) chapters 6-8.

225

Lydos defines the imperial office independently of either the lawful or tyrannical form of monarchy. In doing so, he defines the office narrowly and in terms of a specific set of duties:

The of the Caesares, or rather that of the emperors, is not indicative of either kingship or tyranny, but rather of sole authority and direct command over managing for the better the tumults that arise against the common interest and for commanding the army in whatever way it is necessary to fight their enemies.99

Lydos is here playing a semantic game with the title preferred by late antique emperors, autokrator, including Justinian who stamped it on his coins. As mentioned above, this title literally refers to the sole holder of a particular form of authority, but it could also be understood to mean someone whose authority was self-derived, in other words contingent upon no one else’s approval or consent. Here, Lydos is attempting to make clear that neither the title autokrator nor Caesar, with which it is synonymous, denotes self-derived power. Instead, both refer simply to the emperor’s sole control over the military in both domestic and foreign affairs. The title, far from representing the whole of the imperial office, refers specifically to military command (and we can see here another correspondence between Lydos and Prokopios, who uses the title autokrator extensively for Belisarios, both as a Thucydidean imitation and challenge to Justinian’s authority).

The origin of the emperor’s civil authority remains uncertain and is unrelated to his

99 Lyd. Mag. 1.4 (12.19-23): Τὸ γὰρ τῶν Καισάρων, ἤ γ' οὖν αὐτοκρατόρων, ἐπώνυμον οὐδὲ βασιλείας ἀλλ' οὐδὲ τυραννίδος ἐστὶ σημαντικόν, αὐταρχίας δὲ μᾶλλον καὶ αὐθεντίας τοῦ διοικεῖν τοὺς ἐξανισταμένους κατὰ τῶν κοινῶν θορύβους ἐπὶ τὸ κάλλιον ἐπιτάττειν τε τῷ στρατεύματι πῶς ἂν δέοι μάχεσθαι τοῖς ἐναντίοις.

226 military command. While this distinction between military and civil authority is ultimately academic (in reality each depended on the other), the articulation of a political ideology that accepts the position of emperor but attempts to specifically define the authority of the office is a radical departure from the wholesale absorption of authority described by Justinian in the Novels.

Lydos’ justification for his bifurcation of imperial authority depends on an etymological argument, but one with strong implications for the legal status of the imperial office.

The word ‘to command’ is said by the Italians as imperare from which comes imperator. It is clear that the name of autokrator or Caesar is not indicative of kingship, just the opposite: both the consuls and, after them, the Caesares had the honor of being called imperatores as a title.

Through a combination of etymology and historical argument, Lydos links the military authority of the emperor to that held by the consuls. This is similar to the claim Justinian makes in Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) that the consuls yielded the conduct of war and making of peace to the emperors. But where Justinian uses a broadly defined cession of power to claim absolute control over Roman foreign policy, Lydos uses the same connection to limit the authority granted to the office of emperor (imperator/autokrator) by restricting it to the powers held by the consuls under the Republic, specifically the right to command troops in battle and quiet internal uprisings. Lydos is therefore using the now familiar tool of inverting the logic of Justinian’s rhetoric to make the opposite point. By linking the authority of the emperor to the powers of the consuls, Lydos is not

227 only providing a more accurate history of the development of the imperial office, he is also making the case that the imperial office is simply another form of the consulship.

This is a critical point because, as we will see, Lydos’ conception of administrative reform is as a perpetual process of decay and renewal, a scheme in which the consulship and imperial office become different manifestations of the same post.

By carefully delineating the military authority of the emperors and conceptualizing that authority in terms of the powers vested in the consuls, Lydos depicts the imperial office as a Roman magistracy. He continues this process in his brief discussion of the civil powers of the imperial office:

The office of the Caesares never appeared to make use of tyrannical insignia, instead they used the purple robe when ascending to the senate of the Romans and when directing the forces at arms in the manner of a sole commander (autokratoros), as I said. For this reason the Romans also called these men [the emperors] principes, as if they were the foremost head of the entire politeia.100

By distinguishing between the civil and military authority of the emperor, Lydos is sundering the link between arms and laws which underpins much of Justinian’s rhetoric throughout his legal corpus.101 There is no connection, in Lydos’ telling, between these two forms of authority, which undermines the cyclical logic Justinian develops in Novels

100 Lyd. Mag. 1.4 (14.3-4): οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐπισήμοις τυραννικοῖς φαίνεται χρησαμένη ἡ τῶν Καισάρων ἀρχή, ἁλουργίδι δὲ μόνῃ, τὴν Ῥωμαίων βουλὴν ἀναβαίνουσα καὶ τὰς ἐν ὅπλοις δυνάμεις αὐτοκρατῶς, ὡς ἔφην, ἰθύνουσα, ταύτῃ καὶ πρίγκιπας αὐτοὺς ἐκάλεσαν Ῥωμαῖοι, οἷον εἰ πρώτην κεφαλὴν τῆς πάσης πολιτείας.

101 See especially, Just. Inst. 1.1; Just. Nov. 24 (Praetor of Pisidia), Just. Nov. 25 (Praetor of Lykaonia), and Just. Nov. 26 (Praetor of Thrace).

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24 (Praetor of Pisidia) and 25 (Praetor of Lykaonia), wherein the emperor’s military success legitimized his legal reforms, and vice-versa. Lydos then discusses the fact that the title Caesar is a patronymic title and not linked to any official post except by association.102 This comment on the nomenclature of the imperial office is significant.

Lydos has previously said that the office is called by one of two titles, Caesar or imperator/autokrator, but has proceeded to show that neither of these titles indicates the full powers of the contemporary imperial office because the civil powers of the office were understood through the title princeps. The title of Caesar remains shorthand for the imperial office, but by making the implication of the term autokrator applicable only to the emperor’s command over the military and limiting his civil authority to the role of princeps, a leader rather than absolute commander, Lydos has posited a dual nature for the imperial office that accords with his model of legal kingship. However, Lydos makes clear that the office of Caesar can be abused and made into a tyranny if its proper order

(eutaxia) is not maintained:

This type of proper order for the Caesares was guarded by the Romans up until Diocletian, who first, by crowning himself with a crown composed of costly stone and adoring his clothes and feet with gems, turned to the custom of kings or, to tell the truth, tyrants. And he measure out the land and weighed it down with taxes.103

102 Lyd. Mag. 1.4 (14.4-9). This is likely a response to Justinian’s claim to cherish the title of Caesar above all others in Novel 30 (Proconsul of ), see the discussion of this Novel in chapter four, pp. 249ff..

103 Lyd. Mag. 1.4 (14.9-14): ἐφυλάχθη οὖν παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις ἡ τοιαύτη τῶν Καισάρων εὐταξία ἄχρι Διοκλητιανοῦ, ὃς πρῶτος στέφανον ἐκ λίθου τιμίας συγκείμενον τῇ κεφαλῇ περιθεὶς ἐσθῆτά τε καὶ τοὺς πόδας ψηφώσας ἐπὶ τὸ βασιλικὸν ἤ, τἀληθὲς εἰπεῖν, ἐπὶ τὸ τυραννικὸν ἔτρεψεν, ἀνεμετρήσατό τε τὴν ἤπειρον καὶ τοῖς φόροις ἐβάρυνεν.

229

Lydos’ sartorial commentary draws attention to the contrast between the dress of

Diocletian and the dress of proper Caesares. The discussion of the dress of the Caesares, in turn, is a part of Lydos discussion of the distinction between the civil (princeps) and military (imperator/autokrator) authority of the emperors. Because the emperor’s authority over the military is understood to be absolute from the title of autokrator,

Diocletian’s turn to tyranny must relate to his civil authority, and the one specific detail

Lydos provides is a description of Diocletian’s tax reforms. Because tax reform does not deal directly with the management of the troops it falls, according to Lydos’ scheme, into the civil sphere and therefore confirms that the abuse of his civil powers was behind the tyrannical turn of the imperial office during the reign of Diocletian.104

After undermining Justinian’s use of Aeneas as a monarchical precedent and questioning the nature and limits of the emperor’s civil authority, Lydos proceeds to make the emperor’s invocation of Romulus equally problematic. On the criteria previously established concerning the forms of kingship, Lydos judges Romulus to be a tyrant, that is an unlawful king, based on the murder of Remus and because he was irrational (alogos) in his management of affairs.105 By itself, this judgment of Romulus makes him an undesirable role model for Justinian’s authority, but Lydos goes further and continues his argument on a linguistic level, claiming that the name Quirinus was

104 The of Diocletian as the first of a new, more autocratic type of emperor begins with , Eutr. Brev. 9.26. See also, C. Pazdernik, A Dangerous Liberty and a Servitude Free from Care: Political Eleutheria and Douleia in Procopius of Caesarea and Thucydides of Athens, Disseration (Princeton, 1997) 194-235.

105 Lyd. Mag. 1.5 (14.15-6).

230 given to Romulus on analogy to the Greek kyrios because ‘tyrants love to be called

(kyrioi) and masters (despotai) but not kings (basileis).’106 The inclusion of the term master (despotes) is unnecessary to Lydos’ argument about Romulus, but allows Lydos to link tyrannical kingship to the preferred term of address of many late antique emperors following Diocletian, including Justinian. This reference gives Lydos a pretext for explicitly linking the discussion of Romulus to Justinian in order to defend the contemporary emperor’s use of the title despotes. By establishing this link, Lydos is replicating the parallel established by Justinian’s chronology in Novel 47 (On Dating), but is reversing the effect and making Justinian’s similarities to Romulus a rhetorical liability.

Lydos’ objection to the term despotes is predicated on the relationship it implies between the emperor and his subjects:

The rank of Caesar is greater than that of the kingship because in ancient times it held in its power the ability to give kings to the nations. For it was hateful and foreign to Roman freedom to call rulers masters (despotas), but it was not so to call them kings (basileas). This is because the title master is shared by them [the rulers] and by those who have acquired even a single fugitive slave, while the title of kings is theirs and only theirs.107

106 Lyd. Mag. 1.5 (14.29-30): κυρίους γὰρ ἑαυτοὺς καὶ δεσπότας ἀλλ' οὐ βασιλέας τύραννοι φιλοῦσι καλεῖσθαι.

107 Lyd. Mag. 1.6 (16.1-6): Κρεῖττον δὲ βασιλείας τὸ Καίσαρος ἀξίωμα, ὅτι καὶ δοῦναι βασιλέας πάλαι τοῖς ἔθνεσιν ἐπ' ἐξουσίας εἶχεν. μισητὸν γὰρ καὶ Ῥωμαϊκῆς ἐλευθερίας ἀλλότριον δεσπότας, ἀλλὰ μὴ βασιλέας, τοὺς κρατοῦντας ὀνομάζειν καθ' ὅ τι δεσπότης ὄνομα κοινόν ἐστιν αὐτοῖς καὶ τοῖς ἔνα δραπέτην κεκτημένοις, τὸ δὲ βασιλέων αὐτῶν καὶ μόνων.

231

Put differently, the title of master is meaningless because while it applies to emperors it also applies, legally at least, to the owner of a single slave, even if they are not currently in possession of that slave. The title of king, on the other hand, has a consistent value to which the title of Caesar is pegged on the basis of its ancient prerogative for assigning kings to various nations. The idea that the status of a ruler depends upon the people whom he rules is the same idea found in the choral ode from Sophocles’ Aias which

Lydos references in his definition of lawful kingship. In the Aias, it is the duty of the king to ennoble his subjects and they, in turn, elevate his status through their support.

Justinian, and other emperors, by using the title of master are reversing this process, disparaging their subjects and making the support and praise of those subjects less meaningful. Because the title of master is antithetical to lawful kingship, Lydos goes on to argue, it must be understood as a feature of tyranny.108 The result is that a tyrannical emperor locks himself into a sort of deflationary spiral in which the greater his authority is and more subservient his subjects are, the less prestigious his position is.

Having thoroughly denigrated the title of master, Lydos attempts to reconcile its contemporary use with the benevolent (if at times negligent) image of Justinian he claims to present in the Magistracies. He does this by explaining that Justinian is uncomfortable with the use of the term:

But because the outrage [of the title of despotes] was previously introduced as an honor, the goodness of our most gentle emperor (basileus) tolerates being called master, meaning ‘a good father,’ even

108 Lyd. Mag. 1.6 (16.6-7).

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though his moderation surpasses all of the men who have ever ruled as kings.109

Lydos goes on to say that Justinian accepts the title not because he enjoys it, but because he does not want to embarrass the subjects who are trying to honor him. While this passage makes sense on the surface, the behavior of Justinian is contrasted with the anecdote Lydos reports just prior to this statement. According to Lydos an early emperor, either Augustus or , once walked out of the senate after being called master because he did not think it worth his time to conduct business with slaves.110 Compared to this earlier emperor’s assertive position, Justinian’s desire not to embarrass anyone comes across as weak rather than indulgent, a sense that is reinforced by the adjectives

Lydos uses to describe Justinian: gentle and moderate. If we accept that Justinian could easily have changed the way he was addressed and believe Prokopios’ claims about his preference for the title of master, then the passage can be read in another way. Lydos claims that Justinian was more moderate than any other king in history. The word for moderate comes from a verb, metriazo, which literally means to be measured and often has a sense of being reduced. Lydos’ comment may be understood to mean that Justinian is the least exceptional of all the kings who have ever ruled. This claim makes sense in the context of the evaluative scheme Lydos has just established only if Justinian is also

109 Lyd. Mag. 1.6 (16.13-18): ἀλλ' ἤδη πρότερον ὥσπερ ἐν τιμῇ τῆς ὕβρεως εἰσαχθείσης, ἀνέχεται ἡ τοῦ ἡμερωτάτου βασιλέως ἡμῶν ἐπιείκεια, καίπερ ὑπὲρ πάντας τοὺς πώποτε βεβασιλευκότας μετριάζοντος, καὶ δεσπότης, οἷον πατὴρ ἀγαθός, ὀνομάζεσθαι.

110 Lyd. Mag. 1.6 (16.11-13).

233 the most tyrannical of all kings and the most prone to treat his subjects as slaves, a claim which accords with information provided by other authors, especially Prokopios.

Lydos’ discussion of legal kingship and tyranny, when paired with his subsequent discussion of the tyranny of Romulus, lays out a complex model of proper imperial rule.

The imperial office is most generally referred to as Caesar, out of deference to the tradition of taking the family name of Julius Caesar. The title autokrator, which derives from the Latin imperator, only describes the military authority of the emperor, which is understood to be absolute. The title princeps is used to supplement that of autokrator and to designate the civil authority of the emperor. In civil affairs a good emperor is understood to be a leader rather than a commander and to make decisions in consultation with his citizens. Moreover, a good emperor understands that the value of his rule is determined by the value of the citizens he rules, giving him a vested interest in elevating them rather than oppressing them. The reciprocal relationship between the status of an emperor’s subjects and the value of his own post is tied to the civil function of government. Administrative abuses, which devalue citizens by treating them as servants or slaves, overstep the boundaries of the role of princeps and, by lowering the status of the citizens, demean the emperor and imperial office. Tyranny for Lydos is exclusively depicted as an abuse of civil authority, and it is even possible to see in his definition of the term autokrator support for the use of military force against rebellious or dissident citizens, such as occurred during the Nika Riots.

In constructing his definitions of both the civil and military authority of the emperors, Lydos relies heavily on the precedents established by the consuls. This is in

234 contrast to Justinian whose chronology in Novel 47 (On Dating) attempted to bypass the consulship and establish monarchy as the normative form of Roman government. Nor is this the only point in the Magistracies at which Lydos can be seen responding to Novel

47 (On Dating). Lydos uses consular dating throughout his account of the Republican period and makes a point of mentioning that even Julius Caesar, for whom Lydos has undisguised disdain, altered the Roman state in every respect except the use of consular dating:

The magistracies proceeded in the manner I have already described up until the domination of the first Caesar [Julius Caesar]. And this man, when he had established his controls over affairs, changed the government (politeuma) entirely. He left nothing to the consuls aside from their name, I suppose for the sake of reckoning time.111

This reference to consular dating is given weight by Lydos’ prior and unequivocal condemnation of Julius Caesar as a tyrant.112 In the context of Lydos’ previous discussion of tyranny and legal kingship, this reference would be enough to call attention to

Justinian’s abolition of consular dating and imply that it was an act of tyranny. However,

Lydos goes a step further and responds to the idea, expressed in Novel 105 (Consular

Expenditures), that the conduct of war was yielded by the consuls to the emperors:

111 Lyd. Mag. 2.6 (90.10-14): Οὕτως οὖν τῶν ἀρχῶν ὡς ἔφθην εἰπὼν ἄχρι τῆς Καίσαρος τοῦ πρώτου ἐπικρατείας προελθουσῶν, αὐτὸς μετὰ τῆς Τύχης· ἐπιστὰς τοῖς πράγμασι ξύμπαν ἐξηλλοίωσε τὸ πολίτευμα, ὑπάτοις μὲν μηδὲν παρὰ τὴν προσηγορίαν ἀπολιπών, εἰς μήνυμα τοῦ χρόνου δῆθεν.

