procopius of caesarea the secret history

As Procopius himself states in his introduction: These unpublished things had been unpublished for a reason.

This Greek word didn’t so much mean “anecdotes” as “unpublished things”. What was this additional text by the official historian of Byzantium’s greatest emperor and why had it only emerged after his death? The comparatively short text originally appeared entitled Anecdota (the Secret History is a Latin and much later title). Some years after it a third book, purported to have been written by Procopius emerged. The life of Procopius was like that of many other men of letters of his era, with the possibly exception of the intimate access that he had to the imperial family, but Procopius’ story doesn’t end with his death. The date of Procopius’ death is uncertain but many scholars date it to AD 565, by curious coincidence the same year as both Justinian and Belisarius. At the same time he published a series of official histories The Histories, which were known as The Discourses about the Wars at the time (not a snappy title) and The Buildings of Justinian, a monumental work detailing the huge changes that the emperor made to Constantinople in his lifetime. Over the next twenty years Procopius held a series of public offices possibly culminating in being made prefect of the city in AD 562.

When Belisarius returned to Constantinople Procopius accompanied him and became part of the intimate circle of the emperor himself, Justinian and that of his eminent wife, the empress Theodora (who are shown here in the mosaic images from Ravenna). He accompanied the general on many of his succesful campaigns in Italy and North Africa and was ideally placed to record the battles and events that he experienced. Procopius was clearly succesful in his career as in AD 527 he became the private secretary to the great military hero of the Byzantine a world, a man called Belisarius (a tremendous subject for a future blog). We don’t know too much about his family history but he seems to have come from reasonable means as he trained in rhetoric and became an advocate in the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire. In around AD 500 a man called Procopius was born in the city of Caesarea on the Levantine coast. The book in question is an almost unbelievable piece of work and it always used to be a favourite topic amongst my students when I was teaching Byzantine history in west London about twelve years ago. I was browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells yesterday when I came across a copy of a book that I hadn’t read in years but was intending to blog about – very serendipitous.

Procopius of caesarea the secret history