Here, then, is an important document covering the greater part of the sixth century of Our Lord and the pious reign of their Imperial Majesties Justinian and Theodora, by the grace of God Rulers of the Holy Roman Empire of the East and of the West, and Defenders of the True Faith … Mentioned by the lexicographer Suidas circa 1100, the loss of this valuable work to modern readers was lamented by Baronius in 1548, though the manuscript was then in his custody in the Vatican. A later and more diligent librarian one day discovered the Secret History, and it was published for the first time in print in 1623, the first English translation appearing in 1674.
Not till 1896, however, if we may believe its title page, was a “literal and complete” English translation made: this was privately printed in Athens in an edition of 255 copies, a rare monument of Victorian scholarship and deplorable style, whose obscurities of construction are not alleviated by the harsh bluntness of its vocabulary. English may be made as subtle a tongue as French or Greek, but it slips only too easily into brutality. Lately, however, one James Branch Cabell has lighted the way to an English made safe for the daintiest of readers; and perhaps it is now possible for the present translator, in the most intimate of Procopius’s anecdotes, to convey faithfully the original candor of the sunlit Greek with no more added nuance of veiling than, perhaps, a silken and delicately perfumed metaphor.
Lest the occasional reader be slightly puzzled that a Latin historian should have written in Greek, it may be worth recalling that the capital of the Roman Empire had been removed, since the time of Constantine, from Italy to Byzantium; which city, already Hellenic for centuries, continued to preserve its Grecian character under the new name of Constantinople. That the conquered Greeks had the habit of insidiously enslaving their Roman masters is a familiar statement; the Greco-Roman Empire of the East soon became more Greek than Roman. By the time Justinian came to power, Rome itself, with all the rest of Italy was in the hands of the Goths; who, when they spoke of the Byzantine Romans, alluded to them as Greeks: intending, it must be admitted, a contemptuous reproach.
Justinian, indeed, or rather his brilliant general Belisarius, regained the lost mother country and the Libyan provinces, and for a time it must have seemed the full grandeur of the early Empire had been regained. But it was the last flare of a dying candle. A Fonteius had once prophesied that the Roman Empire would fall when it abandoned the Roman language. And Lydus, a pretorian prefect under Justinian, complains in his De Magistratibus against the ominous change of language in official documents of his time from Latin to Greek.
Still, if only for a time, Justinian had once more made the Mediterranean “Mare Nostrum,” encircled by a Roman Empire superficially equal to that the first and greatest Augustus had left, five centuries before; and governed by the principle of “one state, one church, one law.” The state was Justinian; the church, orthodox Catholic; the law, the newly collated and unified Justinian Code, of immense and lasting importance. (Its definitions were law in Bavaria, for example, as late as 1900.)
How vigorously, even cruelly, this unity was enforced will be seen in the Secret History; and how bitterly the re-conquests of Italy, Africa and southern Spain were paid for by the oppressed subjects of an ambitious Emperor: and all for nothing, since Justinian’s successors immediately abandoned all control of the Western provinces. Only one physical memorial built by Justinian still stands, the Church of St. Sophia. From its minarets in Constantinople the faithful are yet called to prayer. Only, to make the irony complete, it is the Allah of Mohammed whom the faithful have worshipped in this church of Rome, since the year of Christ 1453.
Of the final fall of the Empire there were, as we have seen, omens enough in Justinian’s time. But decadence is notably colorful, and the autumn sunset of Rome was no exception to the rule. Procopius’s Constantinople is as gaudily cinematographic as one might expect when one recalls that the moving picture palaces of today boast of their Byzantine architecture. Here are the nimble Greeks of old Byzantium; sailors from the Pillars of Hercules jostling elbows with Christianized Jews; visiting Persian ambassadors or spies; Vandal, Visigoth, Ostrogoth, and all the barbarian tribal emissaries, staring about contemptuously at the sights of an effete metropolis; here marches a company of the ever-present Pretorian Guard, while the also ever-present crowds of gaily dressed courtesans giggle and whisper as the soldiers march past.
Here, possibly, strides even a Roman (though more likely he bears some such name as Demosthenes) conspicuous in his old-fashioned bordered toga as he goes to the Senate—to vote as the Emperor commands.
Here are the partisans of the Hippodrome teams, wearing their rival Blue or Green colors, and a sharp dagger too, for Blues and Greens seldom meet without blood being spilled in the open street. Here waddle obese eunuchs, with fat noses held high in curious pride: but their frown may mean confiscation of your estates, their scowl your death by the torture rack. Here is the Forum, where you may buy anything from love to a Senate decision. A common girl costs a copper coin; a judge’s favor, of course, requires gold.