112 Lyd. Mag. 2.1 (82.21-5).

235

And organizing the entire military under his command, [Julius Caesar] gave his successors the ability to conduct impending wars either themselves (as they would do unless they honored luxury) or through generals, whomever they chose, or through lieutenant generals, who were called legatoi113 by the Romans.114

Where Prokopios calls attention to the fact that Belisarios, unlike Justinian, continued to perform the traditional role of a military consul, Lydos takes the opposite tack and draws attention to the fact that, despite being granted the right to conduct military matters in person, Justinian has opted not to do so. This decision, as Lydos’ parenthetical statement makes clear, is evidence that Justinian prefers luxury to the proper execution of his office.

The implication in Lydos’ account is therefore that Justinian is more innovative (a trait that Lydos like Prokopios associates with tyrannical rule) and lazier than Julius Caesar.

The effect of this characterization of Justinian as well as the falseness of his claim to command the conduct of war works in conjunction with Lydos’ discussion of the triumphalia three chapters earlier. According to Lydos, Caesar, at a loss for a title that sufficiently conveyed his authority after his triumphs over so many kings, assumed an amalgamation of titles (including consul) and developed a new uniform to accompany the position, the triumphalia, which became the traditional garment of an emperor

113 Lydos does not directly transliterate legati, opting instead for the Hellenized form ληγάτων.

114 Lyd. Mag. 2.6 (90.14-18): ὑφ' ἑαυτῷ δὲ τάξας τὸν σύμπαντα στρατόν, δέδωκε τοῖς μετ' αὐτὸν ἢ δι' ἑαυτῶν (πλὴν εἰ μή γε τὸ τρυφᾶν προτιμῷεν) ἢ διὰ στρατηγῶν, ὧν ἂν θέλωσιν, ἢ δι' ὑποστρατήγων, τῶν παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις λεγομένων ληγάτων, τοὺς ἐνισταμένους διεργάζεσθαι πολέμους.

236 celebrating a triumph.115 Lydos cites as evidence of this tradition the triumph celebrated for the conquest of Africa:

[The tradition of wearing the triumphalia] has been demonstrated clearly in our own time when god delivered Gelimer, the king (basilea) of the Vandals and Libya, along with his entire race, to our empire as a . Therefore it was not appropriate that the victor be in the same uniform as the conquered, who was dressed in purple.116

Lydos’ language is circumspect and he carefully avoids directly mentioning the emperor or making clear who, if anyone, was actually wearing the triumphalia at the ceremony.

The conquest of the Vandals is framed in terms of the empire (basileia) and the central

Roman figure is referred to only as the conqueror (niketes). The problem with Lydos’s account is that the conqueror of the Vandals was Belisarios, not Justinian. As with his parenthetical comment on imperial oversight of wars, Lydos is calling attention to the irony of a palace emperor claiming, two years after Belisarios’ consulship, that the consulship yielded its ancient prerogative over the conduct of war to the imperial office.

In addition to undermining the rationale of Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) and Novel 47 (On Dating), Lydos’ paralleling of Julius Caesar and Justinian offers insight into the author’s understanding of the relationship between tyranny, the imperial office, and the consulship. During Lydos’ most comprehensive (albeit still brief) discussion of

115 Lyd. Mag. 2.2 (82.26-84.16). On this tradition, see M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal rulership in late antiquity, Byzantium, and the medieval West (Cambridge, 1986).

116 Lyd. Mag. 2.2 (84.16-20): καὶ τοῦτο δῆλον ἐν ἡμῖν ἀπεδείχθη ὅτε Γελίμερα τῶν Βανδίλων καὶ Λιβύης βασιλέα πανεθνεὶ θεὸς αἰχμάλωτον τῇ καθ' ἡμᾶς παρεστήσατο βασιλείᾳ. οὐδὲ γὰρ ἦν ὁμοσχήμονα τὸν νικητὴν πορφύραν περικειμένῳ γίνεσθαι τῷ κρατηθέντι.

237 the consulship, he makes clear that the office is both distinctly Roman and inherently anti-tyrannical:

Having returned to Rome and embraced the earth (she is the mother of everything), [Brutus] freed the Romans from tyranny, founding a magistracy that had been known to no race, even though Daniel, the holiest prophet among the Hebrews, makes mention of hypatoi occurring among the Assyrians.117

Lydos links the foundation of the consulship to the abolition of tyranny at a verbal level, subordinating the office’s creation to the act of freeing the Romans by means of a participial clause. By explicitly defining the consulship as an anti-tyrannical office,

Lydos adds significance to the demotion of the consuls by Julius Caesar, an act which he links by to Justinian through his veiled references to Novel 105 (Consular Expenditures) and Novel 47 (On Dating), as well as through the parallels he establishes between the two rulers. Lydos integrates his discussion of the anti-tyrannical nature of the consulship into his assertion that the office was a uniquely Roman invention, even going so far as to argue against the apparent use of the term in the Hebrew . According to

Lydos, the prophet Daniel did not himself use the word hypatos, an assertion few modern scholars would dispute, rather the word was introduced into the Greek translation of the

Hebrew Bible produced at the court of the .118 While this might appear to be a

117 Lyd. Mag. 1.32 (48.2-7): καὶ δὴ ἐπανελθὼν ἐν τῇ Ῥώμῃ καὶ τὴν γῆν περιβαλὼν (αὕτη δὲ μήτηρ τῶν πάντων), ἠλευθέρωσε Ῥωμαίους τυραννίδος, ἀρχὴν ἐξευρὼν παρ' οὐδενὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν γνωριζομένην, καὶ εἰ παρ' Ἑβραίοις Δανιὴλ ὁ προφητῶν θειότατος ὑπάτων παρὰ Ἀσσυρίοις γενομένων ποτὲ μνημονεύει.

118 Lyd. Mag. 1.32 (48.7-11).

238 minor detail, Lydos’ insistence on refuting the argument indicates how important the uniqueness of the consulship is to his conception of the office.119 By making the consulship the definitive Roman office, Lydos is implicitly refuting Justinian’s attempt to portray monarchy as the normative office of the Roman state in Novel 47 (On Dating). It is also worth noting that, just as Lydos distanced Justinian from Aeneas through reference to the hero’s divine parentage, he also refutes any Judeo-Christian connection to the office of consul, and goes so far as to explicitly link the title of the office to the god

Poseidon.120

Tyranny is one of the major themes Lydos develops in the Magistracies and its importance, in turn, raises the profile of the consulship. By equating the consulship with

Roman liberty and its demotion with tyranny, Lydos leads his readers to an obvious question. If Julius Caesar, Lydos’ quintessential Roman tyrant, stripped the consulship of all its honors and powers save dating, then what are the implication of Justinian’s reforms in Novel 47 (On Dating)? Lydos gives clues to his answer at various points in the

Magistracies, especially through the parallels he creates between the reign of Caesar and that of Justinian. Justinian, like Caesar, is a tyrant.

119 It may also represent another point of contact between the Magistracies and the Roman and General History of Hesychios of Miletos, which begins (according to Photios) with the reign of king Belos of .

120 Lyd. Mag. 1.30 (46.3-14).

239

Republicanism and the Consulship

It is natural that the consulship became a lightning for discussions of the Republic in the sixth century. The history of the office was too long, its accomplishments both too great and too essential to Roman identity for it to be able to disappear without comment.

We are fortunate that so many conversations about the consulship survive and in a format where they can be situated in the broader context of responses to Justinian’s reign.

Despite the amount that Justinian discusses the consulship in his laws, we are ultimately uncertain why it was demoted and eventually absorbed by the imperial office.

By the sixth century emperors had long since abandoned the premise that their authority was constituted from an amalgamation of traditional offices. Yet the consulship survived for centuries after the end of the Julio- dynasty and there is no reason to suspect that, absent Justinian’ reforms, the office would not have continued indefinitely. So why did Justinian decide the consulship had to end? There is a wide variety of plausible answers ranging from the centralization of authority to the fear of competition or the desire to put a Justinianic stamp on the entirety of the Roman administration (one imagines that Justinian would have had trouble selling the office as the ‘Justinianic

Consul’). Despite all of the available options we are ultimately unable to definitively discern Justinian’s motivations for the reform from the rhetoric of his laws. In this we find ourselves in the same position as his contemporaries who took it upon themselves to offer their own theories.

The end of the consulship is useful for the study of the sixth century precisely because of the ambiguity of Justinian’s motives. His contemporaries, as demonstrated by

240 the authors discussed above, we unpersuaded by the histories invented to justify

Justinian’s consular reforms in the Novels, but equally lacked evidence of the emperor’s motivations. To fill this gulf of explanation, each author simply took the act as further evidence of the processes they already saw playing out in Justinian’s reign and Roman history more generally. The end of the consulship served as an ideological Rorschach test for sixth-century authors. For Prokopios, the move was primarily motivated by

Justinian’s insatiable greed, as he makes clear in the Secret History, and neatly complimented the emperor’s almost deliberate mismanagement of the empire. Prokopios also insinuated, through the focus on the consulship of Belisarios, that it was an attempt to curtail the reinvigorated office and perhaps the career of its most recent (at the time of

Novel 105 (On Consular Expenditures)) holder. The idea of the consulship as both an alternative and threat to the imperial system is likewise taken up by Jordanes who establishes the conflict between virtuous consuls and corrupt, blood-thirsty emperors as one of the defining features of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. In their discussions of the consulship both authors are effectively writing the history of their own time, even if Lydos is doing so by discussing the relationship between the contemporary world and ancient history. Lydos and Prokopios’ responses to Justinian therefore elucidate the frontlines in the battle to define normative historical memory in sixth-century

Constantinople.

Meanwhile, in Jordanes’ narrative, Belisarios’ failure to repudiate Justinian is an unexpected turn of events, and contributes to the maladministration which was destroying the empire. Lydos, too, viewed the end of the consulship in terms of its implications for

241 the administration of the empire. Despite his frequent praise for Justinian, the entirety of the Magistracies is at odds with the image of Justinian as a diligent and legal emperor.

The chief villain of Lydos’ history was a man Justinian appointed to run the praetorian prefecture not once, but twice. Moreover, the decline of Lydos’ beloved praetorian prefecture took place largely on Justinian’s watch. Although Lydos seeks to absolve

Justinian of responsibility, he does so by asserting that the emperor must not have been aware of the abuses that were taking place. This fits Justinian neatly into the category of ignarus rector proposed by Jordanes. But Lydos also uses to consulship to put a more sinister face on Justinian’s supposed ignorance by associating his reign with the innovations typical of tyranny and linking him to the arch-tyrants Julius Caesar and

Diocletian. The image of the innovative tyrant destroying the administration of the empire through a combination of incompetence and malfeasance, in turn, links Lydos back to Prokopios’ Secret History.

What is intriguing about all of these responses is their willingness to engage with

Justinian on his own terms. Rather than ignore the emperor’s rhetoric, Prokopios,

Jordanes, and Lydos make a point of using it against Justinian, either through deliberate inversion or less specific rewritings of the narrative Justinian develops in his Novels. The willingness of these authors to engage with the Novels as well as their concern with

Republican history and offices indicates that the question of the legacy of the Republic, and by extension the identity of the sixth-century Roman state, was a hotly contested topic. In other words, these authors were not content merely to reject the decisions and historical rhetoric of Justinian’s reign, instead they chose to do so in precisely the same

242 terms the emperor used to make his case for reform. While this in part reflects the relative ease with which a specific response may encode ostensibly unrelated discussions, it also indicates the perceived validity of Justinian’s historical innovations. Lydos, Prokopios, and Jordanes chose to respond in the same idiom because they felt, like Justinian, that the consulship and the Republican history of the Roman state were important enough to contest. Their attachment to the Republic indicates that the history of that period was actively relevant in sixth-century Constantinople independent of Justinian’s attempts to use it as a justification for his policies.

243

CHAPTER FOUR: ROME AND ROMAN HISTORY IN THE AGE OF JUSTINIAN

Inventing the End

The anxieties of the age of Anastasios contained in themselves the seeds of a new confidence that would emerge in the age of Justinian. As we saw in the first chapter, writers under Anastasios struggled to come to grips with the hole in the fabric of Roman identity left by the loss of the city of Rome in the fifth century and the various Isaurians crises that plagued the eastern Roman empire from the accession of Zenon through

Anastasios’ ultimate triumph over Isauria in 497. The loss of Rome affected different writers in different ways, prompting Zosimos to consider the (in his formulation) irreplaceable role Rome played in Roman religion, while Hesychios and Christodoros sought to manufacture new or adapted Roman narratives to replace the now defunct

Romano-Trojan tradition that had predominated at least since Vergil’s Aeneid. Although

Zosimos’ New History allowed for no successful Roman state without the city of Rome and its attendant pagan religious festivals, both Hesychios and Christodoros imagined an independent future and Roman identity for the empire of Constantinople, one predicated on revised narratives of the Roman past.

Of the two, Hesychios was the more conservative and built his conception of New

Rome on analogy to Old Rome, implicitly acknowledging the primacy of the elder city and its history. Yet even he prefaces his discussion of Constantinople by saying that the

244 new city had been built only after ‘the affairs of [Elder Rome] had already reached their limit.’1 Hesychios’ assertion of Rome’s limit, the natural terminus of its life cycle, accords with the opinions of other writers dating at least as far back as the late fourth century, when Ammianus Marcellinus claimed that the city had progressed into its senescence with the advent of the emperors.2 The idea that Rome might become obsolete was therefore already present when, in the fifth century, the city yet again ceased to function as the capital of the western Roman empire. Independent of any notion of a fall, the transfer of government from the Eternal City to Ravenna, a gradual process but one which was firmly entrenched by the reign of Theoderic, marked the end of Rome’s relevance as an active political center in late antiquity, at least from the perspective of the emperor in Constantinople, and must surely have encouraged formulations such as that of

Hesychios.3

It fits the established pattern to find that the two leading voices of the age of

Justinian, the emperor himself and Prokopios, do not belabor the topic of Rome or its history. Yet this is a surprising turn because both men had reason to reflect upon the importance of Rome. For Justinian, the bishop of Rome was a powerful ally, if his assistance could be secured, in the continuing controversies inspired by the Council of

Chalkedon as well as in his imperial project in Italy, while Prokopios spent more than a

1 Hesych. Pat. 1: τῶν πραγμάτων αὐτῆς ἤδη πρὸς πέρας ἀφιγμένων. For Hecyhios’ discussion of Rome and Constantinople, see chapter one, pp. 62ff.

2 Amm. Marc. 14.6.3

3 For eastern perceptions of Rome during this period see W. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome (Princeton, 1968) 3-58; B. Croke ‘A.D. 476: The Manufacturing of a Turning Point,’ Chiron 13 (1983) 81- 119 at 115-119.

245 year facing down a Gothic siege from behind the wall of Rome alongside the general

Belisarios. Nevertheless, when Rome appears in Justinian’s laws it is safely sequestered from contemporary temporal relevance behind a vaguely defined periodization that separates the sixth century city from the archaic and Republican history upon which the emperor was keen to draw in his Novels. Prokopios, for his part, records only the ambiguity of Rome’s contemporary status as a Roman city, depicting it not as a source of

Roman identity, but a recipient of it.

The attitudes of Justinian and Prokopios, which are explored in detail below, force upon us the question: what changed between 10 April 491, when the people of

Constantinople demanded a true Roman for the empire, and the 550s, when the works of

Prokopios, Jordanes, and Lydos appeared to challenge the narrative of the Novels? The simple answer is that the Romans of Constantinople came to understand themselves as

Roman independent of, and in fact in opposition to, the Romans of the west. The more interesting answer is explored below and revolves around the first formulation of the now ubiquitous idea that the western Roman empire had fallen.

Owning Rome

In the spring of 546, Rome was about to fall, again. It was an event that might have seemed impossible to the inhabitants of the city two centuries prior, but had, by the middle of the sixth century, become a regular facet of life in the eternal city, almost routine. The late antique tradition of marching on, and even besieging, Rome began, as many such traditions did, with Constantine, who in 312 defeated in order to

246 gain control of the city and consolidate his control over the western empire. In the fifth century, civil wars slowly transitioned into foreign invasions. The process began in 410 with Alaric, a Roman general of Gothic descent who led a largely Gothic (but arguably

Roman) army in the chivalrous extortion of Rome, but culminated in 455 with the savage and destructive sack of Rome by the Vandal king Geiseric. In the sixth century, during

Justinian’s campaigns of reconquest, the siege of Rome became an almost annual event.

Belisarios invaded Italy in the spring of 536 and quickly occupied Rome, whose Gothic defenders, Prokopios tells us, were fleeing from one gate as Belsiarios’ army marched in through another.4 Yet the Goths quickly counterattacked and by early 537 had invested

Rome. Belisarios resisted the siege for a year and half before finally breaking it in the spring of 538. After Belisarios was recalled in 540, the Goths renewed their offensive under their new king Totila who, after initially bypassing Rome in order to seize the coastal cities of and , retook the city in 546. The city changed hands yet again in 548, was besieged by the Goths once more in 549, and fell again to Totila in 550.

By the time Justinian’s forces liberated the city for the final time, under the general

Narses in 552, Rome had changed hands five times in fourteen years.5

The instability of Rome’s ownership during Justinian’s Italian campaigns was the culmination of a series of shifts in political geography that had been underway since the third-century crisis first uprooted the emperors from their ancient capital and sent them

4 Prok. Wars 5.14.14.

5 For the status of Rome in late antiquity, see J. Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 2002); R. Van Dam, Rome and Constantinople: Rewriting Roman History during Late Antiquity (Waco, 2010); L. Grig and G Kelly (eds.) Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012).

