Villains and Virgins History Podcast
Aug 10, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min · 12 segments
General Belisarius is the most underrated commander of the Roman Empire. He was the man who reconquered the Roman province of North Africa from the Vandals -- and that was just the start of his…
I didn't focus on him specifically because I wanted to save him for these episodes where he gets to be the star of his own story.
But we've seen him in the background of the story of Justinian and Theodora, and so part of this story brushes up against those events and those people because it's part of the same historical moment.
There are a striking number of similarities between the two men in these couples and the two women.
These four people will be the most powerful in the Eastern Roman Empire in their generation.
As we're about to see, Belisarius will distinguish himself with incredible military victories.
Procopius works for General Belisarius for many years, and he writes an official record of the wars, the military campaigns that General Belisarius conducts.
But then, in private, he writes this venomous, slanderous document called The Secret History.
And Procopius does absolutely everything he can to undermine General Belisarius' image.
Specifically by portraying him as a man who was hopelessly infatuated with his wife, blind to her infidelities, and shamefully subservient to a woman who demonstrated no loyalty to him whatsoever.
So it's a scandalous picture that Procopius paints of Belisarius, and it's an image that's deliberately designed to be the opposite of manly or heroic, and something that poisoned the minds of many generations afterwards because historians like Edward Gibbon and others often took Procopius at his word.
So when Procopius is giving very factual accounts of the wars, he's believed, and when he's giving not so factual accounts about these four people in The Secret History, he was also believed.
He gives us incredibly valuable information about the wars that General Belisarius fought in his official histories.
And to take him with the same degree of seriousness when he's writing in The Secret History as we do when he's writing The Wars is a great mistake.
But it's one that has been made by several generations of historians and readers who have, as a result, developed an image of Belisarius that is weak and altogether inaccurate.
More recently, historians have taken a much more critical view of Procopius in The Secret History, and we're going to do that here.
So we're going to talk about Belisarius, but it's impossible to talk about the man and his legacy without also mentioning Procopius and, of course, Belisarius' famous, or infamous, wife Antonina.
I didn't focus on him specifically because I wanted to save him for these episodes where he gets to be the star of his own story.
But we've seen him in the background of the story of Justinian and Theodora, and so part of this story brushes up against those events and those people because it's part of the same historical moment.
There are a striking number of similarities between the two men in these couples and the two women.
These four people will be the most powerful in the Eastern Roman Empire in their generation.
As we're about to see, Belisarius will distinguish himself with incredible military victories.
Procopius works for General Belisarius for many years, and he writes an official record of the wars, the military campaigns that General Belisarius conducts.
But then, in private, he writes this venomous, slanderous document called The Secret History.
And Procopius does absolutely everything he can to undermine General Belisarius' image.
Specifically by portraying him as a man who was hopelessly infatuated with his wife, blind to her infidelities, and shamefully subservient to a woman who demonstrated no loyalty to him whatsoever.
So it's a scandalous picture that Procopius paints of Belisarius, and it's an image that's deliberately designed to be the opposite of manly or heroic, and something that poisoned the minds of many generations afterwards because historians like Edward Gibbon and others often took Procopius at his word.
So when Procopius is giving very factual accounts of the wars, he's believed, and when he's giving not so factual accounts about these four people in The Secret History, he was also believed.
He gives us incredibly valuable information about the wars that General Belisarius fought in his official histories.
And to take him with the same degree of seriousness when he's writing in The Secret History as we do when he's writing The Wars is a great mistake.
But it's one that has been made by several generations of historians and readers who have, as a result, developed an image of Belisarius that is weak and altogether inaccurate.
More recently, historians have taken a much more critical view of Procopius in The Secret History, and we're going to do that here.
So we're going to talk about Belisarius, but it's impossible to talk about the man and his legacy without also mentioning Procopius and, of course, Belisarius' famous, or infamous, wife Antonina.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
