Procopius and the Sixth Century Procopius and the Sixth Century
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PROCOPIUS AND THE SIXTH CENTURY PROCOPIUS AND THE SIXTH CENTURY Averil Cameron London and New York First published 1985 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Paperback edition published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an International Thomson Publishing company © 1985, 1996 Averil Cameron All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of congress ISBN 0-203-98872-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-14294-6 (Print Edition) For ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO Contents Preface vii Introduction viii Part One 1. Procopius: the Problem 2 2. Procopius and the Crisis of Sixth-Century Literature 18 3. The Discourse of Procopius 32 Part Two 4. Procopius and the Secret History 47 5. Procopius and Theodora 66 6. Procopius and the Buildings 83 7. Procopius and Christianity 113 8. The Historian of the Wars 134 9. Procopius and the Persian Wars 152 10. Procopius and Africa 171 11. Procopius and Italy 189 12. Times and Places 209 Part Three 13. The World of Procopius 227 14. Procopius and Sixth-Century Political Thought 244 Conclusion 264 Maps 269 vi Bibliography 274 Index 292 Preface This book has been a long time in gestation. It owed its inception to a suggestion by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, too readily taken up by me in the belief that a book on Procopius would not be too difficult a task for one who had after all used Procopius constantly and thought she knew him. But he proved not to be easily cracked, and the book which has resulted, after many hold-ups of another sort, is very different from the one originally envisaged. While nearly all existing work on Procopius has concentrated on how reliable he is, how much ‘fact’ can be extracted, the problem that interested me most was how to deal with his three apparently very different works without resorting to psychological speculation or becoming too embroiled in circular arguments about dating. Procopius has attracted many admirers for the wrong reasons. Some of these misconceptions need to be corrected and the works seen for what they are before we can begin to use them. I was much helped by a year’s leave from King’s College in 1977/78 spent at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, and by a short stay as a Summer Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1981. Otherwise my thanks are due above all to the many friends and colleagues who have shared with me the results of their own work so that I could make this book as indicative of current trends as possible in the many fields on which Procopius’ work touches. I am especially grateful to T.S.Brown, P.J.Casey, Maria Cesa, Brian Croke, James Crow, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, Alanna Emmett, Michael Maas, Philip Mayerson, John Nandris, Andrew Poulter, Roger Scott, John Smedley, Edward Thompson, Yoram Tsafrir, Everett Wheeler, L.M.Whitby and Ian Wood. Arnaldo Momigliano read the typescript when it was still in a crude form; he will forgive me for my perversity in not following all his suggestions. To mark his seventy- fifth year I dedicate this book to him with affection and gratitude to a teacher and a friend. London A.M.C. 1 January 1984 Introduction Procopius of Caesarea has always enjoyed a lively reputation. He was recognised immediately as a major historian. Rediscovered after the eclipse of letters in the seventh and eighth centuries, he was a main source for Theophanes’ Chronicle. In modern times he has been known since the fifteenth century, and he provided the basis for the favourable view of Justinian held by the early modern jurists. With the discovery of the Secret History in the Vatican Library in 1623, he became the centre of controversy: how could one and the same man have written the admired History of the Wars and this scurrilous pamphlet? There were many who denied the possibility, but serious nineteenth-century studies, with the excellent critical edition by J.Haury (1905–13), established the uniformity of style between the Wars, the Secret History and the Buildings. J.B.Bury, who had previously denied Procopian authorship of the Secret History, was forced to change his view. Since then there has been a mounting bibliography of studies on individual passages or particular problems, but remarkably little overall discussion. Yet Procopius is the main (often the only) source for Justinian’s wars. He is the major writer of the period, and that on a voluminous scale. There is no way to understand Justinian’s reign, or Justinian himself, without understanding Procopius first, and the main historians of the period, Bury and Stein, not to mention Gibbon, found that they had to produce an analysis of Procopius’ work for themselves. A.H.M.Jones, typically, took a more astringent view, but used Procopius just as much. So there is no dispute about the stature of Procopius. Yet since Dahn in 1865 there has been no substantial book in any language that deals with all the main aspects of Procopius’ work: only the encyclopaedic Pauly-Wissowa article by B.Rubin (1957). Much more seriously, the greater part of the work that has been done, especially where it is work of interpretation, has been focussed in the wrong direction. This book attempts both to provide the general study that is so much needed and to lay down the foundation for a different and more realistic way of interpreting Procopius. So much more needs to be done in this period, as well as for Procopius’ own work (critical editions of other works, a lexicon for Procopius) that much will for now have to remain sketchy and even impressionistic. But the most pressing problem, as I see it, is that of methodology —how to read Procopius. If that at least is tackled, the rest can follow later. We ix are in a field here which is still remarkably unknown by comparison with most periods of ancient history—some may find it difficult to realise quite how unknown it is. Procopius is our main guide. If we get him wrong, we have not much chance of going any further. There are two main ways in which Procopius has been misunderstood, first in terms of the relation between his three works, and secondly in relation to sixth- century society and culture. That is why this book is titled Procopius and the Sixth Century. It tries both to explain the works by taking them as a unified system and to place this system within a comprehensible, and therefore explicable, contemporary context. It makes Procopius seem more easily graspable as a writer at the expense of making him less unique, and certainly less comfortingly ‘classical’. That was the first error, and it still persists—to start from the Wars, which is cast in the familiar mould of classical Greek historiography, and to seize on Procopius as an old friend in a strange world, the world of Justinian, church councils, S.Sophia, Theodora. But this approach causes awful problems with the Secret History and the Buildings, which appear far from classical; indeed a large part of the literature is taken up by attempts to explain the relationship between the three. An extra dimension of difficulty is added by the problems of dating the works. There is also the fact that Procopius is so often our only source: how should his ‘evidence’ be judged? Not merely ‘Is he accurate?’ but also ‘How can we get round the difficulty that so much essential source material is filtered through one writer?’ Most studies have only asked the first of these questions. Procopius is commonly regarded as a highly objective writer, so that the only real problem has seemed to be how to reconcile statements made in the Secret History with statements made in the Wars, on the assumption that if a way could be found Procopius would hold no more difficulties. The first priority, then, is to find a way round this dilemma, to explain the relation between the works without resorting to a crude developmental or psychological view (for we know next to nothing about Procopius except what can be got from his own works). The first step towards this explanation will be a detailed demonstration that, however superficially different, Procopius’ works all exhibit an overall coherence; the Secret History is not so undisciplined, the Buildings not so ‘insincere’ and, above all, the Wars not so splendidly objective and rational as they appear in most modern books. Only then shall we be able to use Procopius with real understanding. Much of this book, therefore, is devoted to a fairly detailed analysis of the structure and articulation of the three works. And because the Wars has always been so privileged over the other two for its supposed classicism, I have chosen to begin that analysis from the Secret History and the Buildings, and only then to work backwards to the Wars.