247 prowling along the empire’s frontiers. This shift from center to periphery, the turning inside-out of the Roman empire, continued into the reign of Theodosius when two new capitals, Ravenna in the west and Constantinople in the east, established themselves as the two imperial courts of the Roman world.6 When the Roman government of the western empire was abolished by Odoacer in 476, Rome completed its transition from the beating heart of the Roman world to a foreign city. Upon Belisarios’ landing in Italy in the spring of 536, Rome experienced its final change in status. The former birthplace of empire, the wellspring of Roman imperialism and Eternal City, had become a Roman military frontier. Rome in the sixth century had more in common with the region and Mesopotamia than Constantinople.

Where the writers of the fifth century had struggled to articulate a conception of

Roman identity in an empire that was losing Rome, the writers of the sixth century were forced to confront Rome as an object of empire. The status of the city became entangled not just in the military campaigns being waged in Italy, but also in the structure of the historical narratives that situated Justinian’s reconquest within the broader scope of

Roman history. For the emperor, the problem was two-fold: how to reintegrate the original capital into a monopole empire centered on Constantinople, and how to represent the city’s return to Roman rule, albeit eastern Roman rule. For authors such as Prokopios,

Jordanes, and Lydos, the dilemma was how to understand the relationship between

6 R. Van Dam, Rome and Constantinople: Rewriting Roman History During Late Antiquity (Waco, 2010) 47-80.

248 ancient and contemporary Rome and, by extension, the relationship between ancient

Rome and the contemporary empire.

Complicating the emperor’s relationship with Rome was presence there of the foremost bishopric in the Roman world.7 As had been established at the Council of

Ephesus and confirmed at the Council of Constantinople, the bishop of Rome was the primus inter pares of Christian bishops, and Justinian’s interactions with Rome were perpetually colored by his desire to keep the bishop onside, not only for his program of imperial reconquest, but also in his attempts to reunify Roman Christendom in the wake of the Council of Chalkedon, which for almost a century had split the eastern Roman empire. The see of Rome, far more than the ancient city, occupied Justinian’s focus in ways which will not be discussed here.8 Suffice it to say that while the see of Rome was integral to Justinian’s perception of the contemporary city, it remains distinct and distinguishable from his discussions of Roman history and the contemporary relevance of

Rome as a Roman city.

Rathymia and Imperial Decline in the Novels

The narrative of Roman revival that Justinian lays out in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) implies a corresponding narrative of Roman decline. Though logically necessary, it was

7 N. McLynn, ‘‘Two Romes, Beacons of the Whole World’: Canonizing Constantinople,’ in L. Grig and G. Kelly (eds.) Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012) 345-363.

8 A comprehensive history of Justinian’s interactions with the bishops of Rome has yet to be written. For partial discussions, see G.E. Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, 2013) 102-133; C. Sotinel, ‘Autorité pontificale et pouvoir impérial sous le règne de Justinien: le pape Vigile,’ Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome: Antiquité 104.1 (1992) 439-463; K. Sessa, ‘The Roman Church and Its Bishops,’ in K. Sessa, S. Bjornlie, and J. Arnold (eds.) Brill Companion to Ostrogothic Italty (Forthcoming).

249 by no means a foregone conclusion that the emperor would bother to create such a narrative in his Novels. In fact, creating a narrative of Roman decline would offer the emperor’s critics an obvious line of attack on Justinian’s government.9 Once an official history of Roman decline existed, it would be a simple matter for critics to link

Justinian’s own policies to it. The question then arises: why would Justinian and his administration want to create a potentially double-edged narrative of Roman decline? The answer can be found in the problem posed by Rome itself.

After the murder of Amalasuintha in 534, which set Justinian’s Italian campaigns in motion, the emperor had continued to negotiate with Theodahad, Amalasuintha’s murderer, cousin, and coregent, for the surrender of Italy.10 According to Prokopios, negotiations for Theodahad’s abdication and the cession of Italy to Constantinople were nearing completion, spurred by Belisarios’ success in Sicily during the campaigning season of 535, when Justinian’s armies faced a major setback.11 The invasion of Italy had been intended as a pincer movement. Belisarios would sail from Sicily and force a landing on the Italian coast, while another army under the general Mundo would march through the Balkan provinces and enter Italy from the north. Pursuant to this plan,

Mundo’s army besieged and took the city of Salona in the winter of 535/6 in order to secure the route into Italy and the army’s supply lines for the coming campaign. After the

9 We have already seen ample evidence of contemporary authors’ willingness to turn the rhetoric of the Novels against Justinian, see Chapter 2 especially.

10 For Amalasuintha, see PLRE 2.65 (Amalasuintha). For Theodahad, see PLRE 2.1067-1068 (Theodahadus).

11 Prok. Wars 5.5.17-19 and 5.6.11.

250 siege, a Gothic army sent to relieve Salona happened upon a Roman scouting party that included Mundo’ son Maurikios. Maurikios was killed in the ensuing skirmish, a loss that drove Mundo into a frenzied pursuit of the Gothic army. Although victorious in the ensuing battle, Mundo died shortly afterward from a wound sustained during the fighting, leaving Justinian’ army of without a general on the eve of a major campaign.12 Heartened by this victory, Theodahad broke off his secret agreement with

Justinian and decided to resist the emperor’s invasion.

No one in the winter and spring of 536 could have realized that the collapse of

Justinian’s negotiations with Theodahad would result in an eighteen year campaign that would devastate Italy and drain the attention and resources of the eastern Roman empire, which was soon to be beset by plague and foreign invasions. Nevertheless, the developments of that winter certainly put an end to whatever polite political fictions

Justinian and his administration had devised to advertise and frame the return of Italy to the imperial fold. In place of their bloodless victory, they now faced the dangers and uncertainties of a military campaign alongside the rhetorical problem of how to sell the prospect of a Roman war against the Roman homeland.

During the same period that Justinian had assigned Peter the Patrician to negotiate with Theodahad, from the summer of 535 until the collapse of negotiations in the winter of 536/7, Tribonian and his legal team continued to work on the reforms of the imperial administration of the eastern provinces that had begun in Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia).

The reforms to Pisidia were published concurrently with those to Lykaonia and Thrace on

12 Prok. Wars 5.7.

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18 May 535. These reforms were followed by the reorganization of Pontos and

Paphlagonia in two Novels published together on 16 July 535. During the following summer and fall, Tribonian’s legal attention was diverted to smaller posts in the imperial administration, reforming the post of defensor in July or August and the praefectus vigilium on 15 October 535.

When Tribonian and his team began drafting laws for the year 536, we find evidence that the political and military uncertainty in Italy was having repercussions for the imperial discussions of Roman history embedded in these laws. On 15 February 536, in Novel 38 (On Decurions), Justinian opens a law concerned with managing the inheritance of decurions with an ambiguous reference to a Roman capital:

The ancient founders of our politeia thought it necessary, in imitation of the royal city, to muster the best men in every city and give to each city an organized senate through which all public business should be conducted and arranged according to proper order.13

The ‘royal city’ in question is certainly Rome, whose senate provided the model for all later curial assemblies in the empire, including that of Constantinople. Yet, the Novel does not address Rome by any of its traditional titles, opting instead to call it the ‘royal city.’ This substitution introduces an ambiguity into the rhetoric because, in the winter of

536, there was only one royal or imperial city in the Roman world: Constantinople. The opening of this law appears to be paralyzed between its desire to access the authority of

13 Just. Nov. 38.Pr (246.12-17): Οἱ τὴν πολιτείαν ἡμῖν πάλαι καταστήσαντες ᾠήθησαν χρῆναι κατὰ τὴν τῆς βασιλευούσης πόλεως μίμησιν ἀθροῖσαι καθ' ἑκάστην πόλιν τοὺς εὖ γεγονότας καὶ ἑκάστῃ σύγκλητον δοῦναι βουλήν, δι' ἧς ἔμελλε τά τε δημόσια πράττεσθαι ἅπαντά τε γίνεσθαι κατὰ τάξιν τὴν προσήκουσαν.

252 the Roman tradition to legitimize its reforms and its unwillingness to do so in a way that highlights the uniqueness or authority of Rome. The fact that the phrasing specifically, if indirectly, points to Constantinople indicates that the source of the tension lies in the relationship between these two cities. The winter of 536 was not a moment at which

Justinian’s government felt comfortable elevating the status of Elder Rome at the expense of Constantinople by making it the model for all cities in the empire. Though it is only small feature of a law that does not otherwise concern itself with Roman history, the mention of the ‘royal city’ in Novel 38 (On Decurions) is the first point in the Novels at which we can see Justinian’s rhetoric stumbling over the problem of Rome. A comprehensive solution was provided a month later when, on 17 March 536, Justinian promulgated a Novel that contained his first explicit discussion of the causes of the fall of the Roman west. Before discussing the content of that law and Justinian’s narrative of

Roman decline, it is worth considering why the emperor and his legal team considered it worthwhile to engage with this subject at all.

When examining the sources for the reign of Justinian, it is important to remember that even in this exceptionally well-documented period, only a small fraction of the written texts have survived to modern times. The consistency and emphasis placed on Justinian’s Roman revival in the laws of 535 almost certainly corresponded to a broader program of imperial propaganda. Glimpses of this program survive, in particular the lavish triumph Justinian celebrated over Gelimer in 534 at the conclusion of the

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Vandal War, even if many other specific aspects of it cannot always be recovered.14 Just as Anastasios roughly forty years before had gone to great lengths to associate himself with Pompey and claim for his regime the legitimacy of Roman identity, Justinian’s government would certainly have developed and implemented a coherent program of propaganda, especially after the near disaster of the Nika Revolt in 532. The record

Justinian had developed since that crisis was built around his achievements in arms and laws, the precise features of his reign that are emphasized in the reform Novels of 535.

The setbacks Justinian faced in the winter of 535/6, the death of Mundo and the breakdown of negotiations with Theodahad, were not sufficient to justify a complete revision of the preceding years’ messaging. Tribonian and his team, then, were trapped between two competing imperial agendas, the first of which was maintaining the emperor’s legal rhetoric, which required a continued push to claim the authority of

Roman history, and the second was the anticipation and disarming of potential counter- narratives. This latter task was made more difficult by the fact that Justinian had already overplayed his hand in the Novels, alluding to the reconquest of Rome in Novel 24

(Praetor of Pisidia),15 indicating the extent of his territorial ambitions in Novel 9 (Roman

Prescriptions),16 and claiming for himself the title of Gothicus (along with the titles

14 For the semantic implication of this triumph, see H. Börm, ‘Justinians Triumph und Belisars Erniedrigung. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis zwischen Kaiser und Militär im späten Römischen Reich,’ Chiron 42 (2013) 63-88.

15 For the discussion of this Novel, see pp. 122ff.

16 Discussed below.

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Alamanicus, Francicus, , Anticus, Alanicus, Vandalicus, and Africanus) as early as 16 April 535 in Novel 17 (Imperial Mandates).17

In the spring of 536, as imperial attention swung back to the reform of the eastern provinces, Tribonian was faced with the task of constructing a narrative of Roman history that legitimized Justinian’s military venture in Italy and invalidated Gothic claims to legal ownership of the province.18 The solution he settled on was to finally and permanently divorce ancient and contemporary Rome by creating an official narrative of Roman decline. Such a narrative allowed the emperor to claim to be the direct inheritor of the laws, offices, and traditions of the Roman state, while denying any legitimacy to the

Goths in Italy. This rhetorical strategy makes its first debut in the extant record on 17

March 536 in Novel 30 (Proconsul of Cappadocia). Like the provincial reform Novels of

535, Novel 30 (Proconsul of Cappadocia) claimed to be reintroducing an ancient office, but where the reforms of the previous year had focused on the might of the ancient

Romans and the sources of their success, the opening of Novel 30 (Proconsul of

Cappadocia) calls attention to the difficulties the Romans faced in subduing Cappadocia:

Lovers of ancient erudition do not fail to recognize how great is the name and tribe of the Cappadocians and how much trouble they gave the Romans before being subdued. Cappadocia ruled all of nearby ,19 and men who were both exceedingly famous and worthy of the great

17 Just. Nov. 17 (117.40-42).

18 Cf. The exchange between Belisarios and Vittigis over the legality of the latter’s occupation of Rome in 536, Prok. Wars 5.20.8-18. This episode is discussed further below.

19 This claim has no apparent basis in the historical record. In fact, Cappadocia spent many years as a client kingdom to Mithridates VI of Pontos, who did in fact give the Romans no end of trouble.

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attention of the Romans were produced there. It is an abundant and wondrous land and has made amends with the empire to such a degree that we even established a magistracy there to oversee our private estate. This province is in no way inferior to the province of Pontus, and is in fact much greater. For the tremendous population of this land furnished and established a great city named for our most beloved Caesar [Caesarea], who gave our monarchy a noble beginning. Because of this, the most famous name among all the tribes of the world is the name of Caesar and we treasure this before any other token of our kingship.20

The opening of this Novel harkens back to the claims of erudition and historical learning

Justinian made in the reform Novels of 535.21 Once again the learned emperor is reaching back into obscure history in order to find strategies for Roman success. But where, in the

Novels of 535, the emperor had looked to Roman administrative precedents, Novel 30

(Proconsul of Cappadocia) finds him admiring the failures and frustrations of Roman foreign policy under the Republic. The emperor’s change in focus is made more remarkable by the inaccuracy of his account. Not only did Cappadocia not rule Pontos nor give the Romans a particularly hard time, Pontos had in fact functionally annexed

Cappadocia during the reign of one of Rome’s most persistent enemies: Mithridates VI.22

This is an embarrassing error for an emperor who had taken pains to establish himself as

20 Just. Nov. 30 (223.33-224.12):Ὁπόσον ἐστὶ τὸ Καππαδοκῶν ὄνομά τε καὶ ἔθνος, καὶ ὅπως τὴν ἀρχὴν ἵνα κτηθείη πράγματα παρέσχε Ῥωμαίοις, οἱ τῆς ἀρχαίας πολυμαθείας οὐκ ἠγνοήκασιν ἐρασταί. τοῦ τε γὰρ Πόντου σχεδὸν παντὸς ἐξῆρχε, καὶ ἄνδρες ὀνομαστότατοί τε καὶ φροντίδος ἄξιοι Ῥωμαίοις γενόμενοι μεγάλης ἐκεῖθεν ἤρθησαν. γῆ τε αὐτοῖς ἐστι πολλή τε καὶ θαυμαστὴ καὶ οὕτως ἀρέσασα τῇ βασιλείᾳ, ὡς καὶ ἀρχὴν ἐπιστῆσαι ταῖς ἐκεῖσε κτήσεσιν ἰδίαν, τῆς Ποντικῆς ἀρχῆς οὐκ ἐλάττω, μᾶλλον μὲν οὖν καὶ μείζω. πολυανθρωποτάτη τε γὰρ καθέστηκε καὶ πόλιν παρέχεται μεγίστην τὴν τοῦ φιλτάτου Καίσαρος ἡμῖν ἐπώνυμον τοῦ δόντος ἀρχὴν ἀγαθὴν τῇ καθ' ἡμᾶς μοναρχίᾳ, δι' ὃν ἐν ἅπασι τοῖς τῆς γῆς ἔθνεσιν ὀνομαστότατόν ἐστι τὸ τοῦ Καίσαρος ὄνομα καὶ ᾧπερ ἡμεῖς ἀντ' ἄλλου τινὸς τῶν τῆς βασιλείας συμβόλων σεμνυνόμεθα.

21 In particular in Novel 24, see pp. 122ff.

22 On Mithridates VI, see A. Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton, 2011).

256 the researcher-in-chief of the Roman state. Nevertheless, if the history is taken at face value, then we can see the beginning of a new rhetorical strategy in the reform Novels.

Where, in 535, Justinian had been anxious to glorify ancient Roman achievements in order to provide a historical precedent and justification for his reforms, this Novel shows the emperor backing away from that strategy and calling attention to setbacks faced by

Roman imperialism, at least in the eastern theater. The likeliest explanation for this transition is the continued success of Justinian’s imperial program. At the time this Novel appeared, Justinian’s forces had successfully entered Italy and would shortly take control of Rome. By overplaying the difficulties faced by the Romans in the middle stages of their imperial expansion, Justinian creates a favorable comparison for his own campaign of reconquest, which was getting underway at the same moment in Italy.

After his brief history of the Roman conquest of Cappadocia, Justinian proceeds to offer a digression on the foundation of the city of Caesarea and the title of Caesar. This description is linked to the previous discussion because it justifies the promotion of

Cappadocia over Pontos, as indicated by the explanatory particle gar. It is at this point that Justinian’s historical error begins to make sense; the reversal of the historical relationship between Pontos and Cappadocia is justified not based on the history, which readers may recognize is fabricated, but on the closer association between Cappadocia and the monarchy provided by the city of Caesarea. Like Cappadocia, Justinian’s status is similarly enhanced by the association with Caesar, in this case meaning Augustus rather than Julius Caesar, which he claims to prize above all of his imperial titles. Justinian’s attempts to associate himself with Augustus may serve another purpose as well. As was

257 discussed in chapter one, a major component of Anastasios’ propaganda program was his attempt to link himself to Pompey, whose dominance in Roman politics was superseded by Julius Caesar, who in turn passed it off to his grandnephew Augustus. There are clear parallels between these figures and the emperors of the late fifth and early sixth centuries.

