Justinian

I plead guilty to selective omission here, as John of Ephesus, commenting on the plague, mentions other animals besides rats. However, the fact that he mentions rats at all gives food for intriguing speculation. If physicians of the time had come to associate the plague with rats specifically, then a connection of the disease with rat-borne fleas might eventually have been made, enabling measures of control and avoidance to be taken.

headless figures sitting in bronze boats

John of Ephesus reports people experiencing such visions in areas affected by the plague. Could he have been implying that these were hallucinations?

one of a new breed of appointees

Rather as political and professional advancement in Soviet Russia depended on your being a card-carrying Communist, professing adherence to Marxist-Leninist dogma, so in Justinian’s Empire, subscription to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy was a prerequisite to obtaining a teaching post. A sign (of which the closing of the Schools of Athens was another) that the classical world, with its traditions of intellectual freedom and rational enquiry, was coming to an end.

Chapter 26

this firebrand priest

Despite Theodora’s passionate championing of their cause, by 540 ferocious persecution (directed principally by Menas, Patriarch of Constantinople, backed by Justinian) had reduced the Monophysites outside Egypt to a state of cowed powerlessness. Then, in 543, everything changed. In that year, one Jacob ‘Baradaeus’ (meaning ‘ragged’ from his favourite disguise as a beggar) was permitted to be consecrated Monophysite bishop of Edessa. (Delicate political considerations involving the Monophysite king of an Arab buffer-state dictated that the concession go ahead.) For the Chalcedonian establishment, this proved to be a fatal mistake; they soon found they had unleashed a whirlwind. Imagine a personality imbued with all the toughness, resilience, charisma and sheer power of leadership of a combined Robin Hood-Zorro-Che Guevara-Mahatma Ghandi figure, and you have Jacob Baradaeus. Travelling incognito throughout the eastern provinces, ordaining priests and bishops and running rings around the imperial agents assigned to catch him, he succeeded, almost single-handedly, in re-kindling the dying fires of the persecuted creed. By the time Justinian issued his famous Edict of late 543 or early 544, the Monophysites were once again ascendant in the east.

Both Palace and Gate still extant

Re the Lateran Palace, mediaeval fabric has mostly replaced Roman; the Baptistery however is entirely fifth- century work. The Asinarian Gate — perhaps the finest in the whole circuit of the Aurelian Walls — survives in all its original glory.

a condemnation of certain century-old writings

In the text, I have done my best to outline (as simply as possible, in order to spare the reader) the basic issues involved in the apocalyptic row known as the Three Chapters controversy. The Three Chapters: it sounds innocuous enough. But once I started to scratch beneath the surface and are confronted with: ‘. . while the Divinity of the Logos is to be distinguished from the temple of the flesh, yet there remained but one person in the God-man. .’, or, ‘. . while granting the true Divinity and humanity of Christ, he [Nestorius] denied their union in a single hypostasis. .’, I began to suspect that I had tangled with something in which I could soon find myself out of my depth. Hoping for illumination, I turned from primary sources to more modern ones. As a true son of the Enlightenment, Gibbon treats the subject with magnificent disdain, dismissing it in three contemptuous lines: ‘. . the East was distracted by the Nestorian. . controversy, which attempted to explain the mystery of the incarnation, and hastened the ruin of Christianity in her native land. .’ So, not much help there, then. Antony Bridge (in his Theodora), Robert Browning (in his Justinian and Theodora), and Claire Sotinel (in her article ‘Emperors and Popes in the Sixth Century’ — Chapter 11 of The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian), all struggle valiantly to explain the theological metaphysics of Nestorius, Theodore, Theoderet and Ibas. To them I owe a debt of gratitude for whatever (limited) understanding I’ve been able to glean concerning the Three Chapters.

