Fashioning Sixth-Century Constantinople

The Buildings is a sixth-century text by Prokopios of Kaisareia (Caesarea Maritima) on the building works attributed to the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I (r. 527–65 CE), extolling the virtues of good rulership through praise of architecture. Book I centres on the imperial capital Constantinople: rich in its use of rhetoric and aesthetics, it portrays the emperor as a builder-patron, but also portrays the city itself as a place of beauty and delight to its inhabitants. Several of the buildings described in Book I – such as Hagia Sophia – are extant today; they and others are also documented in a range of historical sources that allow us to compare Prokopios’s account with that of his contemporaries, and to observe the legacy and changing uses of the spaces he describes into the Middle Ages.

Fashioning Sixth-Century Constantinople presents an all-new English translation of Book I paired with a revised edition of the Greek text. It is accompanied by a detailed interdisciplinary commentary, informed by the respective disciplines of philology, history, archaeology and art history, but bringing a new perspective through cross-disciplinary collaboration, especially on points of technical and topographical descriptions, aiming at the most comprehensive and up-to-date commentary of the text.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of Byzantine literature, history, art and archaeology, as well as those interested in the florescence of Byzantine Constantinople.

This volume originates in the project ‘Procopius and the Language of Buildings’ (2018–2022), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and hosted by the Universities of Mainz and Halle-Wittenberg.