Procopius of Caesarea: Literary and Historical Interpretations

Christopher Lillington-Martin, Christopher Lillington-Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317075486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume aims to encourage dialogue and collaboration between international scholars by presenting new literary and historical interpretations of the sixth-century writer Procopius of Caesarea, the major historian of Justinian's reign. Although scholarship on Procopius has flourished since 2004, when the last monograph in English on Procopius was published, there has not been a collection of essays on the subject since 2000. Work on Procopius since 2004 has been surveyed by Geoffrey Greatrex in his international bibliography; Peter Sarris has revised the 1966 Penguin Classics translation of, and introduced, Procopius' Secret History (2007); and Anthony Kaldellis has edited, translated and introduced Procopius' Secret History, with related texts (2010), and revised and modernised H.B. Dewing's Loeb translation of Procopius' Wars as The Wars of Justinian in 2014.

This volume capitalises on the renaissance in Procopius-related studies by showcasing recent work on Procopius in all its diversity and vibrancy. It offers approaches that shed new light on Procopius' texts by comparing them with a variety of relevant textual sources. In particular, the volume pays close attention to the text and examines what it achieves as a literary work and what it says as an historical product.

Part I
Revisiting Procopius

1 Writing about Procopius then and now

Averil Cameron

Interest in Procopius can rarely have been as lively as it is at the moment. There were two well-attended conferences in 2014, in Oxford and Mainz, followed by a Brill’s Companion to Procopius (2017),¹ with commentaries planned or published on parts of the Wars and on the Buildings, new translations of the Secret History and a major revision of Dewing’s translation of the Wars and a steady stream of publications, whether general studies or on specific aspects.² This is interesting in itself, since the return to historiography and to narrative political and military history marks a shift away from the broader cultural and religious emphasis of much recent writing on late antiquity. In the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, published in 2006, Procopius is given only a relatively short account in the context of a discussion of literary culture in general under Justinian,³ but the ‘classicising’ historians of the period, including Procopius, have been the subject of several general treatments in their own right,⁴ complemented by ongoing research projects on late antique historiography in Heidelberg, Ghent and Amsterdam, and no doubt elsewhere too. The new serious and sustained attention to Procopius marks a further step in this direction.

This was not the case when I published my own book on Procopius in 1985, over 30 years ago.⁵ It had grown out of the doctoral work I did in the 1960s on Agathias, Procopius’ continuator, which was published as a book in 1970.⁶ While it is true that Procopius and the Sixth Century was not published until fifteen years after that, it is not quite the case that it represented twenty years of reflection on Procopius.⁷ In the interim, I had been distracted by discovering the then equally neglected Latin panegyric on Justinian’s successor, Justin II, by Corippus, known as the Laudes Justini Minoris,⁸ and had become interested in other questions – art history, ceremony, ritual and the cult of the Theotokos.⁹ I spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1977–1978, supposedly to write on Procopius, but in fact discovering anthropology in Clifford Geertz’s seminar. A seminar at King’s College London had also given rise to a study of the eighth-century Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai.¹⁰ But a book on Procopius was logical and badly needed at the time, and if my book was written only after these diversions, perhaps it was all better for them. In fact, one of my very earliest publications was a partial translation of Procopius (omitting the Vandal Wars and the Buildings) with an introduction, in a series called The Great Histories edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper; it came out in 1967.¹¹ Much of the recent scholarship on Procopius has been focused on detail, but Trevor-Roper evidently thought that Procopius was a great historian. Michael Whitby takes up that challenge in this volume, and perhaps, it is indeed time to stand back and think about his work as a whole as an achievement of historiography.

That Procopius’ Buildings has also been used and relied upon by generations of archaeologists is important. I had experienced this firsthand in the 1970s when I spent two periods in Tunisia at the time of the major UNESCO Save Carthage archaeological mission, and was able to see for myself something of how far it is and is not possible to map Procopius’ narrative of the Vandal wars and his account of Carthage and North Africa in the Buildings on to the actual physical remains on the ground. I also witnessed archaeological colleagues in action using Procopius as a kind of handbook. Late antique archaeology was then only in its early stages, but that experience translated itself into the way in which I interpreted Procopius when I came to write my book. It also illustrated the fact that neither the Buildings nor the other two works can be fully interpreted either by historical/archaeological or by literary approaches alone.¹² By the time I did write Procopius and the Sixth Century in the 1980s, I was also interested in literary theory, and I saw the main problem as being how to approach and explain an author who wrote three such apparently contradictory works.¹³ I was very sure that one would not find it by starting in the traditional way with the Wars,¹⁴ and my starting point was that what were then often called Procopius’ ‘minor’ works might in fact supply the key to the Wars. By now, I was also occupied with issues such as gender and the interaction of literature and historical writing, and the answer I found to my Procopius problem was largely to do with genre. But genre is a problem too, even though considerations of genre are being cautiously explored again after a period out in the cold;¹⁵ not surprisingly, with the benefit of hindsight, the stress I then laid on genre now seems less warranted and does not allow enough for Procopius the writer. That a literary analysis of all three of Procopius’ works together must provide a starting point is still surely basic, however,¹⁶ and even more so, given the revised and tighter chronology now advanced for the three works by Federico Montinaro in the light of his important recognition of two separate, early versions of the Buildings, whose early publishing history he discusses in the present volume.¹⁷

Finally, earlier studies of Procopius emphasized his use of classical models in terms of imitation or mimesis, and here, too, scholarship has moved on; Peter Van Nuffelen’s chapter below offers a subtle discussion of the issue. Not merely sixth-century writers but also generations of later Byzantines writing in high style (especially historians) were heavily indebted to classical models, and they sought to emulate them, a practice to which they were attuned by the educational system inherited from late antiquity. The bad press that has resulted from this among modern critics is well known and has led to a series of apologias and sometimes to less than convincing attempts to find originality in Byzantine works.¹⁸ But more fruitfully, the impact of methods of literary criticism used elsewhere, and the mass of critical writing about the concept of mimesis, has led recently to a very different evaluation of this practice among post-classical and Byzantine writers, based on the much broader concept of intertextuality rather than a binary model of imitation and influence.¹⁹ This is yet to be fully applied to the writings of Procopius, though the omens seem good.

