Procopius and the Sixth Century

Averil Cameron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134764648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Originally published by Duckworth and the University of California Press, Procopius is now available for the first time in paperback. Professor Cameron emphasises the essential unity of Procopius' three works and, starting from the `minor' ones, demonstrates their intimate connection with the Wars. Procopius' writings are seen to comprise a subtle whole; only if they are understood in this way can their historical value be properly appreciated. The result is a new evaluation of Procopius which will be central to any future history of the sixth century.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE
Procopius: the Problem

With the works of Procopius of Caesarea we encounter in an acute form the problem of the dominance of a single author for the history of an important period. The Wars, Secret History and Buildings of Procopius not only represent the main historical source for the reign of Justinian (AD 527–65), but frequently constitute the only source. As Thucydides does for the Peloponnesian War, or Tacitus for the early Empire, so Procopius provides the filter through which we must view the reign of Justinian. He is the major Greek historian of Late Antiquity, perhaps even of Byzantium as a whole, and the proper understanding of his works is crucial to many issues, not least that of the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. He is both a traditional writer and a product of his age. But his works have usually been considered so sharply different that the problem of finding an explanation for these differences has preoccupied the secondary literature. Most often it has been resolved by the simple means of taking the more obviously classicising Wars as basic (and preferable), and then somehow explaining away the notorious Secret History and the unpalatable Buildings. Such an approach has been a too familiar one in the field of Byzantine literature.¹ In Procopius’ case, there have been two main strategies—either to deny him authorship of the Secret History altogether (the most extreme, and now discredited view) or more commonly to explain the differences in terms of his psychology, his responses to changing personal and political circumstances. The trouble with the latter approach, however, is that the dating of the Buildings, and on some views also the Secret History, is not absolutely secure, so that the argument can only be circular. The object of this book is to find a way round this difficulty and to approach the ‘classicism’ of Procopius by placing his work firmly in a contemporary context. As he is by far the most important author for the period, a proper understanding of his work must be a starting point for a history of the sixth century and for Late Antiquity in general.

Since we must of course discuss the evidence for the date and purpose of Procopius’ three works, it will not be possible to avoid altogether the question of his personal views and their development. Indeed it will occupy a major place, especially in the discussion of the Wars, too often assumed to be monolithically uniform. Nevertheless the first way forward must be to take the three works together and to look first at their underlying likenesses; to give more weight to the ‘minor’ works, the Secret History and the Buildings, and to get away from the automatic privileging of the Wars on grounds of classicism. That is why the two shorter works are here treated first, in what may seem a paradoxical arrangement. When they have had their say, the Wars can speak for itself. The result will be to present a more homogeneous and a more Byzantine Procopius, in the sense that he will seem more closely related to his own culture and less of a stray from classical historiography who happened occasionally to reveal his Byzantine origins in an unfortunate lapse.

Surprisingly, there has not been the number of serious studies of Procopius that one would have expected. On the contrary, his work has been taken so much for granted that modern histories of the period still tend to paraphrase large sections of the Wars.² He is, after all, the major source of basic information.³ But although a great many studies exist on individual problems, most begin from the kind of assumptions about the three works which I have already indicated. Thus a prevailing view of Procopius emphasises his supposed ‘rationalism’, and has inevitable difficulty in explaining the Secret History, with its virulent personal attacks, its sexual explicitness and its straightforward acceptance of the demonic nature of Justinian and Theodora.⁴ The textual history of the work provided a way out of the dilemma, however, for the Secret History was not known until the seventeenth century, and it was relatively easy for scholars accustomed to draw from Procopius’ other works confirmation of their favourable estimate of Justinian as Catholic lawgiver to deny that he could be the author of this newly discovered scandal sheet.⁵ No one today would maintain that Procopius did not write the Secret History (though it is only in modern times that the case for Procopian authorship has been fully set out),⁶ but the traces of those early attitudes can still clearly be seen in modern works. Thus most authors regard the relation between the Wars, the Buildings and the Secret History as a primary problem;⁷ it is still usually posed, moreover, in terms of the contrast between the classicising Wars and the other two works, and solved in terms of Procopius’ supposed intentions or psychology. But now with more study of sixth-century literature such standard assumptions as that of the superiority of classicising history to ‘popular’ chronicles are being questioned,⁸ and it is certainly time to apply these newer perceptions to the central body of work basic to sixth-century Byzantine political history—that of Procopius.

