Procopius

And well over half of those people are going to die.

We have accounts from Procopius and others who talk about just piles of bodies on the streets.

They would do their best to clean them up and bring them out of the city.

but they were running out of places to pile up bodies.

So I'm also going to be covering the geopolitics of the time, and it's amazing how much of that geopolitics parallels to today as well.

Well, and I found that one of the trade items that Byzantium was most interested in, according to Procopius and some other historical primary sources, was silk.

And that the Persians were actually blocking access to silk or charging exuberant prices to the Byzantines because they were a necessary middleman.

And so, as he said, you know, the Bab al-Mindeb Strait, we talk about it today with what's going on with Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

It's true.

Well, and speaking of Christian history, if anyone is interested, again, we're not going to be going over this today, but a very cool little piece of history is the University of Chicago actually has, again, it's not formatted necessarily beautifully, but gives you access to multiple languages, and it's a primary source translation into English.

of Procopius, the official historian of the Byzantine Empire under St. Justinian.

And this is fascinating.

Quite a number of townsfolk attacked it with axes.

So Procopius tells us, hacking at it, they eventually decided to cut the beast up, divide it out and eventually to consume it.

Oh, my stars.

I think we can all agree that in general, the whales do have cause to want to attack our yachts.

They don't try to fill that vacuum with wishful thinking.

And Procopius of Caesarea, the historian of the sixth century, wrote about the wars of Justinian and has a fascinating account of the plague of 541, 542, is one of those authors.

He refused to speculate wildly, which was the only kind of speculation that one could have engaged in at the time, lacking any understanding of what causes these diseases.

about the origins and cause of the plague, and he makes sure in his account to essentially refute any kind of moral or theological interpretation, seeing as the plague was not making people improve morally, that it was striking down the good and the bad equally, that there was just no moral pattern that played out in his experience of the outbreak.

Without their aid his task would have been very heavy, and with it the difficulty was removed.

The author does not claim to have grappled with all the chroniclers of the Eastern realm, but thinks that some acquaintance with Ammianus, Procopius, Maurice's Strategicon, Leo the Deacon, Leo the Wise, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Anna Comnena, and Nicetas may justify his having undertaken the task he has assayed.

Oxford, February 1892.

End of Preface.

His own mother used every effort to turn him from his purpose, and his uncle the emperor threatened to disinherit him, but he was quietly persistent, and ere the aged Justinus died he had been induced to acknowledge the marriage of his nephew, and to confer on Theodora the title of patrician.

Theodora, as even her enemies allow, was the most beautiful woman of her age.

Procopius, the best historian of the day, says, quote, that it was impossible for mere man to describe her comeliness in words, or imitate it in art, unquote.

All that her detractors could say was that she was below the middle height, and that her complexion was rather pale, though not unhealthy.

It hangs in the sky like the moon, pale and bluish and cold.

The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that the sun gave off its light without brightness, like it was a year-long eclipse.

He also noted grimly that from the moment it started, people stopped being free of war, pestilence, and anything else that leads to death.

For about 18 months, a haze hung over Europe, the Middle East, and much of Asia.

He tightened tax collection, cracked down on corruption that benefited everyone but the treasury, and trimmed spending.

Contemporaries hated him.

And then there was Procopius.

He was the official historian of Justinian wars, a man who wrote respectful, detailed accounts of the emperor's campaigns.

Yeah.

And at the peak of the plague in Constantinople, Procopius, who was there... claims that 10,000 were dying every single day.

They ran out of graves.

They started stacking the dead in the towers of the city walls.

Chapter 2 The Early Account Now the floor under all of it, and it is not much, and it is very old.

In the middle of the sixth century, a man named Procopius was writing a history of the wars of the Eastern Roman Empire, which is the empire people now call Byzantine, though nobody living in it would have said that word.

He was a secretary who traveled with a famous general.

He wrote several books.

Or he may be arranging a foreign religion into the shape of one high god over everything, a shape that Greek and Roman writers knew how to recognize.

I lean to the thunder reading, and I hold it loosely, and I want you to notice why I am hedging.

Procopius was not a neutral camera.

He was an educated man from inside an empire describing people that empire was fighting, and he wrote them into categories his readers already had.

And during the Ostrogoths, the castellum had continued to be used as both a fortification and a prison.

And when Justinian's forces attack the city of Rome, the Castelum shows up in a story about the defense of Rome, and the writer Procopius tells us that after Justinian's general had captured Rome, he and his forces then have to defend against a counterattack from the Ostrogoths, and the Roman troops who had stationed themselves in the Castel Sant'Angelo end up basically using bronze and marble statues from the mausoleum, from the tomb, end up throwing those down against the Gothic forces to fight them off.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, a big-