Jessica L. Moore, Iowa State University
The sixth-century historian Procopius of Caesarea had a great deal of classical past behind him, to look back on and to reach for. As a classicizing historian recounting a contemporary war, he not only emulated his classical historiographic models but positioned himself at a nexus of historical memory (Cubitt 2007), making an argument for the continued relevancy of the classical tradition at a time of monumental cultural change and renegotiation of the canon (a la A. Assmann 2008). Moreover, his writing in the Wars investigates and challenges the boundaries of Roman memory and Roman identity in the empire of Justinian.
Intertextuality and other classicizing rhetorical techniques have long been recognized as a major and pervasive element in Procopius’ project of history-writing (from Braun 1894 to Kaldellis 2004, e.g.), but they are only a part of larger system of invoking ancient Roman memory in the Wars, and examining these intertexts alongside other types of references to the ancient past and the passage of time provides powerful insights into Procopius’ historiographical aims and his engagement with the broader memory culture of the sixth century Roman world.
In this paper I propose to examine the many layers of memory invocation that Procopius utilizes in the context of narrating a key series of events in the Wars: the historical loss of the city of Rome, and the contemporary sieges, (re-)captures and (re-)losses of the city as the war in Italy dragged on (primarily Wars5.14, 5.18-24, 6.18, 7.8-22, and 8.30) In addition to intertextual refences to his historiographic models Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon, Procopius makes direct and indirect references to events and people of the classical past, inserts periphrastic asides explaining language difference that draw attention to temporal and cultural distance, and draws subtle and overt comparisons that force the reader to grapple both with the connections and the distance between the classical Roman world on the one hand and on the other the Justinianic Empire and post-Roman west of his own day.
In doing so, Procopius was participating in a an ongoing, and at times hotly contested, re-negotiation of the value and the proper place of the classical past in contemporary sixth century Roman identity formation (c.f. Pazdernik 2005, Kruse 2019). Further, his multiple and varied tools for invoking memory construct a model for a post-classical version of Roman identity, one informed by and knowledgeable of the classical past, but engaged with the contemporary sixth-century world. Procopius frames this dual engagement with the past and present as the authentic and ethical way to be Roman in the age of Justinian. He leverages his position as historiographer into authority in the wider project of the construction of cultural and historical memory of Justinian and his reign (Cubitt 2007, J. Assmann 1995), all the while implicating the emperor and other contemporaries in remembering wrongly.