Download PDF | (Hackett Classics) Prokopios, Anthony Kaldellis, H. B. Dewing, Ian Mladjov - The Wars of Justinian-Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (2014).
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Introduction
Prokopios’ History of the Wars of Justinian (or simply the Wars) is one of the greatest works of history written in antiquity or Byzantium. That is not primarily a statement about its length, though it is lengthy. At 1,200 pages of printed Greek, it is longer than almost every other contemporary history that has come down to us from antiquity but it also covers a shorter time frame than most, about twenty-five years, making it the densest account of contemporary warfare. Because of this there are few periods of ancient history that we know as well in terms of their events and personalities. The Wars is written in clear, fluid classical Greek, and rarely bores or confuses the reader. It is an engaging narrative of a fascinating period of history that would otherwise have been much more obscure to us. It draws on classical literature to offer moments of Homeric heroism, Herodotean inquiry, and Thucydidean level-headedness and rhetoric.
Prokopios is always in control. The Wars is also an innovative and courageous work, two aspects that go together. The “safe” practice among historians of imperial Rome was to conclude their narration at the end of the previous reign, thus avoiding the choice between panegyric (flattery of the current emperor) and personal risk (telling the awful truth). Prokopios was the only one who dared to write and publish a work that covered mostly the current reign and that was generally neutral and sometimes critical of the emperor, Justinian, a ruler not known to tolerate disagreement. Prokopios reserved his most biting criticisms for a separate work, which we call the Secret History.’
He also experimented with structure. Justinian’s armies were, at times, simultaneously active in five theaters of war: northern Mesopotamia, Lazike (ancient Kolchis, modern Georgia), the Danube frontier, Italy, and North Africa. There was no precedent for writing a military history about so much going on at the same time. Prokopios tripartite solution has served historians well, though it poses difficulties too. The events of the sixth century were momentous enough, but there is also a sense in which it was an “unexpected” century. It defies the logical progression from the world of the Roman empire to that of the Middle Ages and Islam.
If we knew only the major changes of the fifth and seventh centuries, namely the fall of the western Roman empire and the Arab conquests, we would never postulate the resurgence of Roman power and culture in the sixth century. The fifth-century East was prosperous and relatively quiet, excepting the usual interminable theological controversies. In the sixth century it not only mobilized the resources to reconquer a large part of the West from the barbarians, once and for all codify Roman law, and build Hagia Sophia (projects attributable to Justinian’s initiative), it was also (no thanks to Justinian though) dynamic and innovative in its literary production, including historiography, philosophy and political thought, science, poetry (in both Greek and Latin), geography, antiquarian scholarship, theology, and hagiography. Justinian looms over this period as its main doer, Prokopios as its chief reporter.
The Wars is long enough and does not need an extensive introduction to further lengthen this volume. There is no point in giving an overview of the reign, as there are plenty of books that do that and they rely largely on the Wars anyway. The topics the work does not cover, especially Church history, are largely irrelevant to its own subject matter, which is war. This introduction, then, presents what we know about the author and a likely theory about the construction and composition of this work and its esoteric supplement, the Secret History. While Prokopios’ military narrative is clear enough, he does not divulge basic information about the organization of the Roman army in the sixth century, which he took for granted. This will therefore be laid out in the second section. For other topics of possible interest, such as the enemies with whom the empire was at war, the reader is referred to the guide to scholarship below.
The Composition of Prokopios’ Works
All the facts that we know about Prokopios’ life come from his own writings. He was born ca. 500 in the major coastal city of Kaisareia (Caesarea Maritima), the seat of the governor of the province of Palaestina Prima. The city was a center of learning since the third century (Eusebios was its bishop in the early fourth century) and it boasted many amenities and monuments. The population of its territory was religiously mixed, including Christians of many varieties, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans. We estimate the date of Prokopios’ birth from his appearance in 527 as the legal advisor/secretary of the rising military officer Belisarios (soon promoted to general in 529) and the fact that he was still writing in the 550s. His movements for the period 527-540 were determined by his service to Belisarios, as revealed by seemingly random glimpses in the narrative of the Wars. Before being posted to the east, Belisarios belonged to the retinue of Justinian, who was a general but resident in Constantinople. It is likely, then, that Prokopios and Belisarios met in the capital during the 520s.