If Anastasios was Pompey, then the shift in to Justin paralleled the rise of

Caesar, while the succession of Justin’s nephew Justinian paralleled the rise of Augustus.

It is possible, then, that Justinian is experimenting with a program of propaganda that associates himself with Augustus just as Anastasios did with Pompey. The emphasis on

Augustus’ founding of the monarchy would then correspond to Justinian’s refounding of

Roman government along ancient lines as well as his restoration of Roman control over the western provinces.

The opening of Novel 30 (Proconsul of Cappadocia) sets the stage for the introduction of Justinian’s official account of the decline and fall of the western Roman empire, which is placed at the conclusion of the Novel. Having expanding his claims to be reviving Roman traditions even to the point of implicitly establishing himself as a second Augustus, Justinian proceeds to create a model of Roman history that safely sequesters Roman precedents in a past that is rhetorically inaccessible to non-Romans, in particular the Gothic court in Italy:

The proconsul will deal honestly with our subjects (as we have often ordered), conducting our business with zeal and being prepared to have no concern for money, especially in the midst of such expenses and great wars. For it is through these that God has granted that we make peace with the Persians, overpower the Vandals, , and , and win over the whole of Africa and Sicily. God has granted us also the noble hope that he 258

will assent to our dominion over the remainder of those places which the ancient Romans tossed aside through their continual negligence, though they had previously held dominion over all the territory up to the limits of both oceans. It is this negligence which, taking heart from our alliance with God, we hasten to turn to strength, and we shrink from no challenge, not even the most extreme difficulty. Instead, we continually employ sleeplessness, fasts, and every other manner of toil on behalf of our subjects.23

The conclusion of Novel 30 (Proconsul of Cappadocia) marks the fusion of two major strands of Justinian’s imperial propaganda: his claim to be restoring ancient practices and his persona as the sleepless emperor.24 The emperor’s tireless personal efforts mirror his determination in the face of whatever setbacks his program of reconquest might face and both qualities stand opposed to the negligence (rathymia) which originally cost the

Romans their western provinces. Justinian’s formulation of the cause of Roman decline is, by any modern standard, hopelessly vague, but the diffuseness of his model allows the emperor to bring overwhelming rhetorical force to bear on the problem. Had Justinian opted to advance a more specific cause for Roman decline, he would have been correspondingly limited in the contrast he could draw between his regime and the

23 Just. Nov. 30.11.2 (234.27-43): Καὶ καθαρῶς τοῖς ἡμετέροις ὑπηκόοις (τοῦτο ὅπερ πολλάκις εἰρήκαμεν) χρήσεται, πρᾶγμα διεσπουδασμένον ἡμῖν καὶ χρημάτων ἀμελῆσαι παρασκευάσαν μεγάλων, καίτοιγε ἐν τοσαύταις δαπάναις καὶ πολέμοις μεγάλοις, δι' ὧν δέδωκεν ἡμῖν ὁ θεὸς πρὸς Πέρσας τε ἄγειν εἰρήνην Βανδίλους τε καὶ Ἀλανοὺς καὶ Μαυρουσίους χειρώσασθαι, καὶ Ἀφρικὴν ὅλην καὶ πρός γε καὶ Σικελίαν κατακτήσασθαι, καὶ ἐλπίδας ἔχειν ἀγαθὰς ὅτι καὶ τῶν λοιπῶν ἡμῖν τὴν ἐπικράτειαν νεύσειεν ὁ θεὸς ὧνπερ οἱ πάλαι Ῥωμαῖοι μέχρι τῶν πρὸς ἑκάτερον ὠκεανὸν ὁρίων κρατήσαντες ταῖς ἐφεξῆς ἀπέβαλον ῥᾳθυμίαις· ἃς ἡμεῖς τῇ παρὰ θεοῦ συμμαχίᾳ θαρροῦντες ἐπὶ τὸ κρεῖττον μεταβάλλειν σπεύδομεν οὐδέν τε ὀκνοῦμεν τῶν εἰς ἐσχάτην δυσκολίαν ἡκόντων, ἀγρυπνίαις τε καὶ ἀσιτίαις καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἅπασι πόνοις ὑπὲρ τῶν ἡμετέρων ὑπηκόων διηνεκῶς καταχρώμενοι.

24 For Justinian’s sleeplessness, see B. Croke, ‘Justinian the ‘Sleepless Emperor,’ Byzantina Australiensia 17 (2010) 103-8. For the use of ancient history in the Codex, see C. Pazdernik, ‘Justinianic Ideology and the Power of the Past,’ in M. Maas (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2005) 185-212.

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‘ancient’ Romans who lost the empire. For example, had Justinian highlighted military failure, he could have reasonably adduced his successful campaigns as evidence of his superiority, but not his record of administrative reform or his personal acts of devotion. In order to be able to make use of all the elements of his propaganda, Justinian required an explanation of Roman decline that was either extremely complex and nuanced or one that was simple and vague. As any observer of modern American politics can attest, nuance is rarely effective in political messaging. The imprecision of the term ‘negligence’ (which has additional connotations of personal laziness) allows Justinian to combine his rhetoric of diligent administration, personal devotion and acts of mortification, and successful foreign policy in order to present a portrait of a coherent and comprehensive imperial effort. The choice of negligence as the fatal flaw that cost Rome her empire also allows

Justinian to claim success, along with the title of restorer and reviver, not only based on his proven achievements such as the peace with Persia and conquest of Africa, but also on the basis of the mere attempt to reclaim those lost territories. Justinian’s efforts, by virtue of being proactive and regardless of their results, are themselves a reversal of the cause of Roman decline. What better rhetorical strategy could there be for an emperor who openly admitted less than two years later that his constant activity irritated some of his subjects.25

Justinian’s account of the causes of the Roman decline is remarkable both for its vagueness and for its chronology. Novel 30 (Proconsul of Cappadocia) identifies the negligent Romans as the ‘ancient Romans’ (hoi palai Romanoi). This is an unexpected

25 Just. Nov. 60.Pr (325.14-22), published 1 December 537.

260 way to frame the disintegration of the western empire during the course of the fifth century, especially given that the culminating event of western Roman decline, the deposition of the last emperor, took place in 476. Just over fifty years passed between that seminal moment and Justinian’s accession in 527, placing the event within living memory. Justinian’s peculiar chronology is unparalleled in the laws, in which the latest dateable event to be designated as ancient, with the Latin term antiquitas which translates palai, falls during the reign of (r. 69-79).26 Justinian’s chronology in Novel 30

(Proconsul of Cappadocia) is logically untenable, but nevertheless provides the emperor with a significant buffer against competing claims to Roman legitimacy on the part of the

Goths in Italy (or any other party, for that matter) by sequestering the fall of Rome in a vaguely defined ancient period.

Despite all of the effort Justinian spends in his Novels attempting to isolate contemporary Rome from the authority of Roman history, the emperor himself does not make use of the city’s reconquest in any of his surviving laws. The oversight is somewhat surprising given the potential propaganda coup the recapture of the Roman homeland might have been. One possible explanation for Justinian’s reticence may be continued uncertainty about Rome’s status in the contemporary empire. Such a view is supported by another set of Novels that appeared during this period and addressed the topic of Roman authority.

26 In the Institutes it is claimed that the senatusconsultum Pegasianum, promulgated c. A.D. 73, was unpopular even ‘in antiquity itself’ (ipsi antiquitati), Just. Inst. 2.23.7. For the date of the senatusconsultum Pegasianum, see J.A.C. Thomas, The : Text, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford, 1975), 159.

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Rome and Ancient Rome in the Novels

On 14 April 535, roughly a year before Belisarios would begin the invasion of Italy,

Justinian promulgated Novel 9 (Roman Prescriptions). The law was designed to prevent debts owed to the Church of Rome from lapsing after the standard period of thirty years and extended the limit to a full century, reasoning that this was the longest span of a human life.27 This is a peculiar Novel; not only does it survive, and was likely issued, only in Latin, it also addresses an institution which was not at the time of its publication under the legal authority of Constantinople. The only practical effect the law could have had was the recognition of this new statute of limitations for the Roman see’s holdings in the eastern empire. Under these circumstances, it is easy to see Novel 9 (Roman

Prescriptions) for what it was: a bald-faced attempt to win the support of the bishop of

Rome prior to Justinian’s annexation (by purchase) or invasion of Italy (both options were on the table in 535). 28 For a counterpoint to the rhetoric of Novel 9 (Roman

Prescriptions), a measure of Justininan’s true attitude toward the Church of Rome can be gleaned from the regularity with which he deposed the bishops of Rome following the conquest of Italy.

Novel 9 (Roman Prescriptions) begins by drawing a parallel between the episcopal authority of contemporary Rome and the legal authority of ancient Rome:

27 Just. Nov. 9.1 (91.28).

28 C. Sotinel, “Emperors and Popes in the Sixth Century: The Western View,” in M. Maas (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 267-290 at 277-279; J. Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 225.

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Ancient Rome was chosen to be the source of laws and there is no one who doubts that the highest pontificate is located on that summit. Therefore, we thought it necessary to embellish the fatherland of laws and the font of the priesthood with a special law of our divine majesty. We do this in order that from this city [Rome] the strength of our most beneficial law might extend to all catholic churches, even out to those located at the channel of the ocean, and also in order that our law might be dedicated to the glory of god throughout the west and the east, wherever holdings are found to belong to our churches, whether they are currently held or will be acquired in the future.29

At the outset of the Novel, Justinian articulates a careful formulation that balances the roles and privileges of three major players: the emperor himself, the bishop of Rome, and the city of Rome. To begin with, Justinian restricts his discussion of Rome to ‘ancient’ or

‘earlier’ Rome (anterior), a specification that preempts any contemporary claims to authority by the city or its inhabitants. Its legal authority was ancient and not to be extended into the present as a possible counterweight to the authority of Justinian’s

Constantinople. Justinian’s praise is further limited to the role the city played in the establishment of Roman law, which, in the context of an imperial law, implicitly abrogates the rhetorical authority of ancient Rome to the emperor, who is now not in

Rome. Justinian pushes this advantage, claiming that the force of his law extends to territories as far as ‘the limits of both oceans,’ an ambiguous phrase that might refer to the Straits of Gibraltar or the English Channel. In the spring of 535, Justinian did not control Rome or any part of Italy, much less the territories he implies with this statement.

29 Just. Nov. 9.Pr (91.18-23): Et legum originem anterior Roma sortita est, et summi pontificatus apicem apud eam esse nemo est qui dubitet. Unde et nos necessarium duximus patriam legum, fontem sacerdotii, speciali nostri numinis lege illustrare, ut ex hac in totas catholicas ecclesias, quae usque ad oceani fretum positae sunt, saluberrimae legis vigor extendatur, et sit totius occidentis, nec non orientis, ubi possessiones sitae inveniuntur ad ecclesias nostras sive nunc pertinentes seu postea eis acquirendae, lex propria ad honorem dei consecrata.

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This claim to legal authority is therefore nothing more than a .

Nevertheless, this fiction furthers the rhetorical goals of the Novel and supports the idea that Justinian had inherited both the authority and the geographical scope of ancient

Roman law. Justinian’s self-presentation here fits the pattern seen in earlier chapters:

Justinian plays to his proven strengths in the rhetoric of his laws. Just as Justinian’s authority over the imperial administration was supported by his military successes in

Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia), so too is his authority over Roman law in Novel 9 (Roman

Prescriptions) supported by his legal achievements, in particular his codification of

Roman law, which had concluded with the publication of the second edition of the Codex late in 534.

Justinian goes on to create a parallel between the origin of his legal authority and the origin of the bishop of Rome’s episcopal authority, though he places the bishop at a slight disadvantage by introducing the phrase ‘no one would doubt.’ The power differential thereby introduced into the law, though minor, continues throughout

Justinian’s formulation of the bishop’s authority. Justinian begins by acknowledging the primacy of the Roman see, a status the bishop of Rome zealously sought in late antiquity, but only in terms that grant the emperor himself a corresponding legal authority that, although more ancient, was grounded in the same logic of Roman origin.30 Added to this is the text of the law itself, which offers financial incentives to the Roman Church and implicitly acknowledges Rome’s hegemony over all of the churches in the west.

30 This accords with the so-called diarchic model advanced by Justinian elsewhere in his laws, Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter, 116-127.

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However, this recognition of Roman episcopal authority is balanced out by the unwritten terms of the law. If the bishop of Rome accepts and supports the legality of Novel 9

(Roman Prescriptions), then he effectively recognizes Justinian’s authority to pass laws concerning church property and, more perilously in an Italy still ruled by the Gothic court in Ravenna, recognizes Justinian as the legitimate head of the imperial government with legal authority in Italy.31

Novel 9 (Roman Prescriptions) is effectively an attempt by Justinian to secure the support, or at least neutrality, of the Roman see at the beginning of his campaign to retake

Italy. Justinian makes clear that he would continue to support the primacy of the bishop of Rome, as agreed by the Council of Chalkedon in 451, and offer financial incentives in order to bring the Church of Rome onside. More materially, however, Justinian also reaffirms the bishop of Rome’s control over the territories in the west, which implicitly includes the island of Sicily (the conquest of which began in the spring of the same year this Novel was issued) as well as the territories directly administered by the church in

Italy.32 In other words, Justinian was offering to allow the bishop of Rome to conduct business as usual buoyed by the affirmative support and financial assistance of the imperial government of Constantinople. There was, however, a catch. If the bishop of

Rome undertook to manage lawsuits according to the terms of the Novel 9 (Roman

31 For Justinian’s attitudes toward temporal and religious authority, see R.A. Markus, ‘Carthage—Prima Justiniana—Ravenna: An Aspect of Justinian’s Kirchenpolitik,’ Byzantion 49 (1979) 292-302; J. Meyendorff, ‘Justinian, the Empire, and the Church,’ DOP 22 (1968) 43-60.

32 For the administrative authority of the Roman Church, see J. Gaudemet, L’Église dans l’empire romain (IVe-Ve siécles) (Paris, 1935), 445-446

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Prescriptions), then he accepts that his religious authority is subject to the legal authority of the Roman emperor.

Justinian’s approach to Rome in Novel 9 (Roman Prescriptions) resembles the judgement of Solomon. The emperor is essentially dividing the legacy of the city into two distinct categories: its ancient role as the mother of laws and therefore imperial government, and its current role as a prominent religious center. Like his division of

Roman history into ‘ancient’ and contemporary periods, the segregation of ancient temporal and contemporary religious authority allows Justinian to woo an important ally

(and potentially disastrous enemy) in his campaign to restore Italy to the empire and forestall any threat Old Rome might pose to the status of Constantinople.

Justinian’s careful handling of Rome is a feature of his Novels in 535. Novel 9 appeared on 14 April 535, just over a month before Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia). Novel

24 (Praetor of Pisidia) was the first of Justinian’s laws to draw explicit historical parallels between the contemporary empire and the expansion Rome experienced during the

Republic, yet it too addressed the topic of Rome with care, limiting its comments to

Justinian’s goal of ‘leading antiquity back into the politeia with a greater flowering, and exalting the name of the Romans.’33 As discussed above, Justinian’s ‘greater flowering’ is an allusion to the city of Rome.34 Like Novel 9 (Roman Prescriptions), Novel 24

(Praetor Pisidia) temporally sequesters Roman authority. Justinian is interested in restoring ‘antiquity,’ focuses on reviving offices which (he claims) are older even than

33 Just. Nov.24.1 (189.26-8): Ταῦτα ἐννοοῦντες ἡμεῖς, καὶ τὴν παλαιότητα πάλιν μετὰ μείζονος ἄνθους εἰς τὴν πολιτείαν ἐπαναγαγόντες καὶ τὸ Ῥωμαίων σεμνύναντες ὄνομα.

34 See the dicussion of Novel 24 (Praetor of Pisidia) in chapter two, pp. 122ff.

266 the consulship, and limits his discussion of Roman history to the distant past. All of these strategies help to prevent contemporary Rome from operating, at least in the emperor’s rhetoric, as a potentially destabilizing alternate source of authority, and actively support the proposition that the emperor in Constantinople is the legitimate heir of Roman imperialism as well as Roman identity.

Later during the Italian campaigns, in November or December of 537, Justinian published another law concerning the imperial administration of the newly annexed territories in the west. Like Novel 9 (Roman Prescriptions), Novel 75 (Appeals from

Sicily) survives, and was almost certainly issued, only in the Latin. The Novel orders that appeals from Sicily be directed to Constantinople and the office of the quaestor Tribonian

(who wrote the law himself) but not to Rome:

The appeal may not be brought to ancient Rome nor to any other judge in this royal city, but you yourself will hear them in the manner of a sworn witness and will resolve the lawsuit.35

Once again we see Rome referenced as anterior Rome alongside another ambiguous reference to the ‘imperial city.’ The indefinite pronoun huius might refer back to the city of Rome or to the geographically nearer city from the emperor’s perspective, which would be Constantinople. Although the former option would be more grammatically correct by the standards of classical Latin, the latter makes significantly more sense because the prohibition of appeals to Rome is absolute and requires no further delimiting,

35 Just. Nov. 75.1 (378.12-13): neque ad anteriorem Romam neque ad alium iudicem huius regiae civitatis eatur, sed ipse vice sacri cognitoris audias et litem dirimas.

