The Hidden Historian

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The New York Sun

By day he composes the official history of the Empire in solemn prose laced with purple. By night, dunking his pen in bile, he scribbles out the true record. The official account brims with pomp: public works galore, military victories and triumphal arches, the elaboration of a vast code of law. The hidden history details all the sordid exploits behind palace walls: orgies, murders, appalling torture sessions. For an unknown number of years, the historian pursues this schizophrenic career, tearing down in secret what he exalts in public. He knows that if the work is seen by the emperor or empress, he will die a miserable, slow death. What prompts him to persist in writing this secret book which he himself will never see published?


The historian is Procopius, the book his “Secret History,” a blistering narrative of the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and Theodora, his empress. Posterity remembers Justinian as the sponsor of the law-code that bears his name, or as the builder of Hagia Sophia, one of the grandest monuments of Christendom (still standing, of course, though since 1453 a mosque). In fact, if we are to credit Procopius, Justinian was a monster of depravity, and Theodora was even worse. His “History” was probably composed around 550 but possesses a scathing immediacy; he claimed that it made his “teeth chatter” to write it.


Procopius is a bit like Saint Simon, who spied on Louis XIV’s every foible and folly for 20 years and recorded them in his secret memoirs. Both were terrific snobs; nothing gave them greater pleasure than to document gaffs and lapses in their royal subjects. Of Justinian, Procopius writes, “he himself neither possessed any quality likely to enhance the dignity of an emperor nor attempted to give the impression of possessing it: in speech, dress, and way of thinking he was utterly uncouth.” Both historians hated newfangledness; Saint Simon deplored Louis XIV’s shoddy treatment of the nobility, Procopius despises Justinian’s love of novelty, remarking fastidiously that “endless innovations were his constant preoccupation.”


Procopius implies that this faddishness lay at the heart of Justinian’s spectacular corruption. Under the grandiosity, the successor to Justin and Constantine was a destroyer. Procopius claims that during his 38-year reign, a “million million” people perished; this is obviously a rhetorical formula, but Edward Gibbon, who admired “The Secret History,” estimated that no fewer than 100 million died as a result of Justinian’s savagery and incompetence. It has taken until our own times, and the equally corrupt and bloodthirsty Mao Zedong, to rival that number.


“The Secret History” is most easily available in the Penguin edition, translated by G.A. Williamson (207 pages, $14), who supplies a good factual introduction. Professor Williamson discusses Procopius’s motive for writing a book that might never see the light of day as though it were some baffling mystery. But any writer who had witnessed the atrocities and blatant malfeasance Procopius had seen, over a long career, both in proximity to the emperor and to his brilliant general Belisarius, might have felt impelled to correct the record. The desire to tell the truth seems to have provided his strongest motive. At the end he remarks, “One of these days Justinian, if he is a man, will depart this life: if he is Lord of the Demons, he will lay his life aside. Then all who chance to be still living will know the truth.”


Procopius wondered in all sincerity whether Justinian were not a demon (and recounts several spooky stories to that effect).The emperor’s love of murder makes him seem other than human; he remarks more than once, “of the forcible seizure of property and the murder of his subjects he could never have enough.” His portrait of this monster is scary but utterly credible because he himself is baffled by the contradictions: Justinian lives in ascetic fashion, hardly eating or sleeping; he roams his palaces by night, plotting new cruelties; at the same time, he is affable and gentle, and his subjects have easy and almost unrestricted access to him. He is mildest when consigning some hapless courtier to torture, execution, or banishment.


“The Secret History” draws much of its notoriety from its depiction of the Empress Theodora and of her friend and crony Antonina, the wife from hell of the great general Belisarius. Both women came from shady backgrounds. Theodora, the daughter of a bear-feeder, started out as a child prostitute and became a courtesan; Antonina, daughter of a charioteer and an actress, was equally promiscuous but had the advantage of knowing black magic.


Procopius loathes these women so keenly that you can almost feel the venom coursing through his words as he recounts their sexual enormities. Of Theodora, Gibbon remarked that “her arts must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language” (Gibbon quotes Procopius only in the original Greek with his own comments in Latin). Gibbon didn’t exaggerate; the passages on the sexual antics of both ladies have you rubbing your eyes at times (I’d quote a few, but my Latin is too rusty for decency).


From a literary viewpoint, it is the portrait of Belisarius and his baffling enslavement to his sluttish wife that dominates “The Secret History.” Procopius knew the general well; he had campaigned with him in Persia. All Justinian’s military triumphs occurred because of Belisarius, and so the emperor could not have him murdered. But Theodora was not hindered by such scruples. In Constantinople Belisarius feared for his life, and the passage in which Procopius conveys the terror of the world-conquering commander is a little masterpiece of insight:



It was late in the evening when [Belisarius] set off for home, and on the way back he repeatedly turned round and looked in every possible direction from which he might see his would-be murderers coming towards him. In the grip of this terror he went upstairs to his bedroom and sat down on the bed alone. There was no one honourable thought in his head; he was not conscious that he had once been a man. The sweat ran down his face unceasingly; his head swam; his whole body trembled in an agony of despair.


As fate would have it, Justinian, Belisarius, and Procopius himself all died in the same year, 565. Not long before, the general had been restored to court favor and in 562, Procopius was named prefect of Byzantium. Of the three, only the historian was aware that under the imperial facade, their secretly intertwined lives would continue for centuries.


eormsby@nysun.com


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