Clearly it is necessary to set out my understanding of the facts, such as can be known, of Procopius’ life and writing career.⁹ The evidence, which is meagre, comes mostly from his own works.

He tells us himself, for instance, that he was a native of Caesarea in Palestine,¹⁰ a Hellenic foundation famous for its library, whose core was provided by the books of Origen, organised by Pamphilus, the mentor of the church historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in the reign of Constantine.¹¹ The functioning of Caesarea as an intellectual centre was at its height in the fourth century, when its schools attracted Gregory of Nazianzus and when Libanius remarked on the high pay of its teachers.¹² There is much less evidence for the sixth century, but it continued as a centre of education and perhaps functioned as a feeder for the law schools of Beirut.¹³ Choricius of Gaza in his funeral oration for the great rhetor Procopius reveals that Caesarea succeeded in capturing him for a time, only to lose him to his yearning for his native Gaza.¹⁴ Certainly our Procopius would have had access there to a rich intellectual tradition. Caesarea was a cosmopolitan city with a mixed population of Christians and Jews. There were many Samaritans too, and Procopius could write with authority and experience of the Samaritan revolts and their harsh suppression, especially in AD 529.¹⁵ He wrote, therefore, as a provincial, and as a native of an area and a city which knew what religious division and persecution meant in practice; it is not surprising, then, if in his writings he condemned Justinian’s policies towards religious minorities. In so doing, however, he was one of the very small number of Christians in the Late Empire who did explicitly condemn religious persecution as such.¹⁶ Such a reaction to official policy does not however imply, as many have thought, that Procopius was not a Christian.¹⁷ Interestingly enough, it was shared by Agathias, the continuator of the Wars, who held conventional Christian views on other matters.¹⁸ Nor does it mean that Procopius shared modern liberal ideas: on the contrary, most of his attitudes were totally reactionary, as we shall see. It probably had much to do with early first-hand experience in Caesarea of the ruthless treatment of dissenters, which may have done much to shape Procopius’ later attitudes. Felix Dahn in the nineteenth century sought to explain Procopius’ alienation from the official line by supposing that he was born a Jew; ¹⁹ he was surely wrong, though in the context of the social composition of Caesarea it is not so unlikely a suggestion as it may appear. Later in life, during the writing of the Wars, Procopius had several occasions to feel personally threatened by imperial persecution, especially in AD 528/9 and 546, years which saw attacks on suspicious pagan and heretic intellectuals, doctors and lawyers in Constantinople— just the sort of class that Procopius represented.²⁰

In fact Procopius probably came from the Christian upper classes of Caesarea. The name is common enough, and little can be deduced from it;²¹ of Procopius’ family we know nothing, but that he came of the landowning provincial upper classes is likely from the political attitudes manifested especially in the Secret History, where one of the main themes is that of the exhaustion of this class by the fiscal and other demands of the government. The legal training which Procopius evidently had was a common entry for sons of such families into the administration. It led John the Lydian into a post in the Praetorian Prefecture²² and Agathias from obscure Myrina to legal practice in Constantinople.²³ Whether Procopius studied at Gaza, as has been claimed,²⁴ is extremely doubtful, since there is no direct evidence for the idea and nothing to make the hypothesis necessary. It follows that we cannot appeal to the intellectual background of Gaza as an explanation of Procopius’ attitudes.²⁵ Nevertheless his social and geographical origins do account for many of his interests and his limitations. Thus his education will have been the standard secular education of the day, based on imitation of the classical authors and on the study of rhetoric.²⁶ There is little to suggest serious study of p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• Bibliography