A Short History of the World in 50 Lies

by Natasha Tidd

Procopius had set in stone the history of Justinian, and his writings remained undisputed fact until the early 1600s, when a mysterious manuscript was found deep within the annals of the Vatican library. On translating the document from its original Greek into Latin, antiquarian Niccolò Alamanni discovered that this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill accidentally mislaid archival object; it was a hitherto unknown third book of Procopius titled Anecdota or Secret History. To say that nobody anticipated how explosive the book’s contents would be is a vast understatement. Secret History upended what historians thought they knew about Justinian’s reign, with Procopius starting the book by explaining that much of what he’d written up to that point had been a lie: ‘I have been forced to conceal the real causes of many of the events recounted in my former books. It will now be my duty, in this part of my history, to tell what has hitherto remained untold, and to state the real motives and origin of the actions which I have already recounted.’ Adultery, abortions, secret children, murder, corruption and deceit all played major roles in Procopius’s retelling. Particular aim is taken at Theodora, who Procopius claims was a former sex worker. Indeed, he goes into such lurid details of her rumoured sex life that the 1623 publication of Secret History actually edited those portions out. As a couple, Justinian and Theodora are likened to demons: ‘… scourges of mankind, who laid their heads tog...