Justinian I: LSI

"Imperial Majesty should be not only adorned with arms but also armed with laws, so that good government may prevail in time of both war and peace."

For thirty-eight years the emperor Justinian (482-565)* governed the Roman Empire in the East. His main instruments for that were the law-book and the army he sent to re-conquer the Mediterranean. He was dedicated to a single correct order, with everything and everyone in its proper rank, and enforced it as far as pre-modern state machinery allowed him.

The decisive exhibit is the Corpus Juris Civilis. Justinian set Tribonian and a small commission to reduce the whole Roman inheritance to one consistent hierarchical system, then kept legislating fresh Novellae to meticulously patch the gaps. It was quite typical of LSI's structural-logical instinct: judging previous attempts (like the one of Theodosius II) unsatisfactory, to impose a categorization that logically follows from itself, without contradiction. This enterprise outlived the empire that gave birth to it and served as the backbone of European law for one and a half millennia. No emperor left behind a more characteristic monument to his mental disposition:

"Justice is the constant and perpetual desire to give to each one that to which he is entitled. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of matters divine and human, and the comprehension of what is just and what is unjust."

And he clearly wasn't the kind of carefree ruler who delegates everything to subordinates — the "unsleeping emperor" was quite a workaholic himself. If anything, the tendency in him was the opposite, to be quite a "hands-on" ruler. Even Procopius, who hated him and was writing to destroy his memory, records the asceticism with something close to baffled awe: the emperor, he reports, fasted for two days at a stretch and slept perhaps an hour a night. The Secret History spins this into proof of Justinian being a sleepless demon, but taken more neutrally, what remains is high tolerance for monotonous sustained labor and near-total self-control of appetite and impulse. For the emperor, the orderly grind of administration was the natural medium of life.

The same drive toward enforced uniformity ran through everything he touched. He closed the neo-Platonic Academy at Athens, the last institutional home of pagan philosophy. He hounded heretics, Samaritans, and polytheists with conversion edicts. His decades of theological labor — the Three Chapters affair, the attempt to legislate a Christological formula the whole church would accept (Justinian essentially dictated the 553 AD council's agenda and aggressively coerced Pope Vigilius) — were the work of a man who could not tolerate an unresolved doctrinal ambiguity sitting inside his realm. His principle was: no loose ends, obedience down the line. He strictly enforced his interpretation of Christian moral code as state law (laws on marriage, sexuality, heresy), treating religious dissent as a threat to state order — not just politically, but morally. He saw restriction as virtue. This is pure LSI: order through enforced orthodoxy. The Empire's polytheists saw increased pressure on themselves for the whole fifth century, but even at the beginning of the sixth one it was still possible for pagan antiquarian Zosimus to publish a Roman history from a pro-polytheist view. Justinian's anti-pagan laws put an end to such cases. 

Justinian's Renovatio Imperii may point to a slight EIE accent, although even "pure" LSI's are often quite ideological. He poured the treasury and two decades of war into a vision of imperial restoration that was pitched at the scale of world-history rather than practical advantage — a properly Beta-imperial dream. Hagia Sophia is the same impulse in stone: the grandest structure in the world, raised in under six years after the old one burned in the Nika riots. The Italian reconquest ultimately damaged the peninsula and overstretched the state (although Justinian was spared witnessing losing 2/3 of Italy to the Langobards), but the point, for typing, is the shape of the want: a single magnificent restored order, ranked and total and eternal, that the lawgiver's instinct could then administer forever.

Even Justinian showing some indecisiveness during the Nika riot, and requiring inspiration from Theodora to stay and fight isn't that unusual for the type. LSI can show a certain viscosity in its decisions, unlike SLE and even LSE who are better at immediate adaptation.

WSS's EIE typing for him is questionable. Even in Procopius' hostile account, the drawing of all eyes to himself, the posturing and extravagance and theatrical self-presentation that EIE rulers tend toward (the type of eccentric, performing autocrat) isn't there. Justinian is the opposite in personal style — ascetic, workaholic. The grandeur is in the works, not the man. Theodora herself is a plausible EIE (and her having been a street courtesan of Constantinopolitan demimonde is confirmed not only by Procopius, but also by John of Ephesus, who was sympathetic to her), although we don't have many sources about her directly. On a side note, PDB's MBTI typing of Justinian as ENFP is quite funny and shows the sheer divergence typological terms can take. About Procopius himself, we have his writings, and we know that he ended up bitter and disappointed in the emperor. He is still hard to pin down, and there're multiple interpretations of him, from a fairly banal Orthodox Christian (Cameron) to a crypto-polytheist (Kaldellis).

It is fitting that posterity remembers him in such incompatible registers — Paul the Silentiarius praising the building of Hagia Sophia, Dante placing him in the Heaven of Mercury as the divinely-appointed lawgiver who gave the world its justice, Procopius painting a hypocritical demon who fed on the empire's blood. Both are reaching for the same fact from opposite sides: here was a man of immense, cold, patient ordering power, who took the whole sprawling contradictory inheritance of Rome, and tried, with absolute conviction and at a significant cost, to make it finally consistent. The structures he built to do it outlasted him by a thousand years. 

*Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinian, formally, although "Flavius" was more of a title by that point, and the further two names are known only by a consular ivory diptych of his.