Procopius of Caesarea in Renaissance Italy

Abstract

This chapter examines the two arrivals of perhaps the most famous East Roman historian, Procopius of Caesarea, in the Italian peninsula, two exemplary encounters between Italy and the East Roman world. At a time when the understanding of Italy's past had all but disappeared behind the individual communal power and historiography of Florence and Venice, Milan and Genoa, Naples and Rome, Procopius helped show how Italy had once been a single united polity which might be achievable once more someday. Not for sixty years had there been a Roman emperor in the west when Procopius from Caesarea in Palestine first set foot on Italian soil in 536. In Procopius' native Caesarea, and likely in the nearby Greek intellectual centre that was Gaza, he had the advantage of the best possible literary and rhetorical education.