The Early Byzantine Historians 0230243673, 9780230243675

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The Early Byzantine Historians Warren Treadgold

© Warren Treadgold 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC. and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. ® Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13:978-1-4039-3458-1 ISBN-10: 1-4039-3458-4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Treadgold, Warren T.

The early Byzantine historians I Warren Treadgold p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-3458-4 (cloth)

1. Historiography - Byzantine Empire. 2. Byzantine Empire­ Historiography. 3. Historians - Byzantine Empire. I. Title D14.T72 2007 2006045773

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Por Ihor Sevcenko Who Taught Me to Respect Byzantine Historians Without Always Believing Them

The question is: can we save for ourselves and for our successors this immemorial tradition, this long-standing delight, of talking to past historians as if they were our senior colleagues? I would hope that our urge to reinterpret the past in our own terms will not make us forget that these ancient historians were after all trying to help us. From their point of view, with their own limitations, they were trying to communicate to future generations what they saw or read about events they considered to be important. What else are we trying to do ourselves? -Arnaldo Momigliano

Contents

Ust ofMaps

xi

Preface

xii 1

The Greek Background

2

3

4

5

6

Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon Hellenistic historians Greek historians under Rome The Byzantines and the Greek historians

2 9 13 17

Eusebius of Caesarea

23

Eusebius' life The Chronicle The History of the Church The Life of Cons tan tine

23 26 33 41

Ammianus Marcellinus

47

Ammianus' life Ammianus' History Ammianus' achievement

51 60 68

The New Classical Historians

79

Eunapius of Sardis Olympiodorus o f Thebes Priscus of Panium Candidus and Malchus Count Zosimus Eustathius of Epiphania

81 89 96 103 107 114

The New Church Historians

121

Eusebius' first successors Philostorgius of Borissus Socrates of Constantinople Sozomen of Bethelea Theodoret of Cyrrhus The decline o f church history

1 21 1 26 1 34 145 155 1 65

Procopius of Caesarea

176

Procopius' active career Procopius' literary career The "Persian War"

1 76 1 84 1 92

ix

x

Contents

7

The "Vandal War" The "Gothic War" The Secret History Procopius' achievement

195 199 205 213

Procopius' Contemporaries

227

Count Marcellinus John Malalas Malalas' sources Nonnosus . John the Lydian Peter the Patrician Hesychius of Miletus 8

Procopius' Successors

. Agathias of Myrina Theophanes of Byzantium Menander Protector Evagrius Scholasticus John of Epiphania 9

·

227 235 246 256 258 264 270 279

279 290 293 299 308

The Last Early Byzantine Historians

311

John of Antioch Theophylact Simocatta The "Paschal Chronicle" and the long silence

311 329 340

10 The Historians as a Group

The historians The histories The historiography

350

351 361 368

Chronological Table of the Early Byzantine Historians

382

L ist of English Translations of the Early Byzantine Historians

385

Bibliography

387

Index

401

List of Maps

1 The eastern Mediterranean in early Byzantine times 2 Birthplaces and workplaces of the early Byzantine historians

xi

xvi 380

Preface

After planning to write a book on Byzantine historiography from the fourth to the fifteenth century, I eventually decided to write three books, of which this is the first. While the early Byzantine historians are relatively well cov­ ered by articles, monographs, and handbooks, until now no single scholar has studied all of them in depth. My aim is to put the historians into their historical and literary context, to summarize what we can know about them, to describe what they tell us and how they tell it, and to evaluate their works both as histories and as literature. 1 I also have tried to write not just for schol­ ars, but for general readers ready to overlook some Greek and Latin in the notes if the main text is readable. Though Byzantine historians had different motives, by calling them his­ torians I imply that one of their main purposes was to write a reasonably accurate account of the past. They would firmly have rejected the notion of Postmodernists and some others that history and fiction should be judged by identical standards, which if meant seriously would make truth irrelevant. 2 For example, one can fairly say that The Golden Ass would be a worse novel if it made Lucius die while he was still a donkey, but not that The Pelopon­ nesian War would be a better history if it made Pericles survive the plague . Historians, even when they shared some literary technique with other sorts of writers, used it for a different purpose. Most educated Byzantines thought a thoroughly inaccurate work, no matter how elegant or entertaining, would be a bad history. Procopius expresses the fear that readers might classify his Secret History along with mythology and drama-that is, might take for fiction what he meant to be an historical portrait of the emperor Justinian. 3 The Byzantines also distinguished histories from panegyrics and hagiog­ raphy, in which truth really could be almost irrelevant. Panegyrists were supposed to praise their subject regardless of his merits. If the subject had real virtues, the panegyrist mentioned them, but panegyrics were not judged by their accuracy. St. Augustine was unusually scrupulous when he lamented 1 I include Byzantines who wrote histories in Greek and Latin, but not those who wrote in Syriac, Coptic, or Armenian. Apart from not knowing those languages, my justification is that unlike Eastern writers in Latin, who addressed readers throughout the empire, writers in Syriac, Coptic, or Armenian wrote outside the main Byzantine literary tradition, aware that their readership would be limited to their linguistic group. Their traditions also continued long after the end of Byzantine rule. 2 See Ljubarskij et al., " Quellenforschung," esp. Ljubarskij's remarks on pp. 11-22, my reply on pp. 57-60, and Ljubarskij's reply on p. 6 1 . 3 Procopius, Secret History 1.4.

xii

Preface

xiii

that in praising the emperor "I would tell many lies, and would be admired by people who knew I was lying, " because (as he knew) people expected lies in a panegyric. When Valentinian I asked a provincial panegyrist what the provincials really thought of the prefect he had just praised, the speaker seized his chance to denounce the man as a detested despot. Agathias decided to write the history of earlier times because he assumed nobody believed praise of important people who were still alive. 4 Hagiographers too were supposed to praise their subject, as well as to edify their audience and above all to glorify God. Since they could accomplish all three purposes with fictional material, most hagiographers retold any edifying story they heard. Some even invented saints. 5 Byzantine historians, though sometimes led by their sources or circum­ stances to write hagiography or panegyric, usually avoided writing much about saints or reigning emperors. Byzantine histories are full of descrip­ tions of evil emperors, heretical bishops, and murderous monks, and in these respects evidently reflect both historical reality and popular opinion better than panegyrics or hagiography do. The few Byzantines who read panegyrics seem to have mainly admired their prose style. Even though the Byzantines may have read more saints' lives than histories, just as Americans today may read more detective stories than histories, real holy men were about as important in Byzantium as real detectives are in America. 6 We should also beware of assuming that historians who wrote in more "popular" language, like John Malalas and Count Marcellinus, were read or appreciated by more people. The assertion that Malalas enjoyed more "pop­ ularity" than Procopius seems irreconcilable with our possessing eighty-one Greek manuscripts of Procopius and two of Malalas. 7 We should not even assume, as some scholars do, that Malalas and Marcellinus "are far more repre­ sentative of widely held beliefs in the sixth century" than Procopius. Malalas' history is probably plagiarized from one of the most learned of Byzantine his­ torians, Eustathius of Epiphania, who was Procopius' main literary source. Marcellinus, whose work is preserved in zero Byzantine manuscripts, wrote much the same type of chronicle as his scholarly predecessors Eusebius and Jerome. 8 While most Byzantines were illiterate and read no history at all,

4 Augustine, Confessions VI.6 (whose subject was the harmless fifteen-year-old Valentinian Il), Ammianus XXX. 5.4-10 (on Valentinian I), and Agathias, Histories I, pref. 1 6-20. 5 The classic study is Delehaye, Legends. 6 For a comparison of the Byzantine audiences for historiography and hagiography, see below, pp. 3 7 1-76. 7 Cf. Rapp, "Literary Culture, " p. 394, with Haury and Wirth, Procopius I, pp. xxviii­ lii (Wars), Ill, pp. xv-xx (Secret History), and IV, pp. v-viii (Buildings, admittedly not an historical work), and Thum, Malalas, pp. 4*-16*. 8 Cf. M. Maas, "Roman Questions," p. 18, with pp. 23 1, 234-35, and 246-56 below.

xiv Preface

literate Byzantines were much more likely to read Procopius than Malalas or Marcellinus. Byzantine thinking had very little in common with today's Postmod­ ernism, which looks for truth in panegyrics and saints' lives, for bias in historiography, everywhere for sexuality, and nowhere for religious faith. Of course, Byzantine panegyrics and saints' lives do contain much truth and Byzantine historiography many biases, and the Byzantines did tend to minimize the importance of sexuality in their lives and to exaggerate the importance of faith. We certainly need not share the Byzantines' beliefs and opinions in order to understand them. Yet we cannot understand them by disregarding their real beliefs and opinions, as many Postmodernists have not only done, but done without argument and too often without challenge. Postmodernist scholarship has so little to say about real Byzantine condi­ tions that most specialists on early Byzantine historians have simply ignored it without comment. 9 Since no comparable study has been written on this large subject before, many findings in this book are new and significant. They include Eusebius' method of composition, Ammianus' reason for settling in the West, the professions of Philostorgius and the "Paschal Chronicler," the influence of Eustathius, Procopius' demonology, and the parts of the lost books of Ammianus and Diodorus preserved by Malalas and John of Antioch. When I disagree with previously accepted views, I mention them in my notes more often than in my text; but whenever something is uncertain, as is often the case, a signal in the text like "probably" or "perhaps" will warn skeptical read­ ers to look in the notes. While all my citations refer to the original Greek or Latin texts, which I quote in my own translations, a list of available English translations of the historians appears at the end of the book for the general reader's convenience. For grants supporting my work on this project I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Saint Louis University, particularly its Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. My special thanks go to Anthony Kaldellis for reading my entire text and making helpful corrections and suggestions, even if we still disagree about exactly how many of the early Byzantine historians were pagans. I am particularly grateful to my superb longtime editor, Paul Psoinos, whose expert help was especially valuable for a book as ambitious as this one.

9 I discuss Postmodernist scholarship at greater length in Treadgold, " Imaginary Early Christianity" and "Taking Sources . " I wrote this preface shortly before reading the excellent critique of many aspects of "the new Late Antiquity" in Ward-Perkins, Fall.

Preface

xv

One need not be a Byzantinist to find the Byzantine historians interesting. They form a remarkable portrait gallery, important in themselves yet more typical of their time and place than any other significant sample of Byzantines whose lives and thinking we can know nearly as well. Many of the historians were gifted writers, incisive thinkers, engaging personalities, or all three of those together. Individually and as a group, they shaped both Byzantine culture and modern perceptions of it. W. T. St. Louis September 2005

1 The Greek Background

Enterprising people wrote histories in Greek in every century from the fifth before Christ to the fifteenth of the Christian era. Each historian imitated his predecessors, and above all the earliest of them, Herodotus and Thucydides. Much the same methods of writing history remained in use throughout clas­ sical and Byzantine times. Though spoken Greek changed in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, literary Greek resisted all these changes, so that Thucydides could be a model even for fifteenth-century Byzantine histori­ ans. Some periods were much better recorded than others, but the historical record in Greek never entirely lapsed, and even after many losses it remains continuous today. The Byzantine historians represented the last eleven centuries of premod­ ern Greek historiography, and more than half of the part of it that survives. While their works must have made up less than half the histories originally written in Greek, Byzantine historiography remains impressive if we real­ ize that during the Byzantine period the Greek-speaking world was usually smaller than it had been in Hellenistic and Roman times. Moreover, few read­ ers of Ammianus, Procopius, Michael Psellus, or Anna Comnena will find them much inferior to any of their predecessors but Thucydides and perhaps Herodotus. That the best Byzantine historians have received less attention than Xenophon or Polybius seems to be due not to their relative merits but to modern scholars' tendency to prefer Antiquity to Byzantium. Not all of the Byzantines themselves would have agreed that Byzantine historiography should be considered a separate subject from ancient his­ toriography. "Byzantine" is a post-Byzantine term; the Byzantines called themselves "Romans, " even if they called themselves that in Greek. Yet they realized that their Christianity, and their political separation from the Western Roman Empire, set them off somewhat from their predecessors. Diocletian, the first emperor to make an administrative division between East and West, and Constantine, the first emperor to become a Christian, were both contemporaries of Eusebius of Caesarea, author of the first comprehen­ sive Christian chronicle and the first real history of the Christian Church.

2

The Early Byzantine Historians

Though after Eusebius pagans still wrote history, unlike earlier Romans they wrote in a society dominated by Christians and independent of the city of Rome. So Christianity and the division of the empire did partly distinguish the Byzantine historians from their predecessors. That the tradition of writing history remained unbroken did not of course mean that most historians had read most previous histories. By Byzantine times that was impossible, not just because so much had been written, but because much of what had been written had already been lost. Even some of the histories that survived somewhere were seldom found or read by Byzan­ tine historians, few of whom were professional scholars. Yet almost every Byzantine with a primary education had read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and some of the Old Testament. The majority of Byzantines with a secondary education had read Thucydides and perhaps Herodotus, along with a selection of the ancient poets, orators, and philosophers. Most Byzantine historians had also read some other history of the times before their own, of which they would often write a continuation. Since these ear­ lier histories had incorporated even earlier works, Byzantine historians, like modern historians, reflected the influence of many authors whom they had never read themselves. 1 Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon

The line of maj or Greek historians began with Herodotus, whose Histories extend from the seventh century BC to the end of the Persian Wars in 479 BC. 2 Herodotus was born around 484 in Halicarnassus, a Greek port on the coast of Anatolia that was subject to Persia even after the wars. As a young man he reportedly went into exile because he disliked his city's pro-Persian ruler. Herodotus traveled widely through the Greek and Persian worlds, as far afield as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Thrace. Observing the local monuments and customs, he inquired about the past and present inhabitants, and read whatever he could find in Greek. Eventually he collected accounts going back some two hundred years, which naturally became less plausible and more confused the further back he went, plus a store of geographical and ethnographical data of varying reliability. Then Herodotus wrote the first true history in Greek literature, and its first maj or surviving work in prose. 3 He took as his theme not just the recent Persian Wars but all the conflicts between the Greeks and the peoples to their

1 For this chapter, see particularly Meister, Griechische Geschichtsschreibung; and the more thematic treatments of Fornara, Nature; and Marincola, Authority. 2 See recently Lateiner, Historical Method; and Gould, Herodotus. 3 The works of his older contemporary Hecataeus appear to have been geographical and mythological rather than truly historical.

The Greek Background

3

east. Since books and even literacy were still quite rare, he seems to have presented his work through public readings in various Greek cities, above all at Athens, where his delighted audience reportedly voted him a princely fee from state funds. In 443 he joined an Athenian expedition to found a colony in southern Italy at Thurii, where he settled. He continued to revise his history at least until the year 430. Though he might have refined his work further if he had lived longer, its present form is mature and complete. He emerges from his work as an engaging, gregarious, and intelligent raconteur. Herodotus arranged his material in a very free chronological order. He starts with the history of western Anatolia, where in the seventh century BC the kings of Lydia took over the Greek cities of the coast before them­ selves succumbing to the Persians in the next century. Herodotus frequently digresses from his main narrative. The Persian conquest of Lydia leads him to discuss earlier Persian history, and the Persian conquests of Egypt and other countries inspire him to describe those places at length. About halfway through his work he comes to the revolt of the Anatolian Greeks against the Persians in 500. Here, as he reaches events within the memory of people he could consult, his account becomes more historical and less legendary. With fewer and shorter digressions than before, he describes how help sent from Athens to the Anatolian Greeks provoked two great Persian invasions of Greece itself. The first expedition, sent by King Darius, was defeated by the Greeks at Marathon in 490. The subsequent expedition of King Xerxes lost to the Greeks in the sea battle of Salamis in 480 and the land battle of Plataea in 4 79, which ended the wars and concludes Herodotus' account. Herodotus' work is a general history, and practically a universal one as far as his knowledge permitted. He said something about almost all the peoples known to the Greeks, including a few, like the Amazons, beyond the limits of their knowledge. His history extends from the earliest times of which he had learned to events that older members of his audience could recall from their youth. Yet his work stops just short of becoming a contemporary history, within the author's own memory. Herodotus mentions his personal experiences only as sources for past events and their context. In this sense his is an academic history, concerned with things that he could not have known without doing research of some kind. Although Herodotus states at the outset that his aim is to preserve memo­ ries of the past, he also meant to entertain his audience. A desire to keep them interested seems to lie behind many of his digressions of dubious relevance and credibility. In trying to equal the vividness of epic poetry, he reports as direct quotations what different historical figures supposedly said, even when he cannot have known much or anything about it. Such speeches also permit him to state contrasting opinions, including those of the Persians, in a work that otherwise contains little analysis, a very brief introduction, and no conclusion to speak of.

The Early Byzantine Historians

4

Herodotus' point of view, when it appears, is remarkably evenhanded for a Greek from one of the cities that had suffered most from the Persians. Though Herodotus writes as a Greek, and approves of the Greeks' struggle to free them­ selves from Persian autocracy, he shows no rancor toward Persians and no tendency to idealize Greeks. According to him, King Xerxes was a sensible and honorable man, practically compelled to invade Greece by the orders of a supernatural figure who appeared to him in a dream. 4 On the other hand, Herodotus depicts Themistocles, the Athenian champion of the Greek resistance, as devious and corrupt. Though such were presumably the reports of some informants who favored Persians or opposed Themistocles' policies, Herodotus had enough information and enough critical sense to present other views. What he did instead was to assert that Greek freedom was worth defending even against a benevolent ruler, and even under a flawed leader. He makes his point in a story of two Spartans who told a Persian governor that, knowing only slavery, he had no idea of how sweet liberty was . 5 The mood of Herodotus' history is generally optimistic. His main subject was calculated to please a Greek audience, since the Persian Wars were the first conflict in which a broad alliance of Greeks had defeated foreigners-or at least the first since the Trojan War, the subject of Homer's well-loved poems. Herodotus chose not to continue his history into the next fifty years, during which the Greeks fought each other. On the whole pro-Athenian, he avoided the controversial period when Athens enrolled the islands and coastlands that it had freed from Persia into an alliance that many Greeks considered an Athenian tyranny. When Herodotus' history ends, the Greeks enjoyed peace and freedom, facing no apparent threat from their fellow Greeks or the defeated Persians. Thucydides, who as an adolescent is said to have been moved to tears by Herodotus' readings at Athens, took as his subject the war that broke out in 4 3 1 BC between the Athenian alliance and the Peloponnesian alliance led by Sparta. 6 At that time Thucydides was a young man from a wealthy and prominent Athenian family that owned gold mines in Thrace. He claims to have foreseen that the war would be a momentous one, and to have begun work on his history soon after the war started. He served as one of Athens' ten elected generals in 424, when he was exiled, evidently for failing to pre­ vent the fall of the Athenian colony of Amphipolis to the Peloponnesians. For twenty years he lived in exile, collecting information for his history from Peloponnesians and neutrals as well as Athenians and their allies. Only when the Peloponnesians defeated the Athenians in 404 and had Athenian

4

Cf. Herodotus VII . 1 2-18. Herodotus VII . l 35. 6 See recently S. Hornblower, Thucydides. 5

The Greek Background

5

exiles recalled did he return to Athens. Not long afterward he died, leav­ ing his Peloponnesian War unfinished. He was conscientious, humorless, and brilliant. After an introduction in which he makes the dubious claim that the Peloponnesian War was more important than any previous conflict, includ­ ing the Persian Wars, Thucydides describes the events between 435 and 432 that led to the war. He then inserts a digression on earlier events beginning with the end of the Persian Wars in 4 79, showing how the power of Athens grew and aroused the distrust of the Peloponnesian alliance. Returning to 432 and the outbreak of hostilities, he defines the year beginning in spring 43 1 as the first year of the war, using different Greek systems of dating to mark it. 7 Thereafter, except for a very few digressions, he relates events in chronological order, dividing them into years numbered from the first year of the war and separated into summers and winters. While he may once have believed that the Peace of Nicias had ended the war in 421, Thucydides later decided that it had been a false peace that brought no significant interrup­ tion. The part of his history beginning with 4 1 3 is in rougher shape than the rest, and it breaks off entirely in the middle of 4 1 1 , the twentieth year of the war. His stated plan, however, was to record the whole war up to the Athenian surrender in 404. 8 Thucydides certainly knew Herodotus' work. He criticizes it indirectly for a few errors and begins his digression on earlier Greek history where Herodotus had left off. 9 Thucydides claims to have paid great attention to accuracy by interviewing eyewitnesses and excluding fiction, even at the risk of making his history less entertaining. 10 His prose, much more labored than that of Herodotus, sometimes requires several readings before the sense becomes clear. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides generally excludes versions of events that differ from those he believes trustworthy, and scarcely ever names his sources. He shows little interest in ethnography or geography, or in peoples outside the Greek world, even when the Persians began to intervene in the war. Though most of what he reports is both credible and consistent, he admits that he has reconstructed speeches by historical figures that he gives as direct quotations. 1 1 Though he managed to make most of the arguments presented in these speeches seem appropriate to the situation, most of them are in the knotty and obscure style of Thucydides himself.

7

Thucydides 11.2. 1 . Thucydides V.26. 1 . 9 O n the errors, cf. Thucydides 1.20.2-3 with Herodotus V.SS, VI.S7, and IX.S3. Thucydides' digression begins at 1.89 . 1 . 1 0 Thucydides 1.22.2-4. 1 1 Thucydides 1.22. 1 . 8

6

The Early Byzantine Historians

Thucydides had the advantage over Herodotus of restricting himself to events within the memory of living informants. When he began work in 4 3 1 , the earliest events he records in his prewar digression were less than fifty years in the past; the comparable point for Herodotus would have been around 500, when he began his account of the twenty-one years of the Persian Wars. In the few passages where Thucydides ventures back into earlier times, his account has a rather Herodotean flavor, including some almost mythical elements and only a vague idea of chronology. Dates within years are rare even in his account of the war; any distances he records are approximate; and, despite his contemporaneity, his figures for sums of money and army strengths are scanty and imprecise. 12 Thucydides unmistakably wrote contemporary history. Unlike Herodotus, he wanted to tell future generations what had occurred in his own times and country, not to tell his contemporaries what had happened in the past in foreign lands. Though Thucydides never adduces his own experience as a source, even referring to himself in the third person when he briefly describes his ill-fated service as an Athenian general, he was surely an eyewitness of many of the events he recounts, including most of what was done or said at Athens before his exile in 424 . He must also have spoken with eyewitnesses of many other events. Yet, beyond the barest mention of his methods at the outset, he excludes himself from his narrative as much as possible, cultivating an impersonal omniscience. Like Herodotus, Thucydides shows an understanding of both sides in the war and a general preference for moderation in opinion and action. The extraordinary detachment of both historians may be partly due to their mixed ancestry-Herodotus' father had a Carian name, and Thucydides' father a Thracian one-and partly to their both having written their histories in exile. Yet the wars they recounted gravely disturbed not only their home cities but their own lives. Almost the only people of whom Thucydides expressly disapproves are Clean and Hyperbolus, the leading Athenian politicians at the time of his exile, who had presumably taken part in banishing him. 1 3 The overall impression given b y Thucydides' Peloponnesian War is pes­ simistic, and we can scarcely doubt that the completed history would have been at least as gloomy. It is not simply that Thucydides regretted that his home city of Athens lost in the end, though he expresses admiration for Pericles, the politician who led Athens into the war, and seems largely to share Pericles' admiration for the city as it was when the war began. Thucydides mentions with restrained but unmistakable sorrow the plague at Athens, the destruction of Plataea by the Peloponnesians and of Melos by the Athenians, the civil war on Corcyra, the virtual annihilation 12

13

Cf. Rubincam, "Qualification," pp. 77-95. Thucydides I I I .36.6 and IV.28 (on Clean) and VIII. 73.3 (on Hyperbolus).

