Reporting Battles and Understanding Campaigns in Procopius and Agathias

This paper identifies the source material for Procopius’ and Agathias’ military narratives of Justinian’s Lazican war, A.D. 548–57, as specific, archived documents. Their use of these archived documents explains striking characteristics of their accounts of battles and campaigns, not only in Lazica, but also in other parts of their histories. The commonly-held scholarly view that Procopius and Agathias, and perhaps other classicising historians, were largely dependent on oral sources, or in the case of Procopius on autopsy and oral sources, should therefore be modified

Archaeology · Art · Genealogy · Literature · Narrative · Oral history · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History