THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYabundant literary sources, which portray Justinian both as a great and strong
emperor and as a dangerous reformer. As we have seen, Procopius does both,
and so, in milder tones, does John the Lydian, who had been an offi cial in
the praetorian prefecture and knew what he was talking about. The deacon
Agapetus’ eulogizing Advice to the Emperor, Paul the Silentiary’s equally fulsome
Description of Hagia Sophia and the anonymous and ambivalent Dialogue on Politi-
cal Science represent the range of contemporary responses.^79 Justinian has fea-
tured in modern works as a Christian humanist, as the giver of Roman law to
Christian Europe, as an intolerant and authoritarian persecutor of pagans and
heretics and (anachronistically) as a prototype of totalitarian rule. All these
judgements suffer from the tendency to confuse the man himself with the
events of his reign, which is reinforced by the temptation to read off the per-
sonalities of Justinian and Theodora from two very striking surviving works:
the Secret History of Procopius and the well-known mosaics of Justinian and
Theodora in the church of San Vitale at Ravenna – especially as the rather
podgy appearance of Justinian and the distant look of Theodora in the mosa-
ics both seem to fi t Procopius’ descriptions of the emperor and empress:
[Justinian] showed himself approachable and affable to those with whom
he came into contact; not a single person found himself denied access
to the Emperor, and even those who broke the rules by the way they
stood or spoke in his presence never incurred his wrath ... with a friendly
expression on his face and without raising an eyebrow, in a gentle voice
he would order tens of thousands of quite innocent persons to be put
to death, cities to be razed to the ground, and all their possessions to be
confi scated for the Treasury.
(Secret History 13.1–2)To her bodily needs she [Theodora] devoted quite unnecessary attention,
though never enough to satisfy herself. She was in a great hurry to get
into her bath, and very unwilling to get out again. When she had fi nished
her ablutions she would go down to breakfast, and after a light breakfast
she would take a rest. But at lunch and supper she indulged her taste for
every kind of food and drink. Again and again she would sleep for hours
on end, by day until nightfall and by night till sunrise.
(ibid., 15.6–8)We also have seem to have utterances from Justinian himself, who was a great
legislator and author of theological treatises. But even if the contribution
of Justinian himself can be assumed, works like these are inevitably written
in a rhetorical mode that masks the personality of the author. It is similarly
diffi cult to assess the emperor’s contribution as patron of the culture of his
age, especially in relation to visual art, for despite the mass of public works
to which Procopius’ Buildings testifi es very little imperial art has actually sur-
vived. What little there is, such as the Barberini ivory (Figure 5.1), which is