The Secret History · Concept
Injustice and Lawlessness
The book highlights the systematic dismantling of legal protections, where trials are rigged, laws are retroactively changed for profit, and the innocent are punished while the guilty go free.
The book highlights the systematic dismantling of legal protections, where trials are rigged, laws are retroactively changed for profit, and the innocent are punished while the guilty go free.
Chosroes is accused by his own nobles of breaking his plighted word by invading in peacetime, and the Roman army suffers from Belisarius's neglect of duty.
Innocent men are tortured and exiled for their association with Photius and Belisarius.
Belisarius is condemned without proof, his property seized on false pretexts, and his life spared only through his wife's intervention.
Sergius murders ambassadors under safe conduct, and Solomon kills his rescuer Pegasius, yet both escape justice through imperial favor.
Characters
Chapters
- II: How Belated Jealousy Affected Belisarius’s Military Judgment, to the Joy of the Enemy
- III: Showing the Danger of Interfering with a Woman’s Intrigues, Especially When the Woman Is the Friend of an Empress
- How Theodora, Revenging Her Dear Antonina, Humiliated the Conqueror of Africa and Italy
- How Theodora Tricked the General’s Daughter Into a Liaison with the Empress’s Nephew, and Belisarius Became a Public Laughing Stock
- Ignorance of the Emperor Justin, and His Stencilled Signature, and How His Nephew Justinian Was the Virtual Ruler
- VII: Outrages of the Blues
- IX: And How Theodora, Most Depraved of All Courtesans, Won His Love
- XI: How the Defender of the Faith Ruined His Subjects
