Of his master, the great emperor, it is not for me to speak since to
this day his works speak for him. The thirty-eight years of his reign
are the most brilliant period of the later Roman empire, and if the
military triumphs he conceived were the work of Belisarius and Narses
we must attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the
tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great
pillars of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ which is the legal foundation of
mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all
Civil Law in every civilised country. Of his great ecclesiastical
polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with
less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring
than his codification of the laws. If in Ravenna we are most nearly
and splendidly reminded of him in S. Vitale, we do not forget that he
was the creator of perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical building left
to us, the mighty church--lost to us now for near five hundred
years--of S. Sophia in Constantinople. On the whole we see in
Justinian the greatest of all the emperors save Augustus, and perhaps
Constantine.
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