Wars
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A secretary who accompanied the campaigns writes the Persian, Vandal and Gothic wars in the manner of Thucydides, and records the plague of 541 with an honesty about ignorance that the genre did not require.
- eyewitness military history in the classical manner
- the plague described without an explanatory framework, and said to be inexplicable
- a public history and a private counter-history of the same events
- judgement of a reigning emperor deferred to an unpublished work
Procopius served as legal secretary to Belisarius and saw much of what he describes. The eight books cover the Persian frontier, the African campaign against the Vandals and the long Italian war against the Ostrogoths, with speeches and digressions in the classicising manner. His account of the plague that reached Constantinople in 541 is the fullest ancient description of an epidemic: the buboes, the sudden fevers, the delirium, the failure of every treatment, and the explicit statement that no cause can be assigned and that physicians who opened bodies learned nothing. He also wrote the Secret History, a savage private counter-narrative of the same reign.
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