From the Vault: A Secret History to Writing Angry
Our “From the Vault” posts allow you to take a peek into the history of the Press, where you can rediscover past authors, projects, editors, awards, and more that led to the development of the university publisher that the Press is today. This window into our past spotlights backlist or out-of-print titles and series and also recommends and contextualizes them with similar current and forthcoming titles. Explore the drawers of the Vault with our intern, Mikala Carpenter, as we uncover the hidden treasures that await us in the archives of the University of Michigan Press.
Have you ever thought judgmental thoughts about other people around you, brought on by their actions or your own discontent, and wondered for a fleeting moment what would happen if you wrote those words down and left them for someone else to find? Though you mightn’t expect it, someone has done it before and been found out. One of the greatest examples of this vengeful venting, considered to be the “most calculated attempt to discredit an entire reign in the eyes of posterity,” is Procopius’Secret History, a title in the Press’s Classics in Translation series.
The goal of this series, published in the 1950s and 1960s, was to present relatively unknown or previously un-translated pieces of classical literature to modern English-reading audiences in an accessible, enjoyable way. Other titles in the Classics in Translation series included Catullus’Complete Poetry; Heliodorus’An Ethiopian Romance; Xenophon’s The March Up Country; Petronius’The Satyricon; a volume of Hesiod’s The Works and Days, Theogony, and The Shield of Herakles; Thomas Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides’History of the Peloponnesian War; and C. D. Gordon’s Age of Attila, a new edition of which is shortly forthcoming from the Press.
The volume that stood out the most to me, as I wandered through the drawers of the Vault, was one of the last titles in the series, Procopius’Secret History, translated by Richard Atwater. Lauded as “the most notable Greek historian of the Later Roman Empire” and often compared in talent to Thucydides, Procopius comes down to us through history as a dedicated and intelligent but disgruntled and unsuccessful courtier. While his political aspirations were stunted — by, as he suspects, the conniving of a devilish empress — the 6th century writer is most well-known among classicists for his History in Eight Books (commonly known as Wars), of which the first seven volumes chronicle the attempts of the eastern Roman emperor, Justinian, to regain the territory of the western Roman Empire from the Persians, Vandals and Goths. In the Secret History, the eighth book, Procopius reveals the scandalous secrets of Emperor Justinian, his consort Theodora, and the court that led to the empire’s fall into Byzantine despotism.
The Secret History, written but never published in 550 A. D. and uncovered posthumously in 1623, is a revision to the original seven books of Wars, since, as Procopius explains, “it was not possible, during the life of certain persons, to write the truth of what they did, as a history should.... These secrets it is now my duty to tell and reveal.” Procopius’ work is full of discontented and conservative political criticism, characterizations of Justinian as the “Prince of Devils” and ridicule bordering on the obscene of the actress-turned-empress Theodora. Despite his violent and rash exaggerations, Procopius’ work is one of the only documents left to us that provides contemporary writing on the eastern Roman imperial court. In the original draft of his introduction, which I found in the volume’s file in the Vault, A. E. R. Boak, past University professor of ancient history, celebrated the Secret History as “the outstanding example of vituperative literature that has come to us from all antiquity” while the Press aimed to market the volume as the first translation of the work to “stand as a work of literature in its own right.”
Though his defamatory work, once rediscovered, allowed historians and classicists to amend their views of Emperor Justinian’s reign and open doors to the search for more lost-to-history anecdotas, even Procopius worried about writing his Secret History. It was treasonous and, as Procopius was convinced, unbelievable: “I fear they may think me a writer of fiction.” The Press published Procopius’Secret History in March 1961 and it was republished with Ann Arbor Paperbacks in 1963. The paperback edition is available for purchase online from the Press.
