In 533, he accompanied Belisarius on his victorious expedition against the Vandal kingdom in North Africa, took part in the capture of Carthage, and remained in Africa with Belisarius' successor Solomon the Eunuch when Belisarius returned to Constantinople. Procopius witnessed the Nika riots of January, 532, which Belisarius and his fellow general Mundo repressed with a massacre in the Hippodrome. Procopius was with Belisarius on the eastern front until the latter was defeated at the Battle of Callinicum in AD 531 and recalled to Constantinople. In 527, the first year of Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I's reign, he became the adsessor (legal adviser) for Belisarius, Justinian's chief military commander who was then beginning a brilliant career. He evidently knew Latin, as was natural for a man with legal training. He would have received a conventional élite education in the Greek classics and then rhetoric, perhaps at the famous School of Gaza, may have attended law school, possibly at Berytus (modern Beirut) or Constantinople, and became a rhetor (barrister or advocate). He was a native of Caesarea in Palaestina Prima (modern Israel). Apart from his own writings, the main source for Procopius' life is an entry in the Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia that tells nothing about his early life.
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