ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to encourage dialogue and collaboration between international scholars who work on Procopius and late antiquity from literary, historical and combined perspectives. It makes use of comparative approaches, as they set Procopius' works beside texts from various genres – legal, historical and philosophical – in order to throw new light on Procopius as a historian and thinker. The book explores the theme of representing the world through language in the Wars, which is structural to the whole work and exposes how the difficulty of representing, as well as grasping, reality is central to the poetics of late antique historiography as a result of the changes effected by Christianity. It offers a typology of the author's self-presentation throughout the works and demonstrates how Procopius' representation of himself as a character plays an essential part in building narratorial persona.
