Justinian’s Flea Quotes

“And not merely slogan-shouting, but debate. The Chronicle of the courtier Theophanes faithfully records a debate—perhaps disputation is the better word—between Justinian (through his herald, or mandatus) and the chosen representative of the Green faction. The dialogue is startling on a number of grounds. First, the Green “debater” addresses the emperor, the viceroy of Christ on earth, practically as an equal. He addresses Justinian respectfully—as “Justinianus Augustus”—but registers his complaint precisely as if he were doing so before a small claims court, informing the most powerful man in the world that “my oppressor can be found in the shoemaker’s quarter.” For his part, Justinian, though clearly aware that he holds what might be called a preemptive advantage (“Verily, if you refuse to keep silent, I shall have you beheaded”), still debates both the truth of the Green claims and the theological position that he suggests informs those claims. Justinian tells his interlocutor, “I would have you baptized in the name of one God” only to receive the response, “I am baptized in One God,” evidently an attempt to contrast his Monophysite sympathies with the emperor’s orthodoxy. The Green spokesman accuses the emperor of suppressing the truth, of countenancing murder, and when he has had enough, he ends with “Goodbye Justice! You are no longer in fashion. I shall turn and become Jew; better to be a pagan than a Blue, God knows…”14 The most telling part of the entire dialogue, however, is that it was”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“In the end Diocletian’s plan for the peaceful transfer of imperial power depended on successors who had a stronger sense of duty to the state than an urge to start a dynasty. As such”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“Like Rome”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“Rats, even dead rats, are as familiar to sailors as sunburn. Or fleabites.”
― William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe

“His dekkan system was not merely preserved by Persia’s Arab conquerors but would eventually appear as the model for European feudal vassalage (more because of convergence than shared ancestry).”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“new ruler occupied himself largely with reforming Persia: its administration, its army, its treasury, and its capital. To Khusro, such categories were not discrete. One of the relatively few maxims that can be reliably attributed to him reads, “The throne depends on the army, the army on revenue, revenue on agriculture, and agriculture on justice.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“The most disgraceful thing for kings is to disdain learning and be afraid of science.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“In 529, as part of an imperial ban against pagan education,17 the Academy was shut down, and while the members of its faculty were offered pensions and resettlement, seven of them—Damascius, the Academy’s head; Simplicius; Eulamius; Priscian; Hermeias; Diogenes; and Isidore—were recruited by Khusro to re-create the Academy at the Sassanid capital city of Ctesiphon, there to translate the works of Plato and his successors into Persian.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“In 528, still the crown prince, not yet king, Khusro discovered that his father’s Mazdakite allies were conspiring against the throne. Driven, perhaps, by a combination of loyalty, anger, and a desire to demonstrate a kingly sort of resolution, in 529 the prince arrested, tortured, and executed Mazdak, and followed up with a massacre of his followers. (The Mazdakites would one day serve as inspiration for Islam’s dissident Shi’a.)”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“The European rabbit flea is so synchronized with its host that a female flea only gestates when living on a pregnant doe; when the doe gives birth, so does the flea, and the new fleas find a happy home on the baby rabbit.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“The Greek word for kernel is karys, so the word used to describe creatures without a nucleus is prokaryotic—the name, originally procariotique, was coined in the 1930s by Edouard Chatton, a French marine biologist—while creatures with nuclei are eukaryotic. Bacteria are prokaryotes. Pretty much everything else, from yeast to elephants, are eukaryotes. This realization resulted in the creation of a fifth Kingdom, dividing one-celled eukaryotes, who retained the Protist name, from prokaryotes. Thus, by the time the dust had settled, in the 1970s, the hierarchical tree of life had two domains—Prokarya and Eucarya—and five kingdoms: Plantae, Animalae, Fungi, Protista, and Bacteria.*”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“In 531, Tribonian authored a regulation that required that before any trial or hearing could begin, everyone, including litigants and officials, was obliged to swear an oath of Christian faith while placing a hand on a copy of the Gospels…a requirement made easier by another regulation that ordered a copy of the Gospels placed in every courtroom.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“Conservative estimates place the Persian casualties at some two thousand in less than twenty minutes, victims of the unforgiving geometry of the battlefield. Because of the limitations of anatomy, humans are evolved to act effectively only in the direction that evolution has pointed eyes and hands. The consequences of this simple fact for military tactics, from Caesar to Napoleon to Patton, are always the same: Troops are more vulnerable on either side than they are in their front, and terribly so in their rear. Virtually the entire library of tactics, as set down in classics from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart, consists of ornate descriptions of the best way to apply force—clubs, arrows, or .50 caliber machine-gun bullets—from your front to your enemies’ flank. And, obedient to the Golden Rule of Soldiering, to do so to him before he does so to you.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

“A bishop in Gaul could anoint a novitiate with oil from the olive orchards of Greece, bless the event with wine from the vineyards of Italy, and celebrate the sacrament with bread baked with the wheat of Africa while wearing a garment made by Syrian weavers from Chinese silk, all because of the ships.”
― William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire