One of the
biggest surprises of the summer was receiving a grant for a research project on
more sixth-century things. I’ve applied
for all sorts of grants over the years, and generally been unsuccessful. I’d all but dismissed my chances of getting this
one until I received the shocking notice.
The grant is,
effectively, for a book that will be the follow-up to Procopius book one, and
it will look more at the history side than the historiographical one. That means Procopius is still important, but
he’s one part of a whole, with the other part/s occupied by the archaeological,
epigraphic, legal, and papyrological evidence.
It also entails considering, at least to some degree, the other literary
evidence. Ultimately the book will
provide something of a commentary on how Procopius deals with war in the sixth
century, with the discussion ranging from military organization to planning and
logistics, and even how war was fought.
The book
will offer a holistic approach, and we’re fortunate in that the age of
Justinian is so well documented, perhaps more so than just about every other
period of the ancient or late antique worlds, at least in my opinion. The catch is that the voluminous evidence
doesn’t always cover the same affairs, and this is particularly true for military
matters. There are, for instance, some
detailed reports on fortifications in Jordan and Bulgaria, but scarce reports
on those same structures in our surviving literary evidence. We have detailed descriptions of battles from
Procopius and some other authors, but little in the way of surviving
weaponry. This means we can’t always
compare this disparate material, and trying to make sense of all of it can be a
bit of a challenge. The danger, lo
temptation, too is trying to make all the pieces fit together, when, in reality,
the pieces come from different puzzles. Still,
one of the great thrills of this project is that it’s given me the opportunity
to dabble into all sorts of other kinds of evidence that I’ve paid less
attention to in the past.
To this point,
when I haven’t been embroiled in all sorts of other work matters, I’ve been concentrating
a great deal on the other evidence. I’ve
discovered, for instance, that there is far more epigraphic evidence for military
matters in the sixth century than I’d previously believed. While we’re nowhere near the epigraphic
heights of the first two centuries AD, there are a few inscriptions in Latin
that either mention Justinian, a general, and assorted other commanders as well
some military units. There are even more
Greek ones. Many of these have only a tangential
bearing on my project, for most of the war-related ones have more to say about
war’s impact than about how it is waged, and I’m starting to think I won’t be
able to get into those matters. There’s
also the Anastasius edict, which I’d only been vaguely familiar with
before. I certainly hadn’t realized what
a fabulous document it is.
In fact, I
feel fortunate that there are so many wonderful research tools at our disposal
now, from the two excellent epigraphic databases (for Greek and Latin), to the
papyrological one, and the TLG, which does require access to a research library
of some capacity or other.
We also now
have the wonderful text and translation of the Justinianic Codex, and the grant allowed me to buy a copy. I’ve been looking at this legal material in
more depth than I ever have before, and it’s forced me to come to grips with
what is quite a substantial body evidence, and one that’s been scarcely applied
to the military sphere, especially in the sixth century, apart from Jones. So far it’s posing all sorts of interesting questions
for me. For one thing, there’s a
staggering amount of legislation, and it seems aspiring lawyers would have had
to understand, even know, just about all of it.
If Procopius himself had been a lawyer, and I think he had, this means
that he too would have had to have been intimately familiar with the material. It turns out too that assessors were tasked
with knowing the law, and even providing guidance to judges who might require
assistance.
If
Procopius was both a lawyer and an assessor, this in itself raises interesting
questions about Procopius’ practices as an historian, but also what or who was considered
an essential part of an army. Surely
Procopius wasn’t the only assessor acting in a military environment, just the
only one who wrote quite so much and so well.
It also raises questions about the long reach of Justinian, and how
exactly Procopius might have got the job.
Were generals assigned assessors by Justinian so that he could, in some
ways, keep a check on the generals?
Maybe not directly, but indirectly.
In other words, were the generals expected to follow the letter of the
law as dictated by Justinian, and were they assigned assessors to ensure that
this happened? It seems unlikely, perhaps, but then quite a lot of the legislation
found in the Corpus Iuris Civilis that
specifically concerns military matters actually deals with what could be
considered property duties and expectations of generals and the like.
The legal
material also has me wondering if it, in some way, should be considered an
ideal: this is how things should be, in
Justinian’s eyes. How often would they
work that way in practice? And for my
purposes (military stuff), can Procopius provide evidence for this? Is the law in some sense the rhetoric, and
what Procopius describes the reality?
Anyway,
there’s a lot to chew on, and quite a bit more to digest, so I hope to provide
more posts in the coming months.
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