The nineteenth-century French infant4 would be at significantly greater risk of starvation, infectious disease, and violence, and even if he or she were to survive into adulthood, would be far less likely to learn how to read.” A baby born in France in 1800 could expect to live thirty years-twenty-five years less than a baby born in the Republic of the Congo in 2000. And the phenomenon isn’t restricted to Europe and North America the same improvements have occurred in every region of the world. If you examined the years since 1800 in twenty-year increments, and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers-not just annual per capita GDP, which climbed to more than $6,000 by 2000, but mortality at birth (in fact, mortality at any age) calories consumed prevalence of infectious disease average height of adults percentage of lifetime spent disabled percentage of population living in poverty number of rooms per person percentage of population enrolled in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education illiteracy and annual hours of leisure time-the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning. Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire 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” 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.
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. 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.
First, the Green “debater” addresses the emperor, the viceroy of Christ on earth, practically as an equal. The dialogue is startling on a number of grounds. 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. “And not merely slogan-shouting, but debate.
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