Working with Ancient Greek Texts
I spend most of my time juggling the Perseus Digital Library, the TLG, and the occasional PDF scan of a critical edition. The process is straightforward until you run into the stuff nobody warns you about. When people look up The Secret History Greek Translations, they're usually trying to track down Procopius's Anecdota, sometimes called the Secret History. It exists in Byzantine Greek, not Classical, which changes everything about how you approach it. The language is different. The vocabulary shifts. The textual transmission is messier. I learned this the hard way when I spent three hours debugging a Perseus search only to realize the edition I was querying was keyed to a different manuscript family than the one I actually needed. Start with the text. Grab the OCT (Oxford Classical Texts) edition edited by Hilaire van den Hout, or if you're working on a budget, the Teubner edition by Franz Dahn. Cross-reference against the Loeb with the Honeyman translation if you need to sanity-check your reading. Don't trust any single source. The Greek is full of interpolated passages, contested readings, and scribes who clearly had opinions about their source material.
One edge case that caught me off guard: the Greek word appears in a passage where modern translations render it as "divert" or "turn aside," but in the specific military context Procopius is writing about, it carries a technical meaning closer to "reroute" or "change direction of approach." I was preparing teaching notes and almost propagated a wrong rendering until I checked LSJ alongside the military treatises of Maurice and Procopius's own Bella where the same verb appears in nearly identical tactical descriptions. The workaround was setting up a parallel concordance — I keep a running Excel sheet mapping each occurrence of contested verbs across Procopius's corpus with context notes. It takes about twenty minutes to set up and saves you from looking like an idiot in seminar. Here's the thing nobody emphasizes enough: the Secret History is polemical literature, not journalism. Procopius is writing to discredit Justinian and Theodora. That doesn't mean everything in it is false, but it means you need to calibrate your expectations about tone and credibility. The text itself uses hyperbolic rhetoric that his contemporaries would have recognized as standard invective. Modern translators often miss this because they treat the work as a straightforward historical account rather than a genre piece. For actual translation work, use the Perseus word-by-word tool when you're stuck on syntax, but don't let it replace your own analysis. The parsing it returns is mostly correct but occasionally assigns the wrong case or mood, particularly with participle constructions where the manuscript tradition is uncertain. I've found that checking suspicious parsings against the Stephanus TVX database cuts error rates significantly.
Electronic resources that help: the Suda On Line for later Byzantine lexical references, the DDBDP for documentaryGreek, and the PHI Greek Inscriptions if you ever need to compare Procopius's usage against epigraphic evidence. The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series has some solid secondary material too, though the older scholarship tends to overvalue the Secret History as a window into Byzantine court intrigue while underestimating its literary conventions. Common mistake: treating the Greek text as uniform throughout. It isn't. The work has sections that show signs of being composed at different times, possibly with different revisions. Some passages feel rushed or garbled, likely because the manuscript tradition is fragmentary. When you hit a truly corrupt passage, check the apparatus criticus in both the OCT and Teubner editions. They often disagree on where the corruption begins and ends. If both editors mark a passage as suspect, it probably is. There are situations where automated translation tools simply won't work here. Neural models trained on Classical Greek struggle with Byzantine Greek because the training data skews heavily toward Homer, Plato, and the New Testament. You'll get grammatically plausible but semantically wrong output, especially on technical vocabulary that shifted meaning between periods. I've had better luck combining machine parsing with manual cross-referencing than relying on any end-to-end tool.
Get the Full Details
The main bottleneck is time. A careful reading of a single chapter with full attention to textual variants, cross-references, and contextual analysis takes roughly forty-five minutes to an hour. If you're working through the whole Secret History this way, budget about two weeks for a full pass. Rushing it produces errors that compound quickly because Procopius's sarcasm depends heavily on precise word choice and syntactic arrangement. If you just need a quick overview without engaging the Greek directly, the Maureen Miller commentary or the Evans Loeb introduction will get you through in a few hours. But if you're doing actual translation work or serious close reading, there's no shortcut around wrestling with the text line by line.
