Procopius of Caesarea: The Persian Wars

The first stand-alone English translation of the Persian Wars, a work that not only describes the wars between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, but also provides a detailed account of the Nika riot that nearly unseated Justinian and the first outbreak of bubonic plague in Constantinople.

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Procopius was the major historian of the reign of Justinian and one of the most important historians of Late Antiquity. This is the first stand-alone English translation of his work Persian Wars. It offers a new translation, which has at its basis one published fifty years ago by Averil Cameron. The Persian Wars, despite the title, is a wide-ranging work that reports the history and geography not only of Mesopotamia and the Caucasus, but also of southern Arabia and Ethiopia, Iran and Central Asia, and Constantinople itself. This book is equipped with notes, maps and plans, an introduction, and a translation of a further Greek text, that of Nonnosus, which overlaps with Procopius'. It will be of benefit to specialists and the general reader alike.