The Politics of Roman Memory in the Age of Justinian DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the D

The Politics of Roman Memory in the Age of Justinian DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Marion Woodrow Kruse, III Graduate Program in Greek and Latin 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 government in the western Roman empire 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 Constantinople and worked in or around the imperial administration, responded to the challenge posed by the loss of Rome by rewriting the history of the Roman empire. The new historical narratives 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 emperor Justinian’s imperial messaging and propaganda, especially in his Novels. The imperial history proposed by the Novels was aggressivley challenged by other writers of the period, creating a clear historical and political conflict 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 histories in order to demonstrate the existence of a coherent intellectual movement whose central concern was influencing the normative narrative of Roman history in the sixth century. ii Dedicated to Christopher Tam iii 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 Maria Ethel de la Luz Piñeyro Kruse, Victor 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 Michael 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 panegyric, 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. iv 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 Classics, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS “The Speech of the Armenians in Procopius: 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 Republic,” in G. Greatrex, H. Elton, and L. McMahon (eds.) Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity (Burlington, 2015) 233-245. “Competing Histories in the Sixth Century: Justinian and Procopius,” in E. Turqois and C. Lillington-Martin (eds.) Reinventing Procopius (Burlington, Forthcoming). FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Greek and Latin vTABLE 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 Anxiety in the Age of Anastasios ........................................... 25 A Roman Emperor for the Romans............................................................................... 25 Zosimos: Rome and Anti-Rome.................................................................................... 28 Hesychios of Miletos and the Greek Rome................................................................... 62 Christodoros of Koptos and the Cultural Identity of New Rome.................................. 83 Anastasios and the Greek Rome.................................................................................. 116 Chapter Two: Administrative Reform and Republican History in the Age of Justinian 119 The Roman Republic in the Sixth Century ................................................................. 119 Novel 24 and the Trajectory of Empire ....................................................................... 122 Novel 13: Administrative Corruption and Urban Reform........................................... 145 <a href="#0_1">vi </a> 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 Jordanes’ 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 Novel s............................................................. 249 Rome and Ancient Rome 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 vii 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 -Cassiodorus, 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 Goths and Italians, sent a letter to the emperor in Constantinople which had been drafted by his prefect, the Roman senator 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 Italy 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 title, see A.H.M. Jones, ‘The Constitutional Position of Odoacer and Theoderic,’ JRS 52 (1962) 126-130. 1 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 barbarian general who had himself deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476, an event that is today taken to mark the definitive fall of the western Roman empire. 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 rhetoric 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 emperors of Constantinople; Italy was Roman because of New Rome. The Roman heartland had shifted from Italy to Thrace, 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 2forth and our first explicit historian 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 comes in the 520s, and Jordanes in the 550s. Likewise, discussions of Theoderic as an ideal Roman monarch 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, historians, 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,’ Chiron 13 (1983) 81-119. 3 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 Africa, see J. Conant, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 (Cambridge, 2012). The bibliography on post-Roman Europe, in particular Italy, is massive. For the transition to the Middle Ages, see A.C. Murray (ed.) Afte r Rome’s Fall:Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto, 1998); C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: 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 Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (Oxford, 2009); C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 (New York, 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 Popes and Imperial Pretenders (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 Tragedy: Jordanes and the Invention of Roman-Gothic History, Dissertation (The Ohio State University, 2014). For the Ostrogoths 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, ‘Gens 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 Migration Period 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 History of Rome 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. 4 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 literature; the subject of cultural memory more broadly is not addressed. Moreover, it is not primarily concerned with distinguishing fact from fiction 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, Byzantium 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 Principate (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: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800-1229 (Ithaca, 2013); R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004). 5understanding the anxieties 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 Aeneas through contemporary sixth-century events such

The Politics of Roman Memory in the Age of Justinian DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the D

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