The Secret History · Concept
Suffering of the Common People
The text repeatedly emphasizes the immense hardship inflicted on ordinary citizens, soldiers, and the poor through excessive taxation, monopolies, military neglect, and violent factionalism.
The text repeatedly emphasizes the immense hardship inflicted on ordinary citizens, soldiers, and the poor through excessive taxation, monopolies, military neglect, and violent factionalism.
The senator Theodosius is tortured and driven mad; Photius suffers brutal treatment.
Citizens live in constant fear, are robbed, killed, or forced into submission, with no hope of justice or redress.
Massacres, forced conversions, loss of livelihoods, and mass emigration due to Justinian's policies.
The chapter emphasizes the immense suffering and death of ordinary Romans, barbarians, and provincials due to war, famine, disease, and civil strife.
Characters
Chapters
- III: Showing the Danger of Interfering with a Woman’s Intrigues, Especially When the Woman Is the Friend of an Empress
- VII: Outrages of the Blues
- XI: How the Defender of the Faith Ruined His Subjects
- XVIII: How Justinian Killed a Trillion People
- XIX: How He Seized All the Wealth of the Romans and Threw It Away in the Sea and on the Barbarians
- XXI: The Sky Tax, the Selling of All Offices, and How Border Armies Were Forbidden to Punish Invading Barbarians
- XXII: Further Corruption in High Places
- XXIII: How Landowners Were Ruined
