In the course of the sixth century the Christian world became irremediably divided over a dogmatic issue. The point of contention was whether one should speak of two natures in Jesus Christ, as it had been decided by the Council of Chalcedon (451), or of only one new nature, in which divinity and humanity were joined together. This theological discussion strongly resonated in what we now call the Christian East - the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire and neighboring areas outside the empire, with their distinct linguistic and cultural characteristics.

Throughout his long reign, Justinian attempted to bridge the rift by winning the anti-Chalcedonians over to some sort of acceptance of the council, which since 518 had become the cornerstone of imperial religious policy. He failed, however, to achieve this goal. The opposition between the imperial church and the anti-Chalcedonians that existed at the beginning of Justinian’s – indeed, from the beginning of Justin’s – reign,was still there at his death. By that later date (565), not only had the opposition become much more articulate, the anti-Chalcedonians also had started building up their own ecclesiastical structure and had laid the foundations for the material and spiritual survival of their communities, which still exist today.

In fact, it is in Justinian’s failed religious policy that we find the roots of a self-confident, powerful movement that was able to assert itself in spite of hardship and oppression. Although Justinian oppressed the anti-Chalcedonians and occasionally persecuted them, he also created the conditions that allowed them to exist, to shape their identity, and to negotiate their own domains of influence and power.

No one reading the last chapters of Eduard Zeller’s monumental Philosophie der Griechen, first published between 1844 and 1852, will fail to notice the barely veiled contempt that pervades his account of the final period of ancient Greek philosophy. Summarily treating the fifth and sixth centuries, he concludes that around this time Greek philosophy collapses not on account of external circumstances, but due to internal exhaustion. Zeller’s almost wholesale condemnation of the period no longer stands, yet it would be foolish wholly to disagree with him. The sixth century is a period in which the philosophical glory that was Greece is wearing thin; philosophers, and especially pagan ones, are rare birds indeed, flocking together for shelter and survival in various parts of the empire. What they have to say is, in a sense, derivative and remains largely unintelligible today unless it is understood against the backdrop of the great philosophical past.

Judged from a different perspective, however, Zeller’s view becomes problematic. One only has to take note of the sheer quantity of philosophical writing produced in this late period: it is staggering, and this is particularly true of the time of Justinian. To give but one example: of the roughly sixty different works printed in the Berlin edition of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle (CAG), some twenty belong to the decades discussed in this volume. These also happen to be some of the most substantial and valuable works in the series, rivaling the great commentaries of a luminary such as Alexander of Aphrodisias of the second and third centuries CE. To this output we may add a considerable number of commentaries on Plato as well as other works of different genres, only some of which have survived.

In the course of Justinian’s reign, the apparatus of government dealt with continuing changes in social and economic relationships throughout the empire, altered relations between the imperial court and the church, and a series of reconquests of former imperial territory that were remarkably successful but expensive in manpower and cash. In this context of rapid change at home and abroad, flaws in the machinery of government came to the fore and must have been very clear to those who gave thought to the issue. In the early years of his reign, Justinian addressed problems in the administration of justice, finance, and the armies with a series of major administrative reforms intended to strengthen imperial power over the bureaucracy and the social elite. The institutional stasis that afflicted this bureaucracy, however, nullified all but the most persistent efforts at reform. This chapter investigates the economic and administrative structures of Justinian’s empire to see how they worked and how they changed under his influence.

Economic Resources and Infrastructure

The sophisticated bureaucracy and administrative machinery that enabled the Roman state to function and to defend itself was not a monolith, but rather a constantly evolving set of institutional relationships and established social and economic structures. These changed in response to economic fluctuations and government demands as well as to tensions within late Roman society. This meant in practice that the government at Constantinople had to take account of several different levels of change: in the assessment, collection, and distribution of resources in kind, in manpower, and in cash; in the ambitions, vested interests, and economic situation of provincial and Constantinopolitan elites; in the demands for maintenance and recruitment of soldiers; and in the need to maintain a balance between the interests of those who managed the state’s many different functions in the provinces and the capital and of the producing population.

The reign of Justinian witnessed extraordinary levels of artistic activity, with the emperor himself an energetic patron of the arts. The court and clerical elites followed his lead, as did others throughout the empire and even beyond its borders in regions where the heritage of imperial Rome was still strong, especially in the former Roman provinces of western Europe. By Justinian’s time, Constantinople had become a major center for the arts, rivaling and even surpassing much older cities like Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome. In this chapter we will see how Justinian helped to shape artistic and architectural production in the capital and how this art is reflected in other regions of the empire and of the larger Mediterranean world.

Depictions of the emperor himself illustrate certain essential themes and concepts that characterized Justinianic art and are related to many developments observed in other chapters. Justinian appears as a triumphant conqueror, in accordance with conventions even older than the empire. He is often shown with features derived from the classical past, as ancient iconographic traditions continue to signal the age-old message of authority. Through such images, Justinian makes universal claims to sovereignty and control, aspects of imperial rule particularly emphasized during his reign. Perhaps most importantly, he is pictured as supported by Christ and supporting Christ. In the art of Justinian’s age, many strands of old Roman ideology and new religious expression are woven together in a way that is at once imperial and Christian to an extent never before realized. This Christian-imperial artistic matrix, characteristic of the Justinianic age, is fully in keeping with developments in law, political theory, philosophy, and military affairs.