The Greek Background

7

of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, and the general demoralization that the war caused throughout Greece. Though some Greeks doubtless thought that ending Athenian hegemony was worth these twenty-seven years of warfare, Thucydides was not among them. When he wrote that his history might be useful to anyone who wished to understand future events like the Peloponnesian War, he surely meant to warn against repeating them. 14 Nonetheless, neither Thucydides nor Herodotus gives much space to analyzing events. They pay much attention to the circumstances leading up to their wars, and to the wars' causes in Persian and Athenian expansion­ ism, but neither shows more than an elementary sense of overall strategy. Herodotus muddles his accounts of battles and overestimates Persian strength by a factor of perhaps ten. l 5 He never explicitly suggests why the Greeks won the war, even if his final paragraph hints that the Greeks' poverty made them tougher than the Persians. l 6 Thucydides, despite his service as a gen­ eral, found it hard to see that most of the military operations of the war were irrelevant to winning it. He barely noticed the efforts of the Athenian general Demosthenes to raise a potentially decisive rebellion among the Spartans' slaves, and barely grasped the importance of Persian help even after seeing it win the war for the Peloponnesians. Though he might have handled such questions better if he had been able to finish and revise his work, he had already given the war so much thought that he would probably have made only minor changes. The principal aims of both founders of Greek historiography were to record events and to turn them into works of art. They were less inter­ ested in meticulous accuracy than in general authenticity, as appears from the speeches they include, which are technically fabrications but show a general knowledge of the situation and help dramatize the narrative. Neither author expresses many moral judgments, or any overarching the­ ory of causation or of history. Yet both took great pains to gather their evidence, and to mold their mass of disparate material into a coherent and credible whole. Those were the achievements on which they prided themselves. The same was true of most later Greek historians, who took Herodotus and Thucydides as models and adopted most of the features the two founders had in common. The imitators seldom developed an interest in society, trade, 14

Thucydides 1.22. Herodotus' absurd total of 5,283,320 Persians (VI I . 1 84-86) is based on a figure of 1, 700,000 for the infantry, which Xerxes supposedly reached by building an enclosure that held precisely ten thousand men and packing his soldiers into it in groups (VII.60). The number of 1 70 groups would however be quite plausible if the enclosure had actually held one thousand men. 1 6 Herodotus IX. 1 22 (cf. IX.82). 15

8 The Early Byzantine Historians agriculture, chronology, statistics, or grand strategy, and liked to include fabricated speeches. Unfortunately, the skills that Herodotus and Thucydides displayed in arguing different sides of a case in their speeches, which were characteristic of the popular assemblies of their time, were much less evident in nearly all their successors, who wrote when assemblies were less important. The invented speech was in any case a device that needed to be used with much more care than most imitators realized. Later Greeks generally preferred Thucydides to Herodotus. One reason was Thucydides' language, the Attic dialect that became standard classiciz­ ing Greek rather than the Ionic dialect used by Herodotus. Another reason was that Herodotus included much more folklore, which as educated Greeks became more critical they found na'ive. They correctly considered Thucy­ dides the more sophisticated author, both in his treatment of evidence and in his literary style. While Herodotus wrote for oral presentation to a wide audience, Thucydides, like his successors, wrote for the much more select group that was literate. The difficulty of reading his convoluted syntax and dry content made him a favorite among schoolmasters and scholars, who saw him as a test of erudition. Finally, Thucydides was admired as a man of action who had actually fought in the war he wrote about, while Herodotus' travels, postdating the events he recorded, seemed less central to his subj ect. On the whole, the influence of Thucydides and Herodotus on later Greek historians was salutary. The two founders established history as a literary form of the highest order, on a par with epic poetry and tragedy. Unlike the great epic and tragic poets, however, Herodotus and Thucydides had a long line of imitators. Even if the successors failed to write history as well as Thucydides, they could cover events later than those he had known, which might be as momentous in their way as the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides' example may not have led any historians to become generals, but it probably led some generals to become historians. The veneration of great predecessors that soon blighted Greek drama, and eventually stultified most of the rest of Greek literature, had less intimidating effects on historians. One reason was that a third founder of Greek historiography, Xenophon, was a less awesome figure. 1 7 An Athenian aristocrat, he was born around 430 and became one of the young followers of Socrates. In 401 Xenophon j oined a band of Greek mercenaries hired to support a rebellion by a Persian prince, and was chosen to lead the army out of Persia in 399. His earliest historical work was his Anabasis ("March up Country"), a simply told but exhilarating account of this expedition. He often mentions himself, though like Thucydides only in the third person. Yet Xenophon's Anabasis made less impression on the Greeks than his Hellenica (" Greek Affairs"), which directly continues Thucydides' history from 4 1 1 to 3 62. l7

See Higgins, Xenophon; and Dillery, Xenophon.

The Greek Background

9

Like Thucydides, Xenophon wrote largely from experience, covering events that had taken place during his adulthood, many of which he had witnessed. Again like Thucydides, he was an Athenian who spent much of his life in exile and commanded troops, though in his case as a mercenary, sometimes serving Sparta. His Hellenica has a sort of theme: how Sparta lost the fruits of its victory in the Peloponnesian War. A bluff and straightforward man, Xenophon was sorry for the Spartans but did not brood. He shows reasonably balanced judgment, occasional narrative power, and a lucid and graceful style, which often gives his invented speeches dramatic effect. Yet with its minimal research and indifferent organization the Hellenica was a work that an author of middling literary talents and education could hope to imitate. The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon's Hellenica formed a nearly continuous narrative of most of the history the Greeks knew up to Xenophon's time. The three histories were comparable in length; when later scholars divided them into "books" representing papyrus rolls of roughly a hundred modern pages each, Herodotus came to nine books, Thucydides eight books, and Xenophon seven somewhat undersized books. Though all three historians had several Greek contemporaries who wrote something resembling history, these latter histories failed to win a comparable read­ ership and were soon lost. Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon eclipsed their rivals. A pattern seemed to be developing in which each generation of Greeks supplied a contemporary historian to take up the course of events where the previous historian had left off. Yet, largely because of the persistent pres­ tige of the classical period during and about which they wrote, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon were to keep a unique popularity as the histori­ ans and representatives of an age of Greek greatness. Because many copies of all three histories continued to circulate, all have survived complete up to the present, and each was accessible to most educated and interested Byzantines. The three were read even by people with little interest in history, as neces­ sary elements of a first-class literary education. No historian with any literary ambitions could ignore their example, or at least the example of Thucydides. Hellenistic historians

The pattern of one historian's continuing another could never be entirely sta­ ble, because nothing kept writers from producing competing continuations or from rewriting the work of their predecessors. Nor, despite the success of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, did everyone agree on what a satisfactory history was. Those great historians provided three rather dif­ ferent models, and none gave much guidance for compiling history based on written records. Thucydides and Xenophon were historians of their own times, and though Herodotus wrote about times before his own he had few

10 The Early Byzantine Historians written sources to consult. By the fourth century, however, the volume of Greek written records was large and growing, and most later historians relied more on such records than on oral reports or personal experience. Later historians found it harder to make their mark. Of course no one could repeat Herodotus' achievement in founding historiography. Thucy­ dides, Xenophon, and the other Athenian writers of the fifth and fourth centuries had given writing in Attic Greek particular prestige. When later Greeks wrote in the gradually developing Koine ("Common") dialect, which combined Attic with other dialects, their works seemed careless and uncouth by comparison. Moreover, the cultured private citizen who took an active part in public affairs, like Thucydides or Xenophon, became a rarity by the later fourth century, when Greek history was dominated by kings. A good his­ tory written by a participant had an immediacy that few later writers could capture. The armchair histories written after Xenophon were also easier to replace than contemporary accounts. If another historian covered the same events with a little more information or a better style, or added earlier or later events from other sources, the later history would usually supersede the earlier one. Since private libraries were small and public libraries few, the circulation of all but the commonest books was very limited. Realizing that new histories were unlikely to find a wide readership, historians wrote for a small and scholarly group, and were lucky if they reached even that. Thus very few of the histories written after Xenophon and before the Byzantine period remain intact today. Many of them are little more than ghosts to us, surviving only in summaries and citations by later writers. Two contemporaries of Thucydides had already composed histories taken mainly from written records. Hellanicus of Mytilene integrated the oral and written traditions of various cities and peoples, and Ctesias of Cnidus wrote a history of Persia from King Ninus of Assyria, the mythical founder of Nineveh, to Ctesias' own time in 398. Then a younger contemporary of Xenophon's, Ephorus of Cyme, wrote a general history from the conquest of the Peloponnesus by the descendants of Hercules, which Ephorus apparently dated to 1 069, and probably reached 340 BC before he died. 18 In the late third century, Eratosthenes of Cyrene made the first systematic attempt to work out a chronology of Greek history. In the second century Apollodorus of Athens revised and expanded Eratosthenes' work into a verse chronicle from the Trojan War, supposedly in 1 1 84, until 1 44 in his own times. 19 Meanwhile the succession of histories begun by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon was continued by a series of historians whose works are now lost. The first was Ephorus' younger contemporary Theopompus of Chios,

18 19

Barber, Historian, is the most recent book-length treatment. See Mosshammer, Chronicle, pp. 1 13-27.

The Greek Background ll

whose Hellenica and Philippica ("Affairs under Philip") brought the story down to the death of Philip of Macedon in 336. 20 Theopompus' two histories were in turn continued by four contemporary historians of Philip's son and succes­ sor Alexander the Great, who died in 323. Three of these four historians had taken part in Alexander's campaigns, and one, Ptolemy I, later became king of Egypt. 21 These historians were in turn continued by Hieronymus of Car­ dia, who recorded the wars of Alexander's successors and apparently left off in 272 with the death of the last of them, Pyrrhus of Epirus. 22 Hieronymus' continuer was Phylarchus, probably of Athens, whose history ran from 272 to the death of his hero, the royal revolutionary Cleomenes Ill of Sparta, in 220 or 21 9. A s the Hellenistic world split into different states a s distant a s India, general histories became more cumbersome to write, and some historians limited themselves to single cities or countries. Probably the most influential was Timaeus of Tauromenium, who wrote a history of the western Greeks while at Athens in exile from his native Sicily. Yet ultimately more important were the Egyptian Manetho and the Mesopotamian Berossus, each of whom used records in his own language to compile a general history in Greek of his homeland since the earliest recorded times. 23 By the second century Rome had grown stronger than any Greek state, and its affairs became the subject of the Histories of Polybius of Megalopolis. 24 Born around 200, Polybius was a Greek politician and officer from the cen­ tral Peloponnesus who came to know and respect the Romans when they detained him for seventeen years as a hostage at Rome. The forty books of his Histories began with the First Punic War in 264, when Timaeus' work on the western Greeks had ended, and concluded with Rome's destruction of Carthage in 146, though Polybius had originally planned to stop with Rome's defeat of Macedon in 1 68 . His history is the first since Xenophon's of which a substantial part survives in its original form, including all of Books I-V and extracts from the rest. What remains, around 30 percent of the orig­ inal, is about half as long again as the whole work of either Herodotus or Thucydides. Polybius makes only sparing use of invented speeches, describes military operations in detail, and even recounts some of his own experiences. His 20

See Flower, Theopompus. Besides Ptolemy, who had served as an officer under Alexander, these were the court historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, whose history was interrupted when Alexander executed him in 327, Aristobulus of Cassandria, who had also served under Alexander, and Cleitarchus, evidently another contemporary. See Pearson, Lost Histories; and now Bosworth, From Arrian. 22 See J. Hornblower, Hieronymus. 2 3 See now Verbrugghe and Wickersham, Berossos. 24 See Walbank, Polybius; and Sacks, Polybius. 21

1 2 The Early Byzantine Historians style is somewhat less felicitous than Xenophon's, but his history is just as vivid, better composed, and more reflective. Though Polybius' philosophiz­ ing can be ponderous, his perception of Rome's strengths is acute. As yet another in the distinguished line of exiled historians ranging from Herodotus to Timaeus, Polybius is generally impartial, and not so much pessimistic as fatalistic. His chosen theme of Rome's rise to power is consistently pursued, preserving his work's coherence and continuity despite its mostly annalistic form. The reasons for the survival of so much of Polybius' history were proba­ bly its literary quality, its philosophical bent, its author's credentials as a man of action, and above all its subject, which particularly interested future gen­ erations who lived under Roman rule, the Byzantines included. His history was continued in the early first century BC by the philosopher Posidonius of Apamea, whose work is now lost. Diodorus Siculus ("the Sicilian") can take some of the blame for the disap­ pearance of many earlier histories, but credit for the survival of much of their contents. Born in Argyrium in Sicily, Diodorus settled in Rome around 56 BC and compiled what he called his Library of History. 25 He rewrote and com­ bined Ephorus, Theopompus, Hieronymus, Timaeus, Polybius, Posidonius, and a number of others, supplementing them with dates from Apollodorus' chronicle. His forty somewhat outsized books extended from the creation of the world to 59 BC, just before the beginning of Caesar's Gallic War. Of these, we have Books I-V and XI-XX entire, with excerpts from the rest. Something over 40 percent of Diodorus' work survives, and even that is a bit longer than Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon's Hellenica put together. More successful as a reference work than as literature, Diodorus' Library has an annalistic structure that results in strings of unrelated episodes. Diodorus mentions his predecessors but seldom cites them for specific information, and he adapts their style, though not necessarily for the worse. Most important for ancient and Byzantine readers, using Diodorus' work was far more convenient than hunting down dozens of rare books that were less comprehensive than his and sometimes even longer. His chronological order and his detailed table of contents for each book made him particularly easy to consult. Some contemporary compilers of earlier histories found less favor than Diodorus. In the middle of the first century Castor of Rhodes produced the most comprehensive chronological tables to date. His six books began with 2 1 23 BC, supposedly the time of King Ninus of Assyria, and reached Castor's own time in 61 BC. His tables shared the fate of his source Apollodorus, lost in their original form but partly incorporated into later works. Yet Castor proved more popular than Alexander of Miletus (called PolyhistOr, "Much­ Learned") and Nicholas of Damascus, who wrote histories of such staggering length that they can hardly have been easier to use than their sources were.

25

See Sacks, Diodorus.

The Greek Background

13

Dionysius o f Halicarnassus settled i n Rome around 3 0 BC, just when Diodorus was completing his history there. 26 Dionysius' twenty large books of Roman Antiquities covered the history of Rome from its foundation, which he dated to 75 1 , up to the outbreak of the First Punic War in 264, which was also the beginning of Polybius' Histories. Since Diodorus said little about early Roman history, Dionysius filled a gap, drawing mainly on Latin sources not used by Greek historians before him. His greatest interest was in the earliest, largely legendary period, which he recounts with many invented speeches and little historical sense. About 60 percent of Dionysius' work survives, including Books I-XI entire and excerpts from the rest. The Roman Antiquities is therefore the best-preserved history from the Hellenistic period. One reason is surely that Dionysius was careful with his style, and particularly solicitous to write in the Attic dialect of the fifth and fourth centuries, which by his time had become archaic even at Athens. Though today many scholars dislike such artificiality, for Dionysius to model his style on Thucydides and Xenophon was as natural as for nineteenth-century British and American authors to model their formal prose on Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Dionysius and his similarly educated successors could imitate the geniuses of classical Athens without sacrificing elegance, clarity, or originality. They also knew that their Atticiz­ ing prose would be understood and appreciated by any future reader schooled in the Attic classics, while their contemporary vernacular might not be. Thus of the dozens of major histories written by Greeks after Xenophon and before the Christian era, substantial parts remain of only three: Polybius, Diodorus, and Dionysius. These three survived complete well into the Byzan­ tine period. They were read as sources for early Roman history by Byzantines who considered themselves Romans, though Polybius, the only one of the three to write much about his own times, seems to have been the least read, partly superseded by Diodorus' summary of his work. Greek writers seeking stylistic models preferred classical Attic authors like Thucydides. Anyone who wanted to know what had happened since Xenophon's time could look it up in Diodorus. Greek historians under Rome

During the first Christian century, when the Roman Empire had come to rule almost every Greek-speaking region, Greek historiography began to languish along with the rest of traditional Greek literature. Greeks no longer had the opportunities to make history that Romans did, and in a time of relative peace even Roman history was becoming uneventful by the standards of the Persian or Peloponnesian wars or the conquests of Alexander. For Jews and

26

See Gabba, Dionysius.

14

The Early Byzantine Historians

Christians, on the other hand, first-century history was more momentous, and their contributions to Greek historiography were lengthy, innovative, and influential. Christians regarded the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as, among other things, histories. In particular, Luke's Gospel and his continuation of it in Acts form a history of the beginnings of Christianity in two books, composed as a set. Luke shows more historical awareness than the other Evangelists, and his Gospel provides the most secure date for Jesus' life, the beginning of the preaching of]ohn the Baptist in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (AD 28/29) . Luke's dating of Jesus' birth during the census of Quirinius in AD 6 may even deserve more credence than Matthew's date before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC. 27 Though Luke never met Jesus, he was a com­ panion of St. Paul, and may well have composed both his Gospel and his Acts before Paul's martyrdom around AD 64.28 Mark's Gospel is evidently a bit earlier than this, while Matthew's seems to be roughly contemporary with Luke's two books. John's Gospel is probably the latest, composed a few years after 70. All five works are short as individual books of history go, and not surprisingly Christians preserved all of them in many manuscripts. Soon after the historical books of the New Testament, the two historical works of Flavius Josephus appeared. 29 A Jew born in AD 37 or 38, Josephus was one of the leaders of the Jewish Revolt against the Roman rulers of]udaea that broke out in 66. Defeated and captured by the Romans in 67, he tried to persuade his fellow rebels to surrender, then cooperated with the Romans and settled in Rome to become still another of the expatriate ancient historians. His first work was his Jewish War in seven rather short books, which after a concise account of earlier Jewish history tells the story of the Jewish Revolt up to its bitter end in AD 73. In it Josephus draws heavily on his experience as a participant. Josephus' second work was the Jewish Antiquities in twenty books, a history of the Jews from the creation of the world to the outbreak of the Jewish Revolt. Modeled on Dionysius' Roman Antiquities, the Jewish Antiquities retells the Old Testament, but in its later books draws on Greek and Latin writers. Nicholas of Damascus was perhaps Josephus' chief source, and consequently became redundant and was eventually lost. Somewhat ill at ease writing in Greek, Josephus composed with the help of assistants, and his style and scholarship are merely competent. Yet by providing a handy supplement to both the Old and the New Testament, he won a Christian readership that preserved his lengthy histories entire.

2 7 Luke 2.2. For an irreverent but not dismissive treatment, see Lane Fox, Unau­ thorized Version, especially pp. 27-38, though Lane Fox appears to exaggerate Luke's confusion. 28 See Hemer, Book. 29 See Bilde, Flavius fosephus.

The Greek Background

15

Meanwhile the revival of the archaic Attic dialect, apparent i n Dionysius' Roman Antiquities, had grown into an influential literary movement. Perhaps best called Atticism, it later acquired the name "Second Sophistic, " since it revived the style of the Attic orators or "sophists" of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. 30 Soon some attempt to write in the Attic dialect became almost mandatory for formal writing in Greek, and the Koine dialect became the mark of a less educated writer. Atticism prescribed not only the imitation of stylistic features of ancient Attic authors but the use of obsolete Attic words and grammatical forms. In skillful hands, such artificial Attic could have a certain grandeur and virtuosity, but it often led to obscurity and a language that was more artificial than it was Attic. The first maj or Atticist historian was Arrian of Nicomedia, a consul and provincial governor under the emperor Hadrian (reigned 1 1 7-38). 31 Arrian eventually settled in Athens and set about rewriting the histories of Alexander the Great and his successors. In his Anabasis of Alexander in seven half-sized books (with an eighth on India) Arrian tried not just to synthesize the histories written by Alexander's contemporaries, which he found unsatisfactory, but to improve upon them by making his stylistic models Thucydides, Herodotus, and especially Xenophon, to whom the title Anabasis alludes. 32 Arrian succeeded so well that his history survives complete, and doubtless contributed to the loss of its predecessors. Care­ fully researched and clearly written, it is as good a secondary history as the ancient world produced. Arrian's other histories, apparently written later, included works on his homeland of Bithynia, on the Parthians, and on Alexander's successors from 323 to 320 BC. All these are lost, proba­ bly because their subjects were less interesting to readers than Alexander's campaigns. Arrian's contemporary Appian of Alexandria, another Greek who moved to Rome and gained official posts, also went over well-trodden ground in his Roman History. 33 Its twenty-four fairly short books, which began with t� e foundation of Rome and reached AD 1 1 7, were arranged by topics accord­ ing to the peoples the Romans fought. Drawing on both Latin and Greek sources, Appian's was the first full Roman history in Greek. Shorter than Dionysius' Roman Antiquities despite its larger number of books, it covered far more material. About half of Appian's history remains, including most of Books VI-IX and XI-XVII and many fragments. A passable writer, Appian cared more about rhetoric and morality than about history as such, and delighted in making up speeches.

30

See especially Anderson, Second Sophistic; and Swain, Hellenism. See Stadter, Arrian; and Bosworth, From Arrian. 3 2 Arrian expresses his dissatisfaction with the earlier historians of Alexander in Anabasis 1 . 1 2.2-5. 33 See Goldmann, Beitriige. 31

16 The Early Byzantine Historians In the early third century, a longer and more comprehensive Roman History was composed by Cassius Dio of Nicaea, who again moved to Rome and became a consul and governor before retiring to his homeland. 34 His work extended from the earliest times to AD 229 in eighty particularly short books. Of these, long extracts and almost all of Books XXXIV-LX remain, amounting in all to a little more than half Dio's original work. Like Diodorus, Dio follows an annalistic order, providing a detailed table of contents for each book. Otherwise his idea of what history should be is much like Appian's, including moralizing and fictional speeches. Between them the histories of Appian and Dio eclipsed the popularity of most previous historians of Rome, though the first part of Dionysius' work held its own because of its much more detailed treatment of the earliest period. Around the same time Julius Africanus, a Christian scholar living in Palestine, composed five books of Chronographies. 35 Africanus' main con­ cern was to provide a chronology of biblical history that could be compared with Greek history. He therefore started with the creation of Adam, which he dated to 5 502 BC, and continued his account up to AD 222. Africanus appears to have written a rather bald narrative centered on Jewish history, with occa­ sional references to what was simultaneously happening in Greece. Though lost today, his work accomplished its aim of systematizing biblical chronol­ ogy, because later authors copied its dates. Like most earlier and many later Christian writers, Africanus presumably used Hellenistic Koine Greek, not the ancient Attic dialect. Despite the military and economic crisis of the Roman Empire in the third century and a concomitant decline of Latin historiography, Greek historians continued to write at about the same rate as before. Overlapping with and drawing upon Dio's work, Herodian, a Syrian Greek who became a bureaucrat at Rome, wrote a history that covers the years from AD 1 80 to 238 in eight brief books. Its brevity must have contributed to its preservation, which is nonetheless somewhat surprising. Though he writes about his own times, Herodian is a rhetorical historian of the type of Appian and Dio, only less talented and industrious. Probably the most eminent third-century historian whose work is now lost was Herennius Dexippus of Athens. Dexippus composed a history of the wars of the successors of Alexander, a history of the wars between the Romans and the German barbarians from AD 238 to perhaps 275, and an annalistic Short History of the Greeks and Romans from mythological times to AD 270. 3 6 Likewise lost is a chronicle by the polymath Cassius Longinus, probably a

34

See Millar, Study. Mosshammer, Chronicle, pp. 1 46-5 7, makes persuasive corrections to Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus. 3 6 See Millar, "P. Herennius Dexippus." 35

The Greek Background

17

Syrian Greek, from the first Olympiad to the two hundred and forty-ninth, therefore from 7 7 6 BC to AD 2 1 7. Longinus' student Porphyry of Tyre made an epitome of this work, also lost, which he continued down to the reign of Claudius Gothicus (AD 268-70) . 37 The next significant writer of history was Eusebius of Caesarea, counted here as the first Byzantine historian. Thus, out of the historians who wrote in Greek from Dionysius of Halicarnassus to Eusebius, we have the texts of all of the Gospels and Acts, two works by josephus, one of Arrian's works, and that of Herodian, plus about half the histories of Appian and Dio. Little survives of any others. Josephus' Jewish Antiquities, Arrian's Anabasis, most of Appian, and much of Dio cover events before the beginning of the Roman Empire. Of the preserved historians, only the Evangelists and josephus wrote histories that are chiefly contemporary, and none of them is an Atticist. Yet most authors of surviv­ ing histories had some experience of politics, and Josephus, Arrian, Dio, and Dexippus had commanded troops. As before, in a society where most people stayed where they were born, the proportion of historians who settled away from their birthplaces was remarkable, though only Josephus was a sort of exile. Even most armchair historians were well traveled. The Byzantines and the Greek historians

Most of the Greek historians of Hellenistic and Roman times, including many not mentioned in this brief survey, cannot have had many readers after their contemporaries, and perhaps not even among those. As histories tended to become more formulaic and rhetorical, their quality generally declined, and they became easy to ridicule. 38 Dionysius of Halicarnassus named, along with "countless others, " nine historians so careless of their style that nobody could hear to read them to the end. Among them were Hieronymus, Phylarchus, and Polybius. 39 The works of all nine (none of whom were Atticists) are mostly or entirely lost today, while Dionysius' own work has fared somewhat better. Yet people kept on writing histories, often at great length. Obviously his­ toriography counted as a meritorious and prestigious activity, even if few bothered to read the finished product. If one merely wanted to impress his contemporaries, a lengthy composition was best. Since works were often measured by their number of books, the average length of a book gradu­ ally shrank. The easiest way to produce a long history was to paraphrase the

37

Mosshammer, Chronicle, pp. 1 38-68. As they were by the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata, in his How to Write History. 39 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 4. The others were Duris of Samos, Psaon, Demetrius of Callatis, Antigonus, Heraclides Lembus, and Hegesianax. 38

18

The Early Byzantine Historians

works of others, and if the result was a convenient reference work someone might even use it. Because contemporary histories were of current inter­ est, they too continued to be written. Historians concentrated especially on the Roman Empire, which comprised most places considered important at the time. Precisely when the lost histories were lost for good is usually unclear, but most appear to have survived into Late Antiquity, and a good many into the middle of the Byzantine period. The ninth-century polymath Photius could still read a number of histories or parts of histories that are lost today: all of Ctesias, almost all of Theopompus, all of Diodorus Siculus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the lost works of Arrian, and all of Appian, Cassius Dio, Julius Africanus, and Dexippus. Besides the historians mentioned by Photius, much of Nicholas of Damascus and most of Polybius also survived to be excerpted for a tenth-century anthology. 40 At least one complete copy of Diodorus remained in the Byzantine imperial library in the fifteenth century. 41 On the whole, after Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon scholarly compilations seem to have been preserved at a better rate than contem­ porary histories. The only postclassical contemporary histories to survive intact outside the Bible are josephus' Jewish War and Herodian, the first of special interest to Christians and the second probably something of an acci­ dent. Only fragments remain of the contemporary parts of Polybius and Dio. Though as a rule length hampered survival, Josephus' voluminous Jewish Antiquities and the long compilations of Diodorus, Dionysius, Appian, and Dio fared reasonably well. The preservation of Arrian's Anabasis must owe something to its forming a sort of conclusion to the narratives of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. As long as the papyrus roll remained in use, the loss of a single roll of a long work caused the loss of only a book or two, the most a roll could conveniently hold. When Photius read Theopompus' Philippica in the ninth century, his copy was missing Books VI, VII, XXIX, and XXX of the original fifty-eight, and he knew of a Hellenistic scholar whose copy also lacked Book XII, which Photius found in his copy. 42 This pattern suggests the loss of two (or possibly four) rolls within three centuries of Theopompus' death. Book XII, though 4° Cf. Photius, Bibliotheca codd. 72 (Ctesias), 1 76 (Theopompus), 70 and 244 (Diodorus), 83 and 84 (Dionysius), 58, 92, and 93 (Arrian), 57 (Appian), 71 (Dio), 34 (Africanus), and 82 (Dexippus). On Photius' Bibliotheca and the tenth-century Constantinian anthology (the Excerpta), see below, pp. 79-8 1 . 4 1 See Constantine Lascaris in Migne, PG 1 6 1 , 9 1 7D-9 1 8A. 4 2 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 1 76, 120a.8-14. Photius seems to have learned about the Menophanes who mentioned the loss of Book XII from a lost anthology compiled under Nero by Pamphila of Epidaurus, reviewed in the preceding cod. 1 75 (Treadgold, Nature, p. 65). Menophanes, somewhat earlier than Pamphila but much later than Theopompus, may therefore date from the first century BC.

