Serious doubts have been entertained in times past as to the authenticity of the Anecdota, for at first sight it seems impossible that the man who wrote in the calm tone of the History and who indulged in the fulsome praise of the panegyric On the Buildings could have also written the bitter libels of the Anecdota.  It has come to be seen, however, that this feeling is not supported by any unanswerable arguments, and it is now believed to be highly probable at least, that the Anecdota is the work of Procopius.  Its bitterness may be extreme and its calumnies exaggerated beyond all reason, but it must be regarded as prompted by a reaction against the hollow life of the Byzantine court.

The third work is entitled On the Buildings, and is plainly an attempt to gain favour with the emperor.  We can only guess as to what the immediate occasion was for its composition.  It is plain, however, that the publication of the History could not have aroused the enthusiasm of Justinian; there was no attempt in it to praise the emperor, and one might even read an unfavourable judgment between the lines.  And it is not at all unlikely that he was moved to envy by the praises bestowed upon his general, Belisarius.  At any rate the work On the Buildings is written in the empty style of the fawning flatterer.  It is divided into six short books and contains an account of all the public buildings of Justinian’s reign in every district of the empire.  The subject was well chosen and the material ample, and Procopius lost no opportunity of lauding his sovereign to the skies.  It is an excellent example of the florid panegyric style which was, unfortunately, in great favour with the literary world of his own as well as later Byzantine times.  But in spite of its faults, this work is a record of the greatest importance for the study of the period, since it is a storehouse of information concerning the internal administration of the empire.

The style of Procopius is in general clear and straightforward, and shews the mind of one who endeavours to speak the truth in simple language wherever he is not under constraint to avoid it.  At the same time he is not ignorant of the arts of rhetoric, and especially in the speeches he is fond of introducing sounding phrases and sententious statements.  He was a great admirer of the classical writers of prose, and their influence is everywhere apparent in his writing; in particular he is much indebted to the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and he borrows from them many expressions and turns of phrase.  But the Greek which he writes is not the pure Attic, and we find many evidences of the influence of the contemporary spoken language.

Procopius writes at times as a Christian, and at times as one imbued with the ideas of the ancient religion of Greece.  Doubtless his study of the classical writers led him into this, perhaps unconsciously.  At any rate it seems not to have been with him a matter in which even consistency was demanded.  It was politic to espouse the religion of the state, but still he often allows himself to speak as if he were a contemporary of Thucydides.