Interior Of The Cathedral Of St Sophia, Istanbul (A.D. 532-7), the crowning architectural achievement
of Justinian's reign. The most lavish of all Byzantine churches, it incorporated materials from all over
the Mediterranean and outdid the buildings of pagan Rome in the daring of its structure: the first dome
collapsed in 558 and had to be replaced.
Historians of the law and of architecture cannot say an envoi to Justinian without a salute of deep
admiration for his extraordinary achievements. The Code and Digest, Sancta Sophia at Istanbul, and San
Vitale at Ravenna are enough to put the person responsible among the greater giants of western
civilization. But one cannot help feeling about him as the Anglican John Bramhall in 1658 felt about
Henry VIII-that great good can come of the deeds of dreadful men. In the Church, especially in the
West, many found the Emperor hard to bear. He loved to issue elaborate edicts on orthodox dogma, and
then to summon large synods to ratify what he had prescribed. The horribly maltreated Pope Vigilius
experienced Justinian as a disaster. Pagan intellectuals, not accustomed to agreeing with the Pope, found
reason to dislike the Emperor very much. In 529 the Platonic Academy at Athens was led by the
militantly anti-Christian Neoplatonist Damascius. Justinian closed the place down and confiscated the
endowments, leaving Damascius, with Simplicius and other philosophers, to emigrate to the Persian
Empire in a hope for liberty which was sadly unrealized. They all soon returned. At Alexandria the
Neoplatonic school kept a much lower profile, writing commentaries on Aristotelian logic. Justinian did
not interfere there at all. Moreover, among the Alexandrian exegetes of Aristotle was the Christian John
Philoponus, with an intelligence that anticipated many of Galileo's discoveries. The most significant
evidence of the way Justinian was regarded is the attitude of the principal chronicler of his military and
architectural glories, Procopius of Palestinian Caesarea, an eloquent writer with a sardonic pen who
served under Belisarius. How intense was his hatred of Justinian and Theodora stands out from every
line of his Anecdota or 'Secret History', a portrait of a Stalin-like tyrant married to a grimly penitent
harlot. Procopius thought the apotheosis of arbitrary autocracy unspeakable and appalling.
The imperial absolutism of Diocletian, Constantine, and their successors had long been presupposed by
the Roman legal system. In the second century A.D. the jurist Gaius says explicitly that imperial decrees
have the full force of law without needing further legitimation from the Senate. The supreme
sovereignty of the Emperor was enhanced by the confusions and contradictions of edicts, of which the
fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus complains. Fourth-century Emperors were surrounded
by lawyers, both civil and ecclesiastical, assuring them that their will was the sole source of valid law,
and that they stood above it in the sense of not being bound by the enactments of their predecessors.
When those enactments were so full of contradictions, autocracy was no doubt a necessary doctrine.
Naturally the Emperor was expected to preserve law and order and to defend the frontier. Tyrannical
government made men remember old Stoic vindications of the right to tyrannicide. Christian writers like
Ambrose of Milan, on the other hand, could appeal to the Emperor's status above the law to justify the
Emperor Gratian (376-83) in suspending pagan cult at the Altar of Victory. If the Emperor Julian (355-