The Greek Background

19

hard to find, turned up later i n a t least one roll that was copied and eventually transmitted to Photius. Though Theopompus' work had a certain reputation, obviously it was seldom copied and little read. After the bound volume (codex) replaced the roll around the beginning of the Byzantine period, works were saved or lost not by rolls but by vol­ umes. 43 To take a well-known example, the plays of Euripides that survive today seem originally to have filled two volumes, one of ten selected plays and another of ten plays in alphabetical order from epsilon to kappa. Appar­ ently the latter group formed one volume of an alphabetized set. 44 Probably the full alphabetized set of Euripides was preserved well into the Byzantine period. His selected plays, like the selected plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, were copied often enough to reach us. Though most of the plays of all four dramatists that were not chosen for the regular selection were copied much less often and have been lost, this alphabetized volume of Euripides has survived by chance. Similarly, most of the significant ancient Greek histories seem to have survived well into the Byzantine period, but their preservation till the present has depended on a combination of popularity and accident. The partly pre­ served historical texts show a pattern that suggests a habit of copying them i nto volumes of about five books each during Late Antiquity, even though the texts we possess are often in longer manuscripts copied after the ninth century. Thus the part of Polybius' history that survives intact, Books I-V out of forty, looks like the first volume of an eight-volume set of five books apiece. The part of Diodorus' history that we have complete, Books I-V and XI-XX out of forty, probably made up the first, third, and fourth volumes of another eight-volume set of five books apiece. Of the twenty books of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' history, Books I-X probably represent the first two volumes of 45 a four-volume set of five books each. Of the twenty-four books of Appian's history-a number not divisible by five-Books VI and VII, parts of Books VIII and IX, and Books XI-XVII remain, apart from the excerpts. Photius mentions that his complete set of Appian had three volumes. 46 If our manuscripts derive from a set that also

43

See especially Roberts and Skeat, Birth. Cf. Turyn, Byzantine Manuscript Tradition. The Hippolytus seems to have belonged to both the selected and the alphabetical collection. Which volume out of how many contained the alphabetical plays is hard to say, given that Greek alphabetization was approximate and the number of plays in the alphabetized set is uncertain. We know t he titles of eighty of ninety-two plays attributed to Euripides, including twenty-three t itles within the sequence of the ten alphabetized plays from the Helen to the Cyclops. I f the whole alphabetized collection included about forty plays, the alphabetical plays might have formed the second volume out of four. 45 The mutilated Book XI is preserved separately. 4 6 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 57, 1 Sb.2 1-22. 44

20 The Early Byzantine Historians had three volumes, apparently the first (Books I-X) was dismembered, the second (Books XI-XVII) was preserved, and the third (Books XVIII-XXIV) was lost. 47 Of the eighty books of the history of Dio, we have almost all of Books XXXVI-LX, plus mutilated parts of Books LXXIX and LXXX. This seems to represent volumes eight through thirteen of a sixteen-volume set of five books each, plus the last part of the damaged sixteenth volume. The eleventh-century scholar John Xiphilinus made an epitome of Dio covering Books XXXVI-LXXX, as if his copy was also missing the first seven volumes out of sixteen. Xiphilinus mentions that his text was missing most of Books LXIX and LXX, which would have formed the latter part of the fourteenth volume. To be sure, which specific volumes came to be copied need not have been accidental. The survival of the earlier parts of histories probably shows peo­ ple's natural tendency to start reading long works without finishing them. Thus we have Books I-V of Polybius, Books I-V of Diodorus, and Books I-X of Dionysius. The survival of Books XI-XX of Diodorus, covering the years from 480 to 302 BC, seems to show Byzantine readers' interest in classical Greece. That the surviving part of Appian's history includes Books XIII-XVII, a vivid account of the Roman civil wars from 1 33 BC to 36 BC, is also unlikely to be accidental. The surviving part of Dio, Books XXXIV-LX, likewise covers the years from 69 BC to AD 46, eventful years when the Roman Empire was taking shape. Dio's Byzantine epitomator, Xiphilinus, declares that he will concentrate on Dio's text from the time of Augustus' establishment of the Roman imperial government "because our way of life depends very much on those times and our political system reflects them. " 48 Although the Byzantines possessed much more of ancient Greek histo­ riography than we do, only very well-placed Byzantines would have had access to much more than we have, and the majority would have read far less than that. Even for most of the best-educated Byzantines of Late Antiq­ uity, earlier historiography consisted of Thucydides, probably Herodotus, possibly Xenophon, the Bible if the readers were Christians, and little if any­ thing else. A determined scholar or history buff in Constantinople could find many other histories, including rare authors like Ctesias or Theopompus and recent writers who had not yet been superseded. While the range of histories available in other cities was probably narrower, rarities were to be found at Antioch, Alexandria, Athens, and elsewhere. Those who chose to read such works seem however to have been few. Books were expensive; large libraries

4 7 Note that Books XI-XVII are on average nearly twice as long as Books VI and VII, so that the original first volume presumably had more books than the second. 4 8 See Boissevain, Cassii Dionis Cocceiani Historiarum Romanarum Quae Supersunt Ill, p. 526.

The Greek Background 21

were rare; people with scholarly interests often lacked money or leisure; and the wealthy and leisured often lacked scholarly interests. Yet the Greek historical tradition as a whole was stronger than the influence of any individual history. 49 Every educated Byzantine knew that histories could be either contemporary narratives or scholarly compilations, that war and politics were more suitable subjects for history than commerce or everyday life, that historians should praise good men and blame bad ones, and that historical truth and impartiality were virtues, at least in principle. Roman and biblical history were the most important subjects, but classical Greek histories were the best literary models. Byzantines with any inter­ est in history knew the stylistic conventions that prescribed an artificial Attic dialect, elegant prefaces, invented speeches, and occasional digressions on geography, ethnography, or philosophy. The Byzantines also knew that historiography had long been considered a fitting activity for serious and ambitious men. The Byzantines also thought history should be both entertaining and use­ ful, though for precisely what purposes it was useful remained an open question. The reasons for reading and writing history were vague because the reasons that things happened in history remained in dispute. Some his­ torians, like Thucydides or Polybius, tried fitfully to consider history in a philosophical context, but only in digressions or by implication. Almost all pagan historians believed many events were caused by Fate, though their conception of what Fate was ranged from an actual goddess named Tyche to a nebulous idea of good or bad luck. For Christians, deserved fate was the work of divine Providence, and undeserved fate was the mischief of demons who pagans thought were gods. Yet for most historians, despite such uncontrollable forces, human beings, especially great men like emperors and generals, still had most control over events. Consequently a reader could find in a judicious history what sorts of acts had proved profitable and what sorts had proved disastrous, so that he could imitate the former and not the lat­ ter. Historiography might also improve the behavior of powerful men who hoped to win good reputations in future histories. At the least, history supplied knowledge that let readers impress their acquaintances by making learned allusions. This much, and sometimes a bit more, was the legacy of ancient Greek his­ toriography as it was known during the Byzantine period. What is perhaps remarkable is that the best Byzantine historians did not merely mummify a tradition that had produced no indisputable classic since Thucydides and no arguable classic since Polybius. Since the Byzantines valued traditional for­ mulas and an archaizing Attic style, and gave no special credit to innovation

49

See Fornara, Nature; and Marincola, Authority.

22 The Early Byzantine Historians as such, they might have been expected to compose a long series of almost unreadable histories, at best attaining the basic proficiency of an Arrian or a Dio. While the Byzantines did write some works of this kind, they also wrote some histories of distinction. In early Byzantine times, Ammianus and Procopius wrote histories of genius.

2 Eusebius of Caesarea

Though the four Evangelists and ]ulius Africanus were Christian historians of a sort, their works would hardly have impressed readers familiar with classical G reek historiography. While Christian theology soon came to rival pagan philosophy, so that Origen bore comparison with Plotinus, for more than two centuries no Christian produced a history comparable to those of Arrian, losephus, or even Herodian. Christians did recognize the value of history, because they believed Christ had intervened in it and given the Church a maj or role in it. For Christians the spread of Christianity after the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles should also have been worthy of a continuous record. Yet none was compiled until the late third century. One problem was that early Christianity was an anomalous subject by the standards of clas s ical histories. It lacked a central location like the cities of Rome or Athens, or the traditional themes of war and politics, or the usual protagonists like generals and kings. Unlike Jews, Christians were only a reli­ gious group, not an ethnic one that could be the subject of a national history. The Acts of the Apostles might look like a model for a Christian historiog­ raphy dealing with the life of the Church in different places; but Acts was difficult to imitate, because it focused on the unique figure of St. Paul and formed part of the New Testament canon, which Christians had agreed to l i mit to texts of the Apostolic age. A more academic kind of history, like that of Kings or Chronicles in the Old Testament or of]osephus' Jewish Antiquities, was an obvious possibility for Christian historians, and Africanus had made a start on it. Yet this too had become difficult, because Christians had fa iled to write earlier contemporary histories on which academic historians could draw.

Eusebius' life

l 'he first scholarly historian of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, seems to have been raised a Christian, though we know nothing about his 23

24 The Early Byzantine Historians family. 1 He was apparently born around 255, and probably at Caesarea, where he spent most of his life. 2 At the time Caesarea was a good-sized port, the capital of the Roman province of Palestine. Eusebius received a good ele­ mentary and secondary education in Greek, including secular authors, and learned some Latin and Syriac, which though less common than Greek were both spoken in the city. As a young man in Caesarea, Eusebius became a stu­ dent and close friend of Pamphilus of Berytus (modern Beirut), a priest and biblical scholar who was using his inherited wealth to build up a Christian library. An admirer of the great theologian Origen, Pamphilus seems to have acquired the collection of biblical, theological, and philosophical works that Origen had assembled while working and teaching at Caesarea for some years before his death around 25 3 . Eusebius shared Pamphilus' admiration for Origen, like Pamphilus was ordained a priest, and out of affection for his mentor came to call himself "Eusebius (son) of Pamphilus" (Eusebius Pamphili) . Eusebius helped Pamphilus organize and expand the library at Caesarea, where the two of them copied and edited manuscripts of the Bible and other works, assisted by other students of Pamphilus. Eusebius also read and worked in the Christian library kept by the bishops of nearby Jerusalem, and probably had copies made of books he found there but not at Caesarea. 3 Throughout his twenties and thirties, when the Roman government tol­ erated Christianity in practice though not officially, Eusebius was an active scholar, well supplied with books and research assistants. A more prolific writer than his teacher Pamphilus, Eusebius tried to write whatever he thought the Church needed most. His theological works included massive tomes like his General Elementary Introduction, his Introduction to the Gospel, and his Proof of the Gospel, and biblical commentaries and monographs on biblical problems. Among the fundamental books Eusebius compiled in his younger years were his Chronicle and History of the Church, each of which was a major innovation in Christian historiography. His writings show him to have been, if not brilliant, both competent and industrious, and adept at compiling and summarizing the work of others.

1 On Eusebius in general, see Wallace-Hadrill, Eusebius; Grant, Eusebius; Chesnut, First Christian Histories, pp. 1-1 74; Winkelmann, " Historiography, " pp. 3-1 0 and 1 8-3 1 ; Carikker, Library; and especially Barnes, Constantine. 2 Though his birth is usually put c. 260, Eusebius, History VII.26-27, says that his own time, apparently meaning the time he could remember, began with the episco­ pates of Dionysius at Rome (259-68) and Paul of Samosata at Antioch (c. 260-68). Note that Eusebius' earliest work, the first edition of his Chronicle, seems to date from c. 277, and is unlikely to have been composed before he was twenty. 3 Eusebius, History VI.20. On the Christian libraries of Caesarea and Jerusalem, see also Gamble, Books, pp. 1 5 4-60, and now Carriker, Library.

Eusebius of Caesarea

25

In 303 the emperor Diocletian began a persecution of Christians that lasted in the Eastern empire, with one brief and partial interruption, until 3 1 3 . Pamphilus was imprisoned in 307 and martyred in 3 1 1 , along with a few other members of his scholarly circle. Eusebius spent some time outside Palestine, perhaps in an effort to avoid arrest, and witnessed exe­ cutions of Christians in Egypt and Syria. Yet he visited Pamphilus in prison, and was reportedly imprisoned himself. When Pamphilus was exe­ cuted, he and Eusebius had been collaborating on a work in defense of Origen, which Eusebius finished alone. If Eusebius had sought martyr­ dom, he would presumably have suffered it; but apparently he wanted to continue writing and to preserve the library at Caesarea at a time when all Christian books were supposed to be destroyed. He seems to have managed to save himself and the library without compromising his principles. After the persecution ended, Eusebius enjoyed enough respect among local Christians to be elected bishop of Caesarea around 3 1 4. Even while he was occupied with his episcopal duties, especially rebuilding demolished churches, he found time to bring his History of the Church up to date with a short account of the persecution, which like most Christians he considered glorious rather than tragic. Soon he became embroiled in the contempo­ rary theological dispute over Arius, the priest at Alexandria who argued that Christ was subordinate, not equal, to God the Father. Since Arianism had much in common with the thinking of Origen, whom Eusebius revered, Eusebius opposed Arius' excommunication for heresy by Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. So matters stood in 324, when the emperor Constantine, by this time a pro­ fessed Christian, finished his conquest of the Roman Empire by taking over its eastern part, to Eusebius' delight. Early in 325, however, a church coun­ cil at Antioch excommunicated Eusebius for his defense of Arius, staying its judgment until the meeting of a general church council then being prepared. This ecumenical council, held the same year at Nicaea with Eusebius among the bishops and Constantine in attendance, decided to condemn Arius and Arianism. To avoid condemnation, Eusebius reluctantly subscribed to the council's decisions, then set about having them reinterpreted to accommo­ date Arian obj ections. He and others who agreed with him soon won the con­ fidence of Constantine, who increasingly sided with the Arians against their opponents. Around 326 Eusebius put his earlier Chronicle and History of the Church into their final form. He remained an honored and influential bishop at Caesarea for the rest of his life, and in 328 turned down the offer of the much more important bishopric of Antioch. Continuing to write in his old age, he was around eighty when he composed his last historical work, the Life of Constantine. This he finished writing, though perhaps not revising,

26 The Early Byzantine Historians sometime between Constantine's death in 337 and his own death in 339. 4 He evidently died at Caesarea. Eusebius was honest, hardworking, and dedicated to his Church and his work, if somewhat superficial and unreflective. By most standards he led a successful life, which he must have thought well spent. Only during the Great Persecution did he suffer real danger and distress. Apart from some travels occasioned by the persecution and church business, and his pass­ ing acquaintance with Constantine, Eusebius spent most of his life in his home town, to which he was apparently much attached. Yet by the time of his death he had become the most eminent Christian scholar of his day, and one of the leading figures in the Church and the empire. He favored the tolerance of Arianism adopted by the Eastern Roman govern­ ment for most of the half-century after the Council of Nicaea. Only long after he died did his reputation suffer much from association with Arian­ ism, and by that time many of his writings had come to be considered indispensable.

The Chronicle Eusebius' earliest historical work, his Chronicle in two books, survives today only in extensive fragments of the original Greek, though two translations together preserve almost all its contents. 5 A slightly damaged and revised Armenian version covers both books of the Chronicle, while St. Jerome's Latin version combines a translation of Book II with some interpolations and a short continuation by Jerome himself. Though determining the pre­ cise text of the Greek original is often problematic, not much has actually been lost except for some of Eusebius' exact words. His prose style was in any case unpretentious, since the Chronicle was not really a literary work but a technical treatise, mostly adapted from the writings of others. Book I of the Chronicle described Eusebius' sources, and Book II consisted of an extensive chronological table. In Eusebius' first edition, this table appar­ ently ended with AD 277, the second year of the emperor Probus. 6 The Chronicle seems therefore to have been a work of Eusebius' early youth,

4

On the date of Eusebius' death, see Barnes, Constantine, p. 263. Mosshammer, Chronicle, has made earlier studies obsolete. See also Adler, Time; Burgess, Studies; and Carriker, Library, pp. 49-5 1 and 1 39-48. On the preservation of much of the Greek original of Eusebius' Chronicle by the " Paschal Chronicle" and George Syncellus, see below, p. 344 and n. 95. 6 See Barnes, Constantine, p. 1 1 3. The argument of Burgess, " Dates," that the Chroni­ cle was composed after 306 assumes that its first edition was chronologically consistent, which is far from certain, and requires that the first edition of the History (composed after the Chronicle) date after the Great Persecution began, which seems very unlikely. Carriker, Library, pp. 41-42, accepts Burgess' dating without further argument. 5

Eusebius of Caesarea

27

because at this date he cannot have been much older than twenty. 7 His second and final edition of the Chronicle, which ends with 326, was used for both of the surviving translations. Jerome continued Eusebius' table in his own version to 3 78, adding material from Latin sources to the earlier entries. Since tables like the one in the Chronicle were obviously meant as works of reference, later authors felt free to bring them up to date. Eusebius acknowl­ edged that he had copied and supplemented the work of earlier authors to compile the Chronicle in the first place. Eusebius gave Book I of his Chronicle the separate title of Chronography (in this case, "Chronicle Writing"). He began with a preface stating his pur­ pose, which was to provide a comprehensive and accurate chronology of Greek, biblical, and other sorts of history based on their respective sources. He described in separate chapters his sources for the history of the Chaldeans, Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, giving excerpts from the original texts. These extracts included lists of rulers with the lengths of their reigns and lists of Olympic victors for each Olympiad. By "Chaldeans, " Eusebius meant the Babylonians, Assyrians, Medes, and Persians. He considered Hebrew history to run from Old Testament times to the last Jewish kingdoms of the first century AD. Under Egyptian history he included the thirty dynasties numbered by Manetho, plus the rule of the Ptolemies down to Cleopatra VII. According to Eusebius, Greek history ran from the mythical kings of Sicyon through the Antigonid and Seleucid kings of Macedon, Anatolia, and Syria down to the 249th Olympiad in AD 2 1 7, when his list of Olympic victors ended. Eusebius began Roman history with Aeneas and continued it up to the third-century emperors. Nearly all the sources Eusebius mentioned are secondary compilations of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As sources for the Chaldeans, he named Diodorus, Castor of Rhodes, josephus, Alexander Polyhistor (used as a source for Berossus), and two obscure compilers of the second cen­ tury AD, Abydenus and Cephalion. For the Hebrews, Eusebius cited the Bible, Josephus' Jewish Antiquities, Julius Africanus, and the Christian theolo­ gian Clement of Alexandria. For the Egyptians, Eusebius quoted Manetho, Josephus again, and Porphyry of Tyre. For the Greeks, Eusebius cited Diodorus, Castor, and Porphyry again, and for the Romans Diodorus and Castor once more, along with Dionysius of Halicarnassus. At the end of the hook Eusebius repeated most of the lists of rulers and Olympic victors he had already recorded in discussing his sources. Book II of the Chronicle, with the separate title of Chronological Tables, had its own preface, in which Eusebius explained the single table that followed. This was meant to show readers at a glance who had ruled each people at

7 Yet since he can scarcely have been much younger than twenty, c. 255 seems a better date for his birth than c. 260, which is more commonly conjectured.

28 The Early Byzantine Historians any given time, and to supply brief notes on famous men and events at appropriate places. Since nobody used the BC and AD dates of the Christian era until much later, Eusebius marked his left-hand margins with the numbers of years from the birth of Abraham, which he assigned a date corresponding to our 20 1 6 BC. Eusebius linked his lists for biblical history with those for pagan history at two dates that they shared: the reign of Darius I of Persia, who according to the Book of Ezra ordered the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem, and the fifteenth year of Tiberius, when according to Luke's Gospel John the Baptist began preaching. Assigning a horizontal line to each year in his table, Eusebius devoted a vertical column to each dynasty reigning at the time, with another column for the Olympiad once the Olympic Games began. To most yearly entries he added brief notes on people and events. For example, for the year 466 BC he gave the following information, though in more abbreviated form: S Olympiad

Persian king

Macedonian king

78, year 4

Xerxes, year 1 7

Alexander, year 35

Sophocles and Euripides became famous; Socrates was born. Eusebius' original version included 2,296 yearly entries, and his final version 2,340. Though in the medieval manuscripts of the translated Chronicle that survive today Eusebius' columns appear in segments on one page or two fac­ ing pages, Eusebius may originally have preferred to use continuous columns on one long papyrus roll. 9 The Chronological Tables began with the birth of Abraham, which by com­ paring his lists Eusebius found to correspond with the forty-second year of King Ninus of Assyria, the twenty-second year of King Europs of Sicyon, and the first year of the Sixteenth Dynasty in Egypt. Eusebius explained in a note that in the same year Ninus founded Nineveh. At this starting point the Tables had four columns of numbers, one each for the Assyrian kings, the Hebrew patriarchs, the kings of Sicyon, and the Egyptian dynasties, with spaces for historical notes between columns. Throughout the Tables these columns of numbered years divided, changed names, came to an end, or multiplied according to Eusebius' sources and the course of history. Except for the biblical patriarchs and judges and the years of the Jews' Babylonian captivity, Eusebius assigned columns only to peoples who were ruled by the kings listed in his sources. Beginning with the columns

8 This example is expanded for clarity from the hypothetical reconstruction in Mosshammer, Chronicle, p. 27. 9 The roll, which seems much better suited to the form of Eusebius' table, remained more common than the codex (bound book) until around 300; see Roberts and Skeat, Birth, especially pp. 35-44 and 67-76; and Carriker, Library, pp. 23-25.

