Procopius

Procopius was born around 500 in Caesarea Maritima, the Roman capital of Palestine, a Greek-speaking city with famous schools, and was trained as a rhetor and lawyer, probably in Gaza or Beirut. In 527, the year Justinian became emperor, he was appointed legal adviser and secretary to the young general Belisarius on the Persian frontier, and for the next thirteen years he saw the wars of the age from the commander's tent: the victory at Dara in 530, the expedition that destroyed the Vandal kingdom in North Africa in 533–34, the war against the Ostrogoths in Italy, including the year-long siege of Rome in 537–38, and the entry into Ravenna in 540.

By 542 he was in Constantinople, where he watched the bubonic plague kill, by his count, up to ten thousand people a day; his description in the second book of the Wars is the first clinical account of the disease in European literature. He lived on in the capital as a man of standing, perhaps holding high office, and published the first seven books of the Wars around 551, the eighth about 553, and the Buildings in the mid-550s. The Secret History, written in about 550 in rage and fear, he kept locked away. The date of his death is unknown; around 565, the year Justinian himself died, is the usual guess.

Nothing is known of his private life, and his three books give three different voices: the sober soldier-historian, the court panegyrist, and the author of the Secret History, so venomous that for centuries scholars refused to believe one man wrote all three.

Υπέρ των πολέμων (The Wars) is modelled on Thucydides: speeches before battle, geographic digressions, a cool eye for causes. Its set pieces are the Nika riot of January 532, when half of Constantinople burned and Justinian prepared to flee until Theodora told the council that she would rather die in the purple, quoting the old saying that «royalty is a fine burial shroud»; the plague of 542; and the long agony of Italy. Περί κτισμάτων (Buildings) catalogues Justinian's churches, fortresses and cisterns, and its first book contains the classic description of Hagia Sophia, whose dome seemed to Procopius not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven by a golden chain.

Ανέκδοτα (literally «unpublished things», the Secret History) is the book that made him notorious. He claims that Justinian and Theodora ruined the empire for pleasure and greed; that the emperor was seen walking the palace at night without a head; that Theodora, daughter of a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome, had been an actress and courtesan; that Belisarius was a coward ruled by his unfaithful wife Antonina. Historians read it with care, as the revenge of a conservative senator on a reforming autocrat, but its details about taxation, law and court life are often confirmed elsewhere. The manuscript lay unknown in the Vatican Library until Niccolò Alamanni printed it in 1623. His Greek is an artificial Attic, avoiding Christian terms, so that a bishop becomes «a priest» and a church «a temple», which is exactly why classicists still read him as the last of the ancients.

Every Greek pupil meets Procopius without knowing it: the second-year gymnasium textbook of Byzantine history tells the Nika riot through his eyes, and Theodora's «η βασιλεία είναι ωραίο σάβανο» (royalty is a fine shroud) is a line Greeks still quote when they refuse to run. Hagia Sophia, which his Buildings describes stone by stone, remains the one Byzantine monument everyone knows. The Greek word ανέκδοτο, today an amusing story or joke, took that meaning from the title of his Secret History, the «unpublished» book full of scandalous tales. The Secret History is a bestseller in modern Greek translation and the source of Robert Graves's novel Count Belisarius (1938) and of every Theodora of film and television. The 542 plague he described is called the Plague of Justinian and was cited constantly during the Covid pandemic.

• The Greek word ανέκδοτο and the English «anecdote» descend from the title of his Secret History, Ἀνέκδοτα, «things not given out».
• The Secret History stayed unread for a thousand years, until a manuscript was found in the Vatican Library and printed in 1623.
• He reports that a monk, brought to the palace, refused to enter because he saw the Lord of the Demons sitting on the throne in Justinian's place.
• His description of the 542 plague, with its buboes, delirium and mass graves, is the earliest clinical account of bubonic plague in European writing.