Peter Bell is a retired British civil servant, with experience in Lebanon and Northern Ireland. This book is the product of a DPhil dissertation produced in retirement, and is quite unlike most books produced from doctoral theses. It considers the ‘cat's cradle of forces' to which Justinian's empire was subjected, many of them simultaneously ‘disruptive and centripetal’ (p. 345), dependent on the different actors who were involved. Bell very deliberately invokes his own experience in government and a wide array of social theory to elucidate the difficulties facing the Justinianic regime. Concepts of class, status and power, as well as group identity, are all deployed after due interrogation, without losing sight of the human agency of the key players.

Chapters i and ii set out the need for broad modelling, still rooted in the sources, that enables us to decide between marginal and central phenomena. Drawing on Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Bell sets out a ‘toolbox’ for dealing with the ancient sources. Chapter iii establishes the material basis for the empire, namely the use of its natural resources through agriculture. But, following Peter Sarris and Jairus Banaji, Bell emphasises that an economy that was, in parts, diverse and prosperous, was also unequal, and relied on the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, legitimated by the law. The picture that emerges is of a three-way struggle between the peasants, the state and the landed magnates, where the state's long-term interests (i.e. sustainable taxation that was seen as legitimate) was often challenged by the shorter-term interests of the magnate class.

Chapter iv examines ‘horizontal conflict’ between two trans-provincial organisations that linked upper-class patrons to the lower classes: the circus factions and the ‘Church’. In a turn that may surprise some readers, Bell, following Michael Whitby, very persuasively presents the circus factions as a source of imperial solidarity. Bell argues that as long as the factions were properly managed they could provide a safety valve for popular discontent that, at times, gave the masses a means of redress. But, crucially, they were also mechanisms for elite manipulation of popular power.

The second half of this chapter should be of great interest to readers of this Journal. Here Bell presents a detailed discussion of the Chalcedonian controversies, rooted in the acts of the councils of the fifth and sixth centuries and informed by his own experience of the Northern Irish peace process. He presents the councils as ‘multilateral negotiations’, whose raison d’être was to find a solution pleasing to as many participants as possible, rather than reaching ‘the truth’. One insight that I found striking was his differentiation between the ways in which documents can be read: as a redress to a specific mischief or in purely literal terms (p. 174). He plausibly suggests that the drafters of the formulae of Chalcedon fall into the latter category, while the recipients of the formulae in Egypt or Syria read the text literally, and with their own distinctive understandings of terminology and their own (emotion-laden) ecclesiastical histories. Against such a background, a policy that kept central formulae as vague as possible (as in Zeno's Henotikon) seems eminently sensible.

Bell also makes a link between the structural changes in the Church as a source of patronage and the inability of leading parties to find compromise. The importance of theological slogans for group identity, and the strong connections between bishops and their monastic supporters meant that compromise could always be presented as cowardice.

However, though he acknowledges that it is impossible to separate religious and political thought in antiquity, there is still sometimes a sense that the key protagonists are rational actors manipulating or being thwarted by a populace in the thrall of irrational religion (for example, p. 176). For instance, Justinian's death-bed adoption of ‘Julianism’ is labelled as a ‘mistake’ by Bell. But we could see it instead as a Christological insight, formed by a man with long experience of engagement with the issues who was able to see theological connections across traditional confessional battle-lines.

Chapter v considers the competition between paganism and Christianity. On the one hand, Bell notes the widespread survival of pagan religion, both among the elite and the peasantry, and the survival of Hellenic culture and attitudes within the elite as a whole. Indeed, the very fact that Nicholas of Sion or Theodore of Sykeon (pp. 256–8) needed to perform the kinds of miracles with which pagans were familiar demonstrates the ‘ontological security’ of the old religions. Richard Bulliet has made a similar point in his book Conversion to Islam in the medieval period (Cambridge, Ma 1977): converts bring with them expectations of what ‘religion’ does, and this in turn forces proselytising religions to adapt to their expectations.

Bell uses Pseudo-Dionysius and Malalas to illustrate the potential of Christianity to generate a complete intellectual system, whether by invoking an all-inclusive hierarchy that extends from the lowest mortals to God, tacitly excluding pagans and heretics (p. 253) or Malalas's euhemerising annexation of the classical past (pp. 260–2). There is much to be said for Bell's emphasis on these forms of Christianity, with their cross-confessional appeal, which avoid any criticism of the unequal structures of the state. Still, I would not go so far as Bell in speaking of ‘the Christian ideology’, if only because criticism of the regime could flow from both ‘Hellenic’ and Christian sources. I think in particular of the representation of Justinian's religious intolerance of the Arian Vandals in Procopius' Vandal wars, a form of Kaiserkritik that, to my mind, is strongly rooted in the Bible and in Christian ecclesiastical history.

Chapter vi, on the construction of legitimacy, is the core of the book. It fully vindicates Bell's approach to theory and should make a star appearance on undergraduate reading lists. It also develops many of the insights that Bell first put forward in his 2009 Translated Texts for Historians volume, Three political voices from the age of Justinian. Here Bell emphasises Justinian's vulnerability as an outsider to Constantinople's elite (p. 279), and his further weakness as a result of natural disasters such as the plague of 541 (pp. 306ff.). Using Justinian's own legal programme, Bell presents Justinian combing all three forms of Weberian charisma: he draws on the full range of the Roman legal tradition, asserts his own God-given charisma and demonstrates its rationality, as a means of redress against injustice. The snobbery of Procopius and John Lydus are read as a social fact in themselves, which justifies their criticism of Justinian and John the Cappadocian as parvenus. And Justinian's employment of lawyers and bishops is seen as an attempt to compensate for the disloyalty of an older service elite schooled in paideia. Chapter vii is essentially a coda to chapter vi, and considers Justinian's construction of the Hagia Sophia as a reply to the claims of the powerful aristocrat Anicia Juliana.

In sum, Bell's work is both stimulating and useful. The range of primary material that it cites should be a goad to further investigation even for those who do not share Bell's appreciation of social theory. I should like to conclude with two observations on how one might develop the challenge that Bell sets here, of how to understand the problems of Justinian's reign as a single complex whole. The first is drawn from A. H. M. Jones, whose Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (Oxford 1964) combined a chronological survey with a thematic treatment of the period under study. Bell's thematic approach is fascinating, but I was also left wondering what a similar study of the late fifth century might look like. Here we have a number of forms of ‘dysfunctionality’ (to use Bell's language) that had mostly vanished by the reign of Justinian: inter-ethnic conflict (under Aspar, Leo and Zeno); the collapse of the bronze currency; the loss of the West and the disloyalty of military personnel. Many of these problems were cleared up during the reign of Anastasius, but it may be that they also distracted successive emperors from providing long-term solutions to other issues, such as the dominance of the magnates or the disunity of the Church.

The second is drawn from Adam Schor's excellent book on Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Theodoret's people (Berkeley 2011). Theodoret's works themselves, especially his Cure of Hellenic maladies, provide an impressive example of many of the themes that Bell explores in chapter v, particularly the Christian apology for the inequality of wealth and the absorption of paideia. Schor's book uses network theory to investigate how groups of individuals share cultural cues, such appeals to agapē or philia, and that these define ‘group membership’ much better than shared theology. Furthermore, he argues that the language of patronage in which the experience of Antiochene theologians was couched came to define their language of theology. Like Bell, Schor provides an example of how the history of social structures and that of political systems were intertwined, and the importance of a sensitivity to language use and its context. Perhaps the kind of network theory that Schor used in the study of Theodoret's letters might make an interesting complement to Bell's analysis of the world of Justinian.