Ancient Historians · Part 24 · Later historians · B2–C1
Procopius: The Wars and the Secret History
Part 24 of Ancient Historians, the last: five hundred years after Philo, in Constantinople, a historian called Procopius wrote three books about the emperor Justinian. In the first, he praised his wars; in the second, his buildings. In the third, kept secret until after his death, he called Justinian a demon and his wife Theodora a monster. Which Procopius should we believe? Stance and attitude in reporting (claims, alleges, praises, condemns, apparently, supposedly), contrast and bias, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria. Some of Procopius’s accusations are left out of this lesson.
Tonight is our last historian, and he lives the furthest in the future: five and a half centuries from now, in a new capital called Constantinople, where the Roman Empire will still exist, speaking Greek and calling itself Christian.
Five hundred years! Will historians still be asking our questions then?
Even more of them, Philo. Procopius will write three books about one emperor: two full of praise, and one, hidden in a drawer until he died, full of hatred. It is the strangest puzzle in ancient history. Tonight we learn the grammar of stance: how a writer’s choice of verb shows what he thinks of what he reports.
Procopius (about 500–565 CE) came from Caesarea in Palestine. He became legal adviser and secretary to Belisarius, the greatest general of the emperor Justinian, and went with him on campaigns against the Persians in the east, the Vandals in North Africa and the Goths in Italy. His Wars, in eight books, is an eyewitness history of these campaigns, written in the style of Thucydides, and it includes a famous description of the great plague that struck Constantinople in 542, which…
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