Quaestor. Chancellor, or Secretary of State. ↩
Blues and Greens. Colors of rival hippodrome teams, whose partisans eventually differed also in matter of politics and even, Gibbon suggests, religion: the Greens, in the time of Anastasius, favoring that defender of (Unit—) Arianism; the Blues, when Justinian came to notice, following him and Athanasian orthodoxy. ↩
Tyranny. Tyrant, to a Greek, meant specifically a monarch who had usurped the throne by force and not by normal succession. ↩
Theodora and the Geese. This skit was apparently a burlesque of Leda and the Swan. ↩
Marriage permitted between men of senatorial rank and courtesans. The nominal object of the new law was to save the girls by offering them this reward for “a glorious repentance.” ↩
Amasalontha. Gothic Queen of Italy, who had been imprisoned by her husband Theodatus. ↩
Instructions given Peter by the Emperor. Demanding Amasalontha’s life and liberty be kept inviolate. ↩
Theodatus eliminates Amasalontha. She was strangled in her bath. ↩
Paphlagonian, by a familiar Greek pun, frequent in Aristophanes, also suggests “a blusterer.” ↩
Three obols. Ten cents. ↩
A trillion people. “A myriad myriads of myriads,” is the text, a myriad, or 10,000 being the highest number in Greek arithmetic. The commentator Alemannus computes the total as two hundred millions; and by an even stranger and more economical figuring, the translator for the Athenian Society makes two millions of it. Gibbon suggests dropping one of the myriads, to give one hundred million: “a number not wholly unpermissable.” ↩
Scholars (Latin, scholares) was their actual nickname; but the reference is to their life of ease, not to their erudition. ↩
Scissors. The nickname refers, of course, to his economical clipping of gold coins. ↩
Barbarian, to a Greek, meant anyone who spoke a foreign language; not till late Roman times did the word take on its modern significance. Considering Procopius’s occasional levities, I suspect he was aware of the humor of his phrase. ↩
Colophon
The Secret History
was completed in the 6th century AD by
Procopius.
It was translated from Greek in 1927 by
Richard Atwater.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on a transcription produced by the
Internet Sacred Text Archive
and on digital scans from
Google Books.
The cover page is adapted from
Emperor Justinian,
a painting completed in 1886 by
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
February 21, 2023, 3:11 a.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/procopius/the-secret-history/richard-atwater.
The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.
Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Copyright pages exist to tell you that you can’t do something. Unlike them, this Uncopyright page exists to tell you that the writing and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The United States public domain represents our collective cultural heritage, and items in it are free for anyone in the United States to do almost anything at all with, without having to get permission.
Copyright laws are different all over the world, and the source text or artwork in this ebook may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws before using this ebook. Standard Ebooks makes no representations regarding the copyright status of the source text or artwork in this ebook in any country other than the United States.
Non-authorship activities performed on items that are in the public domain—so-called “sweat of the brow” work—don’t create a new copyright. That means that nobody can claim a new copyright on an item that is in the public domain for, among other things, work like digitization, markup, or typography. Regardless, the contributors to this ebook release their contributions under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, thus dedicating to the worldwide public domain all of the work they’ve done on this ebook, including but not limited to metadata, the titlepage, imprint, colophon, this Uncopyright, and any changes or enhancements to, or markup on, the original text and artwork. This dedication doesn’t change the copyright status of the source text or artwork. We make this dedication in the interest of enriching our global cultural heritage, to promote free and libre culture around the world, and to give back to the unrestricted culture that has given all of us so much.
