Haggai Olshanetsky
Procopius on Soldiers and Military Institutions in the Sixth-Century Roman Empire
(Leiden: Brill, 2021), 300 pp. €104.00/$125.00
Conor Whately is an expert on Roman military history and has published several books on the Roman army. The current book is the second of what the author plans to be a series of four books dealing with the six-century historian, Procopius. The first part, called Battles and Generals: Combat, Culture, and Didacticism in Procopius’ Wars, was published in 2015. This review will present the second book, its contents, and who is its intended audience. Furthermore, I will refer to and discuss several interesting points from its content.
The title of the book may be slightly misleading because its content is not how Procopius portrays the soldiers and institutions. Instead, it is mostly an examination of the said institutions through other sources in order to find out what Procopius intended to say and to better understand his accounts.
The book is split into an introduction, six chapters and a conclusion. From the short introduction at the beginning, and the tendency to mention several other modern historians without elaborating on their opinions, it is clear that the book is intended solely for the academic audience and not for the general public. This, I believe, is a mistake as the book could have been a good introduction to the Eastern Roman Army in the 6th century AD.
The first chapter titled “Generals and Soldiers”, is very short and deals with the fact that Procopius mostly mentioned officers and gave relatively little place to the rank and file. This is part of Procopius’ belief that the generals were the most important element in military affairs, while the regular soldiers were not important to the narrative. The chapter ends with several tables that list the names of soldiers and commanders in Procopius’ works. It is a useful addition, yet it must be stated that a prosopography of soldiers’ names from the period was published before, a fact that the author is aware of too (p.43).
The second chapter, “Tracking Sixth-Century Soldiers”, is the one that is the most focused around Procopius, his methods, the way he writes and what was his own background and experience that made him an authority to write history, and in particular military history. The third chapter, “Catalogues and Legions”, is very different and is much more focused on a particular subject, the terminology used by Procopius. It is mostly concentrated on understanding two terms, arithmos and Katalogos. Whately does this by examining not only Procopius, but also other sources, and so clearly demonstrates that arithmos was the common term in the period for a unit or regiment. Furthermore, he clarifies that Katalogos is not a term for field army (Comitatenses) units, but it simply meant a register or a list. However, Procopius used that unique term to represent soldiers because as an administrator, soldiers were men on a list, and he referred to them as such because he wanted to downplay their importance. The chapter ends with a number of very useful tables for any researcher of military history of this period, including tables of all the places that Katalogos appears in Procopius’ writings but more importantly, tables with all the places where Procopius brings troops numbers.
The fourth chapter “Soldiers in the Field”, is more or less a partial introduction to the Roman army in the 6th century, dealing with everything from Comitatenses, through Foederati, symmachoi, bucellarii, to the role and importance of cavalry in the Eastern Roman army of the time, and it ends with more useful tables on the matter. The fifth chapter continues that line of enquiry by focusing on the limitanei, and the sixth chapter completes this by dealing with recruitment. The three chapters show that if constructed differently, the book could have been a good introduction to the 6th century Roman army, and one can only hope that such a book will be penned by Whately in the future.
In addition, the author’s academic work in this book is immaculate yet I mostly disagree with how he dealt with two issues. The first is the Justinianic Plague, which is debated in the sixth chapter. Whately presents the two camps of the “maximalists” and the “minimalists,” and shows he is aware of many of the publications from 2016-2020. However, a few key publications are absent, which might have convinced him to take a more minimalistic approach, such as Mordechai et al.’s article titled “The Justinianic Plague: an Inconsequential Pandemic?”. Moreover, his analysis of the matter is slightly confusing for me as in the preface (p. x) he claims, “I incorporated some of the fantastic new research on the Justinianic plague in my wider discussion of military demographic,” which is not felt. Whately’s approach seems conservative, and throughout it he avoids coming to a clear decision. For example, this section starts by bringing several decades-old estimations of the population of the Empire and the size of the army, in 540 CE and at the end of Justinian’s reign in 565 CE (p. 208). These numbers say that the population of the Empire shrunk by 25%, even though the Empire grew in this period by finally conquering Italy, and even getting a foothold in Spain. This means that he accepts the maximalist approach, even though a large number of important “minimalist” works have been published in 2018-2019. The problem continues, as he explains that in Procopius’ writings there is no mention of the army being struck by the plague, and yet it does not necessarily mean that such damage did not happen. I find it odd that the army of the Empire that lost half its population to the pestilence, according to Procopius, was not in Tartarus, although the Persian army was annihilated by the plague and was unable to fight the Romans. I think that there is a better explanation for this, which is that the pestilence that the Persians suffered from was different to the one that struck Constantinople, and other parts of the Empire, and may have been limited only to the campaigning Persian army.
Procopius may correctly depict some aspects of the plague of 541-544, which may have been the only wave, though his narrative of Empire-wide depopulation could be just a literary exaggeration that occurred for two reasons. The first lies with Whately’s explanation in this book; Procopius refrained from details and accuracy in military terms because he deemed it unnecessary to his narrative, and was appealing to a wider audience. I think that the same may have happened regarding his depiction of the plague. Secondly, Whately shows that Procopius was influenced by Thucydides’ work on the Peloponnesian War, and the depiction of the plague in Athens. Therefore, I believe that Procopius may have felt required to include a similar plague during his time, which is why he exaggerated the plague and made it more extensive than it was, or at least exaggerated the number of fatalities. Therefore, his depiction of the damage of the plague that full-heartedly abandoned the accuracy of the narrative, can be linked to Procopius’ classicizing approach to writing history, which included taking anachronistic military terminology.
The other issue I have with this book is the reason why Procopius wrote as he wrote and why it is so different from the style of Ammianus Marcellinus. Whately rightly states and emphasises this difference that sometimes is missed (p. 227). This difference is in the depictions of soldiers, and even of war and fighting in general. Ammianus mentions far more units and the suffering of the soldiers, which are either neglected or entirely absent in Procopius’ works. However, an explanation for this discrepancy is missing in Whately’s book. I believe that the discrepancy is due to the difference in backgrounds between the two: Procopius was merely a clerk or an aide of the general Belisarius, and sometimes acted as an administrator in certain logistical capacities. On the other hand, Ammianus was the type of a field commander you might find in the thick of battle. Ammianus understood the soldiers taking pride in their units and unit name as he once did, which is why he mentioned the units’ names and their deeds. He knew that victory was achieved by the blood and suffering of men like him, and wanted to give his brothers in arms the respect that they deserved. For him, they were his comrades in arms, men to fight shoulder to shoulder with. Their suffering was his and should be remembered. On the contrary, Procopius was a desk jockey, and the soldiers of the rank and file were simply names on the list for him. He never managed to see them, understand them or be connected to them. That is in modern terms the difference between a history written by a clerk in the division HQ, and the one written by a company or regimental commander.
Even though I am in disagreement with these two points, I must state that the book is still a wonderful piece of academic work that can even be partly used as an introduction to the Eastern Roman army in the 6th century. I highly recommend it to all those that have an interest in the matter, and especially to an academic audience, as it is a great tool to better understand the subject, as well as a reference book.
Haggai Olshanetsky
Bar Ilan University