Prokopios served on the eastern front in 527-531. In 533 he sailed from Constantinople with the expedition to North Africa and probably returned with Belisarios for the triumph in Constantinople in 534 (though that is not certain). It is likely that he accompanied Belisarios to Sicily in 535; at any rate, we know that in Easter 536 he was in Carthage with Solomon. He then served Belisarios in Italy during the first phase of the Gothic War (536-540), experiencing the siege of Rome, being sent on various missions, and witnessing the fall of Ravenna in 540. Presumably he returned to Constantinople with Belisarios in 540 and was there when the plague broke out in 542. There is no evidence that he served under the general again after that point, especially when Belisarios was disgraced and lost many of his retainers and staff. We cannot account for Prokopios’ whereabouts for the next decade.
In 550-551, Prokopios finished the first seven books of the Wars and the Secret History, presumably in Constantinople (though we cannot be certain of that). He had, however, been working on the Wars for some time, possibly since the 530s. Earlier stages of composition are visible in passages where Prokopios dates the time of writing to the mid-540s (1.25.43, 6.5.26-27). The original end of the Vandal War was clearly 546: Prokopios subsequently added a summary page to bring the story down to 550. We can conjecture, therefore, that a prior version (never released) ended with the events of 545-546, which also coincides with a break in the continuity of his reporting on the eastern front (2.28.11—16). But the war in Italy was ongoing, as it would be still in 551, when he finally released the first installment of the Wars.
The protracted delay of publication entailed structural adjustments to the work. Had Prokopios finished his history ten years earlier, in 540, right after the victory over the Goths but before the resumption of war with Persia, he could have written about the three wars in sequence, for the Endless Peace with Persia was signed in 532, the Vandal War in North Africa took up the next two years (533-534, though the new province remained unstable), and the Gothic War in Italy, which began in 535, seemed to be over by 540. Prokopios had personally witnessed almost all major operations. One scholar has proposed a seam in the work where the account of the Persian War originally led, in 532, to the Vandal War.” After 540, however, the three main theaters of war flared up again, and the Balkans became increasingly unstable as Huns, Slavs, and others raided across the Danube.
Prokopios probably already had long blocks of text, each dealing with a separate war. Rather than break them up and distribute them among the different theaters by year, as Thucydides had done, Prokopios split his narrative into three Wars, posing instead problems of coordination and relegating the Balkan events to digressions in the Gothic War. This also left domestic matters without a home. Some important events, such as the Nika Riots and plague, were placed in the Persian War, while others, such as an alleged conspiracy against Justinian, in the Gothic War. Eventually most internal coverage found its way into the Secret History, a supplementary book necessary for understanding the Wars in many places.
What was the relationship between the Secret History and the Wars? In the preface to the Secret History, Prokopios states that he included in it all the events that took place within the Roman empire that he could not tell in the Wars out of fear of the regime and its spies. When he later refers to that fear and those spies, it is with reference to Theodora (Secret History 16.3, 16.13-14), who died in 548. It has therefore been proposed that the passages dealing with the fall of the hated prefect Ioannes the Kappadokian in the Wars, which read as if they came from the “dossier” that formed the Secret History and do not fit naturally into the narrative of the Wars, were in facttransferred to the Wars from there after the death of Theodora.’
This creates the possibility that Prokopios was planning to write only one work that would have contained the material from both the Wars and Secret History, and that the delay in its publication was caused not only by the ongoing conflicts in the east and Italy but perhaps also by the author’s expectation that the emperor would die and that an integrated polemical history would be safer to publish. Justinian was, after all, about sixty in 542. Prokopios seems to have wanted the overthrow of his regime already in 544 (Secret History 4.40) and was supporting the emperor’s cousin Germanos by the late 540s, a man who had suffered at the hands of Theodora and who might, as a likely successor to the throne, introduce different policies (but he died in 550).* When Justinian was eventually replaced, in 565, with a nephew, his policies were repudiated by the new regime.”
