Justinian

I won’t quote any Gibbon passages this time, but will just say that I thought he could have done a better job with the Nika riots in Constantinople. Gripping (if less literarily talented) summaries of the riots can be found all over the web. Gibbon is a good storyteller in the biographical sense of following someone across an entire career. But as far as dealing with individual incidents, he’s sometimes a bit quick or fuzzy, leaving a slightly disappointed taste in the mouth.

The other thing you can find more detail about on the web than in Gibbon is Justinian’s wife, Empress Theodora. Gibbon is too much of a gentleman to make more than oblique hints. But let’s put it like this: she wasn’t just a prostitute before becoming empress, but also a… stage performer, of the sort you might still find in Amsterdam today. But some of her performances were a bit more imaginative than had occurred to me as being possible.

I thought I’d plow through the chapters on Belisarius today, but then I stumbled across the Deirdre Bair book on Jung, which is refreshingly weird.