The defining verbal representation of Justinian’s bronze horseman was created by Prokopios. His Buildings (I.ii, I.x.5) is a multivalent text, which deserves both a greater consideration and a historiographic rehabilitation. While on the surface Buildings appears to flatter the emperor, I argue that the deeper narrative reveals strong elements of figured speech and safe criticism. Buildings is ekphrastic in certain aspects of form, but not in overall substance. Formal conformity with the genre constitutes a veil for criticism. Focusing on a close analysis of his representation of Justinian’s equestrian monument, I argue that Prokopios indicts Justinian on the charges of gigantomania and obliteration of the past. The bronze horseman features twice in Buildings – within the otherwise coherent cluster of Justinian’s church-building, and as the headlining sculpture in the section dedicated to Constantinople’s non-ecclesiastical monuments. This exceptional return to the bronze horseman is thus both notable and deliberate. The equestrian monument is the only sculptural monument of Buildings that merited a substantive description beyond a list-like entry.

For intellectuals of the re-conquest generation, Prokopios became a helpful guide to the city they had lost and regained. George Pachymeres (1242–ca. 1308), a highly placed court historian, engaged in an intertextual dialogue with the lengthy account of the horseman written by Prokopios. Pachymeres set out to write an exemplary ekphrasis that would outperform Prokopios in vivid explication of Justinian’s monument. The narrative structure follows Prokopios, but emphasizes different points. Pachymeres created a narrative contrast between the Constantinople of his own days and the glorious Constantinople of earlier times by focusing on the horseman – the tangible imperial link that threaded together two eras. The narrative offered by Pachymeres provides a lens through which we can behold the experience of an intellectual returning from exile and a learned observer examining a monument of a glorious past. His extended description of the monument sought to reconstruct its creator’s reasoning by using his own powers of observation, thus addressing a failure of Prokopios. Pachymeres can therefore be considered an eager, early pioneer of the fertile terrain that is now known as "late antique studies."