By 550 at the latest, Prokopios was also planning to write an Ecclesiastical History, which he promises in a number of places, but this work seems never to have been written. Judging from his references to its intended contents, it would have been a scandalous work, closer to the Secret History in spirit.°
The most recent events included in the first seven books of the Wars date to early 551 at the latest. While scholars have proposed that various individual passages may refer to later events, in no case has this actually been proven.’ It would require that Prokopios in, say, 554, went back and added only one trivial piece of information to an otherwise finished narrative without modifying any other passages of the many that would have been obviously out of date by then. It would also mean that no trace of these variant editions of Wars 1-7 survives in the manuscript tradition, despite the fact that the work was widely disseminated already in 551 (cf 8.1.1) and copied often in Byzantium. Besides, he was working on the supplementary book 8 of the Wars, which carried the narrative down to the autumn of 552, including the decisive defeat of the Goths in Italy. That book refers to no event after late 552, and was probably finished in 553.°
The third work that Prokopios wrote was a long panegyric of Justinian, On the Buildings, focusing on the emperor's constructions. The date of this work cannot be securely fixed, though it now appears that Prokopios produced two versions, an early one and an expanded one that postdates the Wars.” We do not know whether it was ever finished, delivered to Justinian, or what circumstances prompted its composition. At any rate, the dynamics of imperial patronage in the empire were such that a request for a panegyrical work could not be turned down, nor should an attempt by Prokopios to secure the favor of an emperor qualify the hostility to the regime that he displays in the Secret History and Wars. Authors under Justinian did not enjoy freedom of speech. For all that, the Bucldings is a major source for understanding the church architecture, art history, archaeology, and topography of the sixth-century empire.
Little that is definite can be said about Prokopios’ sources for the majority of the Wars. For his brief coverage of the fifth century, we know or suspect that he consulted historians whose works are now mostly lost (Priskos of Panion and Eustathios of Epiphaneia), but for most of the Wars there would not have been useful written accounts. For what he did not witness himself, Prokopios would have relied on an extensive network of military, diplomatic, court, and personal contacts, in addition to the official documents that passed through his hands as the advisor of the empire's top general. It is fruitless to speculate beyond that. He certainly knew (some) Latin; as for Gothic, Syriac, or Persian, we cannot say.
We can say much more, by contrast, about the literary traditions on which Prokopios modeled his narrative, which count as “sources” too, for they shaped much of the information he conveys. In ways large and small, he advertised his imitation of the classical historians, especially Thucydides but also Herodotos, Xenophon, and others. The footnotes to the translation identify a number of these intertextual moments. Prokopios not only borrowed from those authors a range of expressions for referring to places, people, times, and events, he also modeled whole episodes on corresponding versions in them, most famously the plague of 542 but also sieges, speeches, debates, and battles. Past fears that this practice undermined the factual, contemporary reliability of his narrative have largely been refuted: even if the template is borrowed, the details are different and authentic (to the degree that they can be independently verified).
Besides, this practice was hardly unique to Prokopios. In late antiquity, being trained to write in classical Greek primarily entailed training in rhetoric, which referred both to formal speeches and to the art of prose composition more generally. Students learned to compose both descriptive and persuasive set pieces, and the former could include descriptions of events too. So the models and textbooks used in the schools of rhetoric were the classical orators and the historians. Before he saw a single battle, Prokopios was probably capable of writing a clear and gripping generic account of one. His experiences and sources later gave him the material to pour into these templates.'°
Moreover, Prokopios is often clever in the comparisons that he chooses to establish between his subjects and their classical counterparts, adding layers of meaning to his text. His quotations and allusions sometimes point to subversive or at any rate interesting parallels: these could be recognized only by those who shared his classical education. For all others the text would inevitably be flatter, even if still more than adequate as a historical narrative.
The Armies of Justinian
The Roman armed forces of the age of Justinian were the direct institutional descendants of the armies of the Republic and early empire, modified by the reforms of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337), and changed by gradual adjustments over the next two centuries. This section lays out the organizational structure of Justinian’s armies. For their modes of fighting, weapons, strategy, tactics, and the function of forts and walled cities in the defense of territories, readers have no better guide than the narrative of the Wars itself.'' Strategies for responding to specific foreign threats are outlined in the next section.
The majority of Roman soldiers were divided between two categories. The first were the /imitanei (“border soldiers”), who served in a particular location by the frontier and usually did not move from it. They were maintained in part by lands designated for that purpose and commanded by duces (singular, dux), who were in charge of specific territories (there were about fifteen duces). These units performed routine border patrol and policing and were the first responders in case of foreign invasion. Prokopios says that Justinian stopped paying /imitanei and then decommissioned them entirely (Secret History 24.12-14), a polemical and distorted claim.
