The emotion of ‘fear’ takes centre stage in Procopius’ Vandal War. I am certainly not the first to notice this emphasis. Recent scholarship has underlined Procopius’ stress on the febrile anxiety that gripped Constantinople when the emperor Justinian I (AD 527–565) announced his military expedition to recover the former Roman provinces of North Africa from the Vandals in the summer of 533.

According to Procopius, the generals, who had just waged a series of hard-fought land campaigns against Persia, were reluctant to launch a sea invasion of a realm which had been out of Roman hands for over a century:

The memory of a botched military expedition in 468 against the Vandals had clearly left its mark on the Roman psyche. This defeat had seen a formidable Roman naval force destroyed by Vandal fireships just off the shores of North Africa and had left both halves of the empire's pride dented and their finances in tatters. Yet Procopius reports that the Roman generals were too frightened to speak up. Only the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian, a man generally denigrated by the historian, had the nerve to warn the emperor about the financial and political ramifi-cations of such a venture. Heeding John's advice, Justinian relented and temporarily abandoned his plan.

It took a religious vision to change the devout emperor's mind. Procopius describes how a visiting bishop related to the emperor a dream where God com-manded the bishop to remind Justinian that ‘after undertaking the task of protecting Christians in Libya from tyrants’, the emperor ‘for no good reason had become afraid (κατωρρώδησϵ)’. God, the bishop reassured the emperor, would be fighting on Justinian's side ‘and make him master of Libya’.