THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYhave still to be fully unpacked, and not surprisingly his versions have domi-
nated much of the historiography.^7 Procopius was a major writer, if not one
of the fi rst rank; it has recently been argued that he was at heart a pagan or a
Neoplatonist,^8 and there were indeed currents of Neoplatonism in sixth-cen-
tury Constantinople, as can be seen in the work of John the Lydian and the
author of the anonymous treatise on political knowledge (Chapter 6).^9 How-
ever, it is not an easy matter to deduce Procopius’ own religious position from
passages in his writings and there are many indications that he largely accepted
the Christian assumptions of his day.
Justinian’s wars pose many questions, not least whether the emperor himself
had any clear intention of ‘reconquering the west’ when he launched the expedi-
tion against the Vandals in 533; it is more likely that the spectacular success over
the Vandals, after which Belisarius celebrated a magnifi cent triumph in Con-
stantinople, suggested the possibility of a similar success against the Ostrogoths
in Italy. The outcome was in some ways ironic: it led in North Africa after 534
to the establishment of a Greek administration, imposed from Constantinople
in the name of Roman restoration, and set up in a province which was tradition-
ally a bastion of Latin-speaking Christianity. Nevertheless, although the Arabs
established themselves in North Africa in the mid-seventh century, Carthage
itself did not fall until the late 690s.^10 In Italy an equally poignant effect of the
long years of war against the Goths by Byzantine armies was the effective
destruction of the Roman senate and the departure of many of the remaining
Roman aristocratic families to the east, where some of them formed a Latin-
speaking colony in Constantinople. Byzantine rule was established in Italy, but
a new challenge came almost immediately from the Lombards, and Justinian’s
conquests came too late for the eastern empire to do more than maintain a par-
tial presence in southern Gaul and Spain; although there was still a Byzantine
presence in Italy until the eleventh century, most of the west was already out
of the reach of Constantinople.^11 The lack of fortifi cations in Spain, in sharp
contrast to those in Byzantine North Africa, might be attributed to the fi nancial
and military diffi culties which Justinian had encountered by the 550s. Finally, it
might be argued that the cost and the effort of this huge and prolonged military
initiative, coinciding as it did with a major plague, continuing and expensive
wars against Sasanian Persia and new threats in the Balkans (Chapter 7), actually
weakened the eastern government and made it less able to deal with the military
challenges of the late sixth and early seventh centuries.
Justinian’s wars are as susceptible to contradictory judgements as the rest
of his policies. The emperor himself enunciated high-sounding claims that he
was restoring the Roman past while issuing such severe laws against pagans
and all other dissidents that they have led one writer to compare him with
Stalin.^12 It was Justinian whose laws forbidding pagans to teach had the effect
of closing the thousand-year-old Academy at Athens, founded by Plato in the
fourth century BC, and who from time to time rounded up suspected pagans
among the elite. In contradiction, the same emperor is also often depicted
as a patron of letters and has been seen as one who inspired a classicizing