267 whereas the redirection of appeals to Tribonian’s office does not necessarily imply that he must oversee these cases personally. The fact that Justinian felt the need to mention

Rome at all is itself noteworthy. In the fall and winter of 537, the city of Rome was under

Roman control but still besieged by Gothic forces, which would not depart the city until

March of 538. There was certainly no immediate of Rome usurping Constantinople’s legal authority, so Justinian’s reform must be understood to be preemptive. Before the conquest of Italy was even complete, Justinian was reorganizing the administration of

Sicily and redirecting it to face toward Constantinople in order to undercut any potential accumulation of administrative influence in elder Rome.

Justinian’s unwillingness to grant Rome any stake in the governance of Sicily outside of episcopal matters is a striking testament both to his desire to centralize his authority over his recent conquests and to his distrust of Rome. Sicily fell firmly within the Italian sphere of influence and the logistical complications, not to mention expense, of redirecting appeals to Constantinople would have been significant. The reform would also have been humiliating to the power brokers of Rome, like the senate and bishop, to whom the removal of Sicily from their jurisdiction would have appeared as extreme as if

Justinian had been forced to yield administrative oversight over the province of Thrace to

Rome.

Novel 75 (Appeals from Sicily) gives the clearest possible indication that

Justinian was anxious to reorient the administration of the west toward Constantinople.

The Novel’s explicit mention of Rome indicates that Justinian perceived the Eternal City as a potential rival to Constantinople and was keen to anticipate any attempts to create a

268 locus of Roman government in the west. Rhetorically, Justinian’s desire to isolate Rome manifested in a historical narrative that treated all of its accomplishments as ancient and introduced the discontinuity of decline. Rome could be praised, but only ancient Rome, a city separated from the modern city by the shame of its failure, a product of negligence

(rathymia), and by an elastic chronology in which ‘ancient’ Rome could refer to any period prior to Justinian’s reign. Even with these rhetorical strategies in place, the emperor did not make the city of Rome a focus of his rhetoric, generally preferring to employ placeless traditions and offices in order to access the legitimizing potential of

Roman history. In short, Justinian’s chief strategy for disarming Rome’s disruptive potential was to ignore it. The same strategy was not an option for other writers in the sixth century, in particular Prokopios, whose career as Belisarios’ assessor brought him face-to-face with the ancient Roman homeland and forced him to grapple with the implications of Rome’s return to the Roman empire.

Rome and the Romans in Prokopios

Justinian never went to Rome. This was not unusual for an emperor by the sixth century, but stands in marked contrast to the experience of Prokopios, who not only marched into

Rome with Belisarios in 536, but also endured with his general the siege of the city in

537-538. It is not surprising, therefore, that the city of Rome looms large in Prokopios’ narrative of the Gothic Wars. What is unexpected, however, is the way in which

Prokopios presents the attitudes of the Goths and (eastern) Romans toward the city. In the frequent letters and embassies exchanged between the two sides, the Romans under

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Belisarios consistently conceptualize the city of Rome as a possession, something to be owned for the sake of owning it. The Goths, meanwhile, understand the city in terms of its inhabitants, rather than its urban structure. By examining the distinctions between these two approaches to Rome, it is possible to understand, if not Prokopios’ own views, then at least the perspectives on Rome he presents as current during the Gothic Wars.

Shortly after Belisarios occupied Rome in 536, he began preparing for a Gothic counterattack. Witnessing these preparations, the people of Rome, in particular the senators, became nervous at the prospect of a protracted siege. When rumors of their discontent reached the Gothic king Vittigis, he sent an ambassador named Albis to address Belisarios and the senate in the hopes of stirring up dissension and confusion.

Albis’ address is rhetorically ornate, filled with counterbalanced clauses and predicated on an abstract discussion of the difference between rashness (tharsos) and

(andreia). When Albis finally comes around to the topic at hand, the impending siege of

Rome by the Goths, he frames the question in terms of the people of Rome rather than the city itself:

Therefore do not prolong any further the suffering of these Romans, whom Theoderic raised in a life of luxury and freedom, and do not stand in the way of the master of the Goths and Italians. How is it natural for you to hole yourself up in Rome, shutting yourself in and cowering from your enemies, while the king of this city wastes his time on a siege and inflicts the evils of war on his own subjects?36

36 Prok. Wars 5.20.11-12: νῦν οὖν μήτε Ῥωμαίοις τοῖσδε περαιτέρω τὴν ταλαιπωρίαν μηκύνεσθαι ποίει, οὓς δὴ Θευδέριχος ἐν βίῳ τρυφερῷ τε καὶ ἄλλως ἐλευθέρῳ ἐξέθρεψε, μήτε τῷ Γότθων τε καὶ Ἰταλιωτῶν δεσπότῃ ἐμποδὼν ἵστασο. πῶς γὰρ οὐκ ἄτοπον, σὲ μὲν οὕτω καθειργμένον τε καὶ τοὺς πολεμίους κατεπτηχότα ἐν Ῥώμῃ καθῆσθαι, τὸν δὲ ταύτης βασιλέα ἐν χαρακώματι διατρίβοντα τὰ τοῦ πολέμου κακὰ τοὺς αὑτοῦ κατηκόους ἐργάζεσθαι;

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Although Albis is in Rome to provoke acrimony between Belisarios and the Romans, the way in which he frames the question of Roman loyalty raises questions about what it means to be Roman in Italy in the 530s.37 According to Albis, the Romans are simply the inhabitants of Rome and no other group is afforded that title. The remainder of Italy is populated by Goths and Italians, while Belisarios and his army are never given any sort of ethnonym by Albis. In effect, then, Albis is postulating a post-Roman world, one in which historical associations matter not at all, especially compared to more recent allegiances, such as that owed by the Romans to the Goths for their fair and indulgent treatment under Theoderic. By denying the existence of any historical or ethnic affinity between Belisarios’ army and the Romans, Albis is able to reframe the question in terms of what the Romans owe the Goths as loyal subjects, even going so far as to make clear that Vittigis is being forced now to make war on his own subjects.

There is nothing particularly surprising about Albis’ rhetorical approach. His goal is to sow dissension, and therefore any reminder of a shared heritage or implicit acknowledgement of the Roman identity of Belisarios’ army would be counterproductive.

What is surprising, however, is the way in which Belisarios responds:

In taking Rome we have taken nothing that is not ours, rather it was you who in earlier times seized this city although it did not belong to you. You have now returned the city to its ancient masters, albeit unwillingly. And if

37 For the loyalties of the Italians during the Gothic War, see J. Moorhead, ‘Italian Loyalties during Justinian’s Gothic War,’ Byzantion 53.2 (1983) 575-596; P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489-554 (Cambridge, 1997) 109-148.

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any of you hopes to set foot in Rome again without battle, he is mad; Belisarios is unable to surrender this city so long as he lives.38

Instead of appealing to a common past, shared heritage, and identity between his army and the inhabitants of Rome or rehearsing the rhetoric of liberation that Justinian sometimes employed in his Novels, Belisarios simply lays claim to the city of Rome as a former imperial possession (just as, for instance, Amalasuintha had previously claimed the city of Lilybaion in Sicily and protested its seizure by Belisarios in 535). Although apparently straightforward, Belisarios’ response in fact has seismic implications for his conception of a common east-west Roman identity, specifically it makes clear that he does not view the former territories of the western Roman empire as Roman. As far as

Belisarios is concerned, Rome is simply an imperial possession, something that belongs to the emperor Justinian because it was previously taken from the Roman government unjustly. The inhabitants of the city are nowhere mentioned and, moreover, Belisarios’ contention that the city is not currently under its ‘ancient masters’ implicitly rejects the notion that the senators of Rome, whom Prokopios makes clear were present, in any way represent an arm of Roman government; the existence of a Roman senate in Rome does not suffice to make Rome Roman. In fact, Belisarios’ failure to make any mention of the inhabitants of Rome reveals a worldview in which people are immaterial and cultural, historical, and even legal claims are secondary to ownership.

38 Prok. Wars 5.20.17-18: Ῥώμην μέντοι ἑλόντες ἡμεῖς τῶν ἀλλοτρίων οὐδὲν ἔχομεν, ἀλλ' ὑμεῖς ταύτης τὰ πρότερα ἐπιβατεύσαντες, οὐδὲν ὑμῖν προσῆκον, νῦν οὐχ ἑκόντες τοῖς πάλαι κεκτημένοις ἀπέδοτε. ὅστις δὲ ὑμῶν Ῥώμης ἐλπίδα ἔχει ἀμαχητὶ ἐπιβήσεσθαι, γνώμης ἁμαρτάνει. ζῶντα γὰρ Βελισάριον μεθήσεσθαι ταύτης ἀδύνατον.

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By far the most striking implication of Belisarios’ speech is the complete reversal of the orientation of Roman identity. Whereas the authors of the early sixth century, in particular Zosimos and Hesychios, had looked to Rome as a source of authentic

Romanness, Belisarios, without fanfare or concern, claims ownership of Rome by virtue of an axiomatic Romanness that is not shared by the city or its inhabitants. Romanness for Belisarios operates at the level of government, which means that Rome has, in the sixth century, become a net importer of Roman identity. It is not the populace, the senate, or the monuments which make Rome Roman; rather it is Belisarios’ army which does so by bringing the city once more under the authority of the Roman emperor, albeit one in the east. Without Justinian, Rome would not be Roman.39 The Roman empire must therefore reconquer Rome in order to once again make it Roman.

Although originally passed over, the history of relations between the Romans and the Goths comes up in a later exchange set in December of 537and modeled on the

Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In the Melian dialogue, the Athenians, who have come to conquer Melos or force its surrender, request a private meeting with the Melian leaders and ask to speak frankly and quickly rather than in the long rhetorical speeches that are typical of diplomatic addresses in Thucydides

(and Prokopios). The Athenians immediately make clear that they do not intend to waste time discussing what is just as they believe that ‘in human reasoning justice arises from

39 Greatrex extrapolates from evidence such as this to argue that Romanness, as a whole, was defined in the sixth century as loyalty to the emperor, G. Greatrex, ‘Roman Identity in the Sixth Century,’ in S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex (eds.) Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London, 2000) 267-292 at 268. Below, I will attempt to situate Belisarios’ attitude within a wider spectrum of definitions of Romanness that were active in Prokopios’Wars and the sixth century in general.

273 common necessity, but when some men have power, they act, and those without strength acquiesce.’40 As a result, the Athenians compel the Melians to debate the question of

Melian independence in terms of Athenian advantage, a debate the Melians are bound to lose.

In Prokopios’ Wars, the Gothic Dialogue is set in a similar context. The Goths, who are besieging Rome, ask for an audience with Belisarios and propose that both sides speak plainly and avoid long speeches, a rule they themselves violate almost immediately.41 However, in introducing this proposal, the Goths make a telling claim:

‘each of us, having come to experience hardships in our present conflict, knows that the events of our war have been to neither of our advantage.’42 Right away, the Goths establish that there is parity between the two sides in this negotiation, a feature which sets the Gothic Dialogue in direct opposition to the Melian Dialogue, in which the forces of

Athens and Melos were in no way commensurate. The Goths then ask to have a discussion based on justice, to which Belisarios agrees, prompting the Goths to rehearse an extensive history of relations between themselves and the emperors of Constantinople.

Prokopios deliberately invokes the model of the Melian Dialogue, only to turn that model on its head. The two sides of the Gothic Dialogue successfully discuss the ownership of Rome using a hermeneutic of justice. The Goths do not claim, as they did

40 Thuc. 5.89: δίκαια μὲν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρωπείῳ λόγῳ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης ἀνάγκης κρίνεται, δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.

41 Prok. Wars 6.6.12.

42 Prok. Wars 6.6.4: Ὡς μὲν οὐδετέροις ἡμῶν ἐς τὸ ξυμφέρον τὰ τοῦ πολέμου κεχώρηκεν ἐξεπίσταται ἡμῶν ἕκαστος ἐς αὐτὴν ἥκων τῶν ἐνθένδε δυσκόλων τὴν πεῖραν.

274 when represented by Albis, that Rome belongs to them simply because they have treated its inhabitants well. Instead, they make the argument that Rome legally belongs to them by virtue of the deal made by the emperor Zenon with Theoderic. Moreover, they say,

Justinian has no cause to revoke that ownership:

We [the Goths] have maintained the laws and the politeia no less than those emperors who have ruled in the meantime, and there exists no [newer] written or unwritten law, either from Theoderic or any of the others who received the command of the Goths after him.43

By claiming imperial sanction and adducing evidence of legal continuity, the Goths are claiming to still be members of the extended Roman polity, functionally no different than

Belisarios himself. In order to drive this point home, the Goths list all of the ways in which they have not changed the governance of Italy, including respecting non-Arian

Christians, the rights of churches, and even yielding control over the consulship to

Constantinople. In addition to these, the Goths mention one additional feature of their rule, which has direct bearing on perceptions of Roman identity in the period. According to the Goths, ‘[the Romans] have continued to hold all of the magistracies of the politeia and no Goth has had a share in them.’44 The Gothic argument is therefore not only that their government is legally and religiously a Roman government, but also that it is still staffed exclusively by Romans. This formulation is interesting both because the Goths’

43 Prok. Wars 6.6.17: τούς τε νόμους καὶ τὴν πολιτείαν διεσωσάμεθα τῶν πώποτε βεβασιλευκότων οὐδενὸς ἧσσον, καὶ Θευδερίχου μὲν ἢ ἄλλου ὁτουοῦν διαδεξαμένου τὸ Γότθων κράτος νόμος τὸ παράπαν οὐδεὶς οὐκ ἐν γράμμασιν, οὐκ ἄγραφός ἐστι.

44 Prok. Wars 6.6.20: ἀλλὰ καὶ πάσας τὰς τῆς πολιτείας ἀρχὰς αὐτοὶ μὲν διαγεγόνασιν ἔχοντες, Γότθος δὲ αὐτῶν μετέσχεν οὐδείς.

275 insistence that magistracies determine Romanness echoes the premise of Justinian’s reform Novels and because the Gothic argument relies upon their being recognized as legitimate Roman subjects. The criteria they outline, therefore, act as a rubric for

Romanness. The areas assessed by this rubric are laws, religion, and magistracies, very much the same criteria Justinian employs in his Novels. The Goths characterize the dispute between Belisarios and Vittigis as, in essence, a Roman civil war, in which neither side can claim to be more Roman than the other—a claim Belisarios never attempts to make. The Goths therefore appear to be incorrectly anticipating Belisarios’ arguments.

Belisarios’ response to the Goths is as brief and stark as his answer to Albis:

The emperor Zenon sent Theoderic to make war on Odoacer not so he could have command of Italy (why would the emperor be interested in exchanging one tyrant with another?), but in order that Italy might be free and subject to the emperor.45

Belisarios summarily rejects the proposition that the Gothic government of Italy could be a legitimate Roman government, calling it instead a tyranny, which was a byword in late antiquity for an illegitimate kingship, a usurpation of imperial authority. The only criterion on which Belsarios assesses Romanness is submission to the emperor, therefore there could never be an independent Roman government in Italy; the Goths, however

Roman their model of rule might be, are rebels against the emperor, and that is all that

45 Prok. Wars 6.6.23: Θευδέριχον γὰρ βασιλεὺς Ζήνων Ὀδοάκρῳ πολεμήσοντα ἔπεμψεν, οὐκ ἐφ' ᾧ Ἰταλίας αὐτὸς τὴν ἀρχὴν ἔχοι· τί γὰρ ἂν καὶ τύραννον τυράννου διαλλάσσειν βασιλεῖ ἔμελεν; ἀλλ' ἐφ' ᾧ ἐλευθέρα τε καὶ βασιλεῖ κατήκοος ἔσται.

276 matters. Even a Roman government administered by Catholic Latin-speaking Romans

(such as the senators of Rome) would fail the general’s standard of Romanness.

Belisarios also repeats his view that Rome (and Italy in general) is a possession, an item to own rather than a group of people to govern: ‘I would never betray the emperor’s territory to another.’46

The Gothic Dialogue questions the sources of (old) Roman identity in the sixth century, asking the reader to consider whether continuity with the Roman past or the emperor is the defining feature of Roman government in Italy. Can Rome itself be Rome anymore without New Rome, specifically without Justinian? The question is ultimately left unresolved as Belisarios categorically refuses to negotiate further and the dialogue ends with an armistice while an embassy is sent to negotiate with Justinian. Nevertheless, it is important to note that neither side makes reference to the city of Rome as a source of

Roman identity. Instead, both discussions of Romanness are predicated on government structures and their modalities, which represents a radical shift from the discussions of

Roman identity that were current during the reign of Anastasios.

Greeks, Romans, and Monuments

After withstanding the siege of Rome, Belisarios spent the next two years completing the conquest of Italy, culminating in his capture of the Gothic capital at Ravenna in the spring of 540. After this, the general was recalled to Constantinople in order to organize the defense of the eastern frontier which had been the victim of a devastating Persian

46 Prok. Wars 6.6.25: ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν χώραν τὴν βασιλέως ἑτέρῳ τῳ οὔποτε οὐκ ἂν παραδοίην.

277 campaign. Following Belisarios’ departure, the situation in Italy rapidly deteriorated as a new Gothic king, Totila, began to roll back the Roman conquest beginning in the north, but quickly working his way down to Benevento and Naples, which he took to deprive the Romans of their major ports on the .