Eusebius of Caesarea

29

for the kings of Assyria, Sicyon, and Egypt, he added columns for the kings of Argos, Athens, Mycenae, and "the Latins" (Latium from the time of Aeneas); then Sparta, Corinth, Israel, and ]udah; the Medes, Macedon, and Lydia; the Romans, Persians, and "Alexandrians" (the Egyptians under the Ptolemies), "Syria and Asia" (the Seleucid Kingdom), and the Jews (under the Maccabees) . By the end only one column remained, for the Roman emperors. Since the columns were for kings, Athens and Rome lost their columns with the abolition of their monarchies. Because Eusebius' lists were incom­ plete, his Assyrian kings ended with 820 BC and his Spartan kings with 777 BC, though the Assyrian monarchy had actually lasted until 609 and the Spartan monarchy until 1 92. While the Babylonian kings were listed at the end of Eusebius' first book, for some reason they never received a col­ umn in his table. 10 The table always had at least two columns for kings, except for seven years under Alexander the Great, until the Romans broke the back of the Jewish Revolt by taking Jerusalem in AD 70. 1 1 Thenceforward Eusebius' table had a single column of rulers until its end, listing only Roman emperors, though continuing at intervals to mark the years of Abraham and the Olympiads. The Tables thus emphasized that the Romans were the first people to unite the known world under an enduring monarchy. Historical notes on important men and events appeared all over the Tables. Most of these notes consisted of a mere sentence or phrase, pro­ viding orientation rather than narrative. Examples are "Death of Moses" (corresponding to 1 4 72 BC), "Sappho and Alcaeus become famous as poets" (600 BC), and "Nero, to cap all his crimes, makes the first persecution of Christians, in which Peter and Paul died gloriously at Rome" (AD 68) . Espe­ cially toward the beginning, many yearly entries had only the columns for regnal years without historical notes, but later some entries had several notes apiece. The Tables allowed their user (who can scarcely be called a reader) to identify such unlikely-looking contemporaries as Isaac and Niobe, Samson and Orestes, Hosea and Romulus, and Daniel and Aesop. Eusebius seems to have been the first to make a systematic combination of J udaeo-Christian and secular sources into a single work. No doubt he followed 10 The reason may be that since Eusebius interpreted the "four kingdoms" prophe­ sied in Daniel 2.3 1-45 as the Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires, he wanted to minimize the importance of the Babylonians (whom the author of the Book of Daniel must have meant to include instead of the Romans). For Eusebius' views on Daniel, see Chesnut, First Christian Histories, pp. 1 67-69. 11 Eusebius overlooked the fact that the Jewish king Agrippa 11, who sided with the Romans during the revolt, went on ruling his modest domains until his death c. AD 1 00. Eusebius limited the period of a unified Macedonian empire to the seven years from 330 BC, when the line of Persian kings ended with the death of Darius m, to Alexander's death in 323 BC, when Eusebius prematurely began a new column for Ptolemy I of Egypt ("of the Alexandrians") alongside the column for the imbecile king of Macedon Philip m Arrhidaeus.

30 The Early Byzantine Historians Julius Africanus and other Christian authors in seeking to demonstrate (correctly) that Christianity drew upon Jewish traditions more ancient than those of the pagan Greeks. On the other hand, Manetho and Berossus had shown (also correctly, despite their legendary accounts of the earliest periods) that Egyptian and Mesopotamian traditions were even older than those of the Jews. Yet Manetho's and Berossus' dates went back tens of thousands of years (incorrectly) . They were therefore incompatible with the date Africanus had derived from the Bible for the Creation (5 502 BC), or indeed with any other date for the Creation that could be reconciled with the Book of Genesis. Unwilling simply to reject Manetho and Berossus, as Africanus had done, Eusebius was also unable to reconcile his Oriental sources with the Bible to his own satisfaction. He hesitantly suggested that the earliest Egyptians and Mesopotamians might have counted months as years, and tentatively calculated that the Creation had occurred in 5 1 99 BC, 303 years later than Africanus had reckoned. When Eusebius came to compile his table, however, he simply began with the birth of Abraham in 20 1 6 BC, which fell conve­ niently within the comprehensive chronology of Castor of Rhodes beginning with 2 1 23 BC. In view of the contradictory evidence, Eusebius' decision was reasonable. His opinion that the Oriental sources for this early period were unreliable was also reasonable and essentially right, though a bit unfair to Manetho. 12 In writing his Chronicle Eusebius appears not to have worked very hard, or at least very long. He probably made direct use of just two of the thirteen authors he mentioned in his first book. These were Africanus, for sacred history and its correspondence with secular events, and Porphyry of Tyre, for the secular events themselves. Both these authors were concise second­ century compilers of earlier works. 1 3 The extracts and lists in Eusebius' Book I and the individual entries in the Tables in his Book 11 could easily have been copied from Africanus or Porphyry by a scribe after Eusebius had marked what he wanted copied and how he wanted it combined. The discussions of sources in Book I must virtually have been copied from Africanus and Porphyry, except for a few notes on those authors' internal coherence and correspondence with each other. Eusebius' personal contribution seems therefore to have been limited to the selection of the material, the prefaces to both books, occasional comments, 12

See especially Adler, Time, pp. 30-42, 46-50, and 65-7 1 . Croke, "Porphyry's Anti-Christian Chronology, " argues that Eusebius drew not on a lost chronicle by Porphyry, which Croke thinks never existed, but on other lost works by Porphyry that contained chronological information. This is possible (if unprovable) but not necessarily of much significance, because the chronological infor­ mation in those lost works could have been as extensive as that in a brief chronicle. Croke's conjecture might however help explain Porphyry's apparent chronological carelessness. 13

Eusebius of Caesarea

31

the arrangement o f the Tables, and the very latest entries. 14 Though Eusebius may have done somewhat more than this-given the loss of Africanus and Porphyry we cannot be sure-whatever research can be attributed to him with certainty is unimpressive. The part of his Tables that begins where Africanus and Porphyry left off included a number of historical notes, especially on the succession of bishops, but its chronology went astray. Eusebius seems to have been poorly served by Porphyry, who had summa­ rized and continued the chronicle of Longinus, who was in turn the latest in a line of Greek chroniclers going back through Castor to Apollodorus and Eratosthenes. Apparently Porphyry copied but failed to continue the list of Olympic vic­ tors that Longinus had compiled up to AD 2 1 7. Much worse, in recording the lengths of imperial reigns between AD 2 1 7 and 270 Porphyry seems to have made three chronological errors, presumably through a faulty memory. He reckoned the reign of Caracalla (21 1-1 7) at seven years instead of six, that of Philip the Arab (244-49) at seven years instead of five, and that of Decius (249-5 1) at one year instead of two. As a result, by the end of his work in the reign of Claudius 11 Gothicus (268-70) Porphyry was two years ahead of himself. 1 5 Eusebius seems t o have left Porphyry's mistakes unaltered i n his Tables. In the first edition the Tables probably ended with the second year of Probus, which Eusebius counted as if it were AD 279 though it was actually 27 7 . Evidently t h e youthful Eusebius, not caring much about sports, failed to see the discrepancy with the current Olympiad. When he continued his second edition up to 326 and realized something was wrong, he tried to make his years tally by rounding down the reign of Carus (282-83) from two years to one, and omitting the sole year of Constantius I's reign as Augustus (305-6) . By thus compounding Porphyry's errors, Eusebius confused himself so badly that to compensate for the missing year of Constantius he assigned two of his years since the birth of Abraham to the twentieth year of Diocletian (AD 305), adding a phantom year to all his calculations. The rea­ son for this confusion can hardly be that Eusebius was unable to add numbers together or to find accurate information about his own lifetime and the two generations before it. He simply disposed of an unignorable problem by an arbitrary expedient. 1 6

14

See especially Mosshammer, Chronicle, pp. 1 38-58. Cf. Burgess, Studies, p. 36, who explains these mistakes, but is probably wrong to attribute the original errors to Eusebius himself; Mosshammer, Chronicle, pp. 1 38-46, which Burgess overlooks, shows that the part of Eusebius' Chronicle that contained the errors was probably copied from Porphyry. 1 6 See Burgess, Studies, pp. 3 7-43 . Note that jerome, in preparing his translation and continuation, made Eusebius' years of Abraham correspond to the regnal years 15

32 The Early Byzantine Historians The innovation Eusebius made in his Chronicle was simply the idea of compiling a comparative table of sacred and secular history. He based this table not on his own historical research but on the research already done by the sources he cited. He meant only to excerpt the parts of their works that were relevant to his purpose, to reproduce the excerpts accurately, and to present them in a way that would illustrate the place of Christianity in history. Though Eusebius could surely have checked his materials more care­ fully than he did, he accomplished what he set out to do. How accurately he transmitted his sources is hard to say, given all the possibilities for error before his material reached him and when his text was copied and translated. Yet most of the errors in his Tables seem likely to be the fault of his sources, except for the two he made for his own times in an attempt to remove a glaring inconsistency. Eusebius' Chronicle was not in itself a maj or achievement of Byzantine his­ toriography. 1 7 Later writers used it but superseded it. Its extreme concision made it less attractive to erudite Byzantines than to the less advanced scholars of Armenia and the medieval West, though Jerome apparently found Book I too arcane to translate for a Latin readership. The subsequent replacement of the roll by the bound book, which for most purposes was more conve­ nient, may have made Eusebius' table harder to consult, and so contributed to its being lost in its original form. Yet the Chronicle did help preserve a large part of the chronological knowledge of the ancient world on which modern scholars still rely. The Chronicle also embodied an historical point of view and contributed to Eusebius' later historical efforts. Unlike his sources, which even if they included tables put them only into single columns, Eusebius emphasized that the Roman Empire had brought peace and order by replacing a multi­ plicity of warring states, an idea he would develop in his later theological works. Also unlike his sources, who devoted themselves either to secular or to biblical history, Eusebius emphasized that during recent history the Roman Empire, despite sporadic persecutions, had allowed the Church to grow, another idea he was to develop in his theological writings. 18 Again unlike his sources, which showed no particular historical theme or historical progress, Eusebius' Chronicle implied that history was developing in a definite direction, one that was favorable to the empire, the Church, and mankind in general.

by delaying the end of Diocletian's reign (actually 305) from 306 to 307 and beginning Constantine's reign a year late in 307 (when Constantine was proclaimed Augustus by Maximian). 17

For a more positive assessment, see Barnes, Constantine, pp. 1 1 1-20. See Chesnut, First Christian Histories, pp. 76-79, with his references to Eusebius' Preparation for the Gospel, his Proof of the Gospel, and other works. 18

Eusebius of Caesarea

33

Obviously mere tables like those of the Chronicle, however serviceable they might be as reference works, could provide only a very simplified overview of history. Yet the Tables provided most of the secular history that really interested Eusebius. He cared about the details of secular history mostly as i llustrations of overarching themes that affected religious history. He knew that many monarchies had existed before the Roman Empire had unified the known world, a point that was valid even if the Assyrian or Spartan monar­ chies had lasted longer than his lists indicated, or if he had the dates of a few Roman emperors slightly wrong. Moreover, too much detailed atten­ tion to matters like Egyptian or Roman imperial history might have cast doubt on Eusebius' convictions that Jewish religious traditions were older than any others, or that Rome had brought more peace and order than the world had previously known. For Eusebius, history before the Roman Empire and the birth of Christ had almost become obsolete. It was impor­ tant mainly for providing the background to the continuing history of Christianity.

The History of the Church While Eusebius' ten-book History of the Church is a somewhat later, more polished, and more careful work than his Chronicle, like the Chronicle it was largely new in conception. Since Acts, no one had tried to write a general account of the Church's development. In his preface Eusebius begs his readers' indulgence not just because what he proposes to do is beyond his powers-a commonplace among Greek historians-but "also because we are now the first to undertake the task, as if setting out on a deserted and untraveled road . " 19 From the outset the History of the Church shows Eusebius' willingness to tackle a large and difficult subject for the first time. Later in his text he contrasts himself with the authors of national histories who had written about aggressive wars, since "our history of the com­ munity in God" was to commemorate "the most peaceful wars for true peace in the soul, " waged by martyrs and other Christians who triumphed over evil. 20 Eusebius observes that he meant his History to be a full account of the events he had already outlined in the latter part of the Tables in his Chronicle. 2 1 The structure of his History does depend on the Chronicle's lists and dates of bishops and emperors, making the History's organization broadly chronological. Yet it frequently changes its subject to include biographies and developments that spanned a number of years and often could not be dated

19

20 21

Eusebius, History 1. 1 .3. Eusebius, History V. 1 .3-4. Eusebius, History 1 . 1 .6.

34 The Early Byzantine Historians precisely anyway. Though more literary than the Chronicle, like it the History is primarily a work of scholarship, not literature. Its style is pedestrian, often contorted, and seldom elegant, without pretensions to Atticism. Nearly half the text, including many of its most memorable episodes, consists of direct quotations from earlier sources, in most cases scrupulously identified. Since Eusebius' main interest is in what he tells rather than in how he tells it, he avoids embellishing or dramatizing his material for the sake of literary art. His writing is therefore as colorless as that of most modern scholarly historians, and for similar reasons. Book I of the History covers the life of Jesus, beginning with a discussion of his nature that is more theological than historical. So basic that even a pagan unfamiliar with Christianity could follow it, the account cites passages in the Old Testament to show that Christ existed not only before his incarnation but before time began. Eusebius goes on to describe the circumstances of Jesus' life, using Josephus' Jewish Antiquities as his main source for the history of the Herodian dynasty and the governorship of Pontius Pilate. Relying on a text of the Antiquities now thought to have been interpolated by Christians, Eusebius quotes Josephus as acknowledging Jesus as the Christ. Eusebius also quotes Africanus' ingenious reconciliation of Matthew's and Luke's contradictory genealogies of Jesus' descent from David. Book I concludes with Eusebius' translations from the Syriac of the letters allegedly exchanged by Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa (forgeries Eusebius accepts as genuine), along with a short account of how Jesus' disciple Thaddaeus cured Abgar of a chronic disease. Book 11 covers the Apostolic period, between Christ's ascension and the beginning of the Jewish War in AD 66. Eusebius transmits the apocryphal traditions that Pilate sent a report of Christ's resurrection to the emperor Tiberius and later committed suicide. The book briefly describes the preach­ ing of the Evangelist Mark at Alexandria, and the ministry and martyrdom of the Apostles Peter and Paul at Rome and of the Apostle J ames at Jerusalem. Besides Acts, Eusebius cites the lost work of the second-century Christian antiquarian Hegesippus, Josephus again, several Christian theologians, and the Jewish theologian Philo. Misunderstanding Philo's laudatory account of the Jewish sect of the Essenes to refer to Christians, Eusebius treats Philo almost as if he were a Christian himself, including a short account of Philo's life and writings. With Book Ill Eusebius reaches the end of the Apostolic age and sets the pattern for later books of his History. He briefly describes the episcopates of the earliest bishops, particularly those of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Rome, beginning with Peter's successor Linus. After quoting Josephus' Jewish War at length on the destruction of Jerusalem, Eusebius adds a brief biogra­ phy of Josephus, whom like Philo he counts as a sort of honorary Christian. After discussing which supposedly Apostolic texts are authentic, Eusebius defines the canon of the New Testament and describes the first heretics and

Eusebius of Caesarea

35

their writings. Next, recording the ministries and deaths of the last surviving Apostles, John and Philip, he catalogues important bishops and Christian authors up to the second-century Papias of Hierapolis, whose lost work on Christian traditions Eusebius cites but finds obtuse. 22 Book IV, covering most of the second century when Christians were seldom persecuted, concentrates again on bishops and writers. Eusebius remarks: "When the churches were already shining throughout the world like glowing beacons, and faith in our lord and savior Jesus Christ was spreading to the whole human race, " heresies replaced persecutions as the Church's main troubles. 23 However, after mentioning the principal Gnostics, Eusebius has little to say about heresy and gives long accounts of martyr­ doms, especially that of Polycarp of Smyrna. Noting the flourishing state of second-century Christian literature, Eusebius catalogues the works of Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, and others, adding quotations from most of them. Here and elsewhere, Eusebius' main concern seems to be to record those who had served the Church by defending the faith in deeds or books, or who had harmed the faith by heresy. The details of their doctrines receive little attention. Eusebius opens Book V by excerpting narratives of martyrdoms under Marcus Aurelius at Vienne and Lyons in Gaul, then cites the works of Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons. Next Eusebius lists and quotes a series of Chris­ tian writers and bishops of the later second century. He gives an account of the heretical prophet Montanus and other Montanist leaders, quoting writers who exposed Montanus' prophecies as demonic rather than divinely inspired. Next Eusebius describes the controversy over dates for celebrat­ ing Easter. He concludes the book with further notes on Christian writers and their works, including Irenaeus and some opponents of the Adoption­ ists, heretics who believed Christ was a man merely adopted as the son of God. Eusebius devotes Book VI to the first half of the third century and partic­ ularly to Origen, whom he and his teacher Pamphilus admired. The book is almost a biography of Origen, so much so that its accounts of bish­ ops and heresies, and of other writers like the chronographer Africanus, become digressions from the story of Origen's life. 24 Provided with increas­ ingly ample information, some presumably from his teacher Pamphilus, Eusebius quotes less and narrates better than in earlier parts of his History. Origen, almost the only figure in the History to emerge as a personality, is described from his boyhood, when his mother hid his clothes to keep him from seeking martyrdom, and his youth, when he castrated himself after

22 23 24

Eusebius, History 111.39. 13. Eusebius, History IV. 7 . 1-2. On Africanus, see Eusebius, History Vl.3 1 .

36

The Early Byzantine Historians

taking Matthew's Gospel too literally. 2 5 Eusebius also explains how Origen worked, supplied by his friend Ambrose with shorthand secretaries, book copyists, and female calligraphers. 26 The book concludes with the perse­ cution under Decius (reigned 249-5 1 ) and its consequences, including the torture of Origen and the Novatian schismatics' harshness toward those who had apostatized. At the beginning of Book VII Eusebius mentions Origen's death as the end of an age. Most of the rest of the book consists of excerpts from the correspon­ dence of the Alexandrian bishop Dionysius the Great, a student of Origen's also quoted in the previous book as a source for the Decian persecution. The letters of Dionysius cited in Book VII describe further persecutions under the emperor Valerian, until Gallienus granted Christians toleration in an edict of 260 that Eusebius translates from the Latin. With the death of Dionysius around 265, Eusebius speaks of entering "our own generation, " and begins recording events within his own memory. 2 7 Yet he still makes heavy use of quotations, adding only a brief denunciation of the heresiarch Mani, who had founded Manichaeanism somewhat earlier, and equally brief accounts of the churches and their bishops until about 303. 28 Eusebius also refers his readers to his separately composed Life of his mentor Pamphilus, which is now lost. 29 Book VIII covers the Great Persecution of 303-1 1 , a nearly contemporary event. Eusebius declares that it was God's punishment for the Christians' bickering during the previous imperial toleration of Christianity, though he forbears to give the discreditable details of such disputes. 30 He cuts short his story of the first martyrs at Nicomedia "to preserve the due proportion of the book, " even though Book VIII is shorter than any of its predecessors. 3 1 His vague record of the martyrdoms he witnessed in Egypt is scarcely longer than a passage he quotes from a letter by one of the martyrs. He ceases to record

2 5 Eusebius, History VI.2.4-5 and VI.8. 1-2. Origen relied on Matthew 1 9 . 12, where Christ says that "there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven," evidently meaning not actual eunuchs but people who remain celibate. 26 Eusebius, History VI.23 . 1 -2. 2 7 Eusebius, History VII.26.3. 28 The latest bishops Eusebius mentions for each major see are Pope Marcellinus (296-304) at VII.32. 1 ; Bishop Peter I of Alexandria (300-3 1 1) at VII.32. 3 1 (described as reigning "twelve full years" until his martyrdom in 3 1 1 ; Peter's successor in 3 1 2, Achillas, is mentioned without reference to his future episcopate at VII.32.30); Bishop Tyrannus of Antioch (304-c. 3 1 4) at VII.32.4; and Bishop Hermo of Jerusalem (300-3 14) at VII.32.29. 2 9 Eusebius, History VII.32.25 . 3 0 Eusebius, History VIII. l . 7-9 and 2.2. 3 1 Eusebius, History VIII.6.5.

Eusebius of Caesarea

37

names of the bishops of maj or sees, as he has done in previous books. He excuses himself from giving a detailed description of the other episodes of the persecution because these would take too long to recount, or would be better recounted by eyewitnesses, or would be recounted by him elsewhere. 32 He concludes with the agonizing final illness of the persecuting emperor Galerius, and Galerius' deathbed edict that halted the persecution. This book, which we shall see Eusebius wrote as a substitute for his original account, seldom rises to the importance of its subject. Book IX describes the brief resumption of persecution under the emperor Maximin, which Eusebius says was so intense that it seemed even harsher than the Great Persecution. 33 Yet Eusebius says little about the sufferings of the Christians at the time. Most of this book, the shortest of all, consists of quotations from Maximin's pronouncements and enactments against the Christians, and of descriptions of the misfortunes God visited upon Maximin when he was defeated by the emperor Licinius and died ignominiously in 3 1 3 . I n Book X Eusebius concludes his History with the triumphant emergence of the Church from persecution. Once again, though he was a contemporary and a participant, he relies heavily on quotations. More than half the book transcribes a sermon delivered by Eusebius himself (identified only as "one of those of middling ability") at the dedication of a new cathedral at Tyre around 3 1 5 . 3 4 The sermon says little about historical events, but expresses the Christians' exhilaration at their deliverance and ascribes the persecution to their now expiated sins. 35 Next Eusebius quotes six documents show­ i ng how the emperors Constantine and Licinius favored Christians. Four of these refer to a controversy in the African Church that must be the schism of the Donatists, who rejected the official hierarchy for allegedly betraying the Church during the persecution. Yet Eusebius never mentions by name either the Donatists, the similar Egyptian schism of the Meletians, or the Arian controversy. He concludes his work with a short account of Constantine's triumph over Licinius in 324 and a celebration of the happy state of the Church. The cumulative impression left by the History, as Eusebius intended, is that the Christian Church had a long and rich tradition of capable bish­ ops, accomplished writers, and courageous martyrs. The attempt to put the life of Christ in historical context in Book I and the admiring portrait of Origen in Book VI are certainly of interest. The History repeats infor­ mation on bishops and writers from the Chronicle but adds many more names and much more detail. Even a reader who suspected that Eusebius

32 33 34 35

Eusebius, History VIII. 1 2. 1 1 and 1 3 . 7. Eusebius, History IX.6.4. Eusebius, History X.4. 1 . Eusebius, History X.4. 5 7-59.

38

The Early Byzantine Historians

was often wrong could hardly fail to be impressed by the sheer number of names and citations, representing every generation since Christ. Given the unique resources of the library at Caesarea, even in Eusebius' time most of what he records must have been hard to find elsewhere, and within a few generations much of it might have been lost if Eusebius had not transmitted it. Yet the dramatic impact of the material suffers from Eusebius' dry and pedestrian presentation, except for some of the more exotic or eloquent direct quotations. Part of the reason the History continued to be read despite Eusebius' heretical connections is probably that so little of it was written by Eusebius, because well over half was either quoted or paraphrased from other sources. This habit becomes unmistakable when Eusebius describes the end of the persecutions by quoting his own sermon at Tyre. The reason for all this quoting cannot simply be Eusebius' incapacity as a writer, since his other works, including this oration, show that his writing skills were perfectly adequate. Eusebius' revision of the last three books of his History seems actually to have made them less interesting. Apparently in 3 1 1 , after writing the first seven books, Eusebius composed a separate work on the martyrs of Palestine, which survives today in a Syriac translation. This is a detailed account, based on Eusebius' own experiences and personal inquiries, of the Palestinians and others who had suffered martyrdom in Palestine dur­ ing the Great Persecution. Eusebius arranged the stories of these martyrs in annalistic form under the eight years of the persecution from 303 to 3 1 1 . Then he abridged this original version of the Martyrs of Palestine for use as an eighth book of his History of the Church. Later, however, he wrote the present (and even shorter) Book VIII to replace his abridgment of the Martyrs of Palestine, turning the latter into a separate work that has survived in Greek. 36 Though the new Book VIII attempts to cover the persecution outside Palestine, both versions of the Martyrs are more vivid and deeply felt than Book VIII, or indeed than most of the rest of the History. Nowhere in the finished History does Eusebius allow himself such personal touches as his description in the Martyrs of his friend Apphianus, whom he praises almost as much for resisting the temptations of the college town of Berytus as for suf­ fering torture and martyrdom. 3 7 No doubt Eusebius' lost Life ofPamphilus was at least as animated and personal as the Martyrs, whose account of the mar­ tyrdoms of Pamphilus and his companions is longer and more striking than

36

See Barnes, "Editions. " See Eusebius, Martyrs 4 , pp. 344-52 i n Lawlor and Oulton's translation and pp. 9 1 2-19 in Schwartz and Mommsen's edition. On Berytus, see Collinet, Histoire, especially pp. 28-29. 37

Eusebius of Caesarea

39

that in the History. 38 For some reason Eusebius decided he should restrain himself in the History from writing too much or too passionately about the events closest to his own experience. Thus Eusebius seems to have produced at least five different versions of his History of the Church. 39 The original version, apparently finished around 295, well before the Great Persecution, consisted of Books I-VII in more or less their present form, except for the very end of Book VII. In 3 1 3 or per­ haps 3 1 4, Eusebius prepared a second version, adding a brief supplement to Book VII to bring it up to the time of the Great Persecution, then covering the persecution itself by abridging the Martyrs ofPalestine as Book VIII and writing the present Book IX. In a third version of his History, around 3 1 5, Eusebius composed the present Book VIII as a more general account of the earlier per­ secution, retained Book IX, and added Book X. For a fourth version, soon after Constantine's defeat of Licinius in 324, Eusebius deleted some favor­ able remarks about Licinius in Book X and briefly recorded Licinius' death. In a slightly revised fifth version, soon after Constantine executed his son Crispus in 326, Eusebius deleted a few references to Crispus. Through all these versions, Eusebius seems to have left most of Books I-VII unchanged. 40 Eusebius' History of the Church, in any of its versions, is abstracted and disjointed. That these characteristics were largely intentional is evident from a comparison of its plodding Book VIII with either version of the livelier Martyrs of Palestine. Several reasons may be suggested. Eusebius' desire to avoid errors seems to have encouraged him to quote his sources rather than adapt them, and to narrate events rather than analyze them. Eusebius was doubtless influenced by his experience with theology and especially with biblical scholarship, which relied on extensive citations from Scripture and other authorities, demanded caution in analysis and judgment, and avoided originality and personal opinions. Yet a better writer would have realized that the result was a work without the literary charm to which even academic historians had traditionally aspired. The History of the Church is only a little more successful as history than as literature. For all its many references to lengths of episcopates and imperial reigns, its chronology is shaky. 41 Eusebius gives disproportionate treatment to Palestine and to the relatively unimportant bishops of Jerusalem. The

3 8 See Eusebius, Martyrs 1 1, pp. 379-83 in Lawlor and Oulton's translation and pp. 93 1-35 in Schwartz and Mommsen's edition. The shorter version also refers to the Life of Pamphilus, which Eusebius seems to have written between the two versions of the Martyrs. 39 On Eusebius' successive versions of the History, see especially Barnes, Constantine, pp. 1 28-29 and 149-50, referring also to Barnes, " Editions. " 40 Barnes, " Editions, " lists four editions because at pp. 1 9 7-98 he does not count the final version omitting references to Crispus as a separate edition. 4 1 Cf. Barnes, Constantine, pp. 1 4 6-47.