Justinian degraded these soldiers in some way, probably by not paying them when they were not on active duty, but he also instituted them in North Africa after its conquest, sending an eastern unit and instructing Belisarios to recruit more locally (in Codex Justinianus 1.27, hereafter cited as CJ, under five additional duces). The backbone of the /imitanei system was the series of fortifications that the late Roman state built extensively around forts, depots, and cities along almost all of its frontiers. These enabled local troops to muster safely, to control and defend the surrounding territory, to protect the population from raiders, and either waste the enemy’s time and supplies by sieges or expose their rear to attack should they just bypass the fortified center and head deeper into Roman territory.
The second category were the mobile field armies, called comitatenses in fourthcentury Latin. Before Justinian, the eastern empire had four field armies: two were “praesental” (i.e., in the imperial presence), stationed in lands around Constantinople, and three were regional, for Illyria, Thrace, and the East. These armies were under the command of a general, called magister militum in Latin and strategos in Greek.
These were the more full-time, expeditionary armies of the later empire and they enjoyed higher status and better pay than the /imitanei. Justinian eventually added three more field armies, for Armenia, North Africa, and Italy, and a command for Spain, when he became involved there in the 550s (not in Prokopios); these all had more frontier duces under their authority. The majority of soldiers that we encounter in the Wars come from the mobile field armies. For example, the expeditionary force that Belisarios took to North Africa in 533 contained many men from the field army of the East, the command that he held at the time. These ad hoc forces were cobbled together from various detachments, but mostly from the field armies, and ranged in total size between 5,000 and 20,000 men.
Numbers are a notoriously difficult problem, both the paper strength of the units and their strength in fact at any time. Prokopios says that the field army of the east in 531 had 20,000 men (Wars 1.18.5) and the army of Illyria 15,000 men in 548 (7.29.3), and these figures are supported by evidence for the fifth century.'” Prokopios’ continuer Agathias says that all the armies together had 150,000 men (Histories 5.13.78), presumably meaning only the field armies after Justinian’s creation of four more (including Spain).
This means that each army was between 15,000 and 20,000 strong. As the /imitanei seem to have amounted to two-thirds of the total army, they would have been 300,000 additional men posted in frontier provinces. Adding the fleets and a number of other types of units (see below), we come to a total of about half a million fighting men—on paper, of course. This was about the population of the capital, Constantinople. If the population of the empire (including the conquered provinces) was around 30 million, this means that one out of every thirty males served in the army, and the ratio is lower if we consider only fit men between eighteen and forty. The army was therefore a sizable demographic presence in Roman life, even beyond its huge institutional presence.
There was a marked increase in the proportion of cavalry to infantry in this period, especially in the field armies, but many modern historians have been misled by the preface of Wars, which makes a facetious argument, into thinking that war was now all about cavalry. Most Romans continued to fight on foot. Cavalry amounted to maybe 20 percent of the field armies, and that in turn included a tiny number of mounted archers who could do the things that Prokopios says in the preface. However, the Wars makes clear that cavalry was overrepresented in expeditionary forces. Belisarios preferred to fight with cavalry, though Prokopios repeatedly reminds his readers of the virtues of the old-style, disciplined infantry formations, which no cavalry charge could break.'?
In addition to the Limitanei, comitatenses, and foederati (see below), there were also the bucellarii, the “private” elite armies that prominent generals and high-ranking magistrates in this period could recruit and support, if they had the means. At his peak, Belisarios maintained 7,000 bucellarii, mostly cavalry (Wars 7.1.20). They are called his “bodyguard” but were in fact an elite corps that functioned as the general’s command staff and carried out special assignments.
They were not “private” in a legal sense; like any other unit, they were absolutely at the emperor's disposal. Belisarios himself was stripped of most of them in 542 and later in the century all such units were folded into the regular army. More prestigious generals could poach each other’s bucellarii (Wars 7.39.17). Emperors had their own guard in Constantinople (we must not forget that the palace was a military-administrative installation with walls, gates, and a garrison). There were the scholae, seven units of 500 men, but by the time of Justinian they had lost their military value: their rank had become a commodity bought from the court (Secret History 24.15—23). The real guard at this time were the excubitores, 300 strong and under the command of the comes excubitorum, a high rank that produced many emperors (including Justin I).
Soldiers were recruited through conscription, hereditary obligations (to serve after one’s father, especially in the /imitanei), and volunteers. Sometimes before expeditions, generals would go around the usual provinces and use cash to entice men to sign up (Wars 7.10.1-3, 8.26.5-17). Justinian enrolled increasingly more foreign soldiers, especially when the plague (starting in 541) decimated the empire’s population. Foreigners volunteered in small or large groups, defected to the emperor, were defeated in war and absorbed into the Roman army (e.g., the Vandals after 534), or served as allies, often in discrete units and under their own leaders, following treaties made between their kings and the emperor. Justinian made many such deals with peoples along the Danube, including Huns, Bulgars, and Lombards.
It was also a long-standing policy of the emperors to settle large groups of barbarians in empty or deserted lands, especially along the Danube, which they would bring into cultivation (eventually paying taxes) and provide recruits. Along the southeastern frontier, the Romans made deals with local Arab chiefs, conventionally called Ghassanids by scholars but now Jafnids (led by al-Harith), to provide armies if necessary but mostly to patrol the zone between Rome and Persia and serve as a counterweight to Persia’s own Arab allies, conventionally known as Lakhmids and now Nasrids (led by al-Mundhir). (The difference in nomenclature is that between these rulers’ respective “peoples,” which are hard to identify in the sources, and their dynasties.) Allied foreign units were called foederati (foedus was a treaty), but soon Romans could join these units (Wars 3.11.3-4). The presence of these foreigners made the army a more multi-ethnic institution than any other part of late Roman society, increasingly so in the 540s and 550s.
The military was the single largest expense of the imperial treasury, claiming about half the budget, perhaps more. It was the chief means by which money would enter the Roman economy (and often travel beyond it): the state paid its soldiers and thus coins would enter the cycle, being eventually collected back by the state in taxes, restamped, and reissued. Soldiers were supported by a mixture of cash payments and supplies in kind, the balance between the two varying by time and place, ability and need; by the sixth century the balance tipped toward cash. The state could provide soldiers’ equipment, including clothes (from state factories), horses, and weapons (whose manufacture was an imperial monopoly), or these could be commuted to cash. A crippling problem faced by the army in the mid-sixth century, especially after 540, was Justinian’s inability to pay so many soldiers who were active simultaneously. Their pay would fall into arrears and they would either resort to extortion from the local population (especially in Italy), rebel, desert to the enemy, or just go home (e.g., Wars 7.11.13-16). There were also special cash donatives paid upon an imperial accession and every five years thereafter. Prokopios says (apparently truthfully) that Justinian abolished the quinquennial donatives (Secret History 24.27-29).
Campaigns and expeditions always cost extra, and sometimes required massive outlays upfront. There were no banks to lend money to the state. The emperors had to save up for this and, if the expedition failed (such as the disastrous effort to retake North Africa in 468, for which we have figures; Wars 3.6.1—2), the empire would be unable to act until it raised the money again. Conversely, conquest could bring riches (such as the Vandal treasury) that offset the initial expense and could pay for the next round of war. Regular revenue in the empire was raised by the office of the praetorian prefect, which was in charge of most taxation. That is why the prefect Ioannes the Kappadokian objected most to the proposed Vandal expedition in 533 (Wars 3.10.7): he would have to find the money for it, just when he was building Hagia Sophia.
We know little about the imperial navy beyond what Prokopios tells us. Its appears prominently in the North African campaign, ferrying the army across the Mediterranean and shadowing its march on Carthage. It was used to supply the coastal Roman forts in Italy during the Gothic War, especially when Totila had gained control of most of the peninsula in the 540s. The navy also routinely patrolled the Danube. In 536, Justinian organized the fleets under the command of the quaestor exercitus (Novel 51).
The Present Translation and Notes
This translation of the Wars is a thoroughly revised version of the translation made by Henry Bronson Dewing and published in the Loeb Classical Library series in five volumes between 1914 and 1928.'* Dewing’s translation, which was very good for its time, is now out of copyright, but this is not a reprint of it. I have corrected Dewing’s occasional errors, eliminated his archaism, modernized the language throughout, and in many places brought out contemporary nuances that Dewing missed. Aiming for an international audience, I have tried to avoid American and British idioms, but hopefully not at the cost of making the prose flavorless. In all, there is hardly a sentence that is left unchanged, and often the revisions are extensive. I have added dates to the margins, almost a thousand footnotes (see below), maps, and a wealth of other auxiliary material. My goal has been to produce an accessible, reliable, and affordable translation of the Wars in a single volume. There is no such version of the text currently available in any language. Prokopios is a major historian on a par with any of his ancient or medieval counterparts, and he deserves to be more widely available.
The revised translation has also been equipped with hundreds of notes. They (1) provide cross-references within the text when Prokopios alludes to previous or future discussions (but not cross-references to the appearances of every item in the Wars; for that there is an index); (2) cite classical sources, especially Thucydides, where Prokopios seems to be imitating their narrative or using their expressions (not for common expressions of two or three words, but usually for extended textual resonance); (3) provide information from other contemporary sources that supplement, explain, or challenge the testimony of Prokopios (see the guide to the main sources below); and (4) explain passages or references that are obscure at first sight or allude to individuals or events that modern readers may not know.
Obviously, they are not comprehensive, nor do they form a full commentary on the Wars. Modern bibliography is excluded from the notes, or else they would have swollen to an unmanageable length, nor is the appearance of individuals across the Wars cross-referenced in them (again, that is what the index is for). For the careers and offices of Prokopios’ protagonists, the interested reader should consult the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (see the guide to scholarship). In the notes I have generally avoided offering or citing interpretations of what Prokopios is saying.
As always, I cannot thank Ian Mladjov enough for providing the excellent maps, barbarian genealogies, templates for the ruler lists, and his general (and constructive) scrutiny of all my decisions in preparing this volume. Ian has made available online a set of invaluable resources for scholars and teachers of history (named “Ian Mladjov’s Resources”). A note on the maps: regional names are used by Prokopios in a general sense and do not often correspond to specific Roman provinces, though they were used for that purpose too. We have therefore decided not to define them with borders. Nor did we deem it useful to include all the Roman mini-provinces that would just clutter up the maps.
The Spelling of Names
Most personal names in Prokopios come from four linguistic traditions (Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Iranian), though he spells all according to Greek conventions. In general—and there are exceptions to the following “rules’—I have used the familiar “English” forms for well-known personages (e.g., Justinian, Theoderic); Latin spelling for the names of Romans from the western half of the empire (e.g., Paulus); and Greek spelling for Romans from the eastern empire (e.g., Paulos). There is no justification left for Anglicizing or Latinizing Byzantine names. As for Gothic names, I have tried to spell them as “authentically” as possible, keeping in mind that there was no standardized way of spelling anything in the early Germanic languages and that in most cases we have only a Latin or a Greek version. I have followed M. Schénfeld’s Worterbuch der altgermanischen personen- und Vélkernamen (Heidelberg, 1911). Iranian names are a problem.
Even more than the Germanic ones, they are spelled in a wide variety of ways in the sources, which were written in different languages and in widely separated periods. FE. Justi, Iranisches Namenbuch (Marburg, 1895), does not aim to provide usable modern forms. In the translation I have tried to give the modern Persian renditions of the middle Persian forms, which are the forms most used in modern scholarship, for example, in N. Frye’s Heritage of Persia and the Cambridge History of Iran (vol. 3); I thank Ian Mladjov for his help with this. When I have been unable to reconstruct that form, which is often, I have simply transliterated the Greek form used by Prokopios.
I have also left the name Chosroes in its Greek form. As for Arabic names, after flirting with the full system of diacritics used in proper transliteration, I reverted to more simple forms. Granted, the diacritics aspire to a higher standard of philological exactness, and perhaps even cultural sensitivity, but the need to use special keyboards and fonts and to know which vowels of an unknown language are long before you can write a name erects barriers between fields and prevents their communication.
For place-names, I have used Greek forms for those in the eastern empire (excluding well-known places such as Athens), Latin forms for North Africa, and modern names for places in Italy, France, and Spain, which usually derive from the ancient Latin ones (whose Greek versions are used by Prokopios). But I make exception for places whose modern name does not derive from the ancient (e.g., I keep Centumcellae, not Civitavecchia); in these cases, the modern name is given in the notes. “Byzantion” is how Prokopios refers to the city of Constantinople; “Byzantium,” by contrast, is a modern invention that refers to the empire as a whole.
Note on the Formatting of the Translation
As published by Prokopios, the Wars consists of eight books: the book number is here given at the top of each page of the translation. The books have, moreover, been divided by modern editors into chapters, between twenty-five and forty in number: the chapters are here separated by an empty line and their number given in bold print. Furthermore, for precision in citing the text each chapter has been divided into sections, some of which are only a sentence long: the section numbers are embedded in the main body of the text in square brackets. The italicized numbers in the margins are dates, exact or approximate. The footnotes are by Kaldellis.
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