Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity by Anthony Kaldellis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 101 tion, will eventually give us a critical text of the Senecan and pseudoSenecan tragedies that builds on Zwierlein's substantial contributions while avoiding his excesses. Meanwhile, however, Ferri has given us one "possession forever," or at least for a very long time, in his Octavia. JOHN G. FITCH DEPARTMENT OF GREEK AND ROMAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA VICTORIA, B.C. V8W 3P4 ANTHONY KALDELLIS. Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History , and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. x + 305. US $49.95; £35.00. ISBN 0-8122-3787-0 (cloth). Procopius is well known both as the historian of the wars of Justinian, on which, being secretary and legal adviser of the emperor's leading general, Belisarius, he was splendidly qualified to write, and also as the writer of the Anekdota or Secret History, a vitriolic attack on Justinian and his empress. In the standard modern reference work, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Barry Baldwin repeats the generally held views that the latter is "vicious, indeed ludicrous, invective." while in the former Procopius, "more observer than analyst ... is conventional in his attitudes toward emperor and society." To this one may add that many scholars castigate Procopius for his stylistic dependence upon Thucydides even to the point of disbelieving some of his details (especially in his account of the plague that ravaged the East in the 540S). Drawing on material by others but largely through his own closely analytical reading of the texts, Anthony Kaldellis now provides us with a masterly corrective, which establishes Procopius as a first-rate historian whose classicism is not affected imitation but an ingenious remodelling that serves his own specific purposes very efficiently but in ways intelligible only to educated and perceptive readers both ancient and modern. Throughout the book conventional modern views, especially of Procopius' presumed shortcomings, are attacked as Kaldellis argues that "lack of insight belongs to those who make the charges" (120) rather than to the historian. Kaldellis challenges current opinion of Procopius ' Christianity and shows connexions between the historian's thought and that of contelnporary philosophical dissidents. He also shows the identity of attitude in the Anekdota, where it is so overtly stated, and that of the Wars, whose covert subtlety is reminiscent of the great Athenian's. But, Inore than this, Kaldellis's exploration reveals a 102 BOOK REVIEWSjCOMPTES RENDUS delicate and acute artistry that, mutatis mutandis, is to be found in many later Byzantines, both historians and writers in other genres (indeed Kaldellis himself had earlier similar insights in his The Argument of Psellos' Chronographia [Leiden 1999]). It is, moreover, lucidly written (but substitute "discrete" for "discreet" on 94) with a welcome absence of jargon, and readers are not forever directed to other pages to understand fully the present argument (repetition is, however, occasionally carried unnecessarily far: cf., for instance, 241 n. 121 with 251 n. 13). Its five chapters are supplemented by 42 pages of notes, a very useful and up-to-date bibliography of 24 pages, an adequate index and two appendixes, the first an invaluable list of Justinianic edicts and passages in the Anekdota written in response to them, the other a very brief plan of Anekdota 6-18. In the first chapter, "Classicism and its Discontents," Kaldellis examines both why Procopius eschewed certain contemporary forms of historiography to put himself in the classical tradition, and compares his aims and methods with those of Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius . This involves consideration of Procopius' undercutting of his boast that Justinian's wars are "the greatest and mightiest in all of history" through the deliberately flawed comparison of Homeric archery and sixth-century cavalry, which Kaldellis uses as his springboard to prove how cleverly his historian sets out to subvert the glories of Justinian and Belisarius even during their life-times. Kaldellis concludes by showing, through close analysis of what Procopius says himself in his three works, that the author of history (Wars), invective (Anekdota) and panegyric (Buildings) had a single and consistent viewpoint. Modern historians, in their search for accurate factual information, are quick to condemn the insertion into a work of tales of doubtful historicity and...