Diss Tracks & Diatribes: Hating from the Super Bowl to Byzantium

It's always been about love and hate...

It was a weekend for the haters.

Kendrick didn’t just eviscerate Drake on a national (frankly international) stage, he did it wearing a pair of bootcut jeans, and he did it while giving a massive Fuck You to white America and the Trump regime (Trump apparently stormed off in a hissy fit).

Memes, indicator species of a flourishing hater culture, have spread quickly across social media and infected even ambivalent, non-hater groups. Don’t care about rap? Well, now you think Drake is a fucking pedo. Don’t care about the NFL? Doesn’t matter: fuck the Chiefs, fuck Harrison Butker, fuck Brittany Mahomes, and, I think, fuck Travis Kelce (?).

The speed at which intertwined delight and vitriol have circulated can probably be explained by depressed liberal and leftist Americans needing a big win after watching the rapid-fire dismantling of American’s democratic institutions by the MAGA ‘government.’ It makes sense. In a moment of enforced hopelessness, hate can feel very real, tangible, and actionable. Whether directed at a single individual, a sports team, or an abstract political entity, hate’s powerful emotive effect comes from its activeness. Hate moves people.

In liberal and leftist circles, the term ‘hate’ usually implies a petty, schadenfreude-y bitchiness. You might gossip about a celebrity that you dislike, or post sly comments on a cringe TikTok. What makes this form of hating so addictive is that it feels good, fun, and indulgent; it’s superficially harmless. So how do we reconcile that with the other kind of hateful discourse that has emerged, which is prominent on the right? The divisive, angry hate which targets minority groups and manipulates the truth to embolden fascists and bigots? Does that kind of hateful discourse also feel, to its practitioners, good, fun, and indulgent?

The kind of ‘minor’ hate that liberals and leftists engage in is usually hardly more than a pet hate, a little annoyance-creature that it feels good to occasionally stroke. We shouldn’t ignore the fact, though, that these pets can easily morph into larger and more dangerous beasts, when they are provoked by fear and insecurity. This is the way that hate has formed on the right, and it is this kind of hate which is beginning to command our societal communication style. It is the kind of hate which is gnashing and pulling at the leash, ready to lay the world to ruin.

Kendrick’s performance got me thinking more generally the politics of hate and its relationship to power. The unprecedented success of this extended diss took him to one of the biggest stages in America, a prize that could only be awarded in a culture obsessed with hate. It was an achievement for the haters, but I think it also encapsulates a wider communication problem.My argument is that the normalisation of hate-as-discourse on both sides of the political spectrum has made it an accepted communicative norm, which has allowed the more aggressive form of hate to fester and grow, and this should create cause for concern.

Because I’m an historian, not a modern political commentator, I’ve decided to take it back to what I know and analyse the rhetoric of two haters I’m very familiar with. They’re haters in different ways: one is an aggressive, MAGA-esque misogynist, writing at the height of the reign of one of the most powerful Byzantine emperors. The other is a sycophantic, sly courtier, making his way through the vague chaos of the eleventh century Constantinopolitan court. But what they share is a commitment to making hate an art, writing texts that vividly illuminate a kind of emotional history which can be occasionally overlooked by historians in favour of writing about structures and institutions and other, non-personal factors. Histories of rage and irrationality, of rumour and intrigue. So, this is the first essay of a two-part series exploring these men and how hate shaped their work.

I’m talking about Procopius of Caesarea and Michael Psellos, two of the most successful haters in Byzantium’s thousand-year history.

And Byzantium was a civilisation that birthed a lot of haters.

It only makes sense to start with the veritable GOAT of all diatribes: Procopius’ Secret History. It’s infamous, for good reason. If you only vaguely know about Byzantine History, you may well have heard of the Secret History. At the very least, you’ll have heard about some of the characters it doesn’t just assassinate, but executes point-blank: the Emperor Justinian, Empress Theodora, the scheming wife of General Belisarius, Antonina, the corrupt Praetorian Prefect John the Cappadocian. It’s an engaging read, but one that confounds scholars. What was Procopius’ motivation in writing the text? Who did he want to read the work, and why?

Personally I always thought the answer was simple: Procopius was a bitter little hater and an aggressive misogynist who couldn’t get laid, and he tried to make it everyone’s problem. Much like the MAGA-hat wearing, slut-shaming, technofascist-loving, small-dick-having incels and far righters of the twenty-first century, Procopius disliked ambitious women and upstart emperors from backwater provinces and efficient, intelligent government administrators who were awarded jobs on the basis of merit, rather than background.

Frankly, many of Procopius’ rants would not be out of place in a Tucker Carlson segment. He hysterically portrays Justinian as a demonic figure, going without food and water for days, spending his time plotting the ‘ruin of the Romans’ and trying to bring ‘the whole political edifice crashing to the ground’ (SH, p.57). The Empress Theodora, meanwhile, is subject to an extensive and detailed attack regarding her sexual proclivities, including the recollection of a rumoured dinner party where she publicly slept with all the aristocratic men in attendance, and, upon exhausting them, she turned her hungry sights on the quaking servants (SH, p.38). He would have been out there with some of today’s great Trumpists, harping on about the decline of the state and the degeneracy of liberals and democrats.

Beyond the Emperor and the Empress, ‘blood-thirsty demons’ (SH, pp.51-2), his grievances extend to all levels of the Justinianic administration. He bemoans the tax-collecting activities of John the Cappadocian, Praetorian Prefect from 532-544 AD, who strips the poor of the minimal wealth that they have — let alone Procopius’ own senatorial class! He claims that John invented something called the ‘air tax:’ ‘this was not a regular or permanent tax, but that by some lucky chance it always seemed to drop out of thin air into his lap’ (SH, p.84). I don’t know about you, but I can fully picture Trump giving a press briefing where he accuses the Democrats or some actually functional government agency of instituting an ‘air tax,’ as justification for persecution or dismantling.

What are we to take away from the relevancy of this discourse some 1,500 years later? Firstly, that political rhetoric is an old art form and that the basics of attack on a political opponent have remained functionally the same. But, secondarily, that it should worry us when the discourse of 1,500 years ago seems not tangentially but immediately translatable to the present. Procopius was writing about an imperial monarchical system, part oligarchy and part autocracy, not a modern democracy. If this discourse of hate feels applicable to the current moment, I would take that as an indicator of democratic backsliding.

The only person that Procopius seems to have any fondness for is his patron, the General Belisarius, who he served as secretary during Justinian’s wars of reconquest in Italy and North Africa in the 530s and 540s AD. The first part of the text is about shielding Belisarius’ reputation, disassociating him from Justinian. But, although Procopius never explicitly portrays Belisarius in a bad light, the General is implied to be weak and ineffectual, utterly beholden to his wife and her whims. Antonina has him ‘wrapped around her finger:’ ‘his passionate love for the woman compelled him to pretend that the evidence of his own eyes was utterly false’ (SH, pp. 2-3).

In this, Belisarius comes to stand as a metaphor for the decline of the Roman State, increasingly run by women who have fully transgressed social norms. If even a top military General, like Belisarius, in many ways a truly masculine exemplar, has come under the thumb of womanly influence, what disaster does this spell for the rest of the state? When I read the tracts on Belisarius, I think about the online discourses about feminism gone too far, or Mark Zuckerberg claiming that Facebook’s workplace needs to be ‘masculine’ again. The female-induced ‘decline’ that Procopius feels is taking place is eerily reminiscent of the discussions of incels and tech-bros about contemporary societal ‘failures.’

Above all, the Secret History is a wildly misogynistic text. It is akin to contemporary discourse in the way that it adopts extreme rhetoric towards women to shape wider societal communication, because hatred of women (or of other minority groups, which can be fed into this same model) is still a widely accepted fact. Theodora and Antonina are stand-ins for any women who dare to be anything but subservient, docile, and quiet. Of Theodora, Procopius says that she ‘was never once known to come to terms with anyone who aroused her ire… her animosity was ever ready to be aroused to the destruction of other people, and no power on earth could mitigate it’ (SH p.61). The root of Procopius’ hatred of Theodora is that she is able to operate in political spheres with ‘masculine’ authority. He has to temper this in his narrative by continually slut-shaming her, reminding his audience that she has come to this political power by way of immorality; therefore, her political agency cannot be taken seriously.

Regarding Antonina, he disdainfully tells us that her mother was a ‘theatre tart’ and that Antonina lived a ‘profligate kind of life’ and ‘never felt the slightest shame for any action whatsoever’ (SH p.3). Again, Antonina’s agency has to be undercut by associating her with sexual shame, the key framework that Roman men used to silence and oppress women. In Procopius’ view, it is the transgressions of these women and the supplication of powerful men to them which have truly hastened society’s downfall.

