Early Byzantine Kaiserkritik: Two Case Histories

Abstract

In recent studies of Byzantine political comment and particularly of opposition to imperial policy the period after Justinian has received a certain amount of space. But the reigns of Justin II and Tiberius II are still neglected by comparison with that of their predecessor, while the spell exercised by Procopius’s Secret History tends to dominate all approaches to contemporary political attitudes. The fascination of the Secret History for modern scholars has, too, inclined them to look only at the negative aspects of political criticism, and to fix their attention on what seem to be ‘mainstream’ writers in the tradition of Procopian history. I want here to try to demonstrate the limitations of such an approach by means of an analysis of the literary sources available for these two reigns. It may be that in the end both reigns must remain imperfectly understood; yet the policies and character of the unhappy Justin II evoked violent excesses of praise and blame and provided an inevitable foil for the well-meaning and amiable Tiberius. Kaiserkritik in East Rome is a concept which needs closer study, and the history of this short period demonstrates that it must be sought in a range of sources which genuinely reflects the spectrum of Byzantine life. There were certain common literary features about the critique of emperors in more formal political works; but political criticism did not confine itself to classical histories, and I suspect that the attitudes revealed by the more popular sources are more interesting and more important. Modern study of Byzantine Kaiserkritik has been neither sufficiently wide-ranging in scope nor sensitive enough to the interaction of genuine opinion with literary form.

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