W. Robert Godfrey

He didn't have a good director to help him with his look there on the wall.

but it's the most famous picture of Justinian that we have.

And so here he is, this Christian emperor advancing the cause of Christ, beginning this foundation, you see, of an experiment in Christian civilization with his great building program and his willingness to persecute not only deviant Christian ideas but the pagans as well.

It was Justinian that seems to have led to the closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens in 529.

That academy had been open almost a thousand years as a center of pagan philosophy, and it came to an end under Justinian.

Again, a sign of his determination that he would have a Christian empire.

He was also a great administrator.

He saw to the codification of the Roman law, which had become kind of complicated, and here a law, there a law, hard to find the precedence in law, and led to the preparation of Justinian's Code, which became the foundation of much legal theory in the whole medieval period and beyond.

He was engaged

frequently in war, first in the east against the Persians, then in the south in North Africa, and finally in Italy.

And it was particularly in his Italian campaigns.

He didn't go himself.

He sent others.

But he took the glory for any success.

He took glory even when there wasn't much success.

If you're emperor, you get to help write the history, and things can turn out better than they actually did.

And one of the things he was determined to do was to restore Roman authority in Italy.

Much of it had fallen into barbarian hands.

I say barbarian because those barbarians actually had largely come into Italy and become Christianized and Romanized, so they weren't radical barbarians.

But