Procopius and Justinian's Financial Policies

Abstract

FOR A LONG TIME Procopius' Anecdota or Secret History so offended the moral susceptibilities of scholars, and particularly those who revered Justinian for his judicial publications, that attempts were made to deny that it could be the work of Procopius or of any other contemporary, or to prove that it was completely untrustworthy as history. Today, however, since the researches of Dahn, Haury, and Panchenko, it is generally acknowledged that the book is not only indubitably the work of Procopius but that it is, in the main, accurate as to the facts it reports. But considerable care must be exercised in distinguishing what Procopius states as fact from his biased explanations of Justinian's motives and character, from his almost wilful misinterpretations of the government's general policy, and from his lurid reports of what, in the nature of things, must have been mere court gossip. Since a good part of the book is taken up with explaining the real causes, as he says, of events Procopius had already described in his Public Histories, there is an abundance of interpretation and only a scattering of facts not elsewhere recorded by him. Nevertheless it is the latter that are of particular interest to the historian, and it is his task to winnow them out in order to add to the total of reliable knowledge about Justinian's reign. This paper is an attempt to test, in one field of government, Procopius' accuracy in reporting facts in the Anecdota and, incidentally, to illustrate how and why he so interpreted these facts that they might contribute to his general polemic on Justinian. It goes almost without saying that it is impossible to check, by reference to other sources, the details of the scandals surrounding the private lives of the chief characters, and the historical truth about them must always remain a matter of purely subjective speculation or, possibly, a matter for psychological analysis. But a large part of the book is devoted to harsh criticisms of Justinian's financial affairs, and here many of Procopius' facts can be checked. Two main charges are laid: first, that the emperor was extravagantly wasteful of public money and second, that this forced him into harsh taxation policies and encouraged graft and corruption. Let us take these up in order. The most emphatic charge of waste, and one that has been insufficiently investigated, is that he disgraced his reign and the empire by vast and unjustified gifts to various foreign powers and especially to Persia. Unfortunately these accusations are all framed in the most general way with few details given. For example, He kept squandering very great sums for service to the state on those of the Huns who chanced from time to time to meet him: as a result of this the land of the Romans came to