Perhaps the most astonishing failure of the Age of Justinian was the disintegration of the one Christian Church of the one Christian Empire into two distinct churches - what we now call Eastern Orthodoxy, on one hand, and the Oriental Orthodox (notably the Jacobite and the Coptic churches) on the other, a division only beginning to be healed in our own time. Remarkably, it seems that this division happened not, as a modern might think, because of nationalistic struggles against the empire, or any desire for autonomy by regional churches, but simply because church leaders, emperors, theologians, and monks, most of them devoted to the ideal of one church and one empire, were unable to resolve a longstanding theological dispute over how one was to understand and talk about Christ’s divine-human reality, the debate over Christology. In the end, the dispute left behind it not only divided churches, a weakened empire, and a redefined role for the emperor, but also new ways of thinking and believing that mark the beginning of Byzantium proper and the end of late antiquity.

The Background

Doctrinal Foundations and Founding Legends (100–400)

The kind of Christianity that won the right to call itself the apostolic faith in the first two centuries CE established as authoritative the first three gospels and the teachings of Paul, all of which assumed the genuine humanity of Jesus. That was to be a foundation of mainline Christology. It is significant, however, that heirs of the original Jewish Christians, who seem to have said that Jesus was only a human being, were by 180 being dismissed as heretics, and that in 268 Paul of Samosata was condemned as a heretic for, among other things, saying that Jesus was a man inspired in essentially the same way as a prophet was inspired.

According to Edward Gibbon, writing in the late eighteenth century, the most important legacy of the Age of Justinian and indeed the most important legacy of the emperor himself lay in the field of law. Gibbon’s assessment still rings true. Though the physical boundaries of medieval Europe were recast repeatedly on battlefields long after the Age of Justinian had ended, the law issued in his name still shapes legal culture today.

The “fair and everlasting monument” Justinian bequeathed to posterity is known today as the Corpus iuris civilis: three codices or books of law, promulgated between the years 529 and 534. The Justinianic Codex, the Digest (or Pandects), and the Institutes sought to harmonize 1,000 years of complex and checkered development in the citizen law of the Romans. Justinian’s new law books contained old wine in new skins; each book utilized and incorporated different types of legal source material from the Roman past, but each also reshaped that material, harmonizing disparate texts with each other, mapping the outline of a system of law in a single body (corpus) of interlocking texts.

Very occasionally the emperor Justinian deserves our sympathy. Epidemics are usually named after their victims: the biblical plague of the Philistines, for example, or the plague of Athens famously described by Thucydides. Yet the pandemic (worldwide epidemic) that struck the empire on an unprecedented scale during Justinian’s reign, spreading to northern and western Europe, many parts of the Middle East, and possibly China, has always been treated differently. In the Secret History Procopius blamed the emperor’s demonic machinations for all the natural disasters of his reign. Even though Justinian himself contracted the disease and its ravages long outlasted him, historians of the sixth century, following Procopius’s lead, have written of “the plague of Justinian.” This is unfair. In what follows attention will be confined for the most part to plague in sixth-century Byzantium. But the phenomenon is far larger, and to convey its “global” impact, extensive chronology, and questionable biological identity, I shall refer to it more neutrally as the early medieval pandemic (EMP).

Itineraries

There had doubtless been localized epidemics aplenty in the later Roman and the early Byzantine empires. Yet, when the EMP arrived in 541, there had apparently not been a major one since the 520s. Looking back to approximately a century before his own time, the author of the Paschal (Easter) Chronicle recorded a Great Death under the year 529, which may well be a mistaken reference to the EMP. Much later on, though more plausibly, the tenth-century universal chronicler Agapius of Hierapolis mentions a “terrible epidemic” that broke out in 525–526 and lasted for six years.

In this chapter I delineate what is not explained in “neo-evolutionary theory” and devise new means to investigate the evolution of ancient states and civilizations. Neo-evolutionary theory depicted the rise of states as a series of “punctuated” (that is, extremely rapid) and holistic changes from one stage (or type of society) to another. In each stage, all social institutions – politics, economy, social organization, belief system – were linked so that change had to occur in all institutions at the same time, at the same pace, and in the same direction. The prehistoric representations of these social types were modeled after “our contemporary ancestors,” societies studied by ethnographers. This progression of ethnographic societies, however, was no more than a metaphysical construction, since San in southern Africa did not become Enga in New Guinea and Enga didn't become Hawaiians (see Figure 1.2).

THE PURSUIT OF THE WILY CHIEFDOM

One may see how archaeologists had implemented neo-evolutionary theory by reviewing why a mighty company of archaeological wallahs pursued the wily chiefdom so diligently.