Procopius has also benefited from a growing interest in narrativity in relation to Byzantine prose writing. Rather than focusing narrowly on the classicizing aspects of Byzantine historical writing, this approach seeks to analyse the techniques by which narrative is constructed by writers like Procopius. Not only do his works relate to those of other historians in the sixth century and later but also to the techniques of narrative and storytelling employed in other types of Byzantine prose writing, including hagiography.²⁰ Especially in view of this blurring between different types of writing (or genres), I believe we should also add to this focus a consideration of fiction and fictionality, a topic somewhat neglected up to now in relation to formal historiography.²¹

Another way in which scholarship has moved on since Procopius and the Sixth Century is undoubtedly in the greater understanding of the pervasiveness of Neoplatonism and Neoplatonic thought in the sixth century. John the Lydian provides one example, but the phenomenon went further and was more complex than the Platonism on which Anthony Kaldellis insists (for which see below).²² But it is far from clear how far this translates into religious affiliations, and gauging the actual level of non-Christian attachments is tricky to say the least. In the 1960s and 1970s, most of this reassessment lay in the future. It seemed important, however, to decide about Procopius’ religious stance, partly in response to the extensive older bibliography, which includes a series of German dissertations on subjects such as his imitation of Thucydides and the role played in his work by concepts like fate or tyche. On the one hand, Procopius uses a ‘sceptical’ and neutral linguistic register, but on the other hand, he sometimes includes Christian material and refers to holy men and bishops, even though on occasion expressing the view that Christian doctrinal disputes are a foolish waste of time. Against that, he says elsewhere that one day he intends to write an ecclesiastical history.²³ Like his model, Thucydides,²⁴ Procopius leaves out what he does not consider germane to his central theme, and since he is the only source for a high proportion of what he writes about and our main source for Justinian, this creates many problems in itself. Among Procopius’ omissions is any serious discussion of Justinian’s attempts to establish religious unity, his meetings with the Syrian Orthodox, the splits, depositions and ordinations among Christians in the eastern provinces, and the Three Chapters affair and its impact on the church of North Africa, even if it is conceded that the protracted council of 553, with Justinian’s harsh treatment of Vigilius of Rome, the latter’s capitulation and his subsequent difficult reception in Italy effectively came too late to be mentioned in the conclusion of the Wars. Yet, as Van Nuffelen argues later, Procopius’ apparent disclaimer in this regard (Wars 5.3.6–8) is not what it seems. Again like Thucydides, there are moments at which Procopius seems to intervene with a personal comment, but despite the impression given by the Secret History, he is not writing a confessional, nor is he under any obligation to give a complete picture of his personal affiliations in his literary works, let alone to be ‘sincere’.²⁵ In a famous passage of the Secret History, he invokes demonology to explain the disasters brought by Justinian and Theodora,²⁶ and this features as a central element in recent discussions of eschatology and apocalypticism.²⁷ It seems from this passage as though Procopius shared in the religious fears and assumptions of his age;²⁸ yet the tone remains hard to read, and we need to remember that the same Procopius is a master of satire and artfulness. In the absence, for the most part, of any information about Procopius outside his own works, these internal contradictions are still troubling. But if once I was overconfident in assuming that Procopius was basically Christian, it is equally rash to assert the opposite. Both conclusions suffer from the biographical fallacy.²⁹ Deducing a writer’s religious views from his literary output is a perilous matter, not least in the face of internal contradictions within the works and apparent contradictions between them.

Anthony Kaldellis’ contributions to Procopian studies are many and demand a more detailed treatment than I can give here.³⁰ In particular, however, his book Procopius of Caesarea, published in 2004, put forward some challenging positions that ask for serious answers.³¹ Yet Procopius of Caesarea is in many ways a very old-fashioned book. Rather than being new topics in the literature, issues like Procopius’ linguistic register and his deployment of the concept of tyche were not only discussed in detail in my book of 1985, but have also been part of scholarship on Procopius since Felix Dahn’s book, published over a century earlier in 1865, or Berthold Rubin’s massive Pauly-Wissowa entry of 1957 and his unfinished book of 1960,³² not to mention a whole raft of German dissertations and several publications by Procopius’ Teubner editor, Jakob Haury. It is not surprising if, in the mid-nineteenth century, Dahn still had to argue about the authenticity of the Secret History (only settled by Haury), and as a man of his age and background, he was in any case interested primarily in the end of the Roman empire and the role of the early Germa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Revisiting Procopius
• Part II Literary tropes
• Part III Persian wars
• Part IV Characterisation
• Part V Military and legal history comparisons
• Part VI Social history comparisons
• Part VII Receptions
• Part VIII The aftermath
• Bibliography
• Index