We should not take what Procopius says about Theodora and Antonina to be ‘accurate.’ Theodora did definitely have a past associated with sex-work, and it is possible Antonina did too. They were evidently powerful, decisive women who acted with significant political agency. Beyond these simple statements, their actual character remains obscure. However, we do have to take what he says about them seriously, because the kind of hateful discourse Procopius employed was shaped by, and in turn shaped, idealised models of womanhood.

The overarching reason that his critiques work is because they are structured through a rhetoric which idealises a ‘better’ past, in which people (women especially) behaved ‘properly’ and the state is not in ‘decline.’ The process by which he constructs an idealised model of femininity is part of the creation of that false past. He wishes to return to a world where women who behave as Theodora and Antonina do are punished severely for stepping out of line. This is the same underlying hatred that is neatly encapsulated in pithy, modern phrases like Lock her up or grab her by the pussy or your body, my choice.

Is this really important, though? Procopius’ words probably had no material bearing on either Theodora or Antonina. We have no idea if the text circulated during either of their lifetimes, or if it ever circulated widely at all. Equally, the hateful misogyny directed at Kamala Harris or Hilary Clinton, whilst vile, does not, because of their relative status and privilege, necessarily endanger them. His rhetorical hate was just that: rhetorical. In the same way that a mean comment on a TikTok is, ostensibly, just a comment.

However, Procopius’ construction of idealised womanhood and the belligerency with which he attacks women for stepping out of line represents a broader societal impulse, and this did have a demonstrable impact on women’s lives. Procopius’ hostility towards women is another example of the sexism that permeated Rome and Byzantium. It kept women largely confined to the home, unable to participate fully in politics or bureaucracy or commerce. It left them unable to divorce their husbands, unable to own property or have money that was entirely their own. It meant they had little recourse when they were being abused by their husbands, fathers, or brothers. In some texts, such as the work of the ever-exalted Aristotle, they were compared to animals, because they were thought to lack logic and reason. Procopius is yet another participant in a campaign of misogyny that has rendered the majority of historical women invisible to us.

It is interesting to note, in light of this, that Justinian’s legal reforms and codification involved the strengthening of pre-existing laws protecting women, and the introduction of new ones, even beyond the elite classes. The issuing of the Justinianic Codex, a project which Procopius reviles, tangibly improved the lives of many women in the Byzantine empire.

This exemplifies why it is important to think about hate proliferating in societal communication. The ways that Procopius shapes his political discourse is through a reliance on culturally-accepted norms of hatred. No matter who his audience was meant to be, or what they wanted from his text, at the end of the day Procopius knew he could persuade or manipulate them through the language he employed. The way he spoke about his characters was an accepted mode of communication. We’ve reached a similar moment where hate is an accepted, even noble, form of communication. This is having an impact on political systems and society. That the statements made by a sixth-century misogynist would likely find a home in a Trump press conference, or on Fox News, or on a 4Chan forum or X thread, should concern us.

Don’t get me wrong, as I said before, hate is indulgent and fun. Hate can be a brilliant diss track coming to life to put a problematic man in his place, or a performance which challenges prevailing socio-political norms in front of a huge audience. Hate can change the course of history, or shape the legacies of those who make and populate it, for better or for worse. But, when hate is repeatedly rhetorically manipulated by bad faith actors, when it becomes the predominant means through which a society communicates with one another and addresses the ‘other side,’ it becomes demonic. We ought to be asking ourselves some hard questions. How often does hate, in its multivalent forms, infiltrate not just our overarching discourse but our everyday parlance? If it is identifiable as a singular, driving force behind cultural production, economic policy, and social relations, what does that actually mean for society and our collective psyche? At what point should we reject hateful discourses in favour of building a better world?

Truthfully, we cannot rely on the false action promised by hatred forever. After all, despite Procopius’ efforts, Justinian’s reign is remembered as Byzantium’s Golden Epoch. But, perhaps what has Procopius rolling most furiously in his abhorrent little grave is the fact that Theodora is now justly credited as an influential, formative figure in that epoch.

That being said, I know that the schadenfreude Theodora’s ghost is experiencing is oh so satisfying.

For this piece I used the 2007 Williamson and Sarris translation of the Secret History: Procopius, The Secret History, tr., G.A. Williamson and P. Sarris, (London: Penguin Books), 1996. Revised 2007.