ABSTRACT
However oversimplified some of Procopius’ views may seem, he was writing during a reign which provoked an unusually high level of theorising about the political order and the role of the emperor, and he was far from immune to such ideas. The same restless activity on the part of Justinian which Procopius so deplored stimulated new thinking, if not new conclusions, about the proper role of a Christian emperor, and the relation of the ruler to his subjects. While he wrestled in three different works with these issues, others addressed them more directly, or found, like him, that they formed the natural subject even of quite unexpected works. It was a reign that saw violent contradictions, rapid change under the guise of restoration, new strains on the state alongside existing problems. Worries about these things inevitably tended, in this centralised political system, to concentrate on the person and function of the emperor; whether they are formal treatises supportive of the system, or the critical remarks of contemporaries at the end of the reign, the range of Justinianic writings touching on this subject shows that Procopius was not alone in his preoccupation with the place of Justinian within the political framework, and that the tensions and contradictions within his work correspond to similar problems felt by others. We shall see that far from being the isolated critic usually assumed in modern books he shared, through his three works, the full range of contemporary reaction. In particular, the Buildings, once it is taken seriously, falls into place as part of the contemporary rhetoric of approved political theory; to dismiss it as mere insincere flattery is to fail to realise that it is the logical counterpart of the Secret History-the one implies the other.