By 544, with matters stabilized by a truce on the Persian frontier, Belisarios returned to Italy in order to check Totila’s advance. His return, however, was as ignominious as his earlier campaigns had been brilliant and, in the words of Prokopios,

‘not only did [Belisarios] not recover anything of what had been lost, he even lost Rome and all the rest, so to speak.’47 It is during his account of the loss of Rome that Prokopios reintroduces the topic of Roman identity to his narrative. The question first appears in a letter Totila sends to the senate of Rome during his siege of the city. As with the address of Albis, the letter’s goal is to encourage the senators to defect from the Roman cause and renew their allegiance to the Goths, but rather than being conciliatory Totila’s tone is reproachful and he upbraids the Romans for betraying the Goths.

In the letter, Totila asks ‘Did you hear about the excellence of the Greeks [the eastern Romans] toward their subjects or learn of it through trial and therefore thought to hand over the affairs of the Goths and Italians to them?’48 The name Greeks is rendered not in the standard form Hellenes, but through a transliteration of the Latin term Graeci, which indicates that the term either is, or is meant to appear to be, a direct quote from the

47 Prok. SH. 5.3: διὸ δὴ οὔτε τῶν ἀπολωλότων τι ἀνεσώσατο, ἀλλὰ καὶ Ῥώμην προσαπώλεσε καὶ τἄλλα ὡς εἰπεῖν ἅπαντα.

48 Prok. Wars 7.9.12: ἀλλὰ τὴν Γραικῶν ἐς τὸ ὑπήκοον ἀρετὴν ἢ ἀκοῇ λαβόντες ἢ πείρᾳ μαθόντες οὕτω δὴ προήσεσθαι αὐτοῖς τὰ Γότθων τε καὶ Ἰταλιωτῶν πράγματα ἔγνωτε;

278 letter, which would have originally been written in Latin. One component of Totila’s reproach of the Romans is that they have betrayed their Gothic masters, who have always treated them well, to mere Greeks. The use of this ethnonym as a pejorative is characteristic of Totila’s rhetoric, and draws on ancient Roman tradition. In fact, of the eight occurrences of the term as a pejorative in the Wars, four are spoken by Totila during the siege of Rome.

Totila’s use of the term ‘Greeks’ to refer to Justinian’s armies represents the first attempt by the Gothic state in Prokopios’ narrative to discredit the Roman identity of the invaders. It is not a coincidence that Totila first employs this term in his address to the

Roman senate; he is attempting to rhetorically undermine the implicit claim of Belisarios’ earlier statements and thereby help to distinguish the cause of the inhabitants of Rome from that of Justinian’s armies. And he does so by establishing a commonality between himself and the Roman senators on the matter of viewing the easterners as ‘mere

Greeks.’49 However, Totila’s attacks on the Roman identity of Justinian’s armies were not intended purely for their consumption. After the fall of Rome in 546, Totila warns his own soldiers not to mistreat the (Italian) Romans because the Goths’ former setbacks were a form of divine punishment for their misdeeds. He drives his point home by highlighting how unlikely their initial loss of Italy was:

I say that before we had assembled as many as two hundred thousand warlike soldiers, and had at our disposal enormous wealth and a surplus of

49 This strategy is reminiscent of Justinian’s attempt to predicate his authority on his superior Latinity in Novel 13 (Praetor of the Plebs), see chapter two, pp. 144ff.

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horses and arms. Moreover, we boasted a great host of most prudent elders, which appears to be most useful to those undertaking a struggle. But we were overpowered by seven thousand Greeks and we were robbed of our kingdom and everything else for no reason.50

Once again, Totila uses the pejorative ‘Greeks,’ though this time the emphasis has shifted. He is no longer trying to create divisions among the besieged in Rome, but instead to shame his soldiers into obedience and moderation. The shame of the Goths was not just being defeated by a much smaller force, but the fact that it was a force composed of Greeks, the implication being that they are inferior to other peoples.

The culmination of Totila’s assault on the Roman identity of Justinian’s armies is not reported directly. Prokopios, after giving a verbatim account of Totila’s speech to his

Gothic followers, gives a summary of the speech he addressed to the senate on the occasion of his capture of Rome. Much of Totila’s speech, as summarized by Prokopios, focuses on the same issues that have characterized Gothic rhetoric throughout the Wars, in particular the fair and beneficent treatment that the Romans received from Theoderic and the other Gothic rulers, and the Roman monopoly on the high offices in the Gothic state. However, at the end of his speech, Totila introduces a formulation which inverts the standards of identity that have so far characterized the speeches in Prokopios’ account of the Gothic War. According to Totila, the Romans were driven to such an extreme of

50 Prok. Wars 7.21.4: λέγω δὲ ὅτι πρώην μὲν ἐς μυριάδας εἴκοσι μαχιμωτάτων ξυνιόντες στρατιωτῶν πλούτῳ τε ὑπερφυεῖ χρώμενοι καὶ ἵππων τε καὶ ὅπλων περιουσίαν τινὰ, ὡς ἔνι μάλιστα, ἐνδεικνύμενοι, καὶ γερόντων ξυνετωτάτων πολὺν ὅμιλον, ὅπερ τοῖς ἐς ἀγῶνας καθισταμένοις ξυμφορώτατον εἶναι δοκεῖ, πρὸς ἀνδρῶν ἑπτακισχιλίων Γραικῶν ἡσσηθέντες, τήν τε ἀρχὴν καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ξύμπαντα λόγῳ οὐδενὶ ἀφῃρήμεθα.

280 ingratitude, that they ‘had brought the Greeks to attack their fatherland and had unexpectedly become traitors to themselves.’51

The language Totila uses to rebuke the senate of Rome is calculated to kindle a sense of identity in the Romans. By making the armies of Justinian out to be foreigners, whose invasion is not a liberation but a subjugation of the Roman homeland, Totila is appealing to a geographical and cultural sense of identity accessible only by the inhabitants of Rome. The Gothic king is, in essence, attempting to force the Romans to think of themselves not simply as the subjects of one or another distant ruler, in which case the difference is simply between Ravenna and Constantinople, but to view themselves as active participants in a sovereign government which Justinian has attempted to overthrow. Totila is in effect encouraging the Romans to embrace a Roman identity based on themselves and constructed in opposition to the identity of Justinian’s armies. A Gothic king is attempting to instruct the Romans on how to be Romans.

As startling a reversal of expected roles as Totila’s address is, it ultimately comes to nothing. The senate does not revive itself as a Roman institution nor meaningfully alter its relationship to Totila. Why not? The question is never directly addressed, but a sense for the problems Totila faces in stirring up Roman sentiment among the inhabitants of

Rome can be gleaned from a letter sent to him by Belisarios shortly after his speech to the senate. The occasion of the letter is intelligence received by Belsiarios indicating, correctly, that Totila, angered by the rebellion of the Romans and by the continual

51 Prok. Wars 7.21.12: οὺς Γραικοὺς ἐπὶ τῇ πατρίδι ἐπαγάγοιντο, προδόται σφῶν αὐτῶν ἐκ τοῦ αἰφνιδίου γεγενημένοι.

281 irritation caused by the city of Rome, had determined to destroy the city and its monuments as retribution. What is startling is that Prokopios records no attempt by the inhabitants of Rome to prevent this destruction. Admittedly, that does not mean no such intervention was staged, but Prokopios’ decision not to mention it accords with his general presentation of the Romans, whose addresses to Belisarios and others are mostly concerned with the suffering they were enduring during the various sieges of Rome.

Belisarios’ letter to Totila breaks the pattern established in his previous communications with the Goths.52 Whereas before Belisarios had there been terse and direct, refraining from abstract concepts or flowery language, the letter to Totila on the destruction of Rome pairs the general’s characteristic pragmatism with an extended digression on the majesty of Rome and its continuing important role in the sixth century:

The work of creating beauty for a city where none was before is the work of men who are prudent and able to live civilized lives, but the destruction of existing beauty befits ignorant men who are not ashamed to leave to a future time this mark of their nature. Of all the cities that happen to exist under the sun, Rome is agreed to be the greatest and most remarkable. It was not built by the virtue of a single man, nor did it attain such a degree of greatness and beauty through the power of a short period of time, but a host of emperors, many companies of noble men, a great length of time, and an excess of wealth and power were able to gather there every other thing from the entire world alongside skilled workmen. In this way they built the frame for so great a city, such a city as you now see, little by little, and they left behind for their progeny memorials of the virtue of all men. The result is that any abuse done to this city would be understood to be a great injustice against the men of every age because it would rob our

52 For the letter, see P. Carolla, ‘Roma vista da Bisanzio e dai Goti: l’epistola di a Totila in Procopio, una laus urbi nel contesto storico-politico,’ Quaderni Medievali 46 (1998) 6-18.

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forefathers of the memory of their virtue and the men born after of the wonder of their works.53

The remainder of Belisarios’ speech is a reversion to form; the general explains to Totila that destroying Rome is not in his best interests regardless of whether he defeats the emperor or not. The opening of Belisarios’ speech, however, is the only explicit description of the role and importance of the city of Rome found anywhere in Prokopios.

It is the sum total of attention given to the founding city of the Roman empire. The reason for this surprising absence is immediately apparent: Rome is a city whose importance is purely historical.

Just as Jordanes described Rome as a sepulchral city, one whose inhabitants no longer deserved the title of ‘Roman,’ so too does Prokopios understand Rome as being little more than a museum.54 In the course of a letter arguing against the destruction of the city, Belisarios does not even allude to the fact that there are still people living in Rome, nor does he imagine any future role for the city. Perhaps as little as fifty years prior to the publication of the Wars, Zosimos could still imply that the Roman empire could not be

Roman without the city of Rome, yet by the early 550s, when Prokopios published his

53 Prok. Wars 7.22.8-12: Πόλεως μὲν κάλλη οὐκ ὄντα ἐργάζεσθαι ἀνθρώπων ἂν φρονίμων εὑρήματα εἶεν καὶ πολιτικῶς βιοτεύειν ἐπισταμένων, ὄντα δὲ ἀφανίζειν τούς γε ἀξυνέτους εἰκὸς καὶ γνώρισμα τοῦτο τῆς αὑτῶν φύσεως οὐκ αἰσχυνομένους χρόνῳ τῷ ὑστέρῳ ἀπολιπεῖν. Ῥώμη μέντοι πόλεων ἁπασῶν, ὅσαι ὑφ' ἡλίῳ τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι, μεγίστη τε καὶ ἀξιολογωτάτη ὡμολόγηται εἶναι. οὐ γὰρ ἀνδρὸς ἑνὸς ἀρετῇ εἴργασται οὐδὲ χρόνου βραχέος δυνάμει ἐς τόσον μεγέθους τε καὶ κάλλους ἀφῖκται, ἀλλὰ βασιλέων μὲν πλῆθος, ἀνδρῶν δὲ ἀρίστων συμμορίαι πολλαὶ, χρόνου τε μῆκος καὶ πλούτου ἐξουσίας ὑπερβολὴ τά τε ἄλλα πάντα ἐκ πάσης τῆς γῆς καὶ τεχνίτας ἀνθρώπους ἐνταῦθα ξυναγαγεῖν ἴσχυσαν. οὕτω τε τὴν πόλιν τοιαύτην, οἵανπερ ὁρᾷς, κατὰ βραχὺ τεκτηνάμενοι, μνημεῖα τῆς πάντων ἀρετῆς τοῖς ἐπιγενησομένοις ἀπέλιπον, ὥστε ἡ ἐς ταῦτα ἐπήρεια εἰκότως ἂν ἀδίκημα μέγα ἐς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους τοῦ παντὸς αἰῶνος δόξειεν εἶναι· ἀφαιρεῖται γὰρ τοὺς μὲν προγεγενημένους τὴν τῆς ἀρετῆς μνήμην, τοὺς δὲ ὕστερον ἐπιγενησομένους τῶν ἔργων τὴν θέαν.

54 This was part of Jordanes’ response to Novel 24, see pp. 122ff.

283 work, it was possible to suggest that Rome was not crucial to either the success or identity of the Roman empire, and even that it did not have a future in that empire outside of its role as a memorial of past deeds, a mere museum of cultural heritage. Belisarios is so absolute in this conviction that he does not even raise the possibility that the city might act as a source of inspiration to future generations; instead it is simply a wonder, something to be viewed but not considered. In Belisarios’ telling Rome is a receipt for empire, keeping track of the expenditures and returns of a previous age’s imperial undertaking.

Belisarios’ perspective on Rome complements the position he has taken in all of his interactions with the Goths to date, including the position he ultimately takes with

Totila. Rome is an object for Belisarios because there is nothing of value left in Rome save for its objects. The city, in the end (and as Belisarios recognized immediately), proves to be indefensible, strategically irrelevant, and generally a distraction from the business of the war. Meanwhile its inhabitants are little more than a tactical liability and a drain on supplies; all they do during the (eastern) Roman occupations is whine about . The failure of Totila’s attempt to rouse a spirit of independence in the inhabitants of

Rome as well as his attempt to delegitimize Justinian’s armies by impeaching their

Romanness reflect a new paradigm in Roman identity in the sixth century: the Roman empire of Justinian had outgrown its need for Rome.

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The Sixth-Century History of the Fifth-Century Fall

In his letter to Totila, Belisarios says that the destruction of Rome and its monuments would be ‘a great injustice against the men of every age.’55 The phrase ‘every age’

(pantos aionos) would be more literally rendered as ‘the whole of eternity.’ Looking backward from that historical moment, the city acts as a testament to the achievements of bygone generations, but looking to the future, the city of Rome is nothing more than a glorified museum. Belisarios gives no indication at any point in his letter that Rome might one day grow again, might be embellished with further monuments recalling yet to be accomplished deeds. Rome’s only function, according to Belisarios, is to act as evidence for future generations of the great achievements of the Romans of a previous age. For Belisarios, the age of Elder Rome is effectively over.

The idea that Elder Rome’s history had somehow ended was widespread in the sixth century. In addition to Hesychios, who is discussed above,56 a similar sentiment underlies the narrative of Roman history Justinian develops in his laws. The vague

‘ancient’ period to which Justinian continually refers when discussing Roman history coincides and, it is implied, coterminates with the period of Rome’s preeminence.

Likewise, Justinian’s narrative of imperial decline caused by rathymia, which is outlined in Novel 30 (Proconsul of Cappadocia), must refer only to the western Roman empire as the Eastern Empire had not lost any territory. It is perhaps not surprising to find that

Justinian’s official pronouncements are reflected in the attitudes of his leading general.

55 Prok. Wars 7.22.11: ὥστε ἡ ἐς ταῦτα ἐπήρεια εἰκότως ἂν ἀδίκημα μέγα ἐς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους τοῦ παντὸς αἰῶνος δόξειεν εἶναι.

56 In chapter one and the introduction to this chapter, see pp. 62ff and 244ff.

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As for Prokopios himself, even though we cannot assume that any character in the Wars speaks for him, there is solid evidence throughout the Wars that Prokopios, in a moment of rare agreement with the rhetoric of Justinian’s regime, shares the views of the emperor and Belisarios. Moreover, key details of Prokopios’ formulation of the end of Roman rule in the west tie him to contemporary authors such as Marcellinus comes and Jordanes, the latter of whom was also generally reproachful of Justinian’s regime. Marcellinus’ view can, in turn, be linked to the writings of Zosimos.57 Taken together, the views of these fifth and sixth century authors show the development of a new historical paradigm, one that answered the anxieties of the age of Anastasios, provided a direction and justification for Roman foreign policy during the reign of Justinian, and has influenced modern conceptions of Roman history ever since.

Belisarios’ belief that the age of Rome had ended does not necessarily reflect that of Prokopios himself, yet Prokopios appears to support this view. While laying out the background to Justinian’s invasion of Africa in book three of the Wars, Prokopios introduces the mid-fifth-century AD generals and rivals Aetius and Bonifatius:

There were two generals of the Romans, Aetius and Bonifatius, both were exceedingly strong and inferior to no man of their time in their experience of wars. These two men came to disagree politically, but had reached such a degree of greatness and of every virtue that if any man called either of these two the last man among the Romans, he would not be mistaken.58

57 S. Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge, 2013) 85-94.

58 Prok. Wars 3.3.14-15: Στρατηγὼ δύο Ῥωμαίων ἤστην, Ἀέτιός τε καὶ Βονιφάτιος, καρτερώ τε ὡς μάλιστα καὶ πολλῶν πολέμων ἐμπείρω τῶν γε κατ' ἐκεῖνον τὸν χρόνον οὐδενὸς ἧσσον. τούτω τὼ ἄνδρε διαφόρω μὲν τὰ πολιτικὰ ἐγενέσθην, ἐς τοσοῦτον δὲ μεγαλοψυχίας τε καὶ τῆς ἄλλης ἀρετῆς ἡκέτην ὥστε, εἴ τις αὐτοῖν ἑκάτερον ἄνδρα Ῥωμαίων ὕστατον εἴποι, οὐκ ἂν ἁμάρτοι·

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Prokopios, here speaking in his own authorial voice, endorses the view that there was a point at which the Romans ceased to produce men of note, giving credit to the idea that there could be, and in fact had once been, a ‘last man among the Romans.’59 It is unclear from the passage itself whom Prokopios means by the term Romans, but the term is surely not meant to include the eastern Romans, especially given the praise Prokopios heaps upon Belisarios at the opening of book seven of the Wars. If we exclude the eastern

Romans, the remaining possibilities are the western Romans, broadly understood, or just the people of the city of Rome. While either is possible, the former option is more likely given that the western empire at this time was still under a government Prokopios recognizes as Roman.

