Opsites is the name twice mentioned by the Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 historian Procopius

Procopius

Procopius of Caesarea was a prominent Byzantine scholar from Palestine. Accompanying the general Belisarius in the wars of the Emperor Justinian I, he became the principal historian of the 6th century, writing the Wars of Justinian, the Buildings of Justinian and the celebrated Secret History...

 in De Bellis, while recounting the events related to the Lazic War

Lazic War

The Lazic War or Colchic War, also known as the Great War of Egrisi in Georgian historiography, was fought between the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia for control of the region of Lazica, in what is now western Georgia...

 fought between the Eastern Roman

Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...

 and Sassanid Persian

Sassanid Empire

The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...

 empires over the Caucasian

Caucasus

The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...

 state of Lazica.

In one passage (Proc. BG IV 9.7-8), Procopius remarks parenthetically that Opsites was an uncle of Gubazes

Gubazes II of Lazica

Gubazes II was king of Lazica from ca. 541 until his assassination in 555. He was one of the central personalities of the Lazic War, first as a Sassanid Persian vassal and after 548 as an ally of the Eastern Roman Empire....

 and at one time king of the Lazi. He was married to Theodora, of Roman senatorial

Roman Senate

The Senate of the Roman Republic was a political institution in the ancient Roman Republic, however, it was not an elected body, but one whose members were appointed by the consuls, and later by the censors. After a magistrate served his term in office, it usually was followed with automatic...

 descent. At the time of the Lazic revolt against Rome, Theodora, while living among the Apsilii, was captured, by chance, by the Persian commander Nabedes and carried off to Persia.

Later in Procopius's work (Proc. BG IV 9.11, 9.14, BG IV 9.29-30), Opsites appears as ruler of the eastern part of Abasgia, a land north of Lazica (the west was under Sceparnas). He was installed after the Abasgians rejected Roman rule 550. Opsites led the Abasgians against the Romans under Ioannes qui et Guzes and Vligagus who defeated the rebels and captured their fort of Trachea. Opsites fled to the Huns

Huns

The Huns were a group of nomadic people who, appearing from east of the Volga River, migrated into Europe c. AD 370 and established the vast Hunnic Empire there. Since de Guignes linked them with the Xiongnu, who had been northern neighbours of China 300 years prior to the emergence of the Huns,...

 of the Caucasus but his family members were all captured.

The scholarly opinion is divided as to whether the Opsites of these two passages are the same person and whether Procopius's report of him being king of Lazica is true. If Opsites indeed ruled as king, this might have occurred before 541, when Gubazes was king. Professor Cyril Toumanoff

Cyril Toumanoff

Cyril Leo Heraclius, Prince Toumanoff was an United States-based historian and genealogist who mostly specialized in the history and genealogies of medieval Georgia, Armenia, the Byzantine Empire, and Iran...

 assumes that, in both cases, Procopius refers to the same person, a member of the Lazic royal family, who became an Abasgian leader. In the view of Toumanoff, this is highly probable given the fact that Lazica and Abasgia revolted together against the Roman hegemony and Abasgia had long been under the Lazic suzerainty.

Sources

• Martindale, John R. & Morris, John (1980), The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. 3, Part 2, AD 395–527. Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
  
  , ISBN 978-0521201599.
• Toumanoff, Cyril (1980). "How Many Kings Named Opsites?". A Tribute to John Insley Coddington on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the American Society of Genealogists. Association for the Promotion of Scholarship in Genealogy.