For the sake of clarity and pace, I’ve somewhat telescoped the main events of the controversy, and emphasized the roles played by the apocrisiarius Stephen (whose denunciation of Justinian’s Edict I have, for dramatic reasons, relocated from Constantinople to Rome), and Facundus, bishop of Hermiane. (Vigilius’ self-serving vacillation needed no underscoring on my part!) This approach is justified, I think, for the following reason. Without some selective highlighting and streamlining in its presentation, the whole Three Chapters topic (which is important for our understanding both of Justinian and of his times) could appear to the average reader as an impenetrable thicket of Christological subtleties.

Chapter 27

Theoctistus — formerly the army’s most brilliant surgeon

Procopius (in his The Wars of Justinian) describes in graphic detail an incident that took place during the siege of Rome, in which Theoctistus successfully treated a soldier horrendously wounded by an arrow between the nose and the right eye, ‘the point of the arrow penetrating as far as the neck behind’, whom other physicians were reluctant to operate on, in case they caused the patient’s death. Roman medical practice, especially in the army, was highly sophisticated and efficient — of a standard unrivalled until modern times. The tool-kit of a Roman medicus, with its array of needles, probes, catheters, lancets, forceps, scissors, etc., would be instantly recognizable to a surgeon of today. Though often brilliant in their ability to cope with ‘accident and emergency’ type injuries, the Romans’ competence in the field of invasive surgery was limited, being primarily confined to lithotomy, the removal of fistulae and the excision of some cancers, provided they were not too deep. Though of course knowing nothing of infection caused by germs, Roman doctors were aware from experience that cleanliness could aid recovery. Roman hospitals, especially army ones, were probably a good deal more hygienic than any operating at, say, the time of Waterloo.

Chapter 28

become in turn the Western emperor

Thus reviving Diocletian’s neat but somewhat arid constitutional device known as the Tetrarchy: two ‘Augusti’ (one for the East, one for the West), with two ‘Caesars’ — emperors-in-waiting, who would replace the Augusti in due course. That was the theory; in practice it could break down, when power-hungry usurpers ignored the formula.

leaving his son to become the Western emperor

Germanus’ son (by Matasuntha) was in fact born posthumously.

I’ll be blunt, Serenity

In an age of subservience and protocol, Narses was noted for speaking his mind to Justinian — and being listened to (probably because his advice was invariably sound, and Justinian, unlike many Roman emperors, was, at bottom, a reasonable and fair-minded man).

pushing up the Via Flaminia from Rome

Losing count of the number of times Rome changed hands during the long Gothic War, I often found myself referring to a useful list compiled by Gibbon giving the various dates on which it was captured: ‘In. . 536 by Belisarius, in 546 by Totila, in 547 by Belisarius, in 549 by Totila, in 552 by Narses’. Determined to break the cycle of siege and capture, Totila was about to demolish the walls when he was dissuaded by Belisarius, who pointed out that such an act would make the Gothic king ‘abhorred by all civilized men’. Such generous restraint on Totila’s part (for which the modern tourist, who today is able to walk around the circuit of the walls in all their splendour, can be grateful) shows that civilized attitudes between enemies could still prevail — before the long campaign descended into ‘total war’, that is.

the nation of the Ostrogoths had ceased forever to exist

There is a terrible Wagnerian grandeur about the fate of the Ostrogoths — a heroic people who first emerge into the light of history, fighting (on the ‘wrong’ side) for Attila in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451, and vanish from it following the disaster of Busta Gallorum/Tadinae in 552. The ‘Ostrogothic century’ encompasses: first, Volkerwanderung on an epic scale — a search for a homeland throughout the Eastern Empire, followed by mass migration to Italy under their hero-king Theoderic (vice-gerent of the Eastern emperor); then a long and bloody war against Odovacar, king of another Germanic people, the Sciri, to secure their Italian homeland; finally — following a long period of harmonious ‘apartheid’ with the Romans, under Theoderic’s enlightened reign — their extinction as a people, resulting from Justinian’s obsession with reconstructing the