Dublin Core
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Procopius of Caesarea (c.500–c.554 AD) was the official chronicler of the rule of the Emperor Justinian. He is most famous for this Secret History, which consists of damaging tales about the Emperor and his wife Theodora.
The scandalous manuscript was only published in 1623 after a copy was found in the Vatican Library.
More than a thousand years after it was first written, the explicit claims about the alleged sexual preferences of the Empress caused a sensation in seventeenth-century Europe. This text enjoyed a certain degree of freedom from censorship because it was printed in Latin and Greek, and therefore only circulated among the educated.
This was bought in 1861 to replace a copy missing from Marsh’s Library by 1828. If the thief who took the book from the Library was interested in its contents, he must have been the beneficiary of a good classical education.