40 The Early Byzantine Historians History becomes less detailed in proportion to the distance of events from Palestine, so that Anatolia, Greece, Rome, and the West are usually neglected, apart from the lists of the bishops of Rome. Among major figures in the West and Anatolia, Eusebius refers to Tertullian sporadically, Cyprian twice, and Methodius of Olympus not at all. Such neglect can be explained only in part by Eusebius' limited access to Latin texts and limited knowledge of Latin, or by his dislike of Methodius' criticism of Origen, which could have been mentioned and dismissed. 42 The History's treatment of the Church during Eusebius' own times, includ­ ing the periods before, during, and after the Great Persecution, is especially unsatisfactory, though it would be improved somewhat by including the Martyrs ofPalestine. Eusebius could surely have done better than inserting his sermon at Tyre into Book X without abridgment. Even if he found the Arian controversy too awkward to mention, he could have described the disputes over Donatism and Meletianism, both of which he certainly opposed and cannot have found much more embarrassing than the disputes he mentions in earlier books. He also says nothing about the major theological writers of his time, though he was one of them. At the least, he could have continued recording the bishops of the principal sees in Books VIII through X, as he had done in his earlier books. In his History, as in his Chronicle, Eusebius seems not to have applied his full concentration and abilities to his task. Though not a distinguished work of history or of literature, the History of the Church is a rather good anthology. Considered as a history of Christian literature, which among other things it is, the History makes skillful use of its quotations from many authors. While Eusebius was not especially adept at combining scattered references in his sources, his quotations from the texts that he had to hand are almost always well chosen. As an ardent reader and a librarian of long experience, Eusebius knew where to look in his books, and could easily recall the passages that he had found particularly well expressed or interesting. 43 The main reason the History of the Church makes a better anthology than a history is probably that Eusebius prepared to write it by rereading the relevant texts and excerpting them, or even by marking passages for excerpting by his assistants. Together with his assistants, he used the framework of the Tables in his Chronicle to assemble his selected quotations in order, adding his own introductory or transitional passages. Though sometimes he paraphrased or summarized, as often as not he let the quotations remain unaltered. What­ ever was not in his Tables or in his selection of quotations, even if he knew it at first hand, was liable to be omitted.

4 2 Cf. Barnes, Constantine, pp. 1 42-43 (on Tertullian and Cyprian) and 193 (on Methodius). 43 On Eusebius' use of sources in the History, see Carriker, Library, pp. 5 3-68.

Eusebius of Caesarea

41

When Eusebius came to continue h i s History into the period of th e Great Persecution, having not yet brought his Chronicle up to date, he simply left out the successions of bishops, for which he had no reference work handy. Having already established his style and method in Books I through VII, he apparently decided that for the contemporary part of the History a more personal approach, like that of the Martyrs ofPalestine, would be inappropriate and discordant. He accordingly either composed or revised the last books to make them resemble the others. Thus the History of the Church is less an ambitious attempt to create a new sort of history than a hasty work by a busy though conscientious man who often let his method of note-taking become his method of composi­ tion. Eusebius could of course have recast his direct quotations and episcopal lists into the more polished form of a traditional history. Yet neither liter­ ary elegance nor historical analysis came easily to Eusebius, who preferred to rely on authorities who were more notable for their content than their style. Eusebius' treatment of contemporary history suffered not just from a lack of established authorities to consult but from his palpable discomfort with the fact that the Church in his day, for all its success, was still riven by internal disputes, especially the Arian controversy. In any case, he seems to have given his readers what they wanted, because his History soon became a classic of Christian literature.

The Life of Constan tine Eusebius' Life of Constantine in four books, though written in his old age, shows more vigor and enthusiasm than his previous historical works do. 44 The Life is neither a formal panegyric, though Eusebius had composed earlier panegyrics of Constantine, nor a formal biography. Its title in our manuscripts, On the L ife of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, may not even be Eusebius' own. Rather, just as Eusebius' Chronicle and History of the Church were Christian adaptations of the ancient forms of the chronicle and general history, so his Life of Constantine is a Christian version of the sort of classi­ cal history that was defined by the reigns of rulers, like Philip of Macedon or Alexander the Great. While the Life is unabashedly favorable to Constan­ tine, no less could be expected of an account by someone writing under Constantine's son who had approved of Constantine's acts and benefited from his favor. Moreover, Christians were used to giving unreserved praise to the heroes of their faith, and Eusebius surely regarded Constantine as a hero, if not quite as a saint. The Life of Constantine partly continues and partly overlaps with the History of the Church, and provides a much more satisfactory treatment of

44

See the commentary in Averil Cameron and Hall, Eusebius.

42

The Early Byzantine Historians

church affairs after the Great Persecution than the History does. Eusebius and other Christians were still coming to terms with the Church's dramatic trans­ formation from an outlawed and persecuted sect to be the empire's officially sponsored religion. How to think and write about a Church that was becom­ ing j oined to the state, and an emperor who had become a leader of the Church, was a problem that Eusebius had never really considered when he revised his History. In the L ife of Constantine he faced the problem, and not surprisingly the result is sometimes awkward. The Life may be called unfin­ ished in the sense that Eusebius would probably have revised it further if he had lived longer, perhaps making it less panegyrical and more historical; but it is not incomplete, nor are its inconsistencies or infelicities much more fre­ quent or glaring than those in the revised versions of the Chronicle or History of the Church. 45 Unlike the Chronicle and History, the Life shows no clear signs of having gone through more than one edition. Eusebius begins Book I with a preface declaring Constantine superior to Cyrus of Persia or Alexander the Great and explaining that his biography will omit most political and military actions and mainly record "things pertain­ ing to [Constantine's] spiritual life . " 46 While praising Constantine's father, Constantius I, Eusebius says hardly anything about Constantine's life before his accession, and little about his life before his conversion to Christianity. The main narrative begins with an account, which Eusebius says he heard from the emperor himself, of Constantine's vision of a cross over the sun, followed by a dream in which Christ told him to adopt a cruciform standard for his army. 47 Then Eusebius adds a catalogue, mostly adapted from his History of the Church, of the crimes and persecutions of the Western emperor Maxentius before his defeat by Constantine, and then of the further crimes and persecutions of the Eastern emperor Licinius. In the Life, as Constantine gradually wins his victories over his adversaries, the progression of events is clearer and smoother than in the History, though sometimes inaccurate. 48 Book 11 opens with the final struggle between Constantine and Licinius, and Constantine's conquest of the eastern part of the empire in 324. More memorably than in the History, Eusebius describes the fortunate results of Constantine's triumph. He quotes several relevant documents: a letter of

45 Barnes, Constantine, pp. 267-70, and "Panegyric, " argues that the Life is clearly unfinished, and that if Eusebius had revised it he would have discarded its panegyrical elements as inconsistent with his plan; but this theory seems to assume that Eusebius meant to write the Life with more care than he did his other works. For the view that the Life is more or less finished, see Averil Cameron, " Eusebius' Vita Constantini. " 4 6 Eusebius, Life 1. 1 1 . 1 . 4 7 Eusebius, Life 1.28-29. 4 8 E.g., at Eusebius, Life 1.47. 1 , the conspiracy and execution of Maximian are put after the defeat of Maxentius, though they are correctly placed before it in Eusebius, History VIII. l 3 . 1 S.

Eusebius of Caesarea

43

Constantine to his new Eastern subjects that establishes imperial approval of Christianity, Eusebius' personal copy of Constantine's letter to the Eastern bishops that mandates the building or rebuilding of churches, and another letter from the emperor to his Eastern subjects that expresses disapproval of paganism. In the last part of the book Eusebius alludes to the controversies in Egypt over Meletianism and Arianism, which he vaguely attributes to a "spirit of envy, " meaning the Devil. He quotes a letter from Constantine to both Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and Arius himself, in which the emperor declares their dispute unnecessary and instructs them to end it. Book Ill, which for the first time moves beyond the period covered by the History of the Church, begins with Constantine's calling the ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325. Eusebius writes as a participant, describing the emperor's arrival and opening speech, of which the historian for once gives not a quotation or paraphrase but his own reconstruction, labeled as such. 49 Otherwise Eusebius says next to nothing about the council's decisions and nothing about his own disagreement with them, and proceeds rapidly to the banquet Constantine held for the bishops afterwards. Eusebius then quotes Constantine's letter to the empire's bishops on the council's determination of the date for Easter-a decision that Eusebius endorsed and reports as if it had been the council's main accomplishment. Also in Book Ill, with more animation, Eusebius records the discovery of the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusalem, Constantine's construction of a church there, and the emperor's letter about it. Eusebius describes the churches of the Nativity and the Ascension built in the Holy Land by Constantine's mother, Helena, whom he eulogizes. A brief reference to the foundation of Constantinople appears among accounts of the churches Constantine built. Eusebius also lists the pagan temples Constantine destroyed, quoting a letter of his on the subject. Concluding the book with a discussion of the emperor's management of the Church, Eusebius quotes three of Constantine's letters on the disputed bishopric of Antioch (one to Eusebius commending him for refusing it) and another forbidding Novatians, Montanists, and other Christian dissidents to hold church services. Eusebius devotes most of Book IV to Constantine's wise and pious admin­ istration of the empire during his last years, especially his military victories and diplomacy, which is illustrated by his letter to the Persian king Sapor II. Among other things, Constantine proclaimed Sundays holidays, banned pagan sacrifices, and repealed laws penalizing celibacy. Eusebius includes two more letters he received from Constantine, one acknowledging receipt of Eusebius' treatise on Easter and the other asking for copies of the Scrip­ tures for use in the new churches of Constantinople. Also mentioned are councils at Tyre and Jerusalem, with a quotation from a letter by Constantine

49

Eusebius, Life III.l l-12.

44 The Early Byzantine Historians to the bishops at Tyre and vague but glowing accounts of both councils. Then Eusebius describes Constantine's mausoleum, final illness, baptism, and death, with brief last words that are presumably Eusebius' reconstructions. The L ife concludes with the succession of Constantine's three sons in 33 7 and a short eulogy of the late emperor. Eusebius, as usual in his works, did not prepare the Life of Constantine with great care, in either the writing or the research. His main source for the Life must simply have been what he had seen and heard in his role as a prominent contemporary churchman. Most of the documents he quotes must have reached him in his capacity as bishop of Caesarea. He may have had a narrative source for some of what he reports-possibly a lost history of Constantine composed soon after 324 by a pagan-but he cannot have used it much. 50 Although he had been to Constantinople, could call on the cooperation of Constantine's sons and successors, and knew Latin, Eusebius seems to have made little if any effort to interview officials or gather docu­ ments. Though by the time he composed the Life Eusebius was old, and busy with episcopal duties, he had never been a careful historian, and his main interest in writing the Life was not precisely historical. What he wanted was to praise Constantine and to illustrate the emperor's unique role in Christian history. The Life of Constantine is the most successful of Eusebius' historical com­ positions as a literary work. Though its narrative includes several repetitions, digressions, and inconsistencies, its order is broadly chronological, and its focus remains on Constantine throughout. Its style is generally more ele­ vated than that of the History of the Church, with many fewer references to Scripture and a few more to the Greek classics. 51 While quotations from imperial documents account for almost a quarter of the Life, as Constantine's own words they are of obvious relevance and interest; by contrast, most of the quotations that form so much of the History of the Church could better have been paraphrased. Unlike the History, which teems with proper names, the L ife omits names whenever possible, sacrificing detail to coherence and readability. No doubt the Life is less candid than the History, because Eusebius, who obviously idealized Constantine, omitted or distorted inconvenient facts more freely in the Life than in the History. Also in contrast to the History, where Eusebius includes much less firsthand testimony than he could have, in the Life he repeatedly implies that his personal acquaintance with the emperor was closer than it seems actually to have been. 52 He sometimes feels

5 0 Averil Cameron and Hall, Eusebius, p. 2 1 , suggest this source, Praxagoras of Athens, on whom see below, pp. 47 48. 5 1 See Averil Cameron and Hall, Eusebius, pp. 21-22. 5 2 See Bames, Constantine, pp. 265-67. -

Eusebius of Caesarea

45

free, as he had not in the History, to adopt the classical historian's technique of inventing speeches for dramatic effect. Yet Eusebius' idealization of Constan­ tine and exaggeration of their intimacy, though defects from the standpoint of historical accuracy, enhance the work's consistency and immediacy. Eusebius must have realized that the Life fell short of being an obj ective account of Constantine's reign. Yet he presumably believed that any distor­ tions in it were less important than the essential truth that Constantine had assured the victory of the Church, just as his stories of martyrdoms omitted the martyrs' earlier sins that their martyrdom had expiated. Still less would Eusebius have cared that the Life fails to evoke Constantine as a recognizable personality, which would have required describing faults and idiosyncrasies that were irrelevant to Eusebius' interests and mostly beyond his knowledge. For Eusebius, the most important fact about Constantine was that he was God's chosen instrument to serve Christianity. As a matter of fact, what has been learned and written about Constantine in modern times has still left him an enigmatic figure, and suggests a carefully cultivated image that made him enigmatic to his contemporaries, and perhaps even to himself. We still find his personality much more obscure than his role in history, which was Eusebius' subject. Eusebius turned out to be right that Constantine's adoption of Christianity as the empire's official religion would be lasting, though in 338 or 339 this cannot yet have been obvious. In later times Eusebius' Chronicle was sometimes consulted but seldom imi­ tated, and in the end its Greek text became so neglected that it was lost. His History of the Church was widely read, served as the model for several later church histories, and eventually influenced some other histories that covered both secular and religious events. Though the Life of Constantine seems to have been read rather less than the History, of Eusebius' three his­ torical works the Life most resembles the Byzantine histories of the eighth through twelfth centuries, which classify events by the reigns of emperors, focus on the emperors' acts, and treat the emperors as Christian rulers whose Christianity and rulership were fully compatible. Eusebius' historical works developed a view of history that became typi­ cal of Byzantium, in which Christianity and the Roman Empire reinforced each other with happy results. Even before the triumph of Christianity under Constantine, Eusebius' Chronicle showed how millennia of squabbling and transitory kingdoms eventually gave way to the single Roman Empire with its orderly succession of Christian bishops. The original History of the Church, written before the Great Persecution, was a story of the steady progress of Christianity. The later versions, dating from after the Great Persecution, end with the increasingly evident triumph of the Church, which in the Life of Constantine is unequivocal. Eusebius' ideas of causation and motivation were straightforward and typi­ cally Christian. He believed that the main guiding force in history was divine Providence, complicated but never permanently thwarted by the stupidity

46

The Early Byzantine Historians

of human beings and the evil power of the Devil. This view, conditioned by Eusebius' own temperament and experience, led each of his three historical works, in all their versions, to optimistic conclusions. From a secular point of view, Eusebius was too optimistic. He seems to have foreseen peaceful growth for the Church after the late third century, though what happened was the Great Persecution. Then he foresaw peaceful supremacy for the Church after Constantine's death, though what happened were the quar­ rels of Constantine's sons, Julian's reversion to paganism, and more of the Arian controversy. Yet even if Eusebius missed these temporary setbacks, he guessed or per­ ceived the longer run of history correctly. Within the next century the Church did triumph, becoming the religion of the great majority of the empire's sub­ j ects. Because Eusebius turned out to be essentially right, and used sources that were unavailable to posterity, he overcame the obstacles of his dubious orthodoxy and slipshod composition and had an influence out of proportion to his abilities as an historian. Favorable circumstances enabled him largely to evade, though not to solve, the church historian's perennial problem of how to treat events that were unfortunate for the Church. Eusebius' implicit answer, which followed from his faith, was that such events could only be of minor and transitory significance.

3 Ammianus Marcell inus

Between the late third century and the late fourth, secular Greek histo­ riography came to an almost complete and unprecedented halt. The lost history of Dexippus and the lost chronicle of Porphyry both ended with 270. After Dexippus and Porphyry finished writing around that date, no one composed an important secular history in Greek for more than a hun­ dred years. A somewhat similar interval had occurred in the first century AD, when over a hundred years separated Dionysius of Halicarnassus from Arrian and Appian. Yet during that time Romans like Livy were writing major histories in Latin from Greek sources, and josephus wrote two major histo­ ries in Greek meant for a wider audience than Jews alone. Though Eusebius' Chronicle may have interested some pagans, his other two historical works would have had little appeal for them. Meanwhile the silence of classical Latin historiography that had begun in the mid-second century continued for most of the fourth. A few writers whose works are now lost were partial exceptions to this absence of secular Greek historians. The first was Praxagoras of Athens, a pagan born around 302. Between about 321 and 324 Praxagoras wrote three historical biographies: the first on the mythical kings of Athens in two books, the second on Alexander the Great in six books, and the third on Constantine in two books. This last work ended with the foundation of Constantino­ ple in 324 and was presumably written soon afterward. It may have been used by Eusebius for his Life of Constantine, and it survived to be read and briefly summarized by Photius in the ninth century. According to Photius, Praxagoras included such dubious facts as that Galerius ruled Anatolia while Diocletian ruled Bithynia, that Constantine killed a lion that Galerius had set upon him, and that Maxentius and Licinius were savage tyrants. These works on Constantine, Alexander, and the Athenian kings, which Praxagoras

47

48

The Early Byzantine Historians

dashed off between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two in the obso­ lete Ionic dialect of Herodotus, seem to have been panegyrics as much as histories. 1 A second historian of these times was another pagan biographer of Constantine, Bemarchius of Caesarea. Born at Caesarea in Cappadocia sometime around 300, by 340 he held a professorship in rhetoric at Con­ stantinople, probably awarded by Constantine himself. The pagan orator Libanius mentions Bemarchius as a frustrated rival who tried to murder him before Libanius fled the city about 342. Around that date Bemarchius seems to have written a work entitled Deeds of the Emperor Constantine in ten books, perhaps hoping to restore his reputation after Libanius had damaged it. Bemarchius appears to have died before Libanius returned to Constantinople around 348, probably to succeed to the late professor's chair. Bemarchius' his­ tory, which was presumably panegyrical, had no known readers or influence, and today all that survives of it is its title. 2 A third lost writer on this period was a certain Heliconius of Byzantium. He is said to have been a "sophist, " evidently a professor of rhetoric like Bemarchius, and to have written a Chronological Epitome in ten books from Adam to Theodosius I, who became emperor in 3 79. Since historians usually ended their histories with the current emperor, Heliconius seems to have finished writing sometime before Theodosius' death in 395. Because he used the archaic name "Byzantium" for his home town of Constantinople, he presumably wrote in Attic Greek, as we would expect from a professor of rhetoric. Since he began with Adam, Heliconius was doubtless a Christian. 3 His history appears to have been a hybrid, a classical universal history like those of Ephorus or Diodorus that incorporated Christian material in the manner of Eusebius' Chronicle.

1 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 62, summarizing Praxagoras' history of Constantine, notes at 21b.9-15 that Praxagoras said he had composed this work at age twenty-two, after writing his work on the Athenian kings at age nineteen and his work on Alexander at age thirty-one; but here the "thirty-one" of the text should be emended to "twenty­ one" ('tptaKomov to dKocr'tov) since Photius' source was evidently Praxagoras himself, writing c. 324 at age twenty-two. Cf. Winkelmann, " Historiography, " pp. 1 4-15 and 34-35, who discusses the problems that arise if the text is not emended. Praxagoras' account of the division of the empire under the tetrarchy confused the arrangement before 305, when Diocletian ruled Anatolia including Bithynia, with that after 305, when Galerius (whom Praxagoras called by his original name of Maximinus) ruled Anatolia including Bithynia. 2 On Bemarchius, see Suda B 259 (for his birthplace and history) and Libanius, Oration 1.31-44 (for his clash with Libanius, who mentions only his orations and not his history); cf. PLRE I, Bemarchius and Libanius 1 . 3 See Suda E 85 1 , and Croke, " Early Development," pp. 3 3 and 3 6 (where Theodosius "11" should be " I " and Suda " I" should be "II"). ·

Ammianus Marcellinus

49

Though no surviving fragments of Heliconius' history have been identified so far, a few excerpts from a history that in some ways resembled Heliconius' remain anonymous, in a mutilated manuscript. 4 Conventionally known as the Anonymus post Dionem ("Anonymous after Dio"), they concern events from the Persians' capture of Antioch in 256 to Constantine's victory over Licinius in 324, with significant details about this poorly recorded period. One fragment also refers to a mythical attempt by the emperor Tiberius (reigned AD 1 4-3 7) to have Christ recognized as one of the Roman gods. After the final excerpt on Constantine breaks off in midsentence, two pages are missing from our manuscript, enough to have reached the accession of Theodosius I. The fragments are in Attic Greek, and their author was a Chris­ tian, because he refers to Diocletian's religion as "what was then honored as divine." The author appears not to be any of the other early Greek his­ torians known to have covered the first four Christian centuries. 5 If he was an historian whose name we know, he was probably Heliconius. Whether or not Heliconius and this anonymous writer were the same person, he or they cannot have had many readers. The pagan historian Eunapius of Sardis, writing near the end of the fourth century, observed that events since Dexippus' time "had not yet appeared in a notable narrative history" before Eunapius' own. Perhaps Eunapius had not heard of Heliconius' work, which would then have been quite recent, and considered Praxagoras' and Bemarchius' panegyrics not to have been noteworthy, or perhaps not to have been real histories. Eunapius praised but obviously did not count as a real history a "pamphlet" by the Caesar Julian on his campaign in Gaul in 3 5 7. This seems simply to have been a brief military dispatch to the senior emperor Constantius 11. 6

4 The Anonymus post Dionem is edited with an introduction and notes in Muller, FHG IV, pp. 1 9 1-99, and discussed by Cataudella, " Historiography, " pp. 437-4 1 and 443-47. 5 See Anonymus post Dionem frs. 1 (on the fall of Antioch), 14.2 (on Constantine's victory over Licinius), 1 4.3 (on Tiberius), 1 5.2 (the final fragment, with Cardinal Mai's note on the missing pages), and 1 3 . 1 (on Diocletian's religion). The other early Byzantine historians known to have covered this period in Greek are Eustathius, John Malalas, Peter the Patrician, Hesychius of Miletus, and John of Antioch. Malalas' work is preserved and is quite different. Hesychius' work seems to have been too short to have gone into as much detail as the fragments do, and no one has suggested it as a possible identification. Cataudella, " Historiography," pp. 437-4 1 , discusses the argu­ ments against identifying the Anonymous with Eustathius, Peter the Patrician, or John of Antioch, but considers Peter a possibility; Antonopoulos, Jihpot;, pp. 1 61-95 (Greek) and 240-4 1 (English), argues that at least the majority of the fragments are not by Peter, and to me and most others they seem the work of a single author. 6 See Eunapius frs. 1 (on the absence of significant earlier histories) and 1 7 (on Julian's pamphlet); cf. Ammianus XVII. 1 1 . 1 (on Julian's report to Constantius). Libanius, Oration XVIII.43-66, may actually paraphrase most of Julian's text, adding some comments.