Prokopios’ stated ambivalence over whether Bonifatius or Aetius might be called the last man of the Romans is disingenuous. Because Aetius significantly outlived

Bonifatius, and governed the Roman state with distinction (defeating in 451), he is certainly more deserving of the title. Moreover, later in his narrative, during his account of the assassination of Valentinian III by , Prokopios reports that Maximus plotted to have Aetius killed in order to clear the way for the murder of the emperor

Valentinian, ‘giving no thought to the fact that the whole hope of the Romans rested on that man.’60 Prokopios’ judgement is echoed by another sixth century author, Marcellinus comes, whose Chronicon covers the years 379-518 and first appeared during the reign of

59 The emphasis in the awkward phrase is certainly as much on the manliness of these two men as it is on their Romanness. It is possible that they are meant to contrast the depictions of Belisarios and Justinian in the Secret History, in which both men are subservient to their wives.

60 Prok. Wars. 3.4.25: ταῦτά τε διανοουμένῳ ἄμεινον ἔδοξεν εἶναι τὸν Ἀέτιον ἐκποδὼν ποιήσασθαι πρότερον, οὐδὲν ποιησαμένῳ ὅτι ἐς αὐτὸν περιέστηκε πᾶσα ἡ Ῥωμαίων ἐλπίς.

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Justin. Marcellinus later extended his work down to 534, bringing him into the reign of

Justinian, at whose court he served as a loyal follower of the emperor. In his account of the year 454, the year in which Aetius was killed, Marcellinus reports:

Aetius, the great welfare of the western respublica and the terror of king Attila, was butchered in the palace along with his friend by the emperor Valentinian [III]. The western empire fell along with this man, and to date it has not been strong enough to be raised again.61

Marcellinus’ description of Aetius’ death utilizes the traditional Roman greeting (salve) and farewell (vale), which are etymologically related to his term for welfare () and the verb ‘to have strength’ (valeo). Not only do these two words bookend this entry, they also resemble the famous funerary address in 101, salve atque vale, reinforcing the funereal note of the narrative, only applied to the empire as a whole rather than to a single man. Just as Catullus was addressing his brother’s grave, so too Marcellinus, by his own description, is here addressing the fallen western empire. Simultaneously,

Marcellinus introduces an element of Christian doctrine into his description. The verb for

‘to fall’ (cedo) is a common euphemism for death, and indeed it is that pun which allows the word to apply at once to Aetius and the western empire, while the verb ‘to rise again’

(relevo) has obvious parallels in the account of the life of Christ.

Marcellinus’ entry for 454 is therefore with loaded Christian and poetic language that

61 Chron. Marcell. 454.2: Aetius magna Occidentalis rei publicae salus et regi Attilae terror a Valentiniano imperatore cum Boethio amico in palatio trucidatur, atque cum ipso Hesperium cecidit regnum nec hactenus valuit relevari.

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Marcellinus describes the death of Aetius and simultaneous fall of the western Roman empire.

The similarity between the descriptions found in Marcellinus and Prokopios raises the possibility that the two were working from a common source or tradition, yet this would not change the fact that both authors accepted the same view.62 Regardless of where the idea came from, its acceptance by two authors who occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum (in terms of their view of Justinian and his projects) and wrote in vastly different traditions (Latin chronicle versus classicizing Greek history) indicates how widespread and popular this explanation may have been in the sixth-century east.

Marcellinus’ formulation also echoes that of another roughly contemporary author,

Zosimos. As discussed above, Zosimos’ New History was not a fundamentally pessimistic work because it allowed for the possibility that the Roman empire might recover the support of the gods through the revival of traditional .63

Similarly, Marcellinus’ description of the fall of the western Roman empire allows for the possibility that it may be recovered by claiming only that it has ‘not yet’ (hactenus) had the strength to revive itself. Moreover, there are religious overtones to Marcellinus’ conception of Roman revival; the strongly Christian language of the empire’s fall invites a parallel between the western empire and Christ, who was dead for three days before his resurrection. Here Marcellinus, though in agreement with Zosimos, diverges from

62 The suggestion that this common source was the history of has been definitively disproven by Croke, ‘Manufacturing a Turning Point,’ 103-115. Croke’s suggestion that there may have been a of Constantinople is certainly possible, but remains unproven.

63 As discussed in chapter one, see pp. 28ff.

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Prokopios, who never describes Justinian’s reconquests as the revival of the western

Roman empire.

Prokopios and Marcellinus’ view of Aetius are similar to those of another sixth- century author, Jordanes. In his Getica, Jordanes devotes a great deal of attention to the defeat of Attila in 451 by a combined Roman-Gothic army under the leadership of Aetius and the Visigothic king Theoderic (not to be confused with the Ostrogothic king of the same name who ruled Italy in the late fifth and early sixth centuries).64 Jordanes describes

Aetius as a man who ‘endured warlike labors and had been born solely for the benefit of the Roman respublica,’65 a man ‘upon whom the respublica of the western territories then rested.’66 Jordanes’ praise of Aetius’ generalship echoes Prokopios’ description of the general as experienced in war, while his image of the entire western empire depending Aetius mirrors the description found in Marcellinus. Jordanes can therefore be included among the chorus of sixth-century historians who believed Aetius to be a central figure in the history of the western empire, and whose death presaged the end of the west.

The death of Aetius is not the only point at which Marcellinus discusses the fall of the western Roman empire. He brings the topic up again in his account of 476, making him the earliest extant author to identify that date and the deposition of Romulus

Augustulus as the definitive end of the western empire:

64 For the Visigothic king Theoderic, see PLRE 2.1070-1071 (Theodericus 2).

65 Jord. Get. 176: labored bellicos tolerans, rei publicae Romanae singulariter natus.

66 Jord. Get. 191: cui tunc innitebatur res publica Hesperiae plagae.

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The western empire of the Roman people, which Octavian Augustus, first of the Augusti, took control seven hundred and nine years after the founding of the city, perished along with this Augustulus in the five hundred and twenty-second year of the reign of the succeeding emperors. Thereafter, the kings of the Goths held Rome.67

According to Marcellinus, the western Roman empire suffered two deaths, the death of its hope of survival in 454 and the termination of the line of emperors who had succeeded

Augustus in 476. The prospect of Roman revival, which was present in Marcellinus’ account of 454, is absent from his description of 476. Marcellinus goes to great lengths to emphasize the finality of 476, beginning with his decision to end the history of the western empire with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus rather than the death of Julius

Nepos in 480, another (deposed) emperor of the period who did not die until 480. It should be noted that the emphasis Marcellinus places on this date by no means indicates that he is attempting, as some scholars have suggested, to ‘manufacture’ a turning point.

The deposition of Romulus Augustulus and the subsequent transition to Gothic rule in

Italy was recognized as a watershed by writers of both the fifth and sixth centuries. The choice of 476 does, however, allow Marcellinus to establish a pleasing symmetry, one writers discussing the fall of Roman have enjoyed ever since, between the founder of the city of Rome, Romulus, the founder of the imperial system, Augustus, and the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a diminutive form of Augustus that literally means ‘little

Augustus’). Marcellinus also belabors the dating of the event, counting the years from the founding of the city (by Romulus) to Augustus and then from Augustus to Augustulus. In

67 Chron. Marcell. 476.2: Hesperium Romanae gentis imperium, quod septigenetismo nono urbis conditae anno primus Augustorum Octavianus Augustus tenere coepit, cum hoc Augustulo periit, anno decessorum regni imperatorum quingentesimo vigesimo secundo, Gothorum dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus.

291 the context of a chronicle, a genre and format in which preeminent importance is attached to dating, this emphasis underscores the seriousness of the moment in a way not paralleled in Marcellinus’ description of Aetius’ death. Finally, in another moment of sympathy with Prokopios, Marcellinus makes a clear distinction between the existence of the western empire and mere control of the city of Rome by juxtaposing the end of the empire with the Gothic occupation of Rome.

Marcellinus’ description of 476 is echoed, in fact copied nearly verbatim, by

Jordanes in both his Romana and Getica.68 Jordanes’ account in the Getica is identical to that found in Marcellinus save for the addition of the phrase sic quoque at the beginning and the addition of prodecessorum to clarify the meaning of the decessorum which is common to both accounts. Neither of these modifications significantly changes the meaning of the sentence, though the addition of the word prodecessorum is echoed in

Theoderic’s speech to Zenon, thereby linking the deposition of Romulus Augustulus to

Theoderic’s ‘liberation’ of Italy.69 In his Romana, however, Jordanes describes the fall of the western empire in 476 by using the same words as in the Getica save that he has removed the word prodecessorum and added the claim that not only the western empire, but also the principatus of the Roman people ended in 476.70

The term principatus in this context is polyvalent. In a literal sense, the term refers to the end of the principate or the imperial office in the West, reinforcing both the

68 Jord. Rom. 345 and Jord. Get. 242.

69 Jord. Get. 291. This scene is discussed further below.

70 Jord. Rom. 345: Romanique populi principatum.

292 finality of the event and the dating scheme based on the foundation of the imperial office by Augusutus. However, principatus may also be read as ‘leadership’ or ‘primacy,’ a reading which would indicate that the inhabitants of Rome lost their primacy of status within the Roman world. Like the literal meaning, this reading is confirmed by other information in the entry, specifically the closing comment on the Gothic occupation of

Rome that Jordanes shares with Marcellinus. Moreover, this reading accords with the description of Rome Jordanes relates during his narrative of Belisarios’ Italian campaigns, in which Rome is described as a sepulchral city and its people and senate as unworthy of the Roman name. Jordanes’ narrative of 476 and his declaration that the city of Rome and its inhabitants have lost their preeminence fit seamlessly into the author’s larger narrative of Roman decline and his view of the city of Rome in the sixth century.

If we accept that Jordanes views the western empire as conterminal with the end of the special prestige traditionally afforded to Elder Rome, then his views are even more closely aligned with those of Prokopios than previously realized. As discussed above, both Prokopios and Jordanes share the view that the city of Rome in the sixth century was little more than a historical marker, though they differ slightly in their emphasis. The two also share a high regard for the abilities of Aetius. The number and specificity of these similarities strongly suggests that Jordanes and Prokopios belonged to a common intellectual movement in sixth century Constantinople, seeing as they were both writing histories of the same contemporary events at the exact same time in the exact same city, and both had been secretaries of Balkan generals in the course of their professional careers. It is possible, in fact it is likely, that the two either knew one another or were

293 familiar with one another’s work.71 In any case, they align more closely and consistently than Jordanes does with Marcellinus, with whom he is most often connected on account of the shared language and genre of the Chronicon and Romana, as well as the shared language in the Chronicon and Getica.

Although Prokopios, Jordanes, and Marcellinus are in general agreement about the importance of Aetius, Prokopios diverges from the other two authors in his portrayal of the ‘fall’ of the western Roman empire. Jordanes and Marcellinus make clear that the fall occurred when Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, but Prokopios presents this as a brief interregnum of the sort that had become common in the fifth-century West.

Prokopios’ account of this period is divided between two different books of the Wars owing to the unusual arrangement of material by military theater rather than chronology.

In book three of the Wars, during the narrative run-up to the Vandal War in Africa,

Prokopios’ narrative follows events in Italy through the appointment of Romulus

Augustulus, whom he calls simply Augustus, moving quickly through the reigns of

Majorianus, Nepos, and . Once he has done so, Prokopios makes a pointed comment about the imperial confusion that prevailed during this period:

There had, however, been other emperors before this in the West, whose names, though I know them thoroughly, I do not consider worth mentioning at all. For it happens that they survived only a short time on the throne and nothing worth mentioning had been done by them.72

71 To this group we may also add Ioannes Lydos, A. Kaldellis, ‘Identifying Dissident Circles in Sixth- Century Byzantium: The Friendship of Prokopios and Ioannes Lydos,’ Florilegium 21 (2004) 1-17.

72 Prok. Wars 3.7.16-17: βασιλεῖς μέντοι καὶ ἄλλοι πρότερον ἐν τῇ ἑσπερίᾳ γεγόνασιν, ὧνπερ τὰ ὀνόματα ἐξεπιστάμενος ὡς ἥκιστα ἐπιμνήσομαι. χρόνον τε γὰρ αὐτοῖς τῇ ἀρχῇ ὀλίγον τινὰ ἐπιβιῶναι καὶ ἀπ' αὐτοῦ λόγου ἄξιον οὐδὲν πεπραχέναι ξυνέπεσε. 294

Prokopios’ refusal to comment on the other western emperors gives the impression of a highly destabilized political situation in the western Roman empire in the late fifth century. That impression is completely correct; western emperors during this period had a remarkably short shelf-life. The chaos Prokopios describes and implies through this comment undermines the distinctiveness of the interregnum that follows the deposition of

Romulus Augustulus, setting a precedent for viewing his deposition not as the culminating event of a Western Roman ‘fall,’ but as simply another in the long series of abortive reigns which characterized western imperial politics in the fifth century.

Prokopios’ narrative of Italian events breaks off with Augustulus, only to be picked up three books later in the opening of his account of the Gothic Wars in Italy. But where Marcellinus and Jordanes pause their narratives following the deposition in 476 in order to mark the passing of the western Roman empire, Prokopios’ presentation of the event is understated to the point of anticlimax. After describing how Odoacer came to power by promising land to his barbarian soldiers, Prokopios says simply ‘having gained the tyranny in this way, [Odoacer] committed no further evil against the emperor, but permitted him to live out the remainder of his life in the manner of a private citizen.’73

This description encodes a stark contrast between the legitimate legal power held by

Augstulus (basileus) and the illegitimate power held by Odoacer (tyrannis). Nevertheless, the event is quickly and unceremoniously passed over in order to introduce the character

73 Prok. Wars 5.1.7: οὕτω τε τὴν τυραννίδα παραλαβὼν ἄλλο μὲν οὐδὲν τὸν βασιλέα κακὸν ἔδρασεν, ἐν ἰδιώτου δὲ λόγῳ βιοτεύειν τὸ λοιπὸν εἴασε.

295 of Theoderic. Theoderic’s campaigns against and eventual assassination of Odoacer is treated with similar brevity. The narrative only pauses once Theoderic gains sole rule over Italy, and even then it is not to commemorate the passing of the western empire, but to make clear that Theoderic was, if not in name, then in practice a Roman emperor. And a damn good one at that:

[Theoderic] did not think it appropriate to usurp either the dress or the title of the emperor of the Romans, but instead spent his life being called rex (for this was how the barbarians customarily addressed their leaders). Nevertheless, in governing his subjects he adorned himself with everything that is appropriate to an emperor’s nature. […] Theoderic was a tyrant in name but a true emperor in action, inferior to none of the men, even the earliest, who have earned a good reputation in this office.74

In Prokopios’ narrative Theoderic is for all intents and purposes a Roman emperor, a fact which strips the events of 476 of any importance. The deposition of Romulus Augustulus was simply another in a long series of imperial depositions that characterized the fifth century in Italy and came to an end with Theoderic, who ruled for thirty-seven peaceful and prosperous years. What makes Prokopios’ depiction of Theoderic even more ironic is the fact that he praises the Gothic king for many of the qualities he criticizes Justinian for lacking, in particular respect for the law. Theoderic was not only a Roman emperor, he was a better Roman emperor than Justinian.

74 Prok. Wars 5.1.26-29: καὶ βασιλέως μὲν τοῦ Ῥωμαίων οὔτε τοῦ σχήματος οὔτε τοῦ ὀνόματος ἐπιβατεῦσαι ἠξίωσεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ῥὴξ διεβίου καλούμενος (οὕτω γὰρ σφῶν τοὺς ἡγεμόνας καλεῖν οἱ βάρβαροι νενομίκασι), τῶν μέντοι κατηκόων τῶν αὑτοῦ προὔστη ξύμπαντα περιβαλλόμενος ὅσα τῷ φύσει βασιλεῖ ἥρμοσται. […] ἦν τε ὁ Θευδέριχος λόγῳ μὲν τύραννος, ἔργῳ δὲ βασιλεὺς ἀληθὴς τῶν ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ τιμῇ τὸ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ηὐδοκιμηκότων οὐδενὸς ἧσσον.

296

Although Prokopios’ account of Augustulus’ deposition breaks the pattern established in Marcellinus and Jordanes, the specificity with which his account counters the narrative set forth in those authors suggests that Prokopios was aware of and likely responding to historical accounts of a Roman fall in 476. To begin with, Prokopios makes a point of dividing his two Italian narratives with Augustulus. There is nothing in his account of western Roman history in book three that requires him to mention the rulers that followed Majorianus, yet he makes a point of bringing his narrative down to

Augustulus and emphasizing the disorder that reigned during that period. As argued above, this narrative undercuts any attempt to make a single imperial deposition, of which there were so many in such quick succession, epochal. Likewise, when Prokopios takes up the narrative again in book five, he makes a point of mentioning the fact that, despite being a usurper, Odoacer ruled ‘most securely’ (bebaiotata) for ten years, a fact that contrasts starkly with the chaos that had previously prevailed in Italy. Moreover,

Prokopios’ insistence that Theoderic was an emperor, a conceit which was not shared even by Jordanes, Theoderic’s most avid apologist in sixth-century Constantinople, logically undercuts any attempt to elevate the events of 476 to epochal status.

