A Subaltern's View of Early Byzantine Africa? Reading Corippus as History

Corippus’ Iohannis is both the last classical epic poem to be written in Latin, and a major historical source for the early Byzantine occupation of North Africa (c. 533-551). The poem has conventionally been viewed as an uncritical celebration of the imperial occupation, thanks to its classicizing imagery and the panegyric aspects of its narrative of recent military successes. The present paper argues that this was tempered with a more critical retelling of the first fifteen years of the Byzantine occupation. This is presented in a metadiegetic analepsis (“flashback”), in the voice of an African officer in the imperial army of occupation. It is suggested that the catalogue of disasters presented here – internecine warfare, social upheaval, and plague – reflect the ambivalent attitude of contemporary Africans to the occupation itself.