50

The Early Byzantine Historians

Given the continuous activity of Greek historians during the second and third centuries, the gap afterwards calls for some explanation. The rea­ son for the first-century gap had evidently been a feeling among Greeks that Romans had taken over the Mediterranean world and would now write their own histories in Latin. Only in the early second century did the Greeks quite realize that their cultural superiority had survived their political subjugation, so that they could write histories in Greek both as Greeks and as subjects of the Roman Empire. Similarly, what blighted secular Greek historiography in the fourth century was proba­ bly a feeling among pagans that Christians had taken over the Mediter­ ranean world and would now write their own histories, as Eusebius and Heliconius in fact did. Why should pagans want to record their own defeat? That Diocletian or his colleagues found no contemporary historians is not surprising. Diocletian retired only twenty-six years after Dexippus' his­ tory ended, and his tetrarchic system began to disintegrate a year later, before an admiring pagan could write a history of the tetrarchs' achieve­ ments. The pagan Praxagoras praised Constantine, but seems scarcely to have realized as yet that the emperor was a Christian. Though Con­ stantine maintained some ambiguity about his faith until he subdued Licinius j ust before Praxagoras wrote, after another year or two no one could have doubted Constantine was a Christian. 7 The pagan Bemarchius probably composed not a history saying what he really thought but a panegyric aiming to please Constantine's son Constantius. By the mid­ dle of the fourth century, most people probably expected Christianity to prevail. Then, in 361, Julian took over the whole empire and proclaimed him­ self a pagan. Despite his death two years later, he showed that the cause of paganism was not necessarily lost, and after him another pagan and a pagan sympathizer proclaimed themselves emperors in 365 and 392, while other pagans conspired in 3 72. At the least, after Julian's reign cultured pagans realized that for some time to come they would be a significant part of the empire's elite. Even many educated Christians must have thought that Eusebius' historical works were no substitute for an elegant classical history of secular events. Eunapius implied that Julian's reign was what inspired his friends to persuade him to continue Dexippus' history up to their day. 8 Around the same time, another pagan, Ammianus Marcellinus, drew similar inspiration from serving in Julian's army and set about writing a history of his own.

7 See Bames, Constantine, pp. 44-53 and 208-12, though Bames emphasizes Constantine's essential Christianity more than some other scholars do. 8 Eunapius frs. 1 and 1 5.

Ammianus Marcellinus

51

Ammianus' life

Ammianus was a great historian, but should we call him Byzantine? 9 He wrote his history at Rome, and in Latin. Yet he was born and raised in the East, spoke Greek as his native language, called himself a Greek, and often quoted Greek words, verses, and even paragraphs. 10 He was only the latest in a line of Greek historians who settled in Rome, including Polybius, Diodorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Appian, and Herodian, though they had written in Greek. Ammianus is mentioned outside his own history only by his Greek contemporary Libanius at Antioch and a Latin grammarian at Constantinople about a century later, when a Greek historian at Antioch seems also to have used Ammianus' work. No surviving Western Roman source refers to Ammianus or his history. 1 1 Nothing like Ammianus' his­ tory had been written in Latin for two and a half centuries, and nothing like it would ever be written in Latin again. In fact, speakers and writers of Greek and Latin were overlapping groups in the fourth century, and the distinction between the Eastern and West­ ern empires was far from sharp. Latin was the official language of the army and the government in both East and West. The boundary between the east­ ern and western parts of the empire shifted several times during the fourth century, and the two were united during most of the period covered by Ammianus' history, including its climax under Julian. Though Ammianus was a Greek in language and culture, like other Byzantines he also considered himself a Roman. 12

9 On Ammianus, see above all Matthews, Roman Empire; and Barnes, Ammianus, which is stimulating but sometimes overly revisionist. The essays in Drijvers and Hunt, Late Roman World, including the bibliographical essay in the introduction, are also of interest. Thompson, Historical Work; Camus, Ammien; Blockley, Ammianus; and Sabbah, Methode remain of value. The most recent survey of the scholarship is Sabbah, "Ammianus. " A multivolume but mainly philological commentary on Ammianus was begun by jonge, Sprachlicher und historischer Kommentar (on Book XIV) and Philological and Historical Commentary (on Books XV-XIX), and is being continued by Boeft et al., Philological and Historical Commentaries (on Books XX-XXV). 1 0 Cf. Ammianus XXXI. 1 6.9, and especially Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 65-78. 1 1 The attestations are Libanius, Letters, no. 1 063; and Priscian, Institutiones VIII.5 1 , pp. 486-87. Though Priscian is often assumed to have been from Caesarea in Mauretania, Palestinian Caesarea seems more likely; see Geiger, "Some Latin Authors." For probable use of Ammianus by Eustathius of Epiphania in the early sixth century, see below, pp. 3 1 4 and 3 1 6-19 with nn. 13, 24, 30, and 3 1 . The arguments of Maenchen­ Helfen, " Date," thatjerome and Claudian drew on Ammianus are not persuasive, since those authors show no verbal parallels with Ammianus but only a common stock of Roman information (and misinformation) about the Huns. 1 2 E.g., Ammianus XIV.8. 1 5 (referring to the Romans as "us" at the time of their annexation of Cyprus in 58 BC), XV. l2.6 (referring to Caesar's adding Gaul to "our

52

The Early Byzantine Historians

In his work Ammianus says more about himself than most ancient or Byzantine historians do, despite the loss of his preface at the beginning, which presumably added more details. Yet much about his life remains a matter of conjecture. He was almost certainly born at Antioch under Constantine, probably around 330. 1 3 At the time Antioch, which Ammianus calls "the beautiful crown of the East, " seems to have been the East's largest city, with some 1 50,000 people, second only to Rome in the whole Roman Empire. 14 Though Antioch was mainly Greek-speaking and had long been one of the foremost centers of Greek culture, Ammianus also learned Syriac, the language of the Syrian countryside. His family were evidently pagans of some means and influence. They may well have been from Antioch's wealthy class of decurions or city councilors, who ranked just below the empire's senatorial nobility. IS Ammianus received an excellent education in the Greek classics, evidently in his native city. Later he cherished memories of "the sweetness of liberal studies" at a select school, where one of his schoolmates was the princely heir to the satrapy of Corduene in Armenia. 1 6 Ammianus also acquired a fine education in Latin, which was readily available at Antioch. 1 7 He needed it for his intended career as an army officer, a common means of evading the burdensome financial duties of decurions. A few years later Libanius referred

alliance" in 58-SO BC), XXII. 1 6.24 (saying that "we acquired" Cyrena"ica when Rome annexed it c. 74 BC), and XXVII.4. 1 1 (remarking that Thrace "passed under the control of our ancestors" in 72 BC). Note that the latter two conquests occurred before Rome annexed Ammianus' home city of Antioch in 64 BC. 1 3 Ammianus certainly lived in Antioch for years; see Ammianus XXII. 9 . 1 4 for his (quoted) characterization of it. His age can be guessed from his having become an officer around 349 but still being "young" in 35 7 (XVI.10.21). I share the usual opin­ ion, reaffirmed by Matthews, " Origin, " that Libanius' letter to a Marcellinus who was a native of Antioch (see n. 1 1 above) refers to Ammianus. Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 54-64, argues against the identification, observing that Libanius could hardly have told the mature and accomplished Ammianus it would have been "a great thing" for him merely to listen to noted Romans declaim; but Libanius' point is that it was an achievement for a Greek just to listen with discernment to declamations in Latin, let alone to pro­ duce his own. Formal literary Latin included so many elaborate constructions, obscure words, and learned allusions that it had become almost as rigorous a test of education as formal literary Greek; Libanius himself did not know Latin. 1 4 For Antioch's population, see Libanius, Letters, no. 1 1 1 9; and cf. Treadgold, History, p. 1 39. In the fourth century Constantinople would still have been smaller than Antioch, whose only near rival was Alexandria. 1 5 Cf. Ammianus XIX.8.6, and Thompson, Historical Work, p. 2. I cannot agree with Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 79-94, that Ammianus' obvious familiarity with Christianity indicates that he was an apostate Christian, though he was certainly an attentive observer of what was by his time a largely Christian society. 1 6 Ammianus XVIII.6.20. 1 7 On knowledge of Latin at Antioch, see Geiger, "Some Latin Authors," pp. 6 1 3-1 7.

Ammianus Marcellinus

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to "the good Ammianus" as "enrolled among the soldiers in his appearance, but among the philosophers in his deeds. " 18 Perhaps in 349, when Constantius II visited Syria, Ammianus became a member of the elite officer corps of the protectores domestici, who attended the emperor himself and other leading commanders. Probably from the time of his enlistment, he was attached to the staff of the master of cavalry Ursicinus, commander of the empire's eastern frontier, who was stationed at the frontier town of Nisibis in Mesopotamia. 19 Ammianus soon came to have a deep respect for Ursicinus. In 354 the Caesar Gallus, then ruling at Antioch as a subordinate of his uncle Constantius, called Ursicinus to the city to preside over a trial of some civilians charged with sedition. Ammianus followed his commanding officer back to his home town. Though Ursicinus was unhappy with his assignment and complained secretly to Constantius, for fear of Gallus the general convicted the defen­ dants on what Ammianus considered insufficient evidence. 20 Meanwhile Constantius, who was then at Milan, decided to depose Gallus for malfea­ sance, and summoned first Ursicinus and then the Caesar to the imperial court. Again Ammianus accompanied Ursicinus, and seems to have remained with him at Milan for several months. 21 Though Constantius executed Gallus, according to Ammianus Ursicinus was also threatened with execu­ tion, despite his earlier complaint against the Caesar. 22 Nevertheless, in 355 the emperor gave Ursicinus the delicate assignment of removing Silvanus, the chief commander in Gaul, who was reportedly plotting a revolt. Ursicinus, appointed Silvanus' successor, was told to try to assume the command in Gaul as if he were unaware of the plot. Ammianus was one of ten protectores who hurried with Ursicinus to Silvanus' headquar­ ters at Cologne. Advised and assisted by Ammianus, Ursicinus pretended to j oin Silvanus' rebellion, then persuaded some of Silvan us' men to assassinate 18 Libanius, Letters, no. 233, probably written in 360 and carried by Ammianus to Tarsus from Antioch. The identification with our Ammianus is likely but not absolutely certain; cf. Bames, Ammianus, pp. 60-62. The depth of Ammianus' education however argues against Bames' suggestion (pp. 58-59) that he came from a military family. Libanius describes his Ammianus as exceptionally cultured for a military man, and the same was undoubtedly true of the historian. 1 9 Ammianus XIV.9. 1 (where the pluperfect implies that his attachment to Ursicinus had occurred earlier), XV.5 .22 (a reference to his being in the protectores in 355 that evidently holds good for the earlier date), and XVIII.6.2 (noting that Ursicinus had held his command for ten years in 359). On the protectores domestici, see ]ones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 636-40. The emperor was supposed to admit new protectores in person, and Constantius was in Syria in 349 and 350, but after that not until 360; see Bames, Athanasius, p. 220. 20 Ammianus XIV.9. 2 1 Ammianus XIV. l l . l-6. 22 Ammianus XV.2. 1 .

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The Early Byzantine Historians

the rebel on his way to church. Though pleased by the outcome, the emperor still had Ursicinus investigated, perhaps partly because of the general's opin­ ion (shared by Ammianus) that Silvanus had been forced into rebellion by the intrigues of his enemies. 23 The investigation must have cleared Ursicinus, because he served for a year as master of cavalry in Gaul. After Silvanus' assassination the country and its army were unsettled, and the Franks besieged and captured Cologne. 24 Despite this reverse, Constantius apparently understood the difficulty of Ursicinus' position. When the emperor appointed his nephew Julian as Caesar in Gaul in 356 with a subordinate general to replace Ursicinus, Ammianus and his commander remained to serve under them. 25 Mean­ while Ammianus saw much of Gaul and presumably met julian, for whom he expresses admiration. 26 The next year, when Julian had recovered Cologne and begun to restore order, Constantius called Ursicinus to his court at Sirmium in Illyricum and sent the general back to his original post on the eastern frontier. While some of Ursicinus' older staff officers received field commands, Ammianus remained an adjutant. 27 After years of growing tension between the Romans and Persians, in 359 negotiations for a treaty broke down. Just then the emperor summoned Ursicinus, who was at Samosata in northern Syria, to the court at Sirmium for promotion to master of infantry. 28 According to Ammianus, Ursicinus' enemies had charged him with attempted usurpation and tried to have him executed. 29 Though Ursicinus and Ammianus delayed their departure, they finally set out and reached the middle of Thrace. There, however, they received new orders to return to the frontier zone to help the newly appointed commander Sabinianus against an impending Persian invasion. After hesi­ tating again, Ursicinus and his retainers obeyed, and hastened to Nisibis on the border. 30 Having prepared Nisibis for a siege, they withdrew just ahead of the Persians' advance guard. Two miles outside the city, Ursicinus ordered Ammianus to take back to Nisibis a lost boy of good family whom they had found. Ammianus rode to Nisibis, dropped the boy at a "half-closed" gate, and galloped away, "because the hardships of a siege frightened me." A s Ammianus fled, he passed so near to a troop of Persian cavalry that he 23

Ammianus XV.S. Ursicinus was accused o f embezzlement. Ammianus XV.8. 1 and 19 and XVI.3-2. 2 5 Ammianus XVI.2.8. 26 Cf. Ammianus XV.9.6 (Gallic inscriptions) and 12.1-4 (the Gauls), and XVI . l Qulian). 2 7 Ammianus XVI . 1 0.21 . 28 Ammianus XVIII.4.7, S.S, and 6. 1 . 29 Ammianus XVIII.4.2-6. 3 0 Ammianus XVIII.6.S-8. 24

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heard a Roman slave tell them Ursicinus had gone that way. Pursued b y the Persians, Ammianus managed to outride them on his excellent horse. He caught up with Ursicinus and his men, signaled to them that the enemy was coming, and rode on with them. As night fell, the fugitives tricked their pur­ suers by tying a lantern to a horse that they drove to the left while they rode to the right. The next day they found a Roman soldier in hiding, forced him to confess to spying for the Persians, learned what he knew, and killed him. Finally they reached the walled city of Amida. 31 From Amida Ursicinus sent Ammianus on a scouting mission to his old school friend, the satrap of nearby Corduene. The satrap remembered Ammianus, received him hospitably, and had him taken to a vantage point where he could see the Persian king Sapor 11 on the march with a vast army, heading for Nisibis. After Ammianus made his report, Ursicinus ordered the country around Nisibis evacuated, and the fields burned to deny the enemy supplies. 32 But the Persians bypassed Nisibis and turned north toward Amida. As Ursicinus and his men tried to retreat to Samosata, they fell into an ambush set by Persians who had evaded the negligent Roman scouts. Many Romans were killed, and Ursicinus barely escaped . Ammianus, abandoning a wounded comrade who had served with him since his time in Gaul, contrived after further perils to get back within the walls of Amida. 33 Now Ammianus had to endure at Amida the Persian siege he had feared at Nisibis. Sapor became so enraged when the defenders killed the son of one of his vassal kings that he vowed to destroy the city at any cost. Ammianus and his fellow defenders, packed in with a mass of civilians, fought furi­ ously. He writes: "With despair of our safety taken for granted, henceforth we thought only of making our deaths glorious-that was what all of us now hoped. " 34 Sabinianus, who remained to the west at Edessa, refused to let Ursicinus risk trying to relieve them. 35 Ammianus' rank gave him a part in directing the defense, which he describes in detail. 36 The defenders held out for seventy-three days, until a defensive mound they had raised inside the city wall collapsed and let the Persians in. 37 While others were still resisting, Ammianus and two companions first hid and then escaped on foot through a small unguarded gate. "As a gentleman," he became exhausted after ten miles of unaccustomed walking, but he found a runaway horse, which he cut loose from its dead owner and rode. After avoiding a Persian detachment that was pursuing other Romans, he and his 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

Ammianus XVIII.6.8-1 7. Ammianus XVIII.6 . 1 9-7.6. Ammianus XVIII.8 with XV.5 .22 (Verinianus' service with Ammianus in Gaul). Ammianus XIX. l-2. Ammianus XIX.3. Ammianus XIX.4-8. Note the first-person plurals at 6.5 and 7.6. Ammianus XIX.8.1-4 and 9.9.

56 The Early Byzantine Historians companions eventually made their way to Antioch. The Persians retaliated for their losses by destroying Amida, executing some of the surviving garrison, and taking the rest captive, including Ammianus' fellow protectores. 38 Again Constantius ordered an investigation of Ursicinus, who protested that the emperor was treating him unfairly and listening to bad advisers. Angered by the retort rather than any findings of misconduct, Constantius ordered Ursicinus into retirement in 360. 39 After his patron's dismissal, Ammianus apparently remained with the army in Syria for three years without seeing more combat. Libanius' remark that Ammianus was living like a philosopher at Antioch around 360 may mean that he devoted his free time to literary study. 40 Then in 363 Julian, by now the openly pagan ruler of the whole empire, launched an invasion of Persia. Ammianus j oined the expedition when it passed the border stronghold of Circesium. 41 As a protector, he was probably attached to the emperor's staff. 42 He remained with Julian throughout the eventful Persian campaign, until the emperor died of a wound. Ammianus may well have been one of the officers present at Julian's deathbed, and a participant in the conference that considered what to do next. He may even have been the anonymous " soldier of moderately high rank" who reproached the pagan praetorian prefect Salutius for declining to succeed Julian as emperor. 43 After the Christian protector Jovian was chosen emperor instead, Ammianus retreated with him and the exhausted army to Antioch. 44 Soon thereafter Ammianus must have left the service. The reason can hardly have been his age, because he was probably in his early thirties. Perhaps he had shown too much enthusiasm for Julian's paganism to be a suitable attendant for a Christian emperor. 45 In the years after 363 Ammianus probably spent most of his time at Antioch, perhaps already preparing to write a history. This also seems to

38

Ammianus XIX.8.5-12. Ammianus XX. 2. 40 See n. 18 above. 4 1 Ammianus XXIII.S.4-7, where he begins to refer to the army as "we. " 4 2 Cf. Austin, Ammianus, pp. 1 7-18. 43 Ammianus XXV.5.3. Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 1 83-84, thinks this is unlikely, because Ammianus was not very influential; but the remark was probably one of many made in the discussion, and it had no effect. Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 1 40-4 1 and n. 49, thinks the anonymous soldier may well have been Ammianus, though he also believes Zosimus may be right that Salutius declined to succeed not Julian in 363 but Jovian in 364. I prefer to believe Ammianus here, though Zosimus (or rather Eunapius) could also be right, because Salutius was such an obvious candidate that he could have been suggested both times. 44 Ammianus XXV. l0. 1 is his last reference to the army in the first person plural. 45 As suggested by Barnes, Ammianus, p. 63. 39

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have been the time when, a s a resident o f the East, he experienced the unscrupulous tactics of its grasping lawyers. 46 Early in 3 72, he witnessed the trials and heard the testimony of a group of pagans charged with plot­ ting against the emperor Valens, some of whom had tried to identify Valens' successor by divination. The prediction was that the next emperor would be perfect in every respect, with a name starting with THEOD-. Convinced that the oracle meant Theodore, a pagan official, the pagans from the seance plotted on his behalf, but were discovered, tortured, and executed along with Theodore himself. 47 Thoroughly alarmed, Valens prosecuted and executed many more suspects. Educated pagans like Ammianus were particularly at risk; some of them burned their books to keep them from being used as evi­ dence of divination. The historian declares that "all of us were slinking about as if in Cimmerian shadows, " terrified as if under the sword of Damocles. 48 Ammianus may have especially feared that the greedy lawyers of whom he complains would denounce him to claim part of his fortune. Valens' reign of terror is the most likely occasion and motive for Ammianus' first trip to Rome. The city prefect of Rome in 3 7 1-72 was a literary man from Antioch, Ampelius, who was evidently both a pagan and acquainted with Ammianus. Ammianus gives a disproportionate amount of treatment to unjust prosecutions by a certain Maximinus at Rome between 368 and 3 70, as if these had still been vivid in his informants' memories. The historian pointedly blames Ampelius for lax enforcement of his own orders against opening taverns before 10:00 AM, serving wine by the drink or cooked meat early in the day, and eating in the streets, all of which offended Ammianus' sense of propriety. The historian acidly complains that the city's nobles had no respect for learning or for any strangers but courtesans and charioteers, and that its common people wanted all outsiders driven from the city. 49 These complaints against the Romans are not only long and impassioned but redundant, because Ammianus has already made the same points at sim­ ilar length much earlier in his work, with reference to riots at Rome in 354. 50 His only apparent reason for connecting a second diatribe with 3 7 1-72 is that this was the time he first experienced in person the Romans' lack of hospi­ tality to strangers. Besides, his only apparent motive for settling in Rome

46

Ammianus XXX.4. 1-4. Ammianus XXIX. 1 .5-1 4 and 23-39. The original Greek letters were 8E0.1. On this oracle, see Treadgold, "Predicting." 4 8 Ammianus XXIX. 1 .40-2.20 (quotation from 2.4). 49 Ammianus XXVIII. 1 (on Maximinus' trials) and 4.3-35. On Ampelius, see PLRE I, Ampelius 3, noting that he was probably not much older than Ammianus and was in Antioch until about 35 7, when Ammianus was young. On the accuracy of Ammianus' account of Maximinus' trials at Rome in 368-70, see Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 24 1-46. 5 0 Ammianus XIV.6. 47

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despite his cool reception was a reluctance to return to Valens' domains in the East, which included other cities that might have suited him better than Rome. Rome did have its attractions for Ammianus. He obviously felt the same awe he ascribes to the emperor Constantius II, which made him "eager to linger longer in the most majestic of all places to live." 5 1 Ammianus says in his earlier remarks that " as a well-to-do stranger" on first visiting a Roman noble "you will be received as if eagerly awaited . . . so that you will regret you had not seen Rome ten years before. " However, Ammianus goes on, the same noble will scarcely know you the second time you come. Preferring singers and actors to philosophers and orators, Roman aristocrats keep their libraries "permanently shut like tombs." 52 When a temporary food shortage caused the expulsion of outsiders, probably in 384, the decree included the few "followers of the liberal arts" like Ammianus but exempted six thousand dancing girls and dancing teachers. 53 Ammianus' fury at the Romans' preference for "childless and celibate" foreigners with inheritances to bestow suggests that he was now married and had at least one child. 54 After Valens died in battle in 3 78, Ammianus could have returned with­ out fear to the eastern part of the empire. He did eventually revisit the East, including Greece, Thrace, and Egypt as far south as Thebes. 55 Yet he proba­ bly found Rome more welcoming after 3 78, when its prefect was Hypatius, a respected friend of his from Antioch who had also been in mortal danger under Valens. 56 Moreover, by the time Valens died Ammianus had appar­ ently been living at Rome for six years, long enough to establish himself there, with whatever difficulties and misgivings, and to begin writing his history in Latin, which was the wrong language for readings and distribution at Antioch. Sometime between 389 and 39 1 Ammianus completed the first twenty-five books of his history. These covered the years from AD 96, the accession of

5l

Ammianus XVI. 10. 1 3-1 7 and 20. Ammianus XIV. 6. 1 2-18. 53 Ammianus XIV. 6. 1 9; cf. Barnes, Ammianus, p. 2 and n. 2. 54 Ammianus XIV.6.22 (cf. XXVIII.4.22). Nor does Ammianus sound like a childless bachelor when he remarks disdainfully that eunuchs, "lacking other relatives, embrace possessions alone as their most congenial children" (XVIII. S.4) . 5 5 Cf. Ammianus XVI1.4.6 and XXII . 1 5 . 1 (Egypt), XXII.8. 1 and XXVII.4.2 (Thrace, sometime after 3 7 6 if Ammianus himself saw the bones he mentions at XXXI. 7 . 1 6), and XXVI . 1 0. 1 9 (Greece, long enough after 365 for a wooden ship to decay-though Greece had been under Valentinian I, not Valens). 5 6 Ammianus XXIX.2. 1 6. Cf. Barnes, Ammianus, p. 122, who thinks Hypatius was the one who brought Ammianus to Rome in the first place. 52

Ammianus Marcellinus

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Nerva, to 364, the death of Jovian. 5 7 In 392 Libanius wrote from Antioch to congratulate Ammianus on the successful readings he was giving from his history in the literary salons of Rome, and to urge him to continue. 58 Ammianus would then have been in his early sixties. Between 390 and 397 he completed six more books, for a total of thirty-one, concluding with Valens' death at the Battle of Adrianople in 3 78 . We shall see that these last books probably appeared after the reign of the pro-pagan Western emperor Eugenius (392-94), and so between 394 and 397. 59 We hear nothing more of Ammianus after he finished his history, though he may have lived on for some years in quiet retirement. While not especially conceited, Ammianus looked out for himself without apologies. He expresses no regret at helping to assassinate a general whom he considered wronged, killing a spy who had apparently been promised his life, abandoning a wounded friend who was begging for help, or leaving to glorious deaths or inglorious captivity comrades at Amida who were still fighting. When Ammianus was tired, he took the horse he found and let his less genteel companions walk. When he was afraid of being besieged, he left the child entrusted to his care exposed to danger just outside Nisibis. (As it turned out, Ammianus would have been safer in Nisibis.) Though each of these actions may have been a defensible expedient in a difficult situation, Ammianus saw no need to justify himself. As a gentleman, he assumed his readers would trust his sense of honor. This brilliant and cultivated man was never quite at ease in the army, the city of Rome, or the Christian-ruled empire. Despite some late success, his life was full of frustrations he makes little effort to hide. While his own military career led nowhere, he saw many of his fellow protectores given high com­ mands and two of about his age made emperors-Jovian and Valens. 60 His patron Ursicinus was dismissed in disgrace, and his hero ]ulian died in failure. Ammianus' religion, after an apparently promising revival under Julian, was once again burdened by imperial disfavor and legal disabilities. Ammianus claimed that along with Ursicinus he had repeatedly suffered from official corruption, slander, and favoritism. He probably had to flee his home in

57 Ammianus XXI . 10.6 mentions the city prefecture of Aurelius Victor in 389, and Ammianus XXII . 1 6. 12 refers to the Serapeum at Alexandria as still standing, though it was destroyed in 3 9 1 . Cf. Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 20-26. 5 8 See p. S 1 and n. 1 1 above. 5 9 At XXVI . S . 1 4, Ammianus refers to the consulship of Neoterius in 390 (Matthews, Roman Empire, p. 23), and at XXIX.S.6, 2 1 , and 24 he seems unaware that the Moorish prince Gildo would rebel in 397 (PLRE I, Gildo). 60 Protectores who had become prominent in the preceding generation included Gratian, father of Valentinian I and Valens, and the usurper Magnentius. See PLRE I, Iovianus 3, Valens 8, Magnentius, and Gratianus 1 .

