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Procopius and the Sixth Century

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Cameron's Procopius and the Sixth Century, first published in 1985, became for a long time orthodoxy on Procopius' mystifying three works.

Cameron's merit is, firstly, to have shown the importance of genre and how it must supersede the search for factual detail, and secondly to have pointed at the complementarity of the three works. Thus Cameron points at the influence and constraints of genre, especially of classical history on the Wars and of invective on the Secret History. Expatiating on the subject's sexual antics, for example, was a conventional part of classical invective. The reader was never expected to take literally Theodora's orgies, her multiple abortions, or the statement that Justinian caused the death of a hundred billion people. Buildings is likewise a formulaic work, if in the opposite sense to the Secret History. Not so much a descriptive or an exhaustive work, it must be seen as an argumentative piece aiming to extol the emperor's church and fortress-building.

At the same time, Procopius and the Sixth Century may be too ready to accept Procopius' Christianity, and too bent on making him a typical Byzantine scholar rather than the classical author he evidently wished to be read as. This has considerable implications as to how his very contradictory works are read, especially the controversial Secret History. Procopius himself wrote in his introduction to it that this was the key to his work, and Cameron's conclusions amount to denying that. This is a learned textual reading of Procopius based on the modern tools of cultural historical analysis, but it is weak on making use of the Wars' classical references. As a result, it tends to downgrade Procopius, and underplay his political message. For a more recent, and perhaps more perceptive but also controversial, analysis, see Anthony Kaldellis's Procopius of Caesarea.