Although recent investigations into the collapse of states have opened new avenues to the exploration of social change that does not lead to “higher” levels of social integration, archaeologists are only beginning to consider the evolutionary distinctiveness of prehistoric societies that few would label a state. These societies have their own histories and cannot be relegated as stages in overall global trajectories towards states. For example, Susan McIntosh and colleagues (McIntosh 1999) have discarded the old neo-evolutionist band-tribe-chiefdom-state taxonomy in order to characterize “alternate” forms of leadership in prehistoric African societies. In his Society Against the State, the anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1989) argued that some societies not only were not on a putative, normative pathway to statehood but also resisted such a social trajectory.

To the extent that archaeologists have sought to explain different evolutionary pathways, they have, not unnaturally, focused on environmental conditions. In prehistoric Australian hunter-gatherer societies, one observes no great inequalities in economic power, no privileged access to symbols of community legitimacy that integrate forms of social heterogeneity, and no specialized political roles apart from those determined within the web of kinship (Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999; Murray 1998). Although significant changes in technology and economy occurred in Australian prehistory, they did not lead to village farming communities, much less states.

In the early history of the first cities, states, and civilizations, differentiated social groups became recombined in cities. These cities were nodal points of pilgrimages, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centers for defense and warfare. In these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new identities as citizens were created but did not entirely supplant existing identities as members of economic, kin, and ethnic groups. Certain aspects of identity were also forged with citizens in other cities who shared a common, if created, heritage, and these were maintained and reproduced over time.

In the earliest cities, new rituals and ceremonies connected rulers with citizens and the gods. These displayed and justified the supremacy and legitimacy of kings and reaffirmed command over the social order. The social roles and practices of citizens were routinized within the urban layout of monumental constructions, streets and pathways, walls and courtyards. The built environment itself demonstrated the superior access to knowledge and planning held by rulers, ostensibly on behalf of all. Statecraft in the earliest cities involved providing an order to the present, which the rulers relentlessly proclaimed in literature and in a created landscape that overlay the unruliness of a society composed of many groups, each with its own interests and orientations.

Archaeologists commonly use the shorthand “complex society” to describe a society that encompasses numerous social groups and institutions of centralization.

There is an irony in beginning a book on the “evolution of the earliest states and civilizations” with an apology for using the term “evolution.” Nevertheless, it is far from unusual for archaeologists (e.g. Hegmon 2003) to eschew the term in favor of discussing “social change,” “social development,” or the like. Critics have argued that social evolution presents a theory of how history is a continuation of biological evolution, in which societies advance from lower to higher forms. Such “neo-evolutionary” theory has been used to justify racism, the exploitation of colonized peoples, and Occidental contempt towards other cultures (Godelier 1986:3). Social evolution has, not entirely unfairly, been characterized as an illusion of history, as a Hegelian prophecy of a rational process that culminated in the modern bourgeois state, capitalist economies, and technological advance. Such criticisms are by no means new, and exuberant schools of disenchantment that are today common in anthropology and other faculties disdain the idea of social evolution in all its forms. Little wonder that many archaeologists are uncomfortable with the term.

Although I criticize neo-evolutionary theory as it has been used in archaeology and anthropology, that is, the attempt to create categories of human progress and to fit prehistoric and modern “traditional” societies into them (which stems from the nineteenth-century founders Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor and was represented in the mid-twentieth century by Leslie White and Julian Steward and others), I find “evolution” an appropriate term for investigating the kinds of social change depicted in this book.

I began this book by delineating the myths that archaeologists created about “the archaic state”: the earliest states were very similar to one another (and so represent the evolution of “the archaic state”); they were large, territorial creatures, evolved from “chiefdoms” and from earlier stages that could be known through ethnographic analogies; they were dominated by ineffably and irresistibly powerful rulers, who controlled, or even monopolized, all means of production and the distribution of goods and services, and monitored the flow of information in them, and instituted true law.

These myths of the earliest states and their evolution are products of archaeological theory, the attempt to understand a process whose outcome is observed but whose dynamics and details are imperfectly known from the observation. Although it is hardly necessary to repeat the social science mantra that “all observation is theory-laden,” it is surprising that the myths created by leading archaeological theoreticians have had such little influence on how research was conducted and data analyzed.

In the last chapter I argued that the evolution of the earliest states and civilizations (Figure 3.1) was marked by the development of semi-autonomous social groups, in each of which there were patrons and clients organized in hierarchies, and that there were struggles for power within groups and among leaders of groups. States emerged as part of the process in which these differentiated and stratified social groups were recombined under new kinds of centralized leadership. New ideologies were created that insisted that such leadership was not only possible, but the only possibility. The earliest states were made natural, that is, legitimized, through central symbols, expensively supported and maintained by inner elites who constituted the cultural and administrative core of the state. Ideologies of statecraft also set the rules for how leaders and would-be leaders must guard these symbols and perpetuate the knowledge of how to maintain, display, and reproduce them. In this chapter I explore the evolution of cities as central arenas in which these processes of differentiation, integration, and social struggle occurred.

The figures in this chapter illustrate the enormous size in area of the earliest cities, and Table 3.1 presents estimates of the large number of people who lived in them.