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This slim little volume is a vicious little dirt disher on the most powerful woman of the middle ages, the Empress Theodora and her husband Justinian. The tabloid journalist of Byzantium, Procopius wrote the Official History just the way his boss wanted it, all sycophantic and slathered with base flattery and outright lies, and then turned around and vented his real feelings about the royal couple in the Secret History. It's a slim little volume, just big enough to expose Theodora as the manipulative little slut she was, starting out as a child prostitute and going on to fame as what sounds like the Byzantine equivalent of a major porn star and prostitute. He dishes on all her little buddies and their sordid peccadilloes also, and criticizes the way these sexually-influenced and immoral low lives screwed up the remnants of the Roman empire left to them. This book raises as many questions as a modern book would on the same theme: What were the author's real motives? What was true and what was base calumny? Is this an anti-feminist tract, equivalent to Nazi hate propaganda? So in one little, easy-to-read ancient classic, you can experience the two-fold pleasures of titillation and deconstruction. |