Justin remained on the throne for almost nine years, but he was neither young nor forceful nor well connected nor well educated. The younger and evidently ambitious Justinian was reasonably assumed to hold the real power. He used the time of his uncle’s reign to consolidate his own power, to learn the ways of court and capital, and to prepare for his own ascendancy. (He made sure, for example, that his unfashionably lowborn spouse, Theodora, would be accepted as empress when his time came, and she too was ready for power.) He was about forty-five when the time came.
The way forward was clear when Justin died in 527.
NEW STATESMEN
The Roman empire had once been dominated by aristocratic families, then later by soldiers. In Justinian’s empire, priests and bureaucrats came to the fore. They drew their authority not from ancestry or from prowess, but from books they had mastered, books from which the rules of life could be extracted. Late antiquity’s most lasting contribution to western societies was its invention of the culture dominated by books and their interpreters, whether religious or legal. We have already seen the written word organized afresh to shape power in the hands of Rome’s bishops, whose claims to papal authority seemed familiar, and even natural, to later generations. To seize the collective imagination, Christianities of every stripe had already used scriptural texts and then the clustering of scriptural texts that we have come to call Bibles vitosha bulgaria private tour.
Roman law tells another story of the power of the written word. In its most archaic form, Rome knew the laws of the Twelve Tables, written down around 450 BCE and still taught to schoolchildren, such as Cicero, who represented the elders he knew as holding up that short text as the key to all legal knowledge. There were legal texts of many kinds in all eras of the late republic and then the empire, and mastery of the techniques those texts depended on was a critical tool for establishing legal authority. That said, legal authority was itself a subsidiary craft in a mainly authoritarian society, a skill the rich drew on in order to protect their claims, but not one they themselves needed to possess. For much of the first centuries of empire, one might expect the legal text to rank second in importance to the judge’s goodwill, especially that of the supreme judge, the emperor himself.
Emperors made law their own through the written word. In a wide variety of ways, they controlled the legal destiny of empire, but through remarkably fragile and evanescent instruments. Most of the laws of the Roman empire that later generations depended on were not carefully crafted proclamations, with every contingency considered and a precise ritual of promulgation that made them part of a whole society’s legal consciousness. At their worst, they were more like letters from on high. Citizens would write to the emperor protesting over grievances, and the emperor would reply—in a letter, often called a rescript, in which he connected the request to what his staff could tell him of legal principle and practice.
Extremes of empire
Then he adjudicated the case as best he could with the information he had. That letter would be sent back to the people who requested it, and copies would be kept in the imperial archives. Who else might know of that text was highly variable. Well-informed legal scholars in major cities would stay in touch with the emperor’s written effusions, but at the geographical extremes of empire even the most privileged men could be quite badly informed. The rule of law had as much weight as it could in a world where any given reader rarely had access to all the laws that might exist.
The defects of such a legal system were widely felt, but only very slowly ameliorated. The first great age of Roman jurisprudence coincided with the bureaucratic development of the empire under the Severan emperors, and came on the brink of an age of disorder and disarray in the third century. The product of this age lay in the work of authoritative canonical jurists, men such as Gaius and Papinian, whose words could be consulted and quoted as long as Roman law held sway. They offered not the actual texts of laws, but digested interpretations and sets of principles for the practical application of, for example, property, torts, and criminal procedure. As indispensable as these works were, they were not themselves the law, and the production of law and the disruption of precedent by living emperors continued Tribonian and the others.
Between that age and Justinian, a great change came over the Roman world: a change of scale. We have seen how under Diocletian and his successors, the number of government employees grew tenfold, although the empire had added no new territory and had experienced only modest population growth. With the reorganization of the western provinces under new management in the fifth century, the absolute number of people who can be described as government employees of the Roman empire declined somewhat, but over comparable spans of territory in the east, it grew and grew and grew.
