The capital error of Justinian’s policy was due to a theory which, though not explicitly formulated till quite recent times, has misled many eminent and well-meaning sovrans and statesmen in all periods of history. It is the theory that the expansion of a state and the exaltation of its prestige and honour are ends in themselves, and valuable without any regard to the happiness of the men and women of whom the state consists. If this proposition had been presented nakedly either to Justinian or to Louis XIV, he would have indignantly repudiated it, but both these monarchs, like many another, acted on it, with most unhappy consequences for their subjects. Justinian possessed imagination. He had formed a high ideal of the might and majesty of the Empire of which he was the master. It humiliated him to contrast its moderate limits with the vast extent of territory over which the word of Constantine or Theodosius the Great had been law. He was dazzled by the idea of restoring the old boundaries of the Roman Empire. For though he only succeeded in recovering, as we shall see, Africa, Italy, and a small strip of Spain, his designs reached to Gaul, if not to Britain. After he had conquered the African provinces he announced his ambitious policy. “We have good hopes that God will grant us to restore our authority over the remaining countries which the ancient Romans possessed to the limits of both oceans and lost by subsequent neglect.”44 In drawing up this magnificent programme, Justinian did not consider whether such an extension of his government would make his subjects, who had to bear the costs of his campaigns, happier or better. He assumed that whatever increased the power and glory of the state must also increase the well-being of its members. The resources of the state were not more than sufficient to protect the eastern frontier against the Persians and the Danubian against the barbarians of the north; and if the Emperor had been content to perform these duties more efficiently than his predecessors, he would unquestionably have deserved better of his subjects.
His conception of the greatness of the Empire was indissolubly associated with his conception of the greatness of its sovran, and he asserted the absolutism of the autocrat in a degree which no Emperor had hitherto attempted.45 This was conspicuously shown in the dictatorship which he claimed over the Church. He was the first Emperor who studied dogmatic questions independently and systematically, and he had all the confidence of a professional theologian. A theologian on the throne is a public danger, and the principle of persecuting opinion, which had been fitfully and mildly pursued in the fifth century, was applied rigorously and systematically under Justinian. His determination to be supreme in all departments made him impatient of advice; he did not like his commands to be discussed, and he left to his ministers little latitude for decision. His passion for dealing personally with the minute details of government had the same unfortunate results as in the case of Philip II.46 Like other autocrats, he was jealous and suspicious, and ready to listen to calumnies against his most loyal servants. And there was a vein of weakness in his character. He faltered at one supremely critical moment of his reign, and his consort, Theodora, had an influence over him which no woman could have exercised over an Augustus or a Constantine.
§ 3. Theodora
It was probably before he had any prospect of the throne that Justinian formed a violent attachment to a girl of exceptional charms and talents, but of low birth and blemished reputation. Theodora had already borne at least one child to a lover47 when she captured the heart of the future Emperor. According to a tradition — and perhaps she countenanced this story herself, for she could not deny the humility of her birth — she had come from Paphlagonia to the capital, where she was discovered by Justinian, making a scanty living by spinning wool.48 But contemporary rumours which were circulated by her enemies assigned to her a less respectable origin, and told a circumstantial story of a girlhood spent in singular infamy. She was said to be the daughter of Acacius, who was employed by the Green Faction at Constantinople as keeper of the wild beasts,49 which they exhibited at public spectacles. When Acacius died his widow married his successor, but this man was soon deprived of the office in favour of another who paid a bribe to obtain it.50 The woman sent her three little daughters, Comito,51 Theodora, and Anastasia, in the guise of suppliants with fillets on their heads, to beg the Greens assembled in the Hippodrome to reinstate their stepfather who had been so unjustly treated. The Greens obdurately refused; but the Blues had compassion and appointed the man to be their own bear-keeper, as the post happened to be vacant. This incident of her childhood was said to be the explanation of the Empress Theodora’s implacable hostility towards the Greens. The three sisters, when they were older, went on the stage, and in those days an actress was almost synonymous with a prostitute. According to the scandalous gossip, which is recorded with malicious relish in the Secret History of Procopius, Theodora showed exceptional precocity and shamelessness in a career of vice. Her adventures were not confined to Constantinople. She went to the Libyan Pentapolis as the mistress of a new governor, but having quarrelled with him she betook herself to Alexandria, and worked her way back to the capital, where she entrapped Justinian.52
This chapter of her biography, which reposes solely on the testimony of enemies, has more value as a picture of contemporary manners than as an indictment of the morals of Theodora. It is difficult to believe that if her girlhood had been so steeped in vice and infamy as this scandalous document asserts, she could have so completely changed as to develop into a matron whose conjugal chastity the same enemies could not seriously impugn, although they were ready to insinuate suspicions.53 But it would be foolish to argue that the framework of the story is entirely fictitious. Theodora may have been the daughter of a bear-keeper, and she may have appeared on the stage. And her youth may have been stormy; we know that she was the mother of an illegitimate child.
After the rise in his fortunes through the accession of his uncle, Justinian seems to have secured for his mistress the rank of a patrician.54 He wished to marry her, but the Empress Euphemia resolutely opposed this step, and it was not till after her death55 that Theodora became the wife of Justinian. When he was raised to the throne, she was, as a matter of course, crowned Augusta.
Her beauty and charm were generally acknowledged. We may imagine her as a small pale brunette, with a delicate oval face and a solemn intense expression in her large black eyes.56 Portraits of her are preserved in marble, in mosaics, and on ivory. There is a life-size bust of her at Milan, which was originally coloured; the tip of the nose is broken off, but the rest is well preserved, and we can see the attractiveness of her face.57 Then we have two ivory tablets representing her in imperial robes.58 These three portraits show her probably as she was from the age of thirty to thirty-five. She is visibly an older woman in the mosaic picture in the church of S. Vitale at Ravenna (c. A.D. 547), but the resemblance to the bust can be discerned in the shape of the face, in the mouth, and in the eyes. But the dominion which she exercised over Justinian was due more to her mental qualities than to her physical charms. A contemporary writer praises her as “superior in intelligence to all the world,”59 and all that we know of her conduct as Empress shows that she was a woman of exceptional brain and courage. Her influence in the Emperor’s counsels was publicly acknowledged in a way which had no precedent