There had been another Procopius who had dared, not only to criticize an Emperor, but to seize the very throne of Constantinople and hold it, for a time, against the timorous Valens, claiming his dying cousin Julian had willed the purple to him, as the Apostate, and Paganism with him, died. And presently that other Procopius was beheaded.
So a second Procopius, who has had enough of wars and Emperors, neither gossips of Theodora in the presence of his family nor claims any kinship to a well-punished usurper, let alone to a Julian who acknowledged the fashionable Galilean only with his dying, and that ironic, breath. No, our Procopius does not whisper these things, except in the safer fashion of King Midas’s barber, who confided to the reticent ground the secret of his master’s inordinately long ears …
If Justinian is an ass, the fact is inscribed carefully in a well-guarded notebook; and other dangerous anecdotes, as they occur to the critic, are similarly jotted down now and then, as Procopius is able to steal an occasional hour alone. When he has written the whole story, he hides the manuscript somewhere against the day when Justinian dies. Then, perhaps, he may publish this Secret History; reading it, for the first safe time aloud, to the book publisher’s copying slaves, revising his sentences as he dictates: for in the first careless draft there must be some few repetitions of phrase or even of subject matter, requiring due correction by the celebrated author of the Military Histories, a Senator and a Rhetorician, well schooled in the tradition of the old Athenian masters.
Only it seems that Justinian did not, like the cancerous Theodora, die quite soon enough. Or else the author was inspired to foresee that critics of a later era would prefer the Secret History unrevised, as being the more interesting and forceful for being penned in a white heat of furious earnestness. True, fury is less generally desirable than cool impartiality in a historian, and a chronicler does not, usually, report that in his judgment the Emperor and Empress of his age were devils in human form, with supernatural powers causing earthquakes and pestilences. But one should remember that devils were very much believed in at this Christian time; and if earlier Emperors of Rome had claimed due worship as gods, certainly even the most honest of historians might conceivably give his sovereigns full spiritual credit, so long as they did not hear about it.
Thus, as you will find, full credit is what he gave them, and (if the appreciative word of a till now unoffending translator be permitted) Procopiously.
In the following text, the chapter divisions are those of the manuscript; the chapter titles, however, are an added whim of the romantic editor, as are the occasional notes in the helpful glossary. And with no more to-do than this slight overture explaining the play for those who like to come early and read the program, he turns to make his formal bow and express a hope that the audience will find as much instruction and entertainment in the production, which starts immediately, as he has found in its rehearsal. Here is a narrative with the fascination of the elder Dumas; but it is more than a collection of anecdotes of intrigue: it is history, in which the purple past of Rome lives again in spirited pictures, thrown, if you care for a further metaphor, upon the screen of the present. For the modern reader, though he will find here many things that are, indeed, all too familiar in present society, may still sigh with relief that such thorough and unmitigated tyrants as the affable Justinian and the prankish Theodora are no longer permitted to pillage their subjects with an utterly unchecked hand. And so the curtain rises. “Once upon a time, fourteen hundred years ago—”
Foreword by the Historian
In what I have written on the Roman wars up to the present point, the story was arranged in chronological order and as completely as the times then permitted. What I shall write now follows a different plan, supplementing the previous formal chronicle with a disclosure of what really happened throughout the Roman Empire. You see, it was not possible, during the life of certain persons, to write the truth of what they did, as a historian should. If I had, their hordes of spies would have found out about it, and they would have put me to a most horrible death. I could not even trust my nearest relatives. That is why I was compelled to hide the real explanation of many matters glossed over in my previous books.
These secrets it is now my duty to tell and reveal the remaining hidden matters and motives. Yet when I approach this different task, I find it hard indeed to have to stammer and retract what I have written before about the lives of Justinian and Theodora. Worse yet, it occurs to me that what I am now about to tell will seem neither probable nor plausible to future generations, especially as time flows on and my story becomes ancient history. I fear they may think me a writer of fiction, and even put me among the poets.
However, I have this much to cheer me, that my account will not be unendorsed by other testimony: so I shall not shrink from the duty of completing this work. For the men of today, who know best the truth of these