60 The Early Byzantine Historians Antioch for fear of Valens' prosecutions. His experiences at Rome disillu­ sioned him so bitterly that he denounced the Romans twice at length, at the risk of turning his public against his work when it appeared. His history shows his disappointment.

Ammianus '

History

Of Ammianus' original thirty-one books, only Books XIV-XXXI sur­ vive today. All our manuscripts appear to depend on one mostly lost ninth-century archetype with an unusually corrupt text. Its scribe had trouble understanding Ammianus' difficult style, and so probably did the scribe of the manuscript he copied, which had gaps of varying lengths even within the mostly preserved books. 61 The loss of the first thirteen books and the preser­ vation of the last eighteen imply that the surviving part formed the second of two early bound volumes. If the binder simply divided the thirty-one books between the volumes as evenly as possible, on average the lost books would have been about a third longer than the surviving ones, which themselves vary in length. 62 Ammianus says that his history started with the reign of the emperor Nerva (AD 96-98) . 63 Since this was when Tacitus' two complementary histories had ended, presumably Ammianus meant to continue Tacitus, whose works formed the most recent large-scale Roman history in Latin. Tacitus' Annals and Histories together covered the reigns from Tiberius to Domitian ( 1 4-96) in thirty books; about half of their total length is now lost. 64 Since Tacitus' final total of thirty books is close to Ammianus' final total of thirty-one, perhaps Ammianus decided as a sort of flourish to give his history one book more than the work he continued. Yet unlike Tacitus and many other historians of Hellenistic and Roman times, Ammianus seems not to have cared much about maintaining symmetry in his distribution of books, whether by fives or tens or threes or sixes. With prefaces marking new sections at the beginnings of Books XV and XXVI, he divided his thirty-one books into odd groups of fourteen, eleven, and six. 65 Nor are his style, method, and outlook much like those of Tacitus.

61

See most recently Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 20 1-8. Note that if the lost books formed half the work their average length would not have exceeded the surviving Books XXII and XXXI. 6 3 Ammianus XXXI . 1 6.9. 6 4 See most recently Melior, Tacitus; and still Syme, Tacitus. 6 5 Note that Ammianus could easily have adjusted his book divisions to convert them into groups of fifteen, ten, and five, for a total of thirty. Disturbed by the present lack of symmetry, Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 20-3 1 , conjectures that our manuscripts' 62

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Since Ammianus' Book XIV begins with the year 353, the lost part must have averaged almost twenty years per book, though the surviving part aver­ ages less than a year and a half per book. Even if the lost books were long enough to make them about half of the full text, they would still have cov­ ered events at ten times the rate of the later books. Of course, Ammianus had far more information for the most recent years than for the preceding cen­ tury and a half, which were poorly documented. In his preface to Book XV he acknowledges that his earlier books were less comprehensive: 66 As far as I have been able to discover the truth, arranging the different events in order, I have related whatever I could witness in my lifetime or know from laborious interrogation of those involved. The remainder, which the following text will unfold, I shall complete with more care, as best I can, without fearing detractors who may think my work long. For brevity is only praiseworthy at times when it ends inopportune longueurs and subtracts nothing from the knowledge of what happened. Although Ammianus implies that this preface begins a definite expansion of his treatment, the only earlier book we have, Book XIV, is about as detailed as the later ones, since it deals with just the years 353 and 354. Yet Ammianus' practice of putting the deaths of emperors at the ends of books seems to have determined the span of Book XIV, which ends with Gallus' death in 354 after the previous book had ended with the death of the usurper Magnentius in 353. 67 In any case, Ammianus notes in the preface to Book XV that he has already begun drawing on his own experiences and interviews with others, book numbers are wrong (though they are confirmed by Priscian; see p. S 1 and n. 1 1 above), so that not just thirteen but eighteen books have been lost before our Book XIV, giving an original total of thirty-six books. Barnes then supposes a division of books into hexads. Yet nothing indicates the new hexad that Barnes postulates at the beginning of our Book XX, and Ammianus' preface to our Book XV clearly signals a division that interrupts another supposed hexad (our Books XIV-XIX) . 66 Ammianus XV. l . l . Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 29-30, translates limatius absolve­ mus as "I shall discharge . . . in a more polished style, " insisting: "What Ammianus promises . . . is neither greater detail nor even probably greater accuracy, but greater lit­ erary polish." Yet this translation fails to fit the context. Greater polish would not make critics complain that the work was too lengthy, and might very well lead to includ­ ing "inopportune longueurs" at the expense of historical information. Here I translate absolvo not "discharge" but "complete," and limatius not "with greater polish" but "with more care, " which would require both more attention and more length to con­ vey full knowledge of what had occurred. While all four of these meanings are found in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the context is the best guide, particularly because, as Barnes acknowledges (Ammianus, pp. 65-78), Latin was not Ammianus' native language. 6 7 That the death of Magnentius concluded Book XIII is evident from the description of Constantius' punishing Magnentius' partisans at XIV. S . The death of Constantius 11

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which should have caused some earlier expansion. Moreover, his twenty-five datable references to his lost books are very lopsided, with ten references to the 24 1 years from 96 to 33 7 and fifteen to the sixteen years from 33 7 to 3 5 3 68 The years after Constantine's death in 3 3 7, which Ammianus and his informants could remember, presumably took up two or three of the lost books, which may have been introduced with another preface. 69 Ammianus may still not have realized quite how prolix he was becoming until he started Book XV. If we compare numbers of books in histories that covered some of the second and third centuries, Ammianus seemingly included much more detail than Dexippus or Longinus, about the same amount as Herodian, and about half as much as Dio. 70 In fact, the references Ammianus makes in his later books show that he consulted Herodian, but give no clear indication that he knew Dio J 1 Ammianus could have produced a more detailed narrative up to 229 simply by adapting Dio's work, which he should have been able to find somewhere. Plainly his main interest was in contemporary history, and when he says he will finish his work "with more care" after Book XIV, he indirectly admits that his previous research was less thorough than it could have been. .

ends Book XXI; that of Jovian ends XXV; that of Valentinian I with its consequences ends XXX; and that of Valens with its consequences ends XXXI. The only emperor whose death does not conclude a book is Julian, but to end Book XV with his death would have either left too little material for another book before what was then the end of Ammianus' work, or forced Ammianus to give more importance to the brief reign of ]ovian, which he considered a mere postscript to julian's reign (cf. XXI . 1 6.20-21). 68 For a full list of the references to the lost books with most of their identifiable dates, see Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 213-1 7. Ten of these references seem not to be datable. The datable references to Ammianus' account of the years before 337 appear in nn. 72-7 4 below. The datable references to his account of the years after 33 7 are: XXV.4.23 (337; see n. 75 below); XIV. 1 0.2 (342); XX. l . 1 , XVII.8.4 , and XXVIII.3.8 (343); XX.6.5 (344); XVIII.9.3 (when troops serving in 359 were new recruits); XV.5 . 1 6 (350); XXI.8. 1 and XXII. 1 3 . 3 (under Magnentius, 350-53); XVI. 6.2 (35 1 ); XIV. 7.21 (35 1 or 352); XV.6.4 (353); and XVI. 1 0. 12 and XX. 1 1 .32 (under Constantius 11 before 353). 6 9 Cf. Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 27-30. 7 0 Dexippus and Longinus took twelve and eighteen books respectively to pro­ ceed from the beginnings of Greek history to the second century. Herodian covers fifty-eight years in eight books, but since his books are decidedly shorter his coverage is comparable to what Ammianus' would have been. Dio, whose books are about as long as those of Ammianus, after AD 96 took thirteen books (LXVIII-LXXX) to cover just over half as much time as Ammianus ( 1 33 years instead of 257). 7 1 See Gilliam, "Ammianus," especially p. 144 and n. 46; and Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 213-1 7.

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Like his surviving books, the earlier ones included not just a narrative but digressions. The digressions that Ammianus' references locate within his nar­ rative were on Egypt under Hadrian (reigned 1 1 7-38), on the Saracens and on a statue of Apollo under Marcus Aurelius (reigned 1 6 1-80), on a statue of the Great Mother under Commodus (reigned 1 80-92), and on Egypt again under Septimius Severus (reigned 193-2 1 1 ) . 72 Ammianus also refers back to his narratives of the reigns of Trajan (98-1 1 7), Marcus, and Severus. 73 For the century and a quarter after Severus, Ammianus refers only to his narra­ tives of the Gordians (reigned 238-44) and of an incident around 324 under Licinius. 74 Despite the profound and lasting impact that Diocletian and Constantine had on the empire in which Ammianus lived, he refers only once to his account of either of them, citing his explanation that Constantine was responsible for starting a war with the Persians in 337. 75 Evidently Ammianus went into more detail in his account of Constantine's sons. If he adopted his rule of ending books with the deaths of emperors as early as Constantine's death in 33 7, Book XI could have covered the complex events up to the death of Constantine 11 in 340 and Book XII could have reached the death of Constans in 350, leaving Book XIII for the usurpation of Magnentius until his death in 353. 76 Ammianus seems to have disliked all the empire's rulers during these troubled years of civil wars and enemy raids. Later he observes that Constans disregarded advice to act honorably, and that Constantius 11 always let corruption run rampant at court. 77 The first two preserved books show no signs that their tale of injustice and misery was much different from what had gone before. At the beginning of our surviving text, Ammianus opens Book XIV by denouncing the Caesar Gallus' punishment of innocent men at Antioch in 353. Then he shifts to the West and deplores Constantius II's cruelty to real and alleged partisans of the defeated Magnentius. Rioting at Rome over a wine shortage inspires Ammianus' first diatribe against the city's people for their greed, triviality, and inferiority to their ancestors. With 354 we return to Gallus' crimes in the East, with a digression on the eastern provinces

7 2 Cf. Ammianus XXII. 1 5 . 1 , XIV.4.2, XXIII.6.24, and XXII.9.6; and Emmett, " Digressions. " 7 3 Ammianus XXV.8.5 (Trajan and Severus) and XXIII.6.24 and XXIX.6. 1 (Marcus, with Verus). 74 Ammianus XIV. 1 .8 (Gordians), XXIII.5. 7 (Gordian III), and XVI.10. 1 6 (cf. Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 21 4-15). 75 Ammianus XXV.4.23. For the date, see Barnes, Constantine, p. 259. 7 6 Though the longer period from 340 to 350 might have taken up two books, then only nine books would remain for events from 96 to 3 3 7, and Books X-XIV would not seem cursory enough to explain Ammianus' promise of more length and care at the beginning of Book XV. 77 Ammianus XVI.7.5 and 8. 1 2-13.

64 The Early Byzantine Historians that Gallus ruled. After lamenting the trials Ursicinus had to conduct on Gallus' orders, Ammianus tells how Constantius learned of Gallus' offenses and had Gallus executed. The book concludes with remarks on the goddess Retribution (under the Greek names Adrastia and Nemesis) and an obituary of Gallus. Book XV, after its preface promising to take more care, begins with Constantius' learning of Gallus' death. In 355 Constantius decided to perse­ cute alleged supporters of Gallus but not to prosecute Ursicinus or the future emperor Julian. Attention then shifts to the Rhine frontier, where the army defeated raids of the Alamanni and Ursicinus put down Silvanus' rebellion. After recording more riots at Rome, Ammianus describes Constantius' procla­ mation of Julian as Caesar at Milan, with appropriate invented speeches. Julian's dispatch to Gaul inspires a digression on the Gauls and their coun­ try. The end of the book refers to more misgovernment and enemy raids in the East. With Book XVI and Julian's assumption of the consulship for 356, the history's tone becomes less negative. Ammianus insists that his account of Julian's deeds, though resembling a panegyric, will be truthful. Most of the book describes Julian's victories in Gaul and wonderfully wise and sober habits. Returning to Constantius, Ammianus describes the corruption of the court, further false accusations of Julian and others, and executions of some of the accused. The events of 35 7 begin with the triumphal entry into Rome of Constantius, who is criticized for celebrating his victory over his fel­ low Roman Magnentius. Finally the narrative turns to Julian's war with the Alamanni, culminating in an elaborate but stirring description of the Caesar's victory at Strasbourg. Book XVII brings Julian's Alamannic war to a triumphant close, capped by his defeat of Frankish raiders. Starting the events of 358 with Constantius, the book describes his erection of an obelisk at Rome, quoting a Greek transla­ tion of its hieroglyphic inscriptions, and his refusal of an unreasonable peace proposal from King Sapor II, quoting letters exchanged by the two monarchs. An account of a devastating earthquake at Nicomedia begins a digression on earthquakes. Ammianus then returns to Gaul and Julian, who forced peace on most of the Franks and Alamanni but was again slandered by Constantius' envious courtiers. Yet Ammianus seems in a better mood even with Constan­ tius, whose campaigns against the Sarmatians and Quadi ended in victories and an eloquent and modest oration by the emperor. Book XVIII begins the events of 359, when Julian imposed peace on the last of the Alamanni by raiding their territory. Then Ammianus returns to the slanders and corruption at Constantius' court, which threatened Ursicinus and provoked the protector Antoninus to desert to the Persians. This in turn introduces the story of Ursicinus' and Ammianus' journey from the East to Thrace and back, their perilous flight from Nisibis, and their arrival at Amida, followed by Ammianus' scouting mission to the satrap of Corduene. The book

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concludes with the Persian invasion of Mesopotamia that trapped Ammianus in Amida. The dramatic story of the siege of Amida takes up the greater part of Book XIX. Along with his own experiences, Ammianus describes an epidemic in the overcrowded city and the attacks, stratagems, and sallies that ended in its fall to the Persians. Then he records grain riots at Rome, the Sarmatians' nearly successful attempt to surprise and kill Constantius, and more of Con­ stantius' treason trials, which condemned innocent pagans for consulting oracles. Book XX begins the year 360 with julian's sending troops to Britain to repel a raid by the Picts. Shifting to the East, the history describes Constantius' dismissal of Ursicinus after the fall of Amida and a solar eclipse that was sup­ posedly visible in the East. When Constantius ordered Julian to send troops to fight the Persians, the outraged soldiers at Paris demanded Julian take the title of Augustus, which he accepted. Back in the East, Ammianus describes Sapor's siege and capture of the frontier towns of Singara and Bezabde. There follow descriptions and paraphrases of the letters exchanged by Julian and Constantius about Julian's proclamation as Augustus, which Constantius refused to recognize. After another of Julian's victories over the Franks, the book ends with Constantius' unsuccessful siege of Bezabde. Book XXI covers the civil war between Julian and Constantius throughout the empire. The book opens with Julian at Vienne, hearing in a dream Greek verses prophesying Constantius' death, to which Ammianus adds a defense of the veracity of prophecies. The events of 3 6 1 begin with Constantius' failed attempt to incite the Alamanni to attack Julian and Julian's decla­ ration of war on Constantius. Next comes Julian's advance to Sirmium, and his men's siege of loyalist forces at Aquileia until news came that Constantius had died. The history then reverts to the time before Constantius' death, recalling how Sapor's withdrawal from the frontier had let Constantius march against Julian. After describing Constantius' premoni­ tions of death and final recognition of Julian as his successor, the book ends with Constantius' obituary. Book XXII opens with Julian's hearing of the death of Constantius and arriving at Constantinople. Ammianus criticizes julian's trials of Constantius' partisans and wholesale dismissal of palace servants. Though approving of Julian's reopening pagan temples and allowing Christians to squabble over theology, the historian finds Julian's humility ostentatious. The emperor's stay at Constantinople, which continued into 362, introduces a digression on Thrace and the Black Sea coast. Then the narrative follows Julian from Constantinople to Antioch, where he remained during the winter of 363. While praisingjulian's religious tolerance, Ammianus obj ects to the lynching of Bishop George of Alexandria, which Julian deplored without punishing. The auspicious discovery of an Egyptian bull with sacred markings opens a digression on Egypt that ends the book.

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Book XXIII, the first of three on Julian's Persian expedition, begins with bad omens when the army set out. The book continues with Julian's sending a detachment to Armenia under his relative Procopius, who was ordered to rej oin the main army later and allegedly named the secret heir to the empire. Having described Julian's equipment and fleet, Ammianus adds a digression on siege machinery. In the following account of the army's advance, amid further unfavorable or ambiguous omens, references to Julian's army as "we" show that Ammianus had joined the campaign. After an inspirational speech by Julian to his men, Ammianus finishes the book with a long digression on the Persian Empire. In Book XXIV Ammianus begins his vivid account of Julian's Persian invasion with several Roman victories. Marching along the Euphrates accom­ panied by a fleet, the army sacked Persian towns, routed Persian troops, and besieged, stormed, and demolished a well-defended Persian city. 78 After destroying another fort and defeating a Persian army, the army arrived before the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, where Julian sacrificed to Mars with inaus­ picious results. At this point modern scholars have postulated the loss in our text of a passage explaining why Procopius' force failed to rejoin the main army. 79 Then Ammianus depicts Julian's decision to burn his fleet as a tragic mistake, which forced the army to march back along the eastern bank of the Tigris toward the Roman frontier. Book XXV begins on a note of foreboding with the arrival of King Sapor and his army. Ammianus records Roman successes in skirmishes with Per­ sian troops, but also the Romans' distress from hunger. Then Julian received a fatal wound, and after a dignified speech died without naming an heir. His death introduces his obituary and the conference at which Salutius refused nomination as emperor, allowing ]ovian, commander of the protectores, to be acclaimed by the army. Though by this time the soldiers were almost starv­ ing, Ammianus condemns Jovian's decision to make peace with Sapor by ceding the border region with the cities of Nisibis and Singara. The historian stops referring to the army as "we" after it reached Antioch. Jovian left for Constantinople and died in early 364 on the way, apparently from acciden­ tal suffocation. The book ends with Jovian's obituary, which concluded the original version of Ammianus' history. Book XXVI opens with a new preface, observing that earlier Ammianus had decided not to include recent events so as to avoid "the dangers often connected with the truth. " Without saying why he changed his mind or how he will avoid dangerous truths, he declares that insignificant details

7 8 Ammianus calls it "Maiozamalcha," but its identification remains problematic; cf. Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 1 55-56. 79 The gap seems to be at the beginning of XXIV. 7.3. Cf. XXIV.8.8; Bames, Ammianus, p. 205; and Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 158-59.

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are unsuitable for history. Resuming his narrative with the proclamation of Valentinian I, Ammianus describes how Valentinian divided the empire and the army, keeping the West for himself and choosing his brother Valens as emperor of the East. After Valentinian's departure for Gaul to fight the Alamanni, the account turns to Julian's relative Procopius, who declared himself emperor at Constantinople. Though Ammianus shows little esteem for either Valentinian or Valens, he also ridicules Procopius, who took over Thrace and northwestern Anatolia before his partisans betrayed him in 365. The book concludes with Procopius' execution and obituary, the harsh pun­ ishment of other rebels, and an earthquake and tidal wave in the eastern Mediterranean. Book XXVII returns to Gaul, where Valentinian's forces defeated Alaman­ nic raiders in 366. After mentioning further events at Rome, the narrative shifts to Valens' four-year campaign to punish the Goths for supporting Procopius, which is introduced by another digression on Thrace. Return­ ing to the West, Ammianus describes Valentinian's proclamation of his son Gratian as eo-emperor in 367. Ammianus praises Valentinian's master of cav­ alry Theodosius, father of the later emperor Theodosius, for defeating raids on Britain by the Picts. The rest of the book covers miscellaneous events in 368 and Persian attempts to seize Armenia and Iberia up to 370. Book XXVIII opens with the unjust penalties inflicted by Maximinus on aristocrats at Rome between 368 and 3 70, which seem still to have rankled when Ammianus arrived in the city. Next come Valentinian's fortification of the Rhine frontier in 369, further disturbances in both West and East, and Theodosius the Elder's measures to restore Britain after his triumphant campaign. The narrative returns to Rome for the prefecture of Ampelius in 3 71-72 and Ammianus' second diatribe against the city's people. The end of the book tells how Valentinian's dishonest officials let the Moors raid Tripolitania for years. Book XXIX starts ominously with the plot to make Theodore emperor to fulfill the THEOD- oracle, which set off Valens' reign of terror at Antioch in 3 72. Turning to the West, Ammianus records other cruel punishments inflicted by Valentinian, but defends and even praises Theodosius the Elder for similarly arbitrary and fierce reprisals during a successful campaign against the Moorish rebel Firmus in 3 73-74 . A victory over the Sarmatians by the future emperor Theodosius the Younger and a flood at Rome in 3 7 4 round off the book. Book XXX begins with the sordid story of the assassination of King Pap of Armenia on Valens' orders, followed by failed negotiations with the Persians over Armenia in 3 73. Reverting to the previous year, Ammianus describes another of Valentinian's wars with the Alamanni. A reference to judicial corruption under Valens introduces a digression on the rascality of East­ ern lawyers. Back in the West, Valentinian marched against the Quadi in Illyricum in 3 75 but ignored the corruption of his officials there. The book

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concludes with Valentinian's death in a rage at envoys from the Quadi, Valentinian's obituary, and the proclamation of his young son Valentinian 11 as Gratian's colleague. Book XXXI opens with omens of Valens' approaching defeat and demise. After a digression on the savage customs of the Huns and Alans, Ammi­ anus describes how they drove the Goths to the Roman frontier. He laments Valens' decision to let many Goths settle in Thrace in 3 76, which induced other Goths to follow without permission. After another digression on pre­ vious invasions of Roman territory, Ammianus tells how tension between Romans and Goths broke out into open warfare in Thrace. Meanwhile Gra­ tian's victories over the Alamanni freed him to march to Valens' aid in 3 78. Valens decided t o fight the Goths before Gratian could share the credit, but in the following battle at Adrianople suffered " losses never recuperable, which have cost the Roman Empire dearly." The dead included Valens and a son of Ursicinus. 80 Observing that Valens' death had been foretold by the THEOD- oracle of 3 72, Ammianus provides the usual imperial obituary. He fails to mention the obvious fact that the oracle had predicted the subsequent accession of Theodosius. After praising an Eastern general for massacring the Goths under his com­ mand before they could learn of the defeat at Adrianople, Ammianus adds a brief conclusion: 81 These things, from the principate of the emperor Nerva up to the killing of Valens, I, a former soldier and a Greek, have recorded to the best of my ability, never (I think) having knowingly dared to dishonor my avowed task of veracity by silence or a lie. May the rest be written by more capable men than I, with advantages of age and learning-whom, if they wish to undertake it, I advise to fit their language to the grander style. Ammianus' achievement

Ammianus himself wrote history in the grand style, not a chronicle or epit­ ome like the recent Latin works of ]erome and Eutropius, but a full-dress classical history like those of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus. With good reason, Ammianus worried that no one might ever write another such work in Latin. Even in Book XXXI, apparently composed after his success­ ful readings from earlier books, he refers gloomily to "my readers-if there should ever be any." 82 Not even Tacitus, Livy, and Sallust can ever have been widely read, and none of their principal works has survived in even as large

8 0 Ammianus XXXI. l 3. 1 1 and 18. Ursicinus had more than one son; see Ammianus XIV. l 1 .3. 8 l Ammianus XXXI. 1 6. 9 . 82 Ammianus XXXI. S . lO.

