Political Debate in the Age of Justinian I

Abstract

This thesis examines how Romans in sixth-century Constantinople debated politics. It begins by observing that Justinian I ruled in a political culture far more open to conflicts of views and criticism of the régime than is often appreciated. It conducts intertextual, contextualist close readings of the texts of thirteen contemporary authors to explain how this culture of debate operated. This literary evidence is marked by highly creative, tactical uses of discourse. The care and ingenuity with which these tactics were formulated confirms the importance that contemporaries placed on mobilising the opinions and expectations of imperial subjects to exert (or defuse) political pressure on the emperor. Chapter One introduces the two defining ideological conflicts of the period, a political debate about Roman tradition and a culture war about classical and Christian culture, and the régime’s strategic need to navigate them. Chapter Two remodels the operation of Justinian’s propaganda as an ecosystem in which a devolved network of propagandists amplified and tailored imperial messages but simultaneously inflected them to suit their own agendas. Chapter Three explores the debate about this propaganda culture that developed within Constantinople’s civil bureaucracy, as traditionalists became concerned with the disjunction between imperial representations and reality. Chapter Four turns to the period’s central debate, tracing how the régime and its opponents dialectically developed new tactics for advancing unchanging conceptions of the extent of imperial authority to intervene in the Roman legal tradition. The whole thesis demonstrates the value of a synchronically intertextual methodology for reading sixth-century political literature.