The Secret History

The Secret History

By Procopius.

Translated by Richard Atwater.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introduction
4. Foreword by the Historian
5. The Secret History
   1. I: How the Great General Belisarius Was Hoodwinked by His Wife, Whose Lover Became a Monk
   2. II: How Belated Jealousy Affected Belisarius’s Military Judgment, to the Joy of the Enemy
   3. III: Showing the Danger of Interfering with a Woman’s Intrigues, Especially When the Woman Is the Friend of an Empress
   4. IV: How Theodora, Revenging Her Dear Antonina, Humiliated the Conqueror of Africa and Italy
   5. V: How Theodora Tricked the General’s Daughter Into a Liaison with the Empress’s Nephew, and Belisarius Became a Public Laughing Stock
   6. VI: Ignorance of the Emperor Justin, and His Stencilled Signature, and How His Nephew Justinian Was the Virtual Ruler
   7. VII: Outrages of the Blues
   8. VIII: Character and Appearance of Justinian
   9. IX: And How Theodora, Most Depraved of All Courtesans, Won His Love
   10. X: How Justinian Created a New Law Permitting Him to Marry a Courtesan on Her Promise to Repent Her Past; and the Truth About the Apparent Quarrels of a Happy Pair
   11. XI: How the Defender of the Faith Ruined His Subjects
   12. XII: Proving That Justinian and Theodora Were Actually Fiends in Human Form
   13. XIII: Deceptive Affability and Piety of a Tyrant
   14. XIV: Justice for Sale
   15. XV: How an Roman Citizens Became Slaves, and a Complaining Patrician Was Ribaldly Mocked by Theodora’s Eunuchs
   16. XVI: What Happened to Those Who Fell Out of Favor with Theodora
   17. XVII: How She Saved Five Hundred Harlots from a Life of Sin, Made Away with Her Own Natural Son, and Other Curious Incidents of Her Passion for Match Making
   18. XVIII: How Justinian Killed a Trillion People
   19. XIX: How He Seized All the Wealth of the Romans and Threw It Away in the Sea and on the Barbarians
   20. XX: Debasing of the Quaestorship
   21. XXI: The Sky Tax, the Selling of All Offices, and How Border Armies Were Forbidden to Punish Invading Barbarians
   22. XXII: Further Corruption in High Places
   23. XXIII: How Landowners Were Ruined
   24. XXIV: Unjust Treatment of the Soldiers, and How Justinian Tricked the “Students” Out of Their Pay by Threatening to Send Them to War
   25. XXV: How He Robbed His Own Officials, Merchants, Sailors, Workmen, and Everybody Else
   26. XXVI: How He Spoiled the Beauty of the Cities and Plundered the Poor
   27. XXVII: How the Defender of the Faith Protected the Interests of the Christians
   28. XXVIII: His Violation of the Laws of the Romans, and How Jews Were Fined for Eating Lamb
   29. XXIX: Other Incidents Revealing Him as a Liar and a Hypocrite
   30. XXX: Further Innovations of Justinian and Theodora, and a Conclusion Which Imagines the Death of an Emperor
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introduction

Like most notables of the Roman Empire in Byzantine times, the historian Procopius was not a Latin. He was born in Caesarea in Palestine about 500 AD, and apparently was one of those Samaritans whom he mentions in the Secret History as adopting Christianity for formal protection and not at all for spiritual reasons. Certainly his frequent allusions to the religion of his period, if they do not, in the words of Edward Gibbon, “betray occasional conformity, with a secret attachment to Paganism and Philosophy,” at least show the detached mind of a critic to whom the hierarchy is not exactly infallible.

If our historian shows at times a Grecian simplicity and an unorthodox distaste for the killing of heretics, it must be remembered that before he became a Roman he had been a Rhetorician, which profession required a long and thorough acquaintance with that seductive siren, Hellenic literature. And one who once dallies with the language of Aeschylus and Sappho is only too likely thereafter to disdain any country other than Arcady. If the young Procopius, journeying to Constantinople in his middle twenties, anticipated himself a second Lysias in another Athens, he was likely to be disappointed. Here, washed by the waters across which Leander had plunged to Hero, and in sight of the Crashing Rocks between which the Argonauts had once venturously sailed, was a colorful but mad city of pomp and confusion, intrigue and cruelty.

For a while, of course, the excitement of living in the kaleidoscopic capital of the world, after the rustic quiet of Samaria and the imagined tranquillity of Theocritus, would stimulate the young stranger to seek a worldly success. The rhetorician’s trade included giving lessons in elocution and acting as advocate in law cases. Apparently Procopius’s skill at either was eminent; for in 527 he had become renowned enough