The Secret History · Question
How does The Secret History develop the theme of Suffering of the Common People?
Answer
The Secret History by Procopius develops Suffering of the Common People across the chapters the companion marks for this theme.
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.
Evidence in the book
- III: Showing the Danger of Interfering with a Woman’s Intrigues, Especially When the Woman Is the Friend of an Empress
The senator Theodosius is tortured and driven mad; Photius suffers brutal treatment.
- VII: Outrages of the Blues
Citizens live in constant fear, are robbed, killed, or forced into submission, with no hope of justice or redress.
- XI: How the Defender of the Faith Ruined His Subjects
Massacres, forced conversions, loss of livelihoods, and mass emigration due to Justinian's policies.
- XVIII: How Justinian Killed a Trillion People
The chapter emphasizes the immense suffering and death of ordinary Romans, barbarians, and provincials due to war, famine, disease, and civil strife.
- XIX: How He Seized All the Wealth of the Romans and Threw It Away in the Sea and on the Barbarians
Roman subjects are pillaged and their wealth given to barbarians, causing widespread suffering.
- XXI: The Sky Tax, the Selling of All Offices, and How Border Armies Were Forbidden to Punish Invading Barbarians
Subjects were robbed by corrupt magistrates, enslaved by Huns, and even punished when they tried to rescue their families from barbarian raiders.
- XXII: Further Corruption in High Places
Farmers forced to transport grain at great cost, poor deprived of dole, cities forced to buy inedible grain, and soldiers unpaid.
- XXIII: How Landowners Were Ruined
Landowners flee, abandon property, or are crushed by multiple levies; farmers die of plague yet survivors pay deceased neighbors' taxes; soldiers quartered in homes.