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a proportion as Ammianus' own. 83 They may however have remained intact longer, since his first thirteen books could have been lost as early as the sixth century. 84 Ammianus knew that Greek culture was more vigorous than Latin culture in his time. Why then, since Greek was his native tongue, did he write in Latin? Even if he felt he had to flee the Greek East for fear of Valens-and this is no more than a plausible conj ecture-Ammianus could have written in Greek at Rome, hoping to return to Antioch when Valens died. The sugges­ tion has been made that Ammianus wrote in Latin to avoid competition, since Eunapius' history in Greek may have appeared before his, or at least Ammianus may have heard of it and thought that it might. 85 Ammianus was however a self-confident writer, and unlikely to have feared compari­ son with Eunapius. Though Eunapius' history is mostly lost today, many complete texts survive in Greek by fourth-century pagan writers like Julian, Libanius, and Eunapius himself. A history in Greek by Ammianus should have had quite a good chance of recognition and survival. Nonetheless, Ammianus, who shows his respect for Latin authors in many allusions and quotations, probably wanted to do what he could to bolster the contemporary revival of Latin culture, in which he could expect to be a more important figure than in the better-established Eastern literary world. 86 He may also have thought that the future of paganism was less bleak in the Latin West than in the more Christianized East, or even that the future of the Roman Empire depended more on its original core in the West than on its eastern provinces. In any case he held the view, by his time rather old-fashioned, that the Roman Empire belonged to the city of Rome. Before his first denunciation of the city's current inhabitants, Ammianus declares that Rome "will survive as long as there are men." In her youth, he says, with the help of Virtue and Fortune, both of which he considers gods, she conquered all the world that was worth mentioning. Now, grown old, she has gone into a sort of retirement. Therefore, "the venerable city, " having made her conquests and laws in order to secure her freedom, "like

8 3 Here I leave the monographs of Tacitus and Sallust out of account. On Tacitus, see p. 60 above. Of Livy, we have Books 1-10 and 21-45 of the original 142 (about 25%), plus fragments and two epitomes, one fragmentary. Of Sallust's Histories we have only fragments. 8 4 Barnes, Ammianus, p. 30, suggests that Ammianus' lost books were already gone by the time of Priscian (see p. 51 n. 1 1 above), who cites only the beginning of Book XIV, the first book that survives today. But even if this was true of the copy Priscian saw in Constantinople, Eustathius of Epiphania could still have consulted a complete copy in Antioch before 526; see below, pp. 3 1 6-19 with nn. 13, 24, 30, and 3 1 . 8 5 See Alan Cameron, " Latin Revival," pp. 47-48. O n the date of the first edition of Eunapius' history, see below, pp. 82-83. 86 See Alan Cameron, " Latin Revival," pp. 42-58.

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a good parent, both prudent and wealthy, has entrusted to the Caesars, as if to her children, " the management of the government and army she had previously managed for herself. Nevertheless, she retains universal respect because of her position and her past, even if many of her present inhabitants fail to live up to her reputation. 87 This quaint extended metaphor expresses Ammianus' simultaneous regard for the city, dismay at its people's behavior, and recognition that the emperors now had all the actual power. One of his purposes in writing in Latin at Rome was surely to uphold the city's prestige and to shame its people into improving their behavior, a task that he blames his countryman Ampelius for shirking as city prefect. 88 What Ammianus thought had grown old-and weak-was the city of Rome, not the emperors, the army, or the empire. He insists that not even the disastrous defeat at Adrianople lacked precedents, and compares it to the catastrophic Battle of Cannae in 2 1 6 BC, from which of course Rome soon recovered to triumph. 89 He considered the Battle of Adrianople irreparable only in the sense that it had badly harmed and scarred the army and the empire; both could regain their strength in time. 90 In his opinion, Rome had defeated the Teutones and Cimbri under the Late Republic and the German invaders under Marcus Aurelius because earlier Romans had been less flabby, not so greedy or gluttonous, and more patriotic. The repulse of the Persian and German invasions of the third century he attributes to the virtues of the emperors Claudius Gothicus and Aurelian. 9 1 Ammianus implies that Rome needed nothing more than virtuous emperors and the vigorous enforcement of proper conduct. In Julian Ammianus found a virtuous emperor in his own lifetime, and the distribution of his treatment shows how important he thought Julian was. Of the history's thirty-one books on 282 years, eleven books cover the ten years of Julian's reign as Caesar or Augustus (355-64) . At the beginning of his section on Julian, Ammianus announces that he will write with more care and at greater length; after that section, pronouncing minor details to have no place in history, he proceeds more summarily. 92 The books on Julian are the only part of the history that interrupts its sad catalogue of injus­ tices and misfortunes to offer sustained hope. Julian is the only one of the eight Augusti and Caesars in the surviving books of whom Ammianus truly approves. We know he also had favorable opinions of Trajan, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius because Ammianus praises Julian for combining

8? 88 89

90 91

92

Ammianus XIV.6.3-7. Ammianus XXVIII .4.3-5 . Ammianus XXXI. 1 3 . 19. Ammianus XXXI. 13 . 1 1 . Ammianus XXXI.S . l l-1 7. Ammianus XV. l . l and XXVI. l . l -2.

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Trajan's victories with Antoninus' clemency and Marcus' philosophy. 93 0ther incidental remarks suggest that, apart from Claudius Gothicus and Aurelian, Ammianus had scant regard for most of the emperors, not just notorious ones like Commodus and Maximinus Thrax but some celebrated ones like Hadrian and Diocletian, whom he found overly haughty. 94 Especially in his obituaries, Ammianus tries to give a balanced view, acknowledging that even Julian had faults, and that even the other emper­ ors of his time had good qualities. The obituaries show what mattered most to Ammianus. The Caesar Gallus was cruel and undisciplined but dignified. 95 Constantius II was suspicious, cruel, tolerant of abuses, and superstitious, but dignified and abstemious. 96Julian was abstemious, wise, brave, and generous, but superstitious and sometimes unjust. 97Jovian was poorly educated and too fond of food, wine, and women, but kindly and dignified. 98 The usurper Procopius was a rebel and a troublemaker, but never killed anyone. 99 Valentinian I was irascible, cruel, greedy, envious, and cow­ ardly, but chaste, a good administrator, and tolerant in religious matters. 100 Valens was greedy, cruel, suspicious, and poorly educated, but a good and honest administrator and builder. 101 Though not in an obituary, Ammianus pronounces Gratian brave and merciful but too easily led by his associates into frivolity and "evil deeds." 102 Obviously Ammianus differed from most modern historians, who judge these emperors primarily as administrators and find them reasonably com­ petent. Even for his time, Ammianus was conservative and puritanical. He gave most weight to a ruler's education, chastity, self-discipline, personal bravery, mercy to enemies, and dignified bearing. He praises even Gallus, Constantius, and Jovian for upholding the majesty of their office, and blames even Julian for failing to maintain it properly. 103 Though Ammianus admits that emperors like Constantius II and Valens were in real danger

93 Ammianus XVI . l .4 (also praising Julian for having the prudence of Titus); cf. XXX.9. 1 (saying that if Valentinian I had lived up to his own best qualities he would have resembled Trajan or Marcus). 94 Ammianus XXXI.S . l 7 (Claudius and Aurelian), XXI . 1 6.8 and XXXI . 10. 18 (Commodus), XIV. l .8 (Maximinus), XXV.4. 1 7 and XXX.8 . 1 0 (Hadrian), and XV.S. 18 (Diocletian). 9 5 Ammianus XIV. l 1 .24-34. 9 6 Ammianus XXI. 16. 97 Ammianus XXV.4. 9 8 Ammianus XXV. 10. 1 4-1 7. 99 Ammianus XXVI . 9 . 1 0-l l . 100 Ammianus XXX.8-9. 10 1 A mmianus XXXI. 14. 1 02 Ammianus XXVII.6. 1 S and XXXI . 1 0. 1 8-19. 1 0 3 C f. Thompson, Historical Work, pp. 82-84.

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from conspiracies, he praises Marcus Aurelius for burning unread the cor­ respondence between the rebel Avidius Cassius and his eo-conspirators, and suggests that Constantius should have abdicated rather than defend himself as he did. l04 While Ammianus gives several emperors credit for administrative ability, by this he means mostly their restraint of corrupt officials, for reasons of morality rather than efficiency. He was uninterested in fiscal discipline, which looked to him like greed, or in strategic insight, which he lacked himself. He obtusely condemns Valentinian I for collecting money to rebuild the army after the Persian debacle, praises julian for the military actions that led to that debacle, and denounces J avian for ceding Roman land to rescue the starving army afterwards. 105 Ammianus had strong preferences, not to say prejudices. As a pagan, he had no love for Christian emperors. He especially disliked Gallus and Constantius II because of their treatment of his patron Ursicinus. He con­ sidered ]avian an unworthy successor to Julian. Ammianus hated Valens for trying and executing so many learned pagans, some of whom were surely Ammianus' friends, and for threatening many more, the historian himself among them. Valentinian I's prosecutions, and his allowing Max­ iminus to prosecute others, probably also affected people who were or later became Ammianus' friends. Perhaps more than was justified, Ammianus felt that he, Ursicinus, and their acquaintances had suffered from the climate of corruption and suspicion that prevailed at the courts of most of these emperors. 106 Yet Ammianus was right that corruption was a major prob­ lem in the fourth-century empire, and had serious political and military consequences. 107 That his approval of Julian depended largely on their shared paganism is evident, even if Ammianus failed to share Julian's passion for reviving the practice of blood sacrifice . The two worst injustices the historian ascribes to Julian are his forcing decurions with valid exemptions to serve on city councils and his barring Christians from public teaching of grammar or rhetoric. 1 08 Both measures probably harmed some of Ammianus' friends; the former may have touched Ammianus himself, and the latter set a prece­ dent against the sort of religious toleration that pagans would later need under Christian rule. Ammianus had a clear personal motive for praising Valentinian I's policy of religious toleration, which would have benefited the historian himself at Rome.

1 04

Arnrnianus XXI . 1 6.9-14 (Constantius and Marcus) and XXIX. l . l S-22 (Valens). Arnrnianus XXX.8.8-9 (Valentinian), XXV.4. 1 1 and 23-27 Oulian), and XXV. 7.5-14 Oovian). 1 06 Cf. Thornpson, Historical Work, pp. 42- 7 1 . 10 7 See especially MacMullen, Corruption. 10 8 Arnrnianus XXII.9. 12 and 10.7 and XXV.4.20-21 . 1 05

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At the beginning of Book XXVI Ammianus observes that at first he had decided not to write about events after 364 because telling the truth would often have been dangerous. What changed his mind? His later books are highly critical of Valentinian I and Valens, who died in 375 and 3 78. But in the West Valentinian was succeeded by his sons Gratian and Valentinian 11, who died only in 383 and 392. Both of them and the young Valentinian's mother, Justina, would have objected to such touches as Valentinian I's man­ eating pet bears. 109 What changed Ammianus' mind seems therefore to have been Valentinian II's replacement by Eugenius in 392, which ended the rule of the Valentinian dynasty. Under the pro-pagan Eugenius histori­ ans could even have criticized Christianity, as long as they thought Eugenius could conciliate or withstand the Eastern emperor Theodosius, who defeated and killed Eugenius in 394. Yet Ammianus seems not to feel at all free to criticize either Christianity or Theodosius in his last six books. Ammianus' attitude toward the usurper Procopius in Book XXVI is interest­ ing. Since Procopius was a well-educated pagan of sober habits and merciful disposition, and said to be julian's designated heir, he should have been much more to Ammianus' taste than Valens, whom the historian thought unculti­ vated, suspicious, and merciless. 1 10 Although technically a rebel, as a relative of Julian Procopius had a hereditary claim to the throne, and Ammianus knew he had virtually been forced to revolt by Valens' patent hostility. 1 1 1 Elsewhere Ammianus sympathizes with necessary revolts by good men like Silvanus in 355 or Julian in 360. Yet the historian condemns and ridicules Procopius relentlessly, compar­ ing this reluctant rebel who never killed anyone to a "predatory beast. " Ammianus denounces Procopius for trying to buy the empire, though he seems only to have promised the customary donative, and mocks him for his necessarily makeshift costume at his acclamation, though Julian had the same problem in 360. Ammianus inconsistently depicts this supposed predator's stammering in terror while giving a speech at Constantinople that was well received. Trying to explain how such an absurd figure gathered so much support, Ammianus cites examples of other unworthy but successful pretenders in history. 1 12 Finally, he complains that the men who betrayed Procopius were executed rather than rewarded. 1 1 3 1 0 9 Ammianus XXIX.3.9. Though Ammianus describes these bears as man-eating, he never names any men they actually ate. 1 10 On Procopius' education, sobriety, and mercy, see Ammianus XXVI.6. 1 and 9 . 1 1; on his paganism and designation as Julian's heir, see XXIII.3.2 and XXVI.6.2-3. 1 1 1 Ammianus XXVI.6. 1 and 3-9. 1 1 2 Ammianus XXVI.6. 10-20. For a different interpretation-that Ammianus simply abhorred rebellions-see Blockley, Ammianus, pp. 55-6 1 , and Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 1 9 1-203. 1 1 3 Ammianus XXVI.9. 1 0.

7 4 The Early Byzantine Historians Why did Ammianus adopt this position? If a pagan historian, a professed admirer of the pagan Julian and a former suspect in the pagan conspiracy of Theodore, had openly sympathized with the pagan usurper Procopius, his readers would inevitably have assumed he also sympathized with the pro-pagan usurper Eugenius. Probably Ammianus did in fact wish success to both Eugenius and Procopius. Given that most subjects expressed loyalty to any regime while it lasted, implying sympathy for Eugenius in a work that appeared under him might not have been dangerous even later. Yet to favor pagan usurpation in a work that first appeared under the strongly Christian Theodosius would have been reckless. 1 14 Since Ammianus went out of his way not to praise Procopius, he probably wrote after 394. His treatment of both the younger and the elder Theodosius is almost embarrassingly laudatory. Ammianus writes nothing unfavorable about either of them, in contrast to almost every other prominent figure in his history. Despite his denunciations of the cruelty of Gallus, Constan­ tius 11, Valens, and Valentinian I, Ammianus pointedly defends Theodosius the Elder against " malevolent critics" who think he was cruel to burn alive or maim his soldiers for desertion, flight, or refusing combat. 1 1 5 Ammianus also probably exaggerates the "frequent engagements" in which Theodosius the Younger, "later a most illustrious prince, " defeated the Sarmatians in 3 7 4 . 1 1 6 The historian however avoids mentioning either the execution o f Theodosius the Elder, which happened i n 3 7 6 before the conclusion o f the history, or the accession of Theodosius the Younger, which occurred in 3 79 just after the history ends. Ammianus recounts Gratian's campaigns as late as 3 78, and he originally planned to record the executions that occurred under Gratian in 3 76. The historian observes that the detested prosecutor Maximinus was executed in that year, "as will be told at the proper time. " 1 1 7 Yet Ammianus never keeps his promise. His motive cannot be reluctance to condemn the execution of the elder Theodosius, which was plainly one of the "evil deeds" he blames on Gratian's associates. 1 18 Yet Ammianus may have been reluctant to explain the reason for the execution, which only the church historian Socrates appears to reveal. According to him, a Theodosius who seems to be Theodosius the Elder was the most prominent of those executed merely 1 1 4 On the political situation, see Williams and Friell, Theodosius, pp. 1 19-3 7. Although Eugenius was a nominal Christian, he was under the control o f h i s pagan general Arbogast, who had chosen him. 1 1 5 Ammianus XXIX.S.22-24, 3 1 , 39, and 48-50. Cf. Thompson, Historical Work, pp. 89-92. 1 1 6 Ammianus XXIX.6. 1 5-16. Cf. Zosimus IV. l 6, who mentions just one battle, though it was a celebrated victory. 1 1 7 Ammianus XXVIII.l .57; cf. PLRE I, Maximinus 7. 1 1 8 Ammianus XXVII.6. 1 5 .

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for having a name beginning with THEOD-, which the oracle of 3 72 had predicted for Valens' successor. l 19 Ammianus believed in oracles in general and this one in particular, which had predicted not j ust the place and manner of Valens' death but the merits and name of his successor, Theodosius the Younger. 1 20 The historian would therefore have understood the fears that evidently impelled Valens to secure the execution of Theodosius the Elder in the confusion after Valentinian I's death. Yet attributing those fears to Valens would have seemed to justify the execution. Writing about it would have been still more awkward if Ammianus thought, probably rightly, that belief in the oracle was what had led Gratian to choose the younger Theodosius as Valens' successor. Theodosius might well have resented the implication he owed his throne to the pagan oracle that had caused his father's death. Finally Ammianus decided to avoid the problem altogether by not describing either the execution of the father or the selection of the son. 121 Thus Ammianus probably started writing his last six books no earlier than 392, when Valentinian 11 died, and completed them no earlier than 394, when Theodosius defeated and executed Eugenius. After the latter date Ammianus may have altered what he had written before it, perhaps even deleting an account of the executions of 3 76. Since the same dynasty still ruled after Theodosius was succeeded by his son Honorius in 395, Ammianus could have completed his history as late as 397. 122 The opinions expressed in his final books on anything that concerns paganism or the family of Theodosius are therefore not necessarily candid. 123 Though none of this means that Ammianus lied, he may well have felt he had distorted the truth somewhat in his remarks against Procopius and in favor of the elder and younger Theodosii. Otherwise Ammianus seems honest, if often biased and not always reli­ able. 124 His long digressions, unlike those of Herodotus, derive less from his own observations and interviews than from wide but often uncritical reading

1 1 9 Socrates IV. 1 9. Socrates says he was a noble Spaniard, as Theodosius the Elder was, and calls him "little Theodosius, " perhaps a reference to short stature. 1 20 Ammianus XXI. 1 . 7-14 (the reliability of oracles), XXI X . 1 .32-33 (the 0EOL1oracle) and 2. 20 (its truthfulness), and XXXI. 1 4.8-9 (fulfi.llment of the oracle at Adrianople). 1 2 1 For a full discussion of this question, see Treadgold, " Predicting." 1 22 See above, p. 59 and n. 59. 1 2 3 Note that here my conclusions generally agree with those of Thompson, Historical Work, pp. 1 08-1 7 . 1 2 4 For a somewhat harsher judgment on Ammianus' accuracy, see Bames, Ammianus, which however seems a little less harsh than his earlier judgment in Bames, " Literary Convention. "

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of earlier Greek and Latin authors. 125 A few digressions do come mainly from his own experience, like those on siege machines and the faults of Roman aristocrats and Antiochene lawyers; but his geographical descriptions, besides being full of myths and errors, give very little information on conditions in his own time. 126 A particularly disturbing inaccuracy occurs in his digres­ sion on eclipses, which is introduced by an account of an eclipse in 360 that, contrary to his explicit statement, could not be seen in Roman territory. 127 Ammianus is at his best, and as far as we can judge at his most trustworthy, in describing contemporary people and events. He gives lifelike details, pro­ duces credible characterizations, and is less one-sided than Tacitus or most other ancient historians; the tallying of virtues and vices in his obituaries of emperors seems influenced by the imperial biographies of Suetonius. Occa­ sionally Ammianus does let his prejudices distort his account, notably when he suppresses the fact that Valens' supposedly innocent victim, King Pap of Armenia, had himself murdered the head of the Armenian Church. 128 On the whole, however, Ammianus omits church history rather than misrepre­ sents it. The reason was not so much that he disliked Christianity (though he surely did) as that he considered it an unsuitable subject for the classical sort of history he was writing. 129 Ammianus includes more statistics than most ancient historians, for such things as numbers of soldiers and casualties in military engagements. He realized that statistical information could be important, and regrets his inabil­ ity to discover the precise numbers killed in the engagements leading up to the Battle of Adrianople. 130 He also inserts a few documents like the letters exchanged by Constantius and Sapor 11, which appear to be essen­ tially authentic. l 3 1 In the tradition of classical historians like Thucydides and Tacitus, Ammianus mentions few dates, but his annalistic arrange­ ment almost always makes clear the year in which each event occurred. His invented speeches are fairly lively-or at least fairly short-by the standards of ancient historians after Thucydides. While often quoting and citing earlier Greek and Latin writers for literary purposes, Ammianus seems to have made little use of written sources in the surviving part of his history. As he indicates in his preface to Book XV, he must have interviewed many eyewitnesses at Rome, Antioch, and elsewhere, 1 25

Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 222-24, provides a convenient list. For a slightly more positive view, see Sundwall, "Ammianus." 1 2 7 Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 1 02-6. 1 28 The best discussion is in Blockley, Ammianus, pp. 62-72. 1 29 Cf. Barnes, Ammianus, pp. 79-94. 1 3 0 Ammianus XXXI .S . l O; cf. XVIII.S . 1 , where Ammianus notes that before desert­ ing to the Persians Antoninus gathered as much information as he could about the numbers of Roman detachments. 1 3 1 Ammianus XVII.S.3-8 and 1 0. 14. 1 26

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and n o doubt h e used whatever written sources h e discovered and thought valuable. His narrative ofjulian's Persian campaign seems to have had at least one literary source, revealed in a few parallels with the history of Eunapius as adapted by Zosimus. Yet Ammianus seems not to have consulted Eunapius' history at other times when, not being an eyewitness, he would have found a literary source much more useful. Besides, Ammianus seems to have fin­ ished writing before Eunapius' history appeared. He is therefore likely to have used not Eunapius' history itself, but a report on the Persian expedition that Eunapius also consulted. 132 Though in describing geography Ammianus usually relied on earlier liter­ ature rather than his personal observations, he readily drew on his military experience in his narrative. Strictly speaking, one could object that he retells his adventures during the Persian invasion of 359 at more length than their historical importance warrants. Yet they make gripping reading, supplying important incidental evidence about the army, the country, and Ammianus himself. In dramatic interest they are second only to his largely firsthand account of Julian's invasion of Persia, which could also be considered dis­ proportionate. Both sections however enhance his history as a work of art, which though composed from traditional elements differs considerably from anything that had been written before. Some traditional features of Ammianus' composition can be distracting to a modern reader. They include his moralizing, his elaborate and con­ torted Latin, his many literary references, his lengthy digressions, and his annalistic arrangement, which forces him to interrupt events frequently as he shifts back and forth from region to region. Yet Ammianus knew what he was doing with all of these, and all of them contribute to effects that he desired. His moralizing examines serious problems and prescribes remedies for them. His complicated Latin describes complex conditions with nuances 1 3 2 On the parallels, see Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 24-25 (leaving the matter open); Matthews, Roman Empire, pp. 1 64-79; and Barnes, Sources, pp. 1 1 7-20 (both inclined to think that Ammianus used Eunapius, Barnes more positively). Thompson, Historical Work, pp. 20-41 and 1 33-3 7, thinks that Zosimus used Ammianus, which seems very unlikely, but he rightly insists that most of Ammianus' sources were not literary. Unlike Barnes and Matthews, I doubt that Eunapius wrote before Ammianus. Fornara, "Julian's Persian Expedition, " shows that the parallels between the two historians are very limited and do not indicate that either Ammianus or Eunapius used the other; even though Fornara wants to deny a common literary source, the arguments in his appendix mention Magnus of Carrhae as a pos­ sibility. Any common source was probably brief and vague, perhaps merely a private letter that came into circulation because of its intrinsic interest. The only source for the existence of Magnus of Carrhae is Malalas XIII.21, whose dubious authority seems insufficient to establish that Magnus was an historian; he may simply have been a junior officer who wrote a short report on his experiences during the war. Cf. E. Jeffreys, "Malalas' Sources, " p. 186, and PLRE I, Magnus 2 and 3.

i .l! ' I

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and qualifications. His literary references emphasize Rome's long traditions and great antiquity, and his digressions and shifts of scene highlight the empire's size and diversity. Though his treatment of earlier events in his lost books cannot have been much more than a lengthy introduction, it must have reinforced these impressions of Roman decline, complexity, antiquity, and sophistication. The result is not only a great history but a literary panorama, a portrait of the fourth-century empire that is more than its sum of events and personal­ ities. Its vitality and expansiveness counteract its pervasive sense of gloom. Though sadly disappointed by the disasters and injustices he had seen in his lifetime, Ammianus believed the empire was big and strong enough to survive them. He realized that both paganism and higher Latin culture were endangered and in need of eloquent exponents, and also that neither was doomed within the next generation or so. He would probably have been sur­ prised to learn that aristocratic paganism would prove more durable in the East than in the West. He would certainly have been appalled at the sack of Rome in 4 1 0, which he may have lived to see, and at the rapid disintegration of the Western empire. He was right in thinking that the Battle of Adrianople, though a terrible blow, had not permanently disabled the Eastern army or the Eastern empire, and that both would last for a very long time to come. If for all his breadth of vision Ammianus foresaw developments in the East more accurately than those in the West, he was after all an Easterner.

4 The New C l assica l Historians

Though after Ammianus no one wrote a classical history in Latin again, at least nineteen historians wrote in Greek between the death of Theodosius in 395 and the accession of Justinian in 527. Seven wrote mostly secular histories in the classical style and are our subject here, while the rest wrote church histories that are the subject of the next chapter. Among the classical historians, three were pagans, three were Christians, and one is not firmly identified as either. Even if none of them wrote a truly great history, all of them seem to have been competent writers, and the best were very good. Taken together, their works must have provided an excellent record of the events of the fourth and fifth centuries, supplying at least three accounts for every part of that period. Sadly, just one of these secular histories survives in its original form: the unfinished New History of Zosimus, which was probably the worst of them. Yet since Zosimus seems to have done little more than summarize his sources, he preserved a substantial part of two of the earlier secular histories. The church historians also made enough use of the secular histories to pre­ serve considerable parts of their contents, though exactly what comes from where is often difficult to identify. Still more of these lost histