Download PDF | Prokopios_ Anthony Kaldellis (ed. & trans.) - The Secret History, with Related Texts-Hackett Publishing Co. (2010).
276 Pages
Introduction
By 550, Prokopios felt that he had been living in a nightmare for most of his adult life. His view of government was that it should guard the borders of the state against barbarian aggression, promote the welfare and respect the rights of its subjects, appoint competent and honest people to high office, and enforce just laws. During the course of the past few decades, however, a regime of men and women, most of whom were unqualified for office, had set out to destroy both the stability of international order and the very foundations of lawful society. They had initiated two horrific wars on flimsy pretexts.
Though they preached liberation, they had brought only ruin upon the lands they had sought to liberate as well as upon their own armed forces, which they ground down through protracted service, often incompetent leadership, and penny-pinching fiscal policies. The liberated peoples were exposed to constant attack by local insurgents and to the rampant corruption and arbitrary rule of the imperial officials in charge of pacification and reconstruction. Moreover, while promoting such “glory” abroad, the regime had actually exposed the homeland to sudden and devastating attacks by enemies both old and new. Major cities, centers of commerce and culture, were destroyed by foreign attacks that could have been prevented. Few felt safe. And a new plague swept through the world, carrying off millions.
At home, the regime inaugurated an era of bigotry, repression, corruption, and injustice. Those viewed as sexual and religious deviants were targeted and persecuted, while funds, often illegally obtained, were funneled to the priests of the only approved faith. Religion was made an instrument of government to a hitherto unprecedented degree. Its rhetoric shaped imperial ideology, but often it seemed only a cover for the regime’s corruption and greed. Laws were canceled, enacted, or modified to suit the interests of the moment. Rights of property and persons were trampled on when they stood in the way of personal whims or ideological imperatives. Properties were seized without cause, citizens made to disappear or held and tortured without trial. Officials squeezed money from their subjects by inventing new fees and indirect taxes. Deficits soared while living standards declined. Power was given to lawless elements to terrorize the population and act outside the law. Critics were silenced, the cultured and intellectual classes scorned by a government that plotted all in secret behind a screen of religion.
These are the charges that The Secret History levels against the rulers of the most powerful state in the world at that time, the Roman emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora. Prokopios set out to expose the mechanisms and personalities behind this type of regime. It is no wonder that it also recounts so many actual nightmares, frightful demonic visitations, and dream-visions of devastation.
The Secret History is a unique historical document. No previous author had yet exposed the crimes of a regime by combining institutional, legal, and military analysis with personal attacks and salacious rumor quite as Prokopios does here. In this dense, behindthe-scenes pamphlet, he artfully combines the roles that today are divided among tabloid reporters, investigative journalists, public intellectuals, and “disgruntled” administration insiders. Its effect on Justinian’s reputation has been devastating. It is worth considering what that reputation might have been had the works of Prokopios not survived, or not been written. Justinian would surely be remembered and even celebrated as one of history’s great rulers: a builder of magnificent churches on an unparalleled scale, especially the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; a codifier of Roman law and major legislator in his own right; an emperor who reconquered provinces that had been lost to the barbarians, chiefly North Africa and Italy, temporarily reversing the empire’s “decline”; and an ascetic Christian monarch who worked tirelessly to restore the Church to unity, contributing personally to the theological debates.' In the absence of Prokopios’ dissident voice, historians would have placed their trust in the emperor’s many pronouncements, which were designed to project precisely such an image of greatness, as well as in the favorable testimonies of the chroniclers who sought his favor and echoed the official version of events. The many other voices of criticism that were raised against Justinian during his reign would have been too scattered, obscure, and insufficiently prestigious to prevail against his pervasive and cunningly designed propaganda.’ It was only by providing detailed and abundant inside information and by deploying the literary techniques and conceptual resources of classical historiography and political thought that Prokopios succeeded in undermining the emperor’s reputation.
Tn fact, The Secret History played a decisive role in the transformation of Justinian’s image in European thought. Before the document’s discovery in 1623, Justinian was more a cultural icon than a historical figure. His name was associated with the codification of Roman law that formed the basis of legal science in the West (beginning in the eleventh century). His legacy was entrusted more to jurists than to historians. Until the seventeenth century, moreover, the controversies that surrounded his name concerned the legitimacy of his interventions in the Church and his heavy-handed treatment of the popes (in a word, the problem of “Caesaropapism”). But these legal and theological concerns emerged from the controversies of medieval and early modern Europe. They did not reflect the concerns of Justinian’s own time or provoke efforts by historians to evaluate the reign as a whole. That began to change in 1623, when Vatican archivist Nicolé Alemanni discovered the text of The Secret History and published it under the double title Anekdota and Historia arcana. The former word is where English gets anecdote, but in Greek it means “unpublished material.” Anekdota is what the work is called in its first definite attestation, in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia Souda.’ Like Historia arcana (The Secret History in Latin), Anekdota is less a title than an editorial description of contents. We don’t know what Prokopios would have called the work. Interestingly, Alemanni did some editing of his own to the text, specifically omitting Chapter 9, the pornographic account of the early years of Justinian’s empress Theodora. It was restored to the text in later editions.
The publication of The Secret History transformed Justinian from a legal abstraction to a human ruler with flaws, personal and political interests, and secrets. Prokopios’ pamphlet has fundamentally shaped all subsequent efforts to come to terms with Justinian’s momentous reign, as we see as early as Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), and culminating in Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1778), whose account of Justinian basically, even gleefully, followed The Secret History.* The problems posed by this single, brief, but indispensible text remain acute today. It is necessary, then, to situate it within its broader historical background and its more specific literary and political context, which is what the rest of the present introduction aims to do.
But before we turn to the Roman Empire in the sixth century, one more point is worth making about Prokopios’ endeavor. He was the sole major historian of the Roman Empire to write about the reign of a living emperor. The rule among his predecessors and successors was to conclude their narrative at the point where the current regime took over, for one could not be both honest and safe when writing about reigning monarchs and their wives and servants. What they sometimes did was to treat past rulers as surrogates for the indirect discussion of present ones (so, e.g., Tacitus’ Tiberius is a cover for Hadrian,’ Ammianus’ Julian is a partial foil for Theodosius I, etc.). Prokopios was unique and courageous not only in that he wrote a neutral and mostly critical history of the wars of Justinian, who was a dangerous man to offend, but also in that he dared to write The Secret History when Justinian, the great spider at the center of the vast imperial web, was still alive. This unique quality infuses his works with the suspense of secrets furtively told and outcomes not yet decided.
The Roman Empire in the Sixth Century
In 527, when Justinian ascended to the throne, the Roman Empire encompassed the Balkans (north to the Danube River), Asia Minor and northern Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. These regions were ruled by a single centralized state whose capital was at Constantinople, or New Rome. Since the fourth century, the empire had unofficially been called Romania, namely the polity of the Roman people (their res publica, or politeia in Greek). The empire that modern historians call “Byzantium” was the direct continuation of this Roman polity, preserving for another thousand years the same name for its state and national identity. The Roman Empire of the sixth century, therefore, was a bridge between the classical empire of antiquity and Byzantium. It had a single, centralized set of military, administrative, fiscal, and judicial institutions; a single coinage and law; a predominant language (Greek); and increasingly one religion, though Justinian managed to split it irrevocably into two hostile churches. It was Roman identity that provided the primary basis of the empire’s unity, not Christianity as is often stated. The faith actually created tensions and, by the reign’s end, a permanent rupture. What stirred less controversy was what all agreed on, namely that they were Romans. The deepest and most stable ideologies are those that are most taken for granted.
The military and cultural resurgence of the sixth-century empire deviates from the conventional narrative in which the fall of the Roman Empire in late antiquity ushers in the Middle Ages. For one thing, it is by now understood that only half of the empire actually “fell,” namely the western half, while the eastern half, “Byzantium,” survived for more than a thousand years. Nor was the history of the eastern empire one of continuous decline. The reign of Justinian in particular (527-565) played an unexpected role in the historical transformation that led from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. Tt occupied that ambiguous pocket of time between the deposition of the last western Roman emperor in 476, when finally even Italy was openly governed by Germanic kings (albeit in a way that preserved many Roman traditions), and the mid-seventh century, when the Arabs began their conquest of the Near East and North Africa. After 700, only parts of the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Italy remained to the “rump” empire. Yet flanked as it was historically by the fall of the West and the rise of Islam, the sixth-century empire nevertheless asserted itself dynamically on the world stage, revealing unexpected sources of strength, resilience, and creativity. The groundwork had actually been laid down in the fifth century, when the political authorities at Constantinople managed to gain control over their barbarian allies and armies, the opposite of what happened in the West. Through diplomacy and bribery, they ensured a long period of relative peace that fostered economic and demographic growth. Military, civilian, and fiscal institutions were consolidated and placed on a sound footing, especially by the accountant-emperor Anastasios (r. 491-518), whom Prokopios and others whose careers were precisely within those institutions would uphold as a model of sober governance. Justinian was thereby enabled to launch a series of military ventures, seizing North Africa from the Vandals, Italy from the Ostrogoths (though only after a twenty-year war), and even parts of Spain from the Visigoths. The story of Roman “decline and fall” did not, just then, seem to be inevitable, and the emperor’s daring general Belisarios was believed by many to rival the heroes of classical antiquity. In fact, Justinian repeatedly proclaimed his intention to restore the glory of the Roman Empire, and it was precisely Prokopios’ intent to question and undermine that claim.
Drawing on a pool of new talent, Justinian pushed through internal reforms as well. Early in his reign, he appointed a team of jurists (ultimately headed by the scholar Tribonianos) to codify Roman law and bring it up to date. The fruit of their labor was a hugely influential compilation known in modern times as the Corpus of Civil Law (Corpus iuris civilis), which is still the main source for Roman legal thought. The emperor continued to issue reform edicts, trying to improve administrative efficiency and, in particular, to constantly refine the law of property succession, creating considerable confusion among the propertied classes. He also sponsored extensive and innovative church building, which would be panegyrically described by Prokopios in the Buildings (after 554).° His crowning achievement was the cathedral of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in the capital, completed in 537 by the architects Anthemios and Isidoros. Justinian also labored to solve the religious impasse of his age, namely the split between those who accepted and those who rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451). Here he vacillated between dialogue and persecution. The controversy generated a great deal of heated writing on both sides and the emperor’s policies resulted in failure (and, many believed, heresy): the Church was split in two with few prospects of ever being unified again.
Toward other fields Justinian was either indifferent or hostile. That some flourished was often in spite of his efforts and due to the vitality of the culture at large. He cracked down on the non-Christian Platonist philosophers of Athens, closing their schools in 529531 and leaving them no choice but to seek refuge in Persia, from where they returned under guarantee of protection in 532, and continued to write commentaries on ancient philosophy. Historiography attained classical levels of quality with Prokopios’ Wars, whose narrative was continued around 580 by Agathias, a classically educated lawyer. The sixth century also witnessed the composition of annalistic chronicles in Latin and Greek that were favorable to Justinian; ecclesiastical histories and accounts of saints’ lives in Syriac and Greek that were not; epigrams and erotic poetry; the compilation of medical encyclopedias as well of a massive gazetteer in sixty books by Stephanos of Byzantion; the kontakia of the great liturgical poet Romanos Melodos; antiquarian scholarship by Ioannes Lydos on Roman institutions and the Roman calendar (in Greek, but using Latin sources); the only history of the Goths to survive from antiquity, written in Latin and in Constantinople by Iordanes, who claimed to be of Gothic descent himself; a philosophical dialogue treating contemporary political issues; and the last Latin epic poet of antiquity, Corippus (who came of age in Vandal North Africa but sought patronage at the Byzantine court).’ The literary scene, then, combined innovation, encyclopedism, and the continued development of classical genres. Little of this was sponsored by Justinian, though a fair deal of it was responding to the developments of his reign, in many cases negatively.
Greek was spoken by the majority of the population and in all parts of the empire. Other languages, except Latin, were mostly regional. Coptic was spoken by a large part of the population of Egypt as was Syriac (a form of late Aramaic) in some of the eastern provinces, but there was considerable bilingualism in both regions (with Greek). In contrast to Syriac, which produced a vast corpus of Christian writings in this period and afterward, the tongues of Anatolia (such as Phrygian) are sparsely attested and were soon to disappear. Many Armenians lived in the eastern provinces and had joined the Roman armies, especially after the formation of a field army for the northeastern frontier. Latin was spoken in some Balkan regions, at the top levels of the administration, and, after a fashion, in the army. The eastern Mediterranean had been governed in Greek by Roman officials ever since the time of the Republic. However, the universal extension of Roman citizenship in 212, the gradual concentration of the legions in the East, the creation of a New Rome in the East by Constantine in 330, and the expansion of the bureaucracy transformed the Greek-speaking East in accordance with Latin law and administration. Justinian’s origins were in the central Balkans so, while he knew Greek, his native tongue was Latin. But two proponents of Latinity during the reign (Tribonianos and Toannes Lydos) were speakers of Greek from Asia Minor. Use of Latin by the administration, however, was steadily receding, as Lydos complained.* In the early fifth century, all communication between subjects and the state had to be translated from Greek into Latin to reach the higher levels of the administration, whose responses then had to be translated into Greek to be understood by the original petitioners.’ But since that time the requirement to use Latin was gradually dropped by bureau after bureau until even Justinian began to issue his edicts in Greek (with Latin translation). In the process, however, a great number of Latin terms entered the Greek vocabulary, as the reader of The Secret History can see. Many chapters of The Secret History denounce Justinian’s persecution of religious minorities. The population of the empire was by now overwhelmingly, but not monolithically, Christian. There were still pagans in the provinces while many intellectuals, especially in the capital and even high in the administration, subscribed to nonChristian philosophical systems. Pagan cults were still local and diverse in character, and they had no empirewide institutions. There was probably little in common between the pagans of Harran in Syria, of Athens, and of upper Egypt, and it would be mistaken to think of philosophers as “pagans.” The Church, of course, lumped them all together and called them Hellenes, that is, Greeks (paganus was used in the Latin West). Jews could be found in many cities and regions of the empire, but they concerned the authorities less than did the Samaritans (a parallel branch of ancient Judaism), who repeatedly revolted in Palestine in the fifth and sixth centuries and had to be militarily suppressed. Christian heresies still survived from earlier phases of the Church, including Arianism and Montanism. A measure of religious diversity, then, characterized the empire in 527 when Justinian took the throne. Through persecution and coercion, he did leave the empire a more Christian realm by the end of his reign. Where Justinian failed, ironically, was in achieving Christian unity. In fact, his efforts to make all Christians accept the Council of Chalcedon, whether through dialogue, compromise, or persecution, resulted in open schism. In contrast to the persecution of the minority groups mentioned above, this was a development that Prokopios does not much discuss in The Secret History, in part because he found theological controversy distasteful and also because he promised to cover those events in a likewise scandalous Ecclesiastical History, a work that, in the end, he never wrote.'°
Another of Prokopios’ main complaints in The Secret History concerned the cities. The Roman Empire in the sixth century was still a network of cities, each of which drew sustenance and revenue from its agricultural hinterland. But trade was a crucial part of the overall economy. The cities were less autonomous than they had been in the earlier Roman Empire. All law was now Roman law; local politics were subordinate to the imperial bureaucracy; and the cities’ finances were often micromanaged by imperial officials. The tax rate was higher, so less money was available for local projects, maintenance, and new buildings. Cities had to petition the court for tax breaks and financial assistance, especially after natural disasters and barbarian raids. In many places the physical amenities of classical culture crumbled (e.g., gymnasia and baths), but there was extensive church building. The Church was now one of the greatest landowners and was continuously receiving gifts and bequests. Thus the topography, aesthetics, and power structures of most urban centers changed, though this did not sap their cultural vitality. The dynamic literary culture discussed above was produced by writers who originated in virtually every province of the empire. Talent flowed to the capital and administration, though these men did not lose pride in their native cities.
One of the goals of The Secret History was to expose how the corruption and fiscal oppression of Justinian’s regime negatively impacted the cities and the economic prosperity of his subjects. Writers and intellectuals like Prokopios generally came from the more prosperous sectors of local society, but we lack precise demographic and economic data for the overall structure of imperial society. Small farms cultivated by free peasants probably formed the basis of both society and economy, but some have argued that large estates were on the rise (these are better documented in Egypt, where the papyri reveal the existence of fiscally complex, family-run agribusinesses)."! A complicated system of contractually agreed rents, fees, and labor duties bound small farmers and large landowners in reciprocal, if asymmetrical, relationships. Slaves now constituted a smaller part of the workforce than in the earlier empire. In theory, the same law applied to all Romans. Power came from office, not birth or ethnicity, and career advancement was open to all. Some of the generals and civil administrators in The Secret History came from humble provincial backgrounds. The emperors of the late fifth and sixth centuries were former soldiers, peasants, or accountants, often of provincial origin. But in practice wealth conferred great advantage in terms of securing connections, credentials, and offices, whether local or imperial. Justin and Justinian, men of humble and even “rough” provincial origin, rose up through a system that deferred to families of wealth, illustrious descent, and entrenched power. Opportunity and conceit, then, as well as talent and privilege, made for a fluid and dynamic social scene.
By 500, therefore, what we call the Roman Empire was partly the nation-state of the Roman people (Romania), an aspect that would emerge more fully in middle Byzantium, and partly a multiethnic empire, an aspect temporarily highlighted in the sixth century by Justinian’s wars of conquest. The primary and unquestioned identity of the vast majority of the population was Roman, certainly of Latin and Greek speakers but also of Syriac speakers and in Egypt; likewise of pagans and Christians, Chalcedonians and Monophysites, rich and poor.'? With a few exceptions (for example, among Samaritans, Jews, and possibly Isaurians), there were no ethnic or territorial groups that maintained a historical memory, ethnic identity, or social structure that differentiated them from mainstream Roman society. Regional diversity was mostly geographic or reflected only administrative realities. “Macedonians,” for example, were merely Romans from Macedonia. We find throughout The Secret History references to Thracians, Paphlagonians, Bithynians, Kappadokians, Kilikians, Phoenicians, Palestinians, and others. These were not ethnicities but regional labels derived from the names of provinces or classical geography: almost all of these people were simply Romans. Yet negative stereotypes attached to certain regions. Under Justinian, the Kappadokians, who already had a reputation for being uncouth, were further reviled because of the harsh fiscal measures devised by Justinian’s despised prefect Ioannes the Kappadokian, who appears often in the work.'* That so many individuals in the narrative bear these regional markers indicates, conversely, the widespread participation by provincials in what was by now a national and Roman political culture.
On the other hand, Justinian’s conquests in the West, along with his incorporation of hitherto unconquered regions of the Caucasus into the empire, revitalized the sense that Romans exercised imperial hegemony over others.'* Prokopios himself was not without Roman pride but he detested how Justinian linked this imperialism to his own aggrandizement and corrupt regime (to say nothing of the botched military planning). Moreover, the emperor seemed not to treat his Roman and barbarian subjects any differently. He extensively recruited soldiers from among the barbarians, both those within and outside the empire, and his imperial ventures in the West left the Balkans and the East exposed to barbarian attack. The Secret History reacts to these policies by demanding that the borders of the empire be defended against all enemies by armies recruited among, and loyal to, the population that they were charged to protect.’* War should be waged only in the interests of Romania, and not to feed a monarch’s hunger for exaltation.
The Historical Background of The Secret History: An Overview of 518-551
Between 450 and 565, the imperial throne was occupied by provincials of humble origin who rose up through the ranks of the army or bureaucracy. Justin I (r. 518-527) was an illiterate Balkan peasant who, at an advanced age, was captain of the palace guard when Anastasios, himself almost 90, died in 518. Through intrigue with the guard, he had himself acclaimed emperor. The following overview will trace the history of the empire from that moment until 551, focusing on the events and people that Prokopios discusses in The Secret History (therefore excluding ecclesiastical history).’* It will also follow the movements of Prokopios himself, to the extent that they can be reconstructed. Readers familiar with this historical background may skip this section. Studies of many of the events and topics mentioned here are cited in A Guide to Scholarship in English.
Politically, Justin’s first concern was to secure peace with Vitalianos, a general who had been in rebellion against Anastasios for many years. In 518, Vitalianos was reconciled to the regime in exchange for offices, including the consulship in 520. But that year he was murdered in the palace, a deed that many blamed on Justin’s nephew Justinian, who had risen to a position of great influence. Justinian would become consul in 521. A few years later, after the death of Justin’s empress Euphemia, a law was passed allowing senators to marry former actresses; its purpose was to enable Justinian to marry Theodora.” In 526, the great metropolis of Antioch was destroyed by an earthquake that caused thousands of deaths. Justin undertook to rebuild it. Tensions had meanwhile been mounting with Persia during the 520s regarding the religious loyalties of subject peoples in the Caucasus, the Lazoi and Iberians. In 527, Justinian was made emperor just a few months before Justin’s death.
Justinian immediately moved against pagans, Manicheans, and apostates, and soon (in 529 or 531) targeted the schools at Athens. At the same time, in 528, he appointed a commission to revise Roman law that concluded its work in 534 with the final version of the Corpus iuris civilis (mentioned earlier). By the end, the director of this project was the jurist and guaestor Tribonianos. In 529, there was a major Samaritan revolt in Palestine. The rebels captured Neapolis (Nablus) and set up an emperor of their own named Ioulianos, but the rebellion was crushed militarily. In 530, Moundos defeated a Slav raid in the Balkans (he was a Gepid who had served the Goths in Italy for decades and had recently taken up service under Justinian). In that year, a Persian offensive against Armenia was defeated by Sittas (married to Theodora’s sister Komito); and the young general Belisarios defeated a large Persian army in a battle at Daras by the border. Prokopios of Kaisareia (the metropolis of Palestine) had been serving as Belisarios’ assessor and private secretary in the East since at least 527 and would accompany the general for many more years.'® The following year (531), Belisarios was defeated by the Persians at Kallinikos and was recalled to Constantinople. Chosroes (Khusrow) meanwhile succeeded his father Kavades (Kavadh) on the Persian throne and began negotiations for peace with Rome. Before these could be concluded, a major riot, the so-called Nika riots, broke out in Constantinople in January 532 and escalated into an urban insurgency. The protesters, perhaps instigated by a senatorial faction eager to overthrow Justinian, demanded the dismissal of two hated officials, the praetorian prefect Ioannes the Kappadokian and the qguaestor Tribonianos. This they obtained, but when they attempted to replace Justinian on the throne with Hypatios, a nephew of Emperor Anastasios, thirty thousand of them were massacred in the hippodrome by the soldiers of Moundos and Belisarios. A large part of the city burned down, including the church of Hagia Sophia, but reconstruction began immediately.'” Later that year, a treaty was agreed upon with the Persians, the so-called Eternal Peace, according to which the empire would keep Lazike while Iberia would go to the Persians. Joannes the Kappadokian was restored to the prefecture, where he implemented an ambitious policy of administrative and fiscal reform that was opposed by some (e.g., Prokopios and Ioannes Lydos). Tribonianos and his team continued to work on the Corpus despite his dismissal as quaestor. With peace secure in the East, the following year (533) Justinian launched a major naval expedition under Belisarios against the Vandals in North Africa. The Vandals, who were Arians (a heresy according to which the Father and the Son were not of the same divine “substance”), were believed to be persecuting their Catholic subjects. In the fifth century, under the leadership of their king Gaiseric (t. 428-477), they had led a number of destructive naval raids against Roman lands from Carthage, even capturing Rome itself in 455. Attempts to reconquer the lost province had been spectacular failures. Yet Belisarios defeated their king Gelimer in two pitched battles in 533 and regained Carthage by the end of the year. In 534, Belisarios was slandered to the emperor (there was always fear that a successful general might set himself as a rival emperor in the provinces) and returned quickly to the capital, where a spectacular triumph was staged to celebrate the victory and honor Belisarios while highlighting his firm devotion and submission to Justinian. The general left Solomon in command of North Africa, but Justinian’s civilian administrators were already implementing measures that were unpopular with the soldiers. Meanwhile, the Gothic regime in Italy was weakening. Amalasountha, the daughter of Theodoric the Great, was ruling in the name of her son Athalaric, but he died in 534. She made a tentative offer to surrender Italy to Justinian in exchange for a pension in the East, but changed her mind and associated her corrupt relative Theodahad with her in the kingship. In 535, he imprisoned and killed her (at the instigation of Theodora, according to The Secret History). Sensing weakness, Justinian sent Moundos to conquer Dalmatia (which he did, though he died in battle), while Belisarios, now sole consul, conquered Sicily in preparation for an assault on Italy. Prokopios had accompanied the African expedition from the beginning; presumably he had returned to Constantinople and then back to Sicily with Belisarios in 535, In 536, he was in Carthage when the army mutinied against the general Solomon. The rebels were defeated first by Belisarios, who arrived from Sicily, and then by Justinian’s cousin Germanos.
Meanwhile, the Goths in Italy elected Vitigis as their king. Theodahad was arrested and killed. Vitigis then ceded southern France (Provence, ancient Transalpine Gaul) to secure the neutrality of the Franks and abandoned south Italy and Rome in the face of the Roman advance. When Belisarios captured Naples after a brief siege, some of his barbarian troops slaughtered many of its citizens, an atrocity that was widely noted and imperiled Italian loyalties. Belisarios occupied Rome at the very end of 536 and defended it against a Gothic siege for over a year. Prokopios was an eyewitness of this dramatic campaign. In March 538, the Gothic army retreated northward while the Romans pressed their advantage, taking cities and strategic locations in the north. The Franks sent an army across the Alps to aid the Goths, but it retreated in 539 after being struck by disease. The Goths slaughtered the population of Milan, but by 540 Vitigis had been confined to Ravenna. In May of that year, Belisarios pretended to accept a Gothic offer to become emperor of the West over both the Italians and the Goths, but when he was in possession of Ravenna he proclaimed himself loyal to Justinian and told the Goths to disperse. The king and his treasure were taken to Constantinople by Belisarios, who had again been slandered at the court, though this time there was no triumph. Prokopios, having served as an agent and military advisor in the Italian campaign, accompanied him back to the capital. Meanwhile, Sittas was killed in Armenia by rebels in 538 and was replaced by Bouzes, who imposed harsh measures. Solomon defended North Africa from Moorish raids and lay the groundwork for prosperity in the province (539-544). The new cathedral of Hagia Sophia was inaugurated in 537, after only five years of construction.
To this point, the initiatives of the regime could have been described as a stunning success. Peace in the East, a major legal codification, the construction of Hagia Sophia and many other churches, and the reconquest of North Africa and Italy testify to Justinian’s vision and his ability to select talented men to implement his policies. But Prokopios would already have noted many disquieting signs. The massacre of the Nika rioters and the suppression of dissidents and “deviants” revealed the regime’s ruthless authoritarian character. Too many of Justinian’s officials were corrupt, which undermined justice at home and caused discontent among the non-Roman people brought under imperial authority. The emperor’s stream of legislation created confusion and insecurity; some of his edicts seemed designed to serve particular interests, not the common good. More worrisome was the arbitrary and vindictive behavior of Theodora, who had to have her way and did not care whether the laws or the dignity of the state were trampled in the process. Belisarios also, for all his brilliance as a general, too often caved in to the demands of his soldiers, and he refused to stand up to his unfaithful wife, Antonina. This, at least, is the picture conveyed by The Secret History. The potential existed for a major miscalculation: Justinian’s ambitious rhetoric thinly veiled an imperial edifice that was beginning to crack, both at home and abroad. The emperor had left the East and the Balkans dangerously exposed in order to pursue his adventures in the West, and he relied too heavily on bribing barbarians not to invade Roman territory, which soon turned into an extortion racket on their part. Even as Belisarios was returning to the capital in 540, with a second king and treasure in tow, all this potential for disaster suddenly exploded.
Before surrendering Ravenna, Vitigis had sent emissaries to King Chosroes of Persia, proposing an alliance against Justinian. Their plea was welcome: the Persian king knew how vulnerable the Roman East was and, moreover, he claimed that Justinian had violated the peace by trying to bribe some of Chosroes’ own allies into a Roman alliance. In the summer of 540, Chosroes invaded Syria, besieging cities, sacking some and extorting payment from others, until he finally reached Antioch, which he captured and destroyed before carrying off tens of thousands of its citizens to southern Mesopotamia. ‘The war was on. Meanwhile, a large Bulgar army raided northern Greece and Thrace, reaching the Long Walls near Constantinople.
In 541, Theodora and Antonina plotted and engineered the downfall of Ioannes the Kappadokian.”° Belisarios was dispatched to the East but did not press deeply into Persia so as not, Prokopios claims in The Secret History, to be cut off from news of his wife, from whose affair with their adopted son Theodosios he could no longer avert his eyes. Lazike, meanwhile, rebelled against the oppressive imperial governors and invited the Persians in to expel the Romans. Chosroes marched to the Black Sea, captured the fortress at Petra, and accepted the vassalage of King Goubazes. The imposition of harsh taxes by corrupt officials was having the same effect in recently conquered Italy, straining the loyalties of the native population and allowing the Goths breathing space to recoup and elect a dynamic new king, Totila (Baduila), one of the noble heroes of Prokopios’ Wars. It is not clear where Prokopios himself was during these years.
Totila rolled back many of the Roman gains in central Italy during 542. Some minor campaigning took place in the East as well, but much of it was put on hold because of the plague, which had spread out of Egypt in the previous year and reached Syria and Constantinople by late spring. For two hundred years this disease would ravage North Africa, Europe, and western Asia, and modern estimates of its death toll sometimes reach as high as one third of the population. Prokopios, who probably witnessed the outbreak in Constantinople, authored the most sober and reliable account of its symptoms, both the medical and the social.”' It is possible that the Roman army faced recruitment problems after this point and that Justinian increasingly turned to barbarian mercenaries to wage his many wars. In 543, Totila continued to make gains in Italy. Bouzes and Belisarios were recalled to Constantinople under suspicion of plotting against the palace. Bouzes was imprisoned by Theodora for two years. Belisarios was disgraced, but later pardoned as a favor to his wife. It seems probable that Prokopios was no longer serving with Belisarios at this point; we know that he was already composing the Wars during the 540s. The following year (544), Belisarios was sent to Italy, but with few soldiers. He was to spend the next five years there playing a cat-and-mouse game with Totila and ultimately achieving nothing. Meanwhile, Solomon was killed in battle in North Africa. His nephew Sergios was given command of the province, which was to prove a disastrous decision. The province lapsed into anarchy and suffered from renewed Moorish raids. In the East, Chosroes failed to capture the city of Edessa despite a determined siege. Perhaps it was after he had witnessed this string of disasters that Prokopios began to experiment with the idea that the world was governed by chance (tyche) and not the providence that Justinian so believed was on his side. This notion of random chance would feature prominently in the historian’s works, including The Secret History.
In 545, Rome and Persia signed a five-year truce that excluded Lazike. The Goths captured more cities in Italy. In 546, the rebel commander Gontharis killed Areobindos, the governor sent to relieve Sergios in North Africa, and ruled the province from Carthage. He was soon killed by the Armenian officer Artabanes, who had once fought against the Romans in his native land but had now taken up service under Justinian. The command of the province passed to him, but he wished to be recalled to Constantinople to marry the emperor’s niece, the widow of Areobindos.”” The Goths took back Rome at the end of the year, but Belisarios retook it in a daring move the next spring (547). The general Ioannes Troglita was transferred from Mesopotamia to North Africa, where he found the province in a state of siege. In 548 he defeated the Moors in a major battle and began (again) to rebuild the shattered province. Theodora died of cancer that year, which altered the balance of power at the court. Antonina secured the recall of Belisarios in 549; he was sent to the East, though still under suspicion. Now the Lazoi again changed their allegiance, inviting the Romans to expel the Persians. The Roman general Dagistheus besieged the city of Petra but encountered fierce resistance. Meanwhile, Totila was besieging Rome, virtually abandoned by this time, and regained it in January 550. Dagistheus cleared Lazike of Persian forces except for the garrison at Petra, which was reinforced by the Persians. Justinian appointed his nephew Germanos to lead a new Italian expedition. Germanos married Matasountha, a daughter of Amalasountha and granddaughter of Theodoric, to legitimate himself in Gothic eyes, but he died of illness after fighting some Slavs near Serdica. The Slavs ravaged Thrace, reaching the Long Walls near Constantinople, while in the West Totila took the war to Sicily. This was probably the situation when Prokopios wrote The Secret History. In 551, the Romans took Petra in Lazike and Justinian appointed Narses to finish the Gothic War, which he did the following year at the battle of Busta Gallorum.
At the time when the Wars and The Secret History were completed (in 550-551) everything was still unresolved. Three parts of the known world had been ravaged by nearly continuous warfare (Italy, North Africa, and parts of the East). The entire Roman world had been devastated by the most lethal plague in history and had endured Justinian’s authoritarian rule. The wars of conquest had created more problems for the empire than they had solved. Armies had been deployed on too many fronts, leaving the core of Romania unprotected. Possibly because of the plague, recruitment of native Roman soldiers declined and was offset by the hiring of increasingly more barbarian mercenaries. The latter, however, had no loyalty to the Roman people, least of all to the former Roman provinces they were now being paid to conquer, pillage, and occupy. Those territories, recently ravaged by war and political instability, were then squeezed financially to offset the cost of their own conquest and administration. It was difficult for imperial officials to come across as liberators under such circumstances (which is what Justinian’s official rhetoric required them to be), and many turned out to be harsh and corrupt as well. As a result, Justinian constantly had to devise new ways to squeeze money from his former subjects in the eastern empire, and these are chronicled with indignation in The Secret History.
The Works of Prokopios
Prokopios has long been notorious for writing three different, even apparently contradictory, accounts of the reign of Justinian: the ostensibly neutral but occasionally critical Wars, the hostile Secret History, and the panegyrical Buildings. This ideological flexibility was taken as emblematic of the perfidy and subtlety of the “Byzantines” who were despised by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, while the corruption, deceit, and pornography on display in The Secret History were used to paint an equally negative picture of his society. It is only recently that scholars have come to terms with the fact that The Secret History, no less than Prokopios’ Wars and Buildings, is a highly crafted literary representation of individuals and events with specific ideological and rhetorical goals. But how could one person let his words flow in such different channels? Which reflects the real Prokopios? To answer these questions, we must consider the circumstances under which the three works were composed and pay close attention to the ways in which they subtly allude and respond to each other.
Tt seems that Prokopios was already planning to write a major historical work in the late 530s, that is, after the conclusion of the Eternal Peace with Persia (532), and while that peace still held; after the conquest of North Africa (534); and while the prospects for a swift end to the war in Italy were still good.” In this early version, the narrative would move from the conclusion of the Eternal Peace to Africa and then to Italy. But the Persian invasion of 540 reignited war on the eastern front, and the war in Italy dragged on inconclusively during the 540s. Prokopios therefore decided to split his narrative into three theaters: the Persian War (Books 1-2), the Vandal War (Books 3-4), and the Gothic War (Books 5-7). This had definite advantages for the organization of material, but it also meant that some books were discontinuous (there was nothing to report from the eastern front between 532 and 540, for example), while events in the capital and Balkans (mostly raids by Slavs and “Huns”) had to be placed awkwardly into narratives focusing on other theaters of war (mostly in the Persian and Gothic War). Prokopios wanted this to be a major work of classical historiography in the tradition of the ancient historians such as Thucydides, one of his models. But he could not, in a public work, reveal everything that he knew about Justinian. It seems, therefore, that he kept two separate files, one with material that would go into the Wars and another with all the dirt on the regime. The second he could never publish while Justinian and especially Theodora were still alive. But by the mid-540s, the emperor was in his sixties and had already ruled for a long time. It is likely that Prokopios was waiting for him to die in order to integrate much of the material in his Secret History file into what was slowly taking shape as the Wars. The death of Theodora in 548 must have relieved some of the pressure. It is possible that the account of the downfall of the prefect Ioannes the Kappadokian in the Wars came originally from the secret file, though Prokopios still could not tell the full truth because one of the protagonists, Belisarios’ wife Antonina, was still alive.**
But by 550/551, Prokopios had, perhaps, run out of patience and decided to compose two separate works, the Wars and The Secret History as we have them (Justinian would in fact live on for another fifteen years). There is another reason why he may have delayed publication, namely that the 540s offered him no satisfying or convenient point at which to end his narration of the many ongoing wars. The war with Persia raged on in Lazike, with the Persians still holding out in the fortress at Petra; Totila seemed to have gained control over most of Italy; North Africa was more settled after the campaigns of Ioannes Troglita but ruined as a province; and Slav and Bulgar raids in the Balkans were intensifying. It did not seem as though things would improve anytime soon. That is why each of the Wars ends on such a negative note, and taken together, their conclusions are a massive indictment of Justinian’s policy, fully in agreement with the accusations laid against the emperor on precisely this point in The Secret History (chiefly in Chapter 18): all these people killed, all these lands ruined, and for what? In fact, on closer inspection, the Wars is not all that neutral. Prokopios put serious attacks on imperial policy in the mouths of his speakers, including many spokesmen for Justinian’s enemies and the peoples he conquered. He openly reveals the crimes committed by the officials whom Justinian appointed to govern those peoples as well as the fact that the emperor’s western ambitions had left the East and Balkans dangerously exposed. The hero of his account of the 540s was the Gothic king Totila. Moreover, the historian laced his prose with subtle allusions to classical literature that imply damning comparisons between Justinian and ancient tyrants and barbarians, thereby revealing indirectly what he could not say openly. Each of the three Wars—the “wars that Justinian waged against the barbarians,” as the preface programmatically announces (1.1.1)—ends badly.*
In short, the Wars quietly points to the thesis of The Secret History, while The Secret History bluntly corrects the omissions, misrepresentations, and even lies that had to be put in the Wars to ensure the author’s safety. The two texts complement each other: they were not fused into one because of the constraints of Prokopios’ circumstances. For example, in the preface to the Wars Prokopios promises that he will not hide the wretched deeds even of those who were close to him because history must be impartial (1.1.5). The same term (“wretched deeds”) is used at the end of The Secret History’s Preface (1.10) to characterize all that is about to be divulged regarding Belisarios, Justinian, and Theodora. Not only does this reveal the common purpose of the two works, it also indicates that the full purpose of the Wars will not be clear to one who does not also then read The Secret History. This is evident in the system of cross-references used in The Secret History: when Prokopios refers to the Wars, it is always back to what he calls “the earlier books.” And at one point in The Secret History he summarizes his indictment of Justinian by calculating the destruction that he wreaked in North Africa, Italy, and the East (18.5-31), thus replicating his “signature” tripartition of the theaters of war. The Secret History is a kind of supplement to the Wars—and Prokopios’s singular outlook is reflected in both texts.
The forward cross-references in The Secret History are also interesting, for they declare Prokopios’ intention to write a separate Ecclesiastical History that would tell the history of the Church, or at any rate Justinian’s policies toward it, in the critical and even scandalous manner of The Secret History.** That is why he leaves contemporary Christian controversies out of The Secret History, though he does cover Justinian’s persecution of pagans, Samaritans, and the ancient heresies (such as Arianism). Prokopios never wrote his Ecclesiastical History, however, which is unfortunate because it would have cast an entirely different light on the history of the Church than do the other histories and hagiographies of this period. This was, as far as we can tell, the only other work that Prokopios was planning to write as of 551.
‘Two years later much had changed. The Romans had recaptured Petra in Lazike and Totila was defeated by Narses in a major battle, dooming the Gothic cause. In 553/554, Prokopios wrote an appendix to the Wars, which became Book 8, in which he covered events in each theater up to that date. While Book 8 contains many geographical and ethnographic digressions, it is, given the recent victories, surprisingly critical of imperial policy, even more so perhaps than the first seven books. The beginning of the preface to Book 8, moreover, copies the beginning of the preface of The Secret History, indicating the continuity of Prokopios’ intention and providing an inside joke to those in his inner circle of friends who had read the secret work.” In the preface to Book 8, Prokopios notes that the previous books had become famous in every corner of the Roman Empire. Readers of The Secret History, however, would know that this was not true of a// that he had written. Yet Book 8 of the Wars, a public work, refers forward to the Ecclesiastical History (at 8.25.13), which was still unwritten. This was an odd announcement, as that work was likely to be critical of Justinian and the priesthood. Moreover, he had made it clear in the original version of the Wars that, in his view, theological disputes were stupid and a waste of time.” This public announcement of the Ecclesiastical History probably explains why the work was not written, despite the fact that Prokopios by that time had a large file of relevant material. The work was too inflammatory to publish while Justinian was still alive, and it is likely that the emperor outlived the historian. As of 554, there were still no signs that Prokopios planned to write any other work.
But then, sometime in the second part of the decade, Prokopios composed the Buildings, a panegyric glorifying Justinian’s constructions, which were mostly religious but included military and civil engineering projects. It is not clear whether the work is complete, how it was delivered to its honoree, or what exactly it was meant to accomplish. Yet even though we cannot know exactly what induced Prokopios to reverse his stance in this way, we can still imagine the kinds of motives that may have led him to it. It has been proposed, for example, that Prokopios’ repeated praise of the mercy that Justinian showed to conspirators, an odd theme to put at the beginning of a work such as this, may indicate that the historian had been implicated and had to clear himself.’ Or, Justinian may have simply asked the famous historian of the Wars to write a panegyrical work, a request that he made of other learned men in his capital. One of them, Ioannes Lydos, who was also to write a critical study of the regime and may have been on close terms with Prokopios, claimed that Justinian had once asked him to write a panegyrical account of the victory over the Persians in 530, and noted later in the same work that “it was not safe to refuse the requests of an emperor such as him.”*° Justinian, or one of his high officials, may have wanted the historian to position himself more favorably toward the reign than he had in the Wars. And the gifts of emperors were not lightly to be despised in any case.
Be that as it may, the Buildings should be read as an insincere work. Not only does it attribute to Justinian constructions that properly belong to Justin or Anastasios, but the first chapters are also laced with odd insinuations and many classical allusions that subvert the surface praise, in other words the same techniques that are used in the Wars.*! While the Buildings reflects Justinian’s own propaganda and is useful to have for that reason, we should be cautious in using it as a source for Prokopios’ views. On many points it offers a completely opposing interpretation of events than we find The Secret History, for example regarding the Convent of Repentance founded by Theodora for former prostitutes (17.5—6).” Let us also remember how Saint Augustine described his own days as an imperial orator: “how unhappy I was. . . on that day when I was preparing to deliver a panegyric on the emperor! In the course of it I would tell numerous lies and for my mendacity would win the good opinion of people who knew it to be untrue.”**
The Structure and Themes of The Secret History
For all that it consists of diverse material that Prokopios could not safely include in the Wars, The Secret History is not an unorganized dossier of notes. The historian did his duty by drawing it up into tight, thematically coherent, and interconnected narratives, which reveal few traces of their disparate origins. The text consists of three discrete sections. The first two are announced at the end of the Preface (at 1.10), in which Prokopios promises to reveal the wretched deeds of Belisarios (corresponding to Chapters 1-5 of the text) and then the wretched deeds of Justinian and Theodora (corresponding to Chapters 6-18). The third part (Chapters 19-30), a legal and administrative commentary on the regime, was added on afterward, possibly a few weeks or months later but in any case during the same year that the first two parts were composed.
Part I (Chapters 1-5): The Gynocracy. This section is not, as promised, exactly about Belisarios but about his wife Antonina, or rather about how Antonina, in collaboration with Theodora and some eunuchs, managed to dominate and emasculate Belisarios. His displacement in the text by these two women reflects his lack of virtue and even dignity. In fact, the point of these chapters is to show what happens when masculine virtue is displaced by feminine vice, which draws its strength from the manipulation of sex and men’s weaknesses. The dramatic low point for Belisarios comes when he is recalled to the capital under suspicion, disgraced, and made to think that his execution was imminent.
In this state of terror he went up to his room and sat alone upon his bed, having no intention of doing anything brave, not even remembering that he had once been a man. His sweat ran in streams. He felt light-headed. He could not even think straight in his panic, worn out by servile fears and the worries of an impotent coward. (4.22)
‘The women make it seem that Antonina intervened to save her husband (again reversing the normal plotline in which the man saves the woman in distress).** The scene that ensues may allude to forms of sadomasochistic sex.
He jumped up from the bed and fell on his face before his wife’s feet. Placing a hand behind each of her calves, he began to lick the soles of his wife’s feet with his tongue, one after the other, calling her the Cause of his Life and Salvation, promising that henceforth he would be her devoted slave and not her husband. (4.29-30)
Prokopios’ point is always political, not merely to expose a personal weakness. For example, this episode foreshadows the humiliating new rite of prostration that Justinian and Theodora imposed on the court, forcing Romans to behave in a way that had always been associated with “oriental” monarchies.*® The personal emasculation of Belisarios in this episode had direct political consequences of its own. For one thing, it prevented the man from acting nobly as a tyrannicide, an accepted virtue in both the Greek and Roman traditions.
Everyone was thinking that . . . Belisarios’ plan was to stop wasting his time in Byzantion and that as soon as he found himself outside the city walls he would without delay take up arms and do something noble and befitting a man against his wife and against those who had violated him. But it was not to be. He ... simply obeyed that woman. (4.40-41)
All this is intimately connected to the indictment of tyranny that runs through The Secret History, for one of the essential characteristics of tyranny in classical thought was the subversion of the public interest by the disordered private and family life of the tyrant and his associates. This is demonstrated strikingly in the episode of Chosroes in Lazike, which occupies the middle of the first part of the text. Facing a mutiny, the king read aloud a letter sent by Theodora to one of his officials, which proclaimed her absolute power in the Roman state. What kind of a state, he asked the mutineers, is governed by a woman (2.36)? The narrative then reveals how Theodora arbitrarily imprisoned officials and ruined imperial policy in pursuit of her private interests and vendettas. “Private comedy has turned into political tragedy.”*””
Prokopios wields narrative in a subtle way to highlight the subversion of family values as well. Belisarios adopted a young man named Theodosios, with whom Antonina, his mother by adoption, had an affair. Meanwhile, she turned against her biological son from a previous liaison, Photios, who sided with Belisarios to undermine his rival Theodosios. Lust and weakness triumph here over natural ties of affection. The low point in the narrative is when Belisarios begs his stepson Photios to help him against his wife Antonina (Photios’ natural mother) and to kill his adopted son Theodosios (2.6-13), Antonina’s lover. Belisarios claims that he raised Photios as both father and mother (2.7), but neither he nor Antonina would come to Photios’ aid when he was later imprisoned by Theodora. The affair of Antonina and Theodosios reads in part like one of the ancient romance novels, in that the protagonists are constantly being driven apart by circumstances despite their great passion for each other, but in this case the virtuous and even pure premises of such novels have been turned on their head: the characters of The Secret History are always antiheroes, as we see in Belisarios’ refusal to do anything heroic.
Part Il (Chapters 6-18): Justinian and Theodora. This is the largest and central section of The Secret History, and it aims to capture the very different and complex personalities of the imperial couple. The origin of Justinian’s family (6) and the chapter on his character and appearance (8) are separated by an account (7) of the violence of the hippodrome fan-clubs (basically sporting guilds that engaged in hooliganism and street crimes). The origin and character of Theodora (9.1-32) and the account of her appearance and marriage to Justinian (9.47-10.23) are also separated by a brief return to the topic of the fan-clubs (9.33—46). This establishes a coherent thematic counterpoint: the two main characters come together against a background of lawless violence and the disruption of social order. Most of the events in these chapters occur during the reign of Justin, but in Prokopios’ view Justinian was the real power behind the throne starting as early as 518, which is the date from which, writing in 550551, he counts the thirty-two years of Justinian’s power rather than his reign, which technically began in 527.°* The analysis of Justinian’s reign begins in Chapter 11 with a discussion of his foreign policy and persecution of religious groups; Chapter 12 then introduces a major theme of the rest of the work—how the imperial treasury confiscated the properties of senators. This chapter introduces the suggestion that Justinian and Theodora were really demons (which is discussed in more detail later). The rest of this part of The Secret History alternates between the lifestyle and crimes of Justinian (Chapters 13-14) and the lifestyle and crimes of Theodora (Chapters 15-17), before reaching a crescendo of war, slaughter, and natural disaster in Chapter 18.
The goal of this central section of the text is not merely to document the specific crimes committed by Justinian and Theodora but to paint portraits of their characters. These portraits are subtle and quite unforgettable. Perhaps they are the most masterful literary images of rulers in the Greek tradition since the days of classi-cal tragedy. In Prokopios’ mind, Justinian was a tyrant—there could be no question about that—but in decisive ways he did not fit the classical image of a tyrant. He is revealed in the text as a calm, accessible, apparently good-natured, hardworking ruler who hardly ate or slept. He did not abuse his power in order to indulge his bodily desires, as tyrants were supposed to do. Theodora, on the other hand, was his opposite. She raged furiously and nursed her grievances, slept and ate a lot, hardly worked at all, and was contemptuously inaccessible. Yet the narrative subtly reveals that these differences were superficial, or rather they reinforced each other. Prokopios claims that their apparent disagreements over matters of policy and personnel were an illusion, a theater devised to divide and conquer. More fundamentally, the two rulers were governed by their mutual love of money and their bloodthirsty eagerness to use violence in order to obtain it. Because of this, “even the good aspects of [Justinian’s] nature were turned by him to the mistreatment of his subjects” (13.33). He was perfectly calm when he signed orders for the destruction of towns and the enslavement of populations (8.29, 13.2). He was malicious but also naive and easily led around, a destructive combination (8.22-23). His eros was not for other men’s wives, as with ancient tyrants, but for Theodora his wife on the one hand (9.30-32) and for murder and money on the other (e.g., 8.26, 11.3). Murder and theft are the major themes of The Secret History as a whole, namely how the private vices of two very different people ruined the Roman state.
The most sensational aspects of this part of the text have received the most attention in modern scholarship, namely the pornographic account of Theodora’s past and the claim that Justinian was a demon. We will discuss them separately below. A more interesting aspect that has, however, been overlooked is the subtle structural analysis to which Prokopios subjects the regime, that is, his analysis of how Justinian’s policies adversely affected the political, military, and economic balances of the empire. By bribing the Huns not to invade Roman territory, for example, Justinian unintentionally provided a supply that created its own demand. More and more tribes began to raid the empire in order to qualify for these payments, and some continued to plunder in violation of the agreement (11.5-10). In order to recruit them as mercenaries for his wars to liberate Roman lands abroad, he prohibited his generals in Illyricum from attacking them when they were raiding Roman lands that he already did control (21.26-29). When he persecuted heretics by confiscating their property, he caused many Orthodox Christians, whose livelihood depended on those properties, to lose their jobs and become destitute (11.16-19). He esteemed officials who brought him increased revenues even through illegal means and so, “[a]s a result, many would try hard to show him that they were in fact immoral, even though they were not, at least in their own private lives” (13.2425). These counterintuitive results were perhaps not intended by Justinian, but Prokopios is astute in tracing the complex patterns of causality. Justinian apparently did not care what the results were so long as he got his way in the short term.
Part III (Chapters 19-30): The Corruption of Laws, Administration, and Policy. Prokopios presents this as an integral part of The Secret History, but it was evidently written later in the same year as a kind of appendix. It is a sustained critique of Justinian’s administration, the men whom he chose for high office (especially his praetorian prefects, guaestores, and magistri officiorum), and the laws that he issued. In fact, Prokopios often alludes to the actual language of Justinian’s edicts, which he must have had available to him as he was writing, making this section a kind of historical-legal commentary. This, along with its detailed analysis of fiscal and administrative policy, makes the final section of The Secret History a unique and unprecedented treatise by ancient conventions.’ The major theme is to show how Justinian constantly changed or disregarded laws and manipulated the administration in order to consume the wealth of his subjects (Prokopios presents this image at the very beginning of the section as a nightmare seen by one of his informants; 19.1-3). Prokopios’ outlook is not to be identified with that of any particular class, for he explains how the emperor victimized senators, landowners, merchants and craftsmen, sailors, the urban populace, soldiers and officers in the army, silk traders, residents of provincial cities, lawyers, artists, the poor, and those on public welfare. We should remember that “it is possible for a historian to complain of injustice without the complaints necessarily relating to his own experiences.”” Besides, Prokopios was probably not a senator.
After Chapter 27, however, the exposition lapses into a series of scandals that are only loosely connected to each other by the theme of the emperor’s avarice and stinginess. It seems that Prokopios dumped some leftover material into these final chapters. And whereas in the rest of the work the amount of repetition and overlap is insignificant, indicating the careful planning with which it was composed, in the third section he does repeat a handful of accusations that he had made in the second, such as paying off the barbarians and the wasteful constructions by the coast (19.6-16). Particularly strange is the way in which he “introduces” Justinian and Theodora at 22.23-32 as if all that he had written in the second part was not fresh in his mind. While the emphasis on witchcraft is a new feature here, he even repeats the charge that Justinian’s will was “light as dust” that he had already made at 13.10, without referring us back to that passage as he normally does. Perhaps he was reworking his original notes anew.
Overall, the structure of The Secret History reveals considerable planning and tight consistency. There is, as just noted, little overlap. All of the many cross-references, both internal and external, and both forward- and backward-looking, pan out. Some material, as noted, has been inserted awkwardly, such as the final chapters; the material on Sergios and the younger Solomon at 5.28-38;"' the story of Makedonia is not fully developed at 12.28; and the brief section on the magister officiorum awkwardly intrudes into the narrative of Petros Barsymes as praetorian prefect at 22.12-13. This digression was probably added later (the “he” with whom the text begins after the digression is Petros and not Justinian, with whom the digression ends). But these are minor flaws in a work that is otherwise artfully put together, considering that Prokopios did not employ a linear narrative sequence on which to hang his material and could have found little guidance for what he was attempting here in the literature of the classical tradition.
The Style and Images of The Secret History
Though Prokopios wrote in an elevated register of ancient Greek, the individual sentences that make up The Secret History are short and blunt and their syntax is usually uncomplicated. The same syntactical forms are repeated often and there are almost no rhetorical flourishes. Prokopios does not try to dazzle his readers with his eloquence or arcane style. That is done adequately by the nature of the material and his accusations. The intensity of the work stems from its contents, but these are related matter-of-factly. In fact, the vocabulary of the work as a whole can be called minimalist. The same terms are used to describe similar crimes, and the vocabulary deployed for motives and states of mind is likewise repetitive (“consistent” might be a more positive way of putting it). One comes across the same abstract verbs many times, while groups of people are typically designated via plural participles (which results in a high incidence of “those who . . .” in translation). In these senses, The Secret History can even be called a restrained work (certainly compared to the rhetorical pomposity of Justinian’s own edicts). This stylistic uniformity, moreover, and the accuracy ofits internal crossreferences, reinforce the conclusion that the work is not an assembly of disparate notes but was carefully written in a relatively brief period of time in 550/551.
The language, however, is mostly faithful to Prokopios’ classical models and laced with allusions to ancient literature, some of which are well chosen to enhance the argument of The Secret History. Consider, for example, the courtship of Justinian and Theodora:
As it was impossible for anyone who had reached the rank of senator to marry a prostitute (this being prohibited from the earliest times by the most ancient of laws), he forced the emperor to annul those laws with another law, and so afterward he lived with Theodora as his lawful wife, effectively making it feasible for anyone else to marry a prostitute. (9.51)
The narrative here, in both structure and language, is modeled on Herodotos’ Histories 3.31, which recounts the mad Persian king Kambyses’ illicit desire to marry his sister. The king pressured his jurists to circumvent the ancient law that prohibited such marriages and discover an “other law,” namely that “he who is king of Persia can do whatever he wishes.” Prokopios thereby links Justinian to a mad oriental despot (and one of the subliminal themes of the Wars was how similar Justinian was to his Persian nemesis Chosroes). Moreover, there is a nice pun here: the “other law” (heteros nomos) that Justinian compelled Justin to pass so that he could marry Theodora alludes to the word for prostitute here, a high-class escort, or courtesan (hetaira), which is probably what Theodora was by this stage in her career. The story works on a symbolic level as well: Justinian’s rise to sole power coincides with the overturning of the Roman laws of private life, a prominent theme of The Secret History and basic to ancient views of tyranny. Note that Justinian is then said to have “mounted” the imperial position (9.51—the pun works in Greek as well as in English).
The most frequently cited classical author in The Secret History is the comic playwright Aristophanes. At first glance this is surprising, for the contents of The Secret History are not really funny. But Aristophanes was not merely a comedian. His deeper themes were war, cultural decline, corruption, and demagoguery, and his plays have strong tragic dimensions (e.g., the ending of the Clouds, the most quoted play in The Secret History). The density of Aristophanic language and images is meant to mock Justinian and his minions, stripping them even further of respectability and legitimacy. This was Aristophanes’ own goal in mocking the bellicose but vulgar Athenian politician Kleon, to whom some of the allusions in The Secret History point. For Prokopios, too, Justinian “acted like a barbarian in his manner of speech, dress, and thinking” (14.2) while “[t]he state resembled a kingdom of children at play” (14.14). The emperor may have been all-powerful but he was also gullible and easily led around by flatterers (13.10-12). This resonates powerfully with Aristophanes’ caricature of “The People” (Demos) who ruled in the radical democracy of his times. The Knights is also referenced frequently in The Secret History: “O Demos, how splendid your rule! All men fear you like a Tyrant. But you're easy to sway, with flattery, fawning, and deceit” (1111-1117). Theodora, too, had not forgotten her theatrical instincts. “When it suited her interests, she converted even the most important matters into a farce, treating them like one of those stage skits they put on in the theater” (15.24). Both Prokopios and Aristophanes, then, exposed and mocked the rise and rule of vulgarity.” It is worth noting here that the first external mention of The Secret History, found in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of classical studies called the Souda, intriguingly refers to the text as “an invective and a comedy against the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora.”*
We must, then, be sensitive to the nuances and subtle allusions that may lie behind the language of Prokopios at any point. “The kingdom of children at play,” for example, is an allusion to Herodotos’ Histories 1.114, where Kyros, the future king of Persia, played the game of “king” with his friends. Beyond the surface mockery, the allusion is a way to compare Justinian to a Persian monarch. Other images serve similar aims. Prokopios concludes his description of Justinian’s appearance by noting that he “retained a ruddy complexion even after two days of fasting” (8.12). He then conjectures that Justinian most resembled Emperor Domitian (r. 81-96), one of the most hated men in Roman history (also cited as an archetypical tyrant by Prokopios’ contemporary Ioannes Lydos).* Prokopios tells a macabre (and unhistorical) story about how Domitian was hacked into pieces, which his wife had stitched together; then she set up a statue showing him in this grotesque form. Seeing this statue in Rome, Prokopios noted its similarity to Justinian. Beyond the image of a butchered Justinian that this comparison inevitably brings to mind (an image that Prokopios presumably wanted to become real), there is another, more subtle, parallel. Emperors became tyrants when they lost all shame, when they could no longer blush, and the word for it was the same as for a “ruddy” complexion. This is how Cassius Dio, an early third-century historian, described Nero’s lapse into tyranny.” Regarding Domitian, it was said that his “ruddy face saved him from blushing with shame.” By extension, this “ruddy expression, which fortified him against blushing at his acts, might be implicated in his tyranny.’ Prokopios claims that Justinian did not blush (13.2), but how could he given his ruddy appearance? “As if the word ‘shamelessness’ were written prominently on his forehead, he casually and unscrupulously advances to the most abominable actions” (10.5). Theodora, by contrast, was “pale” (10.11); her utter shamelessness is so flaunted in the text (e.g., 9.14) that she presumably had no use for the cover of a ruddy complexion. She simply never felt any shame.
Remaining faithful to the language of their classical models, Prokopios and other authors in late antiquity avoided using Christian and Roman technical terminology or, if they had to use a word such as monk or referendarius, they explained it as though it were unfamiliar or attributed it to “the Christians” or “the Romans” (meaning Latin speakers). This practice was imposed by the autonomy of the conventions that governed classicizing literature and had no bearing on whether the author was himself a Christian or a Latin speaker. The linguistic mirage of a world that had not changed fundamentally since the age of Thucydides did not, however, affect Prokopios’ ability to discuss contemporary religious issues. The broader strategy of classicizing authors was to present their own times in terms of the classical models that had withstood the test of the ages. Writing in this way offered the best guarantee that one’s own works would still be accessible in one or two thousand years. Those models, moreover, offered a range of transhistorical concepts of analysis that could be understood by educated readers regardless of their specific cultural context. So discussing the sixth century AD as if it were the fifth century BC avoided the parochialism that we encounter in less sophisticated writers of the time (for example, in the chronicler Joannes Malalas). It did not preclude one from writing about contemporary religious issues. Prokopios was, after all, planning to write an ecclesiastical history, probably in the same stylistic register. He refers in The Secret History to baptism and Christian adoption (1.16), albeit with circumlocution, and often notes that his protagonists violated even “the most dreadful oaths that exist among Christians” (2.13). Justinian scandalously had himself proclaimed emperor “three days before the Easter celebration, at a time when it is not permitted to greet one’s friends or even wish them peace” (9.53; because it was period of mourning). His condemnation of the servility with which the Senate, the priests, and the populace prostrated themselves before the whore Theodora— “as if she were a goddess” and with “upturned hands as though in prayer”—is infused with religious language, to highlight the pollution of their act (10.6-8).””
Furthermore, Prokopios was not above using Christian images and words to attack Justinian and Theodora. He has a monk call Justinian “the Lord of Demons,” alluding to Scripture (12.26). The powerful climax of Chapter 18, which draws together the themes of death and destruction in every country, civil strife, war, foreign invasion, famine, plague, flood, and earthquake, replicates precisely the list of evils from which Christian congregations prayed to be spared in the Divine Liturgy: “Rescue, Lord, this flock, and every city and country, from famine, plague, earthquake, flood, fire, the sword, invasion by foreigners, and civil war.”** The liturgy would, of course, have included ritual blessings for the emperor Justinian, which is why it is all the more ironic that Prokopios links his litany of evils to the notion that Justinian was the Lord of Demons. We must remember, however, that this was all for the purposes of rhetorical invective and ideological polemic, and not necessarily an expression of Prokopios’ own religious views.
There is probably subtle humor to be found in Prokopios’ Christian forays as well. The youth Theodosios with whom Antonina has an affair in the first part of the text used to belong to the heretical Christian sect of the Eunomians; he was baptized and adopted by Belisarios, making Antonina legally his mother (1.15-16). Now, as it happens, the fourth-century heretic Eunomios had argued that God the Son was of a different nature and inferior to God the Father, whereas the Orthodox believed not only in the equality but the identicalness of their natures. Well, after his conversion and baptism, Theodosios “the son” definitely usurps the place of his “father,” at least in Antonina’s bed. He had truly embraced the Orthodox position.
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