Jack Oster

Two of the most important Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, historians are Procopius of Caesarea (c. 550) and Theophanes the Confessor (c. 820). Theophanes’ Chronographia covers the years 284-814 AD and uses much material from earlier sources, including Procopius’ Wars, in writing his history. This study aims to compare both writers’ depictions of the Nika Riot in Constantinople (532) and the Vandal Wars in North Africa (533-534) in order to determine how they understood their own history and Roman identity. By closely reading both sources and using a variety of studies of them, I will explore how both men incorporate their biases and opinions into their work. The results show that the emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565), whom Procopius vehemently hated, had become an important figure in the Byzantine mind by the time Theophanes was writing, and that Procopius’ carefully constructed prose, filled with literary allusions, was simplified significantly when Theophanes used him as a source. This implies that the Byzantines of Theophanes’ time had become significantly more thoroughly Christianized and took much less interest in the Classical Greek works upon which Procopius modeled his work. Furthermore, there is much more research that can be done comparing various Byzantine historians and how they received and understood their own history, along with the Classics in both Greek and Latin.