History of the Wars

Procopius of Caesarea says at the start of the work that he was appointed adviser to the general Belisarius and so saw nearly all of what he describes. The first two books deal with Persia, the next two with the Vandals, and the last four with the Goths. For the wars of the 530s and 540s he is an eyewitness or close to eyewitnesses. For the events of 476, which he sketches at the start of the Gothic War, he writes some seventy years later and from the point of view of Constantinople, for which Odoacer was a usurper.

His account of the Nika riot in the first book includes the burning of the old church of Holy Wisdom and a speech he gives to the empress Theodora. He introduces it as spoken “to the following effect”; like other ancient historians he gives his characters’ speeches in his own words.