Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Classicism and Its Discontents
—The Preface of the Wars
—A Typology of Classicism
—A Distorting Mirror?
—Interdicting the Secret History and the Buildings
2. Tales Not Unworthy of Trust: Anecdotes and the Persian War
—Arcadius and Isdigerdes (1.2.1-10)
—Anatolius and Vararanes (1.2.11-15)
—Ephthalites, Persians, and Romans (1.3.1-1.4.13)
—The Pearl of Perozes (1.4.14-31)
—The Tyranny of Cavades (1.5-7)
—The "History of the Armenians" (1.5.7-40)
3. The Secret History of Philosophy
—The Sequence of Regimes Ends in Tyranny
—Tyranny and the Politics of Philosophy
—Plato's Nightmare
—Platonic Texts, Platonic Readers
4. The Representation of Tyranny
—Chosroes and Justinian, "Emperors of East and West"
—"Vanity of Vanities": Despotism and Imperial Ceremony
—"The Rule of Women" and the Plan of Secret History 1-5
—Laws, Demons, and the Limits of Classicism in the Secret History
—Alternatives and Solutions
5. God and Tyche in the Wars
Christianity?
—Coping with Tyche
—The Supremacy of Tyche in the Vandal War
—The Struggle Between Virtue and Tyche in the Gothic War
—Catastrophe in the Persian War
—Tyche and God in Book 8 of the Wars
—Precedents and Conclusions
Notes
Index

Promotional Information

A major new study of the last great historian of classical antiquity.

About the Author

Anthony Kaldellis teaches Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. He has translated Genesios's On the Reigns of the Emperors and has written books on Psellos's Chronographia and (in Greek) on the Roman and Byzantine history of Lesbos.

Reviews

"Important, well argued."--Choice "A masterly corrective, which establishes Procopius as a first-rate historian... No scholar of late antique and Byzantine literature can afford to leave it unread."--Mouseion