In this new role too he seems to have distinguished himself, and we hear of his being entrusted with various special and important commissions. He continued to serve under Belisarius in the Vandal campaign in 533, and against the Ostrogoths in Italy in 535. After the capture of Ravenna in 540 he returned to Constantinople to write, or complete, his valued Military Histories. This weighty work included two books on the Roman wars with the Persians (408–553), two on the Vandal wars in Africa (395–545), and four on the Gothic wars, of which the fourth volume is a general supplement bringing the narrative down to 559.
The Military Histories are of high merit, and have been acclaimed as “conspicuously brilliant as compared to the low literary level of his age,” not unworthy of the language of Thucydides and Herodotus, in spite of the fact that his medium was necessarily the Koine, an Attic tainted by Roman and Asiatic influences, with certain stereotyped redundancies of phrase: to classic Greek what modern newspaper English is to Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, while Procopius had been fairly careful in the Military Histories to write as much of the truth about the campaigns he had seen as could diplomatically be told under a jealous Emperor, he had therein praised the real greatness of Belisarius more highly than Justinian thought his subject required. The Emperor, in short, was highly displeased with the Military Histories.
To restore himself in the imperial favor, to say nothing of saving his head, Procopius immediately set to work on a description of the Edifices erected throughout the Empire by a tyrant who prided himself on his talent for architecture. By filling this work with almost slavish flattery, the desired object was attained. The Emperor was delighted, and Procopius was made a Senator. The purple border on the historian’s toga, however, did not appease his critical conscience. It had been bad enough to smooth over certain incidents in the Military Histories; but the false praise of Justinian in the Edifices, however diplomatically necessary it had been, shamed the honest pagan soul of the writer.
He determined, for once, to write the whole truth about this fickle autocrat, his inhuman Empress, and their degenerate court. What he wrote could not, obviously, be published during Justinian’s lifetime, or even, perhaps, his own; but the Secret History would at least be revealed to posterity, so that future generations who read of Justinian’s greatness in other books of Procopius should also learn in this of his cruelties, his deceptions, and all his genial deviltries.
The Secret History (sometimes referred to as the Anecdotes, though this is a transliteration and not a translation of the Greek name Anekdota) was completed in 559, a date determinable by the writer’s mention of Justinian, in the latter part of the book, as having reigned for 32 years. Justinian ruled for 38 years (527–565). And it is quite certain the Secret History remained secret, for in 562 the Emperor appointed Procopius Prefect of Constantinople. Three years later Justinian died. Whether Procopius outlived him is unknown.
But his Military Histories, Edifices, and Secret History are all happily extant, the great sources of our knowledge of his time.
The historian’s is an interesting, but hardly an easy task. If he writes what people wish to believe, he must frequently violate his conscience; if he writes the full truth, a storm of indignation may overwhelm him. Few chroniclers have solved the difficulty as Procopius did, by describing both sides of a question in different volumes.
Yet he hesitated in approaching the Secret History, for fear later generations might find some of the things he had to say, incredible. “I fear,” he admits, “they may think me a writer of fiction, and even put me among the poets.” He need not have worried over this possible fate. Few indeed are the moderns to whom Procopius is recognizable as a proper name; and how many of even these could guess whether a Procopius was a tumor or a tuber?
He is not read in university Greek classrooms, because he is a late Roman writer; Latin seminars leave him unstudied, because he wrote in Greek. There is not a schoolbook of Roman history, of course, that is not indebted to Procopius for its pages on the time of Justinian; but the debt is not necessarily acknowledged. Gibbon, who read him with delight in the Greek, indeed quotes liberally and enthusiastically from the Secret and Military Histories in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“Happy would be my lot, could I always tread in the footsteps of such a guide”); but even Gibbon is now unread by the multitude—Gibbon, who devoted a lifetime to penning that most amazingly brilliant narrative of the fall of an Empire, while his colonial contemporary Washington was building a new one. Where is the Plutarch to write the parallel lives of these two historians?
We may only for the moment speculate upon the gallant picture of General Washington, thoughtfully pacing the shows of Valley Forge while he considers the problem of avoiding foreign entanglements, while, across the seas, the more portly Mr. Gibbon, consuming the pages of Procopius with one hand and a sixth glass of Madeira with the other, meditates on the clear, if uncontemporary, figure of the Empress Theodora, “whose strange elevation cannot be applauded as the triumph of female virtue;” or, after his ninth glass, plans a nice sentence on the late ladies of the Byzantine period and their novel habit of wearing silken dresses, which present to the imaginative historian a vision of “naked draperies and transparent matrons.”
Mr. Gibbon, by the way, would doubtless have snorted with amazement could even his clever mind have forseen the possibility that a later editor of his Decline and Fall—a
