Gregorius was endlessly busy and distracted by the demands of his office, and we can track his concerns through the happy chance of the survival of his official register of letters. More than 900 such missives show him as an attentive and mainly effective administrator. He controlled official estates at a distance through stewards and managers, he conducted diplomacy with the leaders of neighboring provinces, and he paid particular attention to ensuring the continuity of local governance in Italy and beyond. He assembled a leadership team, as we would say nowadays, following the model of Roman bureaucracy of the last three centuries, and we can see some of those leaders themselves advancing to higher responsibility over the years. He was not directly accountable for military affairs, but he was in constant communication with generals and he advocated strenuously for a vigorous, vigilant defense.

Attacking corruption

Personally, he was an austere and challenging leader, attacking corruption and demanding the highest and most self-denying personal integrity. In practice, his patronage fell on those who, like him, had come through a difficult training to reach a high ethical standard. When he died, his epitaph called him a consul,5 but his successors, restive with regard to his personal style, execrated his name and sought to forget all he had struggled to teach. His successors of the seventh century were, in the aggregate, far less effective as rulers and far less well known to posterity than he, and they did not prevail in their effort to make us forget his name.

That personal style was the most remarkable thing about him. If Theoderic looked forward pragmatically to a continuing and more or less well-led Roman empire, and if Justinian looked forward delusionally to a restored grandeur that was never in the cards, Gregorius anticipated doom. The apocalyptic last things of the Christian religion preoccupied him, and he regarded the civil and military setbacks that the western provinces underwent in the late sixth century as signs of the impending end. Though he struggled hard to advance the physical and material well-being of the population entrusted to his care, his frank expectation was that the struggle was of little use. The horrific disaster and judgment that Christianity promised as waiting for humankind in the vestibule to an eternity of happiness was the best that Roman society could look forward to. Gregorius was the most effective and best-documented orator among Roman rulers since the age of Cicero, but his surviving speeches counsel not civic responsibility or imperial ambition, but resignation and moral preparation for disaster.

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