Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/814

Rh 790 PIIOCOPIUS who had a measure of judicial as well as administrative power, and have been well compared by Mr Hodgkin (Italy and Her Invaders, vol. iii. p. 638) to those of an English judge advocate. When the Persian War was suspended Frocopius probably returned with his general to Constanti nople ; and when Belisarius was despatched against the Vandals of Africa in 533 Procopius again accompanied him, as he subsequently did in the war against the Ostro goths of Italy which began in 536. Whether he held the same position of legal assessor through these campaigns or was merely a member of the large personal following which Belisarius had we do not know. Suidas calls him the secre tary (v7roypa&amp;lt;ci; s) of Belisarius, but this may be merely a reference to his original appointment as criyx/3oi&amp;gt;Aos in the Persian campaign. He was evidently much valued by Beli sarius, who twice employed him on difficult and important missions once in 533 to obtain from Syracuse provisions for the Roman fleet and information as to the preparations of the Vandals, and again in 537, when the historian was despatched from Rome, which Belisarius was holding against the Goths, to collect troops and corn in Campania and bring them in a fleet to Ostia. On both occasions Procopius ac quitted himself with skill and success. He passes lightly over his own performances, and nowhere strikes us as eager for an opportunity of singing his own praises. After the capture of Ravenna in 539 Procopius would seem to have returned to Constantinople, where he was in 542, the year of the great plague, which he has minutely described (Pers., ii. 22). It does not appear whether he was with the Roman armies in the later stages of the Gothic War, when Belisarius and afterwards Narses fought against Totila in Italy, though his narrative of these years is so much less full and minute than that of the earlier warfare that probably he was not an eye-witness of these campaigns. Of his subsequent fortunes we know nothing, except that he was living in 559. He was an advocate by profession (Agathias, Evagrius, and other Byzantine writers call him p^rwp), but whether he practised law after his return from the Italian wars may be doubted, for he must have been then occupied with the composition of his his tories, and his books show that he spent a good deal of time in travel. He seldom refers to legal matters, and shows little interest in them, mentioning only in the most cursory way the legislation and codification of Justinian. Whether he was the Procopius who was prefect of Con stantinople in 562 (Theophanes, Chronographia, 201, 202) and was removed from office in the year following cannot be determined. Little can be founded on the name, for it was a common one in that age, and had this Procopius been our historian one might have expected some of the subsequent writers who refer to the latter to have men tioned this fact about him. On the other hand the historian was evidently a person of note, who had obtained the rank of Illustris (Suidas calls him IXXouorpios), and a passage in the Anecdota looks as if he had risen to be a senator (Anecd., c. 12), so that there is no improbability in his having been raised to the high office of prefect. There has been some controversy as to his religion. So far as external profession went, he must have been a Christian ; for paganism, persecuted by Justinian, would hardly have been tolerated in so conspicuous a person ; nor is there any evidence for his being a heathen other than the cool indifference with which (except in the D&quot;, JEdi- ficiis) he speaks about Christian beliefs and practices. He seems to have been so far a Christian as to have believed in a God and have held Christ to be a supernatural being, but he frequently expresses himself in sceptical language , talks of God and Fate as if practically synonymous, and entertained great contempt for the theological controversies which raged so hotly in his own time. Procopius s writings fall into three divisions the His lories (Persian, Vandal, and Gothic Wars) in eight books, the treatise on the Buildings of Justinian (De in six books, and the Unpublished Memoirs (TO. Hist aria Arcana), here cited as the Anecdota. The Histories are called by the author himself the Books aboiit the Wars (ol vwep rwv TTO^MV Aoyoi). They consist of (1) the Persian Wars, in two books, giving a narrative of the long struggle of the emperors Justin and Justinian against the Persian kings Kobad and Chosroes Anushirvan down to 550 ; (2) the Vandal War, in two books, describ ing the conquest of the Vandal kingdom in Africa and the subsequent events there from 532 down to 546 (with a few words on later occurrences); (3) the Gothic War, in four books, narrating the war against the Ostrogoths in Sicily and Italy from 536 till 552. These three treatises were written continuously to form one connected history ; but, as the arrangement of events is geographical, not chronological, they overlap in time, the Persian War carry ing its narrative over a large part of the period embraced in the Vandal War and the Gothic War. The fourth and last of the four books of the Gothic War is really a general history of the empire, designed to continue the Persian War as well as the Gothic. It was written after the year in which the preceding seven books had been published, and was itself published apparently in 554 or 555. These eight books of Histories, although mainly occupied with military matters, contain notices of some of the more im portant domestic events, such as the Nika insurrection at Constantinople in 532, the plague in 542, the conspiracy of Artabanes in 548. They tell us, however, comparatively little about the civil administration of the empire, and nothing about legislation. On the other hand they are rich in geographical and ethnographical information, often of the highest value for our knowledge of the barbarian and particularly of the Teutonic tribes who lived on the borders of the empire and were either its enemies or the material of its armies. As an historian, Procopius would have deserved honour in any age, and is of quite unusual merit when one con siders the generally low literary level of the age which produced him. From the 4th to the 15th century the Eastern empire has no lay writer of gifts approaching his. He is industrious in collecting facts, careful and impartial in stating them ; his judgment is sound, his reflexions generally acute, his conceptions of the general march and movement of things not unworthy of the great events he has recorded. His descriptions, particularly of military operations, are clear, and his especial fondness for this part of the subject seldom leads him into unnecessary minuteness. The style, although marked by mannerisms, by occasional affectations and rhetorical devices, is on the whole direct and businesslike, nor is the Greek bad, when one considers the time. Thucydides and Herodotus are the two models whom he keeps always before his eyes : he imi tates the former in the maxims (yi/w/zai) he throws in, and the speeches which he puts into the mouth of the chief actors ; the latter in his frequent geographical digressions, in the personal anecdotes, in the tendency to collect and attach some credence to marvellous tales. It need hardly be said that he falls far short of the vigour and profundity of the Attic, as well as of the genial richness, the grace, the simplicity, the moral elevation, the poetical feeling of the Ionic historian. The speeches are obviously com posed by Procopius himself, rarely showing any dramatic variety in their language, but they seem sometimes to con vey the substance of what was said, and even when this is not the case they frequently serve to bring out the points of a critical situation. The geographical and ethnological notices are precious. Procopius is almost as much a geo-