The character of Theoderic is critical here both because it plays into subsequent events in Prokopios’ narrative, in particular the constant appeal in Gothic rhetoric to the peace and prosperity Theoderic brought to the Romans and Italians, but also because it raises complicated questions about what Prokopios understood Romanness to be. If

Theoderic could become a de facto Roman emperor by ruling well and, crucially, in accordance with Roman law (a point also raised by the Goths during the Gothic Dialogue

297 discussed above), then it stands to reason that anyone who ruled in the same manner could attain the same status. Conversely, it would theoretically be possible for an emperor, by not respecting the law, to lose his legitimacy both as an emperor and as a

Roman. Therefore, submission to the emperor, which was the single criterion for

Romanness in the view of Belisarios (at least in Prokopios’ narrative), was not only meaningless in itself, but even self-defeating if the emperor in question was the sort of innovator that Prokopios accuses Justinian of being in his Secret History.

Prokopios was not alone among sixth-century authors in his praise of Theoderic.

Jordanes, like Prokopios, took an extremely positive view of the Gothic king, papering over the often contentious and hostile relationship between Theoderic and the emperor

Zenon in his Getica and Romana. In fact, Jordanes invents an address by Theoderic to

Zenon asking for permission to serve the emperor by conquering Italy on his behalf. This is a total reversal from the narrative of Prokopios, who claims that Zenon, ever a crafty politician, used the conquest of Italy as a convenient way to rid himself of the troublesome Theoderic. However, Jordanes stops short of ever comparing Theoderic to an emperor, although he does belabor his status as consul and dramatize his loyal subordination to Zenon. The specificity with which the accounts of Jordanes and

Prokopios invert one another can be traced back to the logic of their depictions of 476. In order for the western Roman empire to fall in 476, Jordanes cannot allow Theoderic to be anything more than a loyal vassal, any hint of his functioning as an authentic Roman emperor would undermine the finality of Augustulus’ deposition. The reverse was true for Prokopios. The different emphases we see in the two men’s accounts of Theoderic’s

298 reign and his relationship to Zenon, despite the fact that both authors praise the Gothic king, can be traced back to their differing readings of the events of 476 and their different assessments of a postulated Roman fall.

The Sixth-Century Consensus

What emerges from the accounts of these sixth-century writers and their fifth-century antecedents is a coherent portrait of the matrix of historical thought that began to take shape in Constantinople in the late fifth century and had developed, almost to the point of codification in certain circles, by the 550s. As mentioned above, the terms of this discussion appear to have crossed political factions, incorporating authors who supported

Justinian as well as those who despised him or never lived to see his reign. We may therefore reasonably challenge the notion that the fall of the western Roman empire was viewed as a non-event by its contemporaries and developed into a model of historiography only as a result of the efforts of .75 The paradigm of the fall of the western Roman empire was developed in the eastern Roman empire at least in part as a response to the anxieties of the age of Anastasios and certainly in response to

Justinian’s campaigns of reconquest.76

By recognizing the parameters of the historical model of the decline and fall of the western Roman empire current in the sixth century, it becomes possible to situate

Justinian’s use of Roman history within its broader intellectual context. Far from making

75 Argued inter alia by G. Bowersock, ‘The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome,’ Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49 (1996) 29-43 at 35-43.

76 As argued on the basis of different evidence by Kaegi, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome, 59-145.

299 bland and vague statements concerning the ‘ancient’ Romans, Justinian’s laws were actively engaging with contemporary debates about the causes and implications of western Roman decline. Justinian’s decision to gate the majority of Roman history behind an elastic conception of an ‘ancient period’ was an attempt to create historical space between his regime and the widely perceived collapse of his elder and more prestigious mother empire. Under these circumstances Belisarios’ comment in his letter to Totila about the historical period in which Rome was made great can be seen for what it is: a careful rehearsal of an official or semi-official party line, which was put into

Belisarios’ mouth by Prokopios, himself a keen observer and manipulator of imperial rhetoric.

It is not surprising that under these circumstances, the city of Rome became a lightning rod for discussion of Roman identity, the politics of Justinian’s reconquest, and the history of the western Roman empire. The city of Rome stood apart from the political circumstances in Italy in the sixth century and the magnificence of its monuments, something no sixth century author denies, were an uncomfortable reminder both of the status of the city and of the fragility of empire. It was crucial for writers who did not accept the Romanness of the Italians living under the Goths to disarm the city of Rome, to render its monuments and historical associations somehow inert or backward facing.

Justinian achieved this by restricted the city’s glories to the past, while Jordanes and

Prokopios used the city’s monuments, as well as the fecklessness of its current inhabitants, against it. Jordanes went even further and, along with Marcellinus, accepted that Roman government had ended in the western Roman empire in 476. Nevertheless,

300 both men still felt compelled to comment specifically, even in their aggressively abbreviated histories, on the fate of the city of Rome.

301

CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF ROMAN MEMORY IN THE AGE OF JUSTINIAN

When Belisarios arrived in Byzantion with Gelimer and the Vandals, he was deemed worthy of an honor which in former times was assigned to generals who had crowned themselves with great victories that were deserving of fame. It had been a period of around six hundred years since anyone had risen to this honor, except , , and however many other emperors had conquered some barbarian tribe while acting as general. Displaying the spoils and prisoners of war, Belisarios proceeded through the middle of the city in a procession which the the Romans call a ‘triumph.’ He did so not in the ancient way, but walking on foot from his own house right into the hippodrome, and then from the starting line until he reached the imperial throne.1 -Prokopios, Wars 4.9.1-3

By the time Belisarios conducted the Vandal king Gelimer through the streets of New

Rome in the winter of 534, it had been forty-three years since the people of

Constantinople had asked Ariadne to find a Roman emperor for the Romans. In that time the empire had been ruled by three different emperors, it had faced down the threat of

Persia in the east, and retaken Vandal Africa in the west, all while codifying Roman law and rebuilding the urban heart of Constantinople. This was the apogee of the age of hope, and even Prokopios, publishing more than fifteen years after the fact and in the shadow of the failures and frustrations of the 540s, was not immune to the sense that something

1 Prok. Wars 4.9.1-3: Βελισάριος δὲ ἅμα Γελίμερί τε καὶ Βανδίλοις ἐς Βυζάντιον ἀφικόμενος γερῶν ἠξιώθη, ἃ δὴ ἐν τοῖς ἄνω χρόνοις Ῥωμαίων στρατηγοῖς τοῖς νίκας τὰς μεγίστας καὶ λόγου πολλοῦ ἀξίας ἀναδησαμένοις διετετάχατο. χρόνος δὲ ἀμφὶ ἐνιαυτοὺς ἑξακοσίους παρῳχήκει ἤδη ἐξ ὅτου ἐς ταῦτα τὰ γέρα οὐδεὶς ἐληλύθει, ὅτι μὴ Τίτος τε καὶ Τραϊανὸς, καὶ ὅσοι ἄλλοι αὐτοκράτορες στρατηγήσαντες ἐπί τι βαρβαρικὸν ἔθνος ἐνίκησαν. τά τε γὰρ λάφυρα ἐνδεικνύμενος καὶ τὰ τοῦ πολέμου ἀνδράποδα ἐν μέσῃ πόλει ἐπόμπευσεν, ὃν δὴ θρίαμβον καλοῦσι Ῥωμαῖοι, οὐ τῷ παλαιῷ μέντοι τρόπῳ, ἀλλὰ πεζῇ βαδίζων ἐκ τῆς οἰκίας τῆς αὑτοῦ ἄχρι ἐς τὸν ἱππόδρομον κἀνταῦθα ἐκ βαλβίδων αὖθις ἕως εἰς τὸν χῶρον ἀφίκετο, οὗ δὴ ὁ θρόνος ὁ βασίλειός ἐστιν.

302 ancient was being restored in the winter of 534/5. But at the climactic moment of imperial ambition, we find insecurity, a desire to secure the present to the Roman past.

The triumph had been, from the time of the Republic, a mutable ceremony, recast and redeployed to meet the political needs of the moment. 534 was no different, and the revival of the non-imperial triumph, even though it was ultimately still subordinate to the emperor, reflects a shift in the fundamental questions circulating in New Rome. In 491, the question that lay behind the selection of Anastasios, a true Roman, was ‘who is

Roman?’ This was fundamentally a question of identity. In 534, the question had become

‘how are we Roman?’ The anxiety at the heart of Roman politics had become one of practice mediated through history.

Romanness was assumed in 534, but the proper performance of Romanness was debated, which in turn made historical memory the battlefield for competing political agendas. We can see this dynamic at play in Prokopios’ account of the triumph. For

Prokopios, the fact of Belisarios’ triumph is remarkable primarily insofar as it reflects a return to tradition after six centuries of neglect. Belisarios’ victories are worthy of fame, but the victories themselves matter only because they justify the triumph. Up to this point, Prokopios and Justinian, the figure lurking in the background of this ceremony, are in agreement about the importance of Roman history in structuring the Roman present, but their agreement is shortlived. For all that Belisarios’ triumph was a return to tradition in terms of the honor being awarded to a general rather than an emperor, it was still not conducted in the ‘ancient way,’ and the general was forced to walk on foot from his private residence and kneel before the emperor’s seat in the hippdrome, the public face of

303 imperial power in Constantinople. In Prokopios’ narrative, the improper observance of the triumph reveals that falseness of the age of hope. 534 was an end, not a beginning, and no triumph would await Belisarios in 540 when he returned from Italy with the

Gothic king Vittigis. Justinian, in Prokopios’ telling, was correct in looking to the Roman past, but his historical memory had failed him—the importance of the triumph was not the mere granting of the title, but in the proper observance of its traditions. The historical memory reenacted on the streets of Constantinople and in the hippodrome in 534 was false, just as the historical memory promoted in the Novels had been false, just as the sense of Roman revival that characterized the age of hope had been false. These failures were connected, and part of the intent behind the Wars was Prokopios’ desire to correct the problems he perceived in the emperor’s construction of Roman historical memory.

Belisarios’ triumph in 534 was recorded by Prokopios in his Wars, which were published in 551/2. Between the composition of Hesychios’ Patria and that of the Wars,

Rome had fallen out of the Roman imagination. The city of Romulus no longer held a central place in the historical memory of the Romans who worked in and around the imperial court in Constantinople. The deprivileging of Rome was part of a larger movement away from concrete touchstones of Roman identity and toward an abstracted notion of Romanness derived and constructed from historical legacy, political continuity, administrative offices, and revisionist mythistory. Prokopios Romanness from

Rome in the Wars, Jordanes insists that the emperor is not the respublica in the Romana, and Justinian himself treats Rome as little more than a cradle, the birthplace of the legal tradition he wielded as emperor, in his Novels.

304

All of these narratives assume, explicitly or implicitly, the existence of a Roman fall, whether in 476 or at some other point such as the death of Theoderic, and all of them are a direct response to the resulting reorganization of the Roman world around the city and empire of Constantinople. In addition to accepting the end of the western Roman empire, these narratives were actively engaged in the creation of a new historical memory which, although initially restricted to a small group of current and former bureaucrats operating in Constantinople, nevertheless left a definitive mark on the historiography of the sixth century, one which is observable even in modern scholarship. Despite the differences found in these authors, their histories share a group of common concerns and characteristics which identify them as a coherent intellectual movement. This identification is only enhanced by their chronological, geographic, and social proximity.

It is difficult to determine the extent to which Tribonian was innovating when he thrust Justinian’s imperial persona into the intellectual milieu of sixth-century

Constantinople, but there can be no doubt that, despite several points of fundamental agreement, the overwhelming response to the emperor’s intrustion was negative. In particular, the trio of authors whose works appeared in the 550s, Lydos, Prokopios, and

Jordanes, took Justinian to task for his internal contradictions, his willful misreadings of

Roman history, and the vast gulf between the rhetoric of the age of hope and the realities of 551. Regardless of the potential for lost precedents, the decision of Justinian’s administration to wade into historical debates in search of legitimacy for administrative reforms, and by implication a broader program of imperial propaganda, suggests that a wide section of the elite (broadly understood) of Constantinople was or was perceived to

305 be looking or susceptible to new narratives, a new paradigm of Roman historical memory, in the sixth century.

As mentioned in the introduction, the debates over Roman history that characterize the intellecual scene in sixth-century Constantinople are fundamentally concerned with contesting the authorization of Justinian’s historical narrative.

Theoderic’s Romanness was promoted by Prokopios and Jordanes as a counterpoint to the idea of a Roman fall in 476, an idea whose first attestation in Marcellinus comes can be closely linked to Justinian’s inner circle. Likewise, Lydos countered Justinian’s claim to be reintroducing antiquity with his administrative reforms by pointing out the gradual corruption of the praetorian prefecture and the imperial office. Not only was Justinian incapable, in Lydos’ telling, of reintroducing antiquity, he could not even be bothered to respect the authority of his own Digest, whose authority he openly contradicts in Novel

13 (Praetor of the Plebs).

The coherence of the response to Justinian’s historicizing imperial propaganda in the Novels is a far cry from the earliest manifestations of the need to reconstruct Roman history in the sixth century. During the reign of Anastasios, the question was one of legitimacy: what did it mean to be a true Roman? The voices that survive are all closely linked to Anastasios’ court, but it does not appear likely that a coherent historical and intellectual movement would have formed in response to the fundamental assertion of that emperor’s regime: that the eastern Romans were equally, if not more, Roman than the western Romans. It is a testament to the utility of historical memory, as well as the ability of time to calm anxieties, that by the reign of Justinian the discussion had

306 progressed to a point where it was possible to take the Romanness of the eastern Roman empire for granted.

In addition to these general observations on the development of historical memory and the intellectual history of sixth-century Constantinople, there are a number of important, albeit more specific, conclusions that arise from this dissertation. The first, and perhaps most surprising, of these is the movement of Zosimos from the margins of sixth century historiography to its absolute center. This conclusion was foreshadowed by the link Bjornlie established between Zosimos and Marcellinus comes, but the evidence presented in this dissertation clearly shows that all of the major components of Zosimos’ historical method and narrative link him to the concerns which were current in the reign of Justinian.2 Given the weakness of the evidence for placing Zosimos in the reign of

Anastasios, it may be suggested that future scholars at least consider the possibility that he was in fact a Justinianic author. Regardless of the reign he is assigned to, Zosimos can no longer be dismissed as the last pagan voice of late antiquity crying out in a Christian wilderness. Pagan or not, his history was sufficiently mainstream to be echoed by

Justinian himself, and he was perceptive enough to detect the major historical fault lines that would divide the histories written in the age of Justinian. We need not find Zosimos’ history persuasive, but we must admit that it was a sophisticated and ambitious attempt to address a complex question, and it deserves to be studied on those terms.

2 S. Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna, and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge, 2013) 85-94.

307

Aside from moving Zosimos into the mainstream of sixth-century historiography, this dissertation has also cemented the links between the works of Prokopios, Jordanes, and Lydos. While Kaldellis posited a connection between Lydos and Prokopios more than a decade ago, the coincidences of thought and circumstance outlined in this dissertation firmly places the burden of proof on those who would seek to deny that

Lydos, Prokopios, and Jordanes were acquainted with one another in Justinianic

Constantinople.3 It beggars belief to imagine that three authors in similar social and professional circles could publish works with so many thematic correspondences at the same time and in the same place without having been in direct contact with one another.

Finally and most critically, this dissertation has demonstrated that Justinian’s

Novels were intended to be, and were in fact, read as a coherent corpus in the sixth century, at least during Tribonian’s tenure as quaestor. The large number of internal allusions, the coherence of historical models betweens Novels, and the lack of overt repetition all contribue to this view of the Novels. Yet the most important piece of evidence is the response of contemporary authors, particularly those who belonged to the administrative class of Constantinople. Jordanes, Prokopios, and Lydos read the Novels as a corpus and responded to them as a coherent model of Roman history. We should therefore add Tribonian, in his capacity as Justinian’s ghostwriter, to the list of major historians operating in the sixth century.

3 A. Kaldellis, ‘Identifying Dissident Circles in Sixth-Century Byzantium: The Friendship of Prokopios and Ioannes Lydos,’ Florilegium 21 (2004) 1-17.

308

The sixth century was undoubtedly a moment of profound transformation, but that transformation was not between classical antiquity and the middle ages nor was it conceptualized solely or primarily in terms of religion. The intellectual transformation that took place in sixth-century Constantinople, but which had roots in the innermost sanctum of the palace as well as the farthest military frontiers of the empire, was a transformation of Roman historical memory spearheaded by a small group of mid-level bureaucrats working in or with the imperial administration. Three key issues link these writers and their works: the erasure of New Rome’s dependence on Old Rome for authority and identity; the invention of an end to the western Roman empire, whether in

476 or at another moment; and the rejection of the emperor Justinian’s attempts to rewrite

Roman history in order to advance imperial propaganda. In their responses to these issues, the authors of the sixth century were continuing a tradition as old as the practice of Roman history. As such their innovations do not reflect a discontinuity or even a transformation, but rather a continuation of the long tradition of the manipulation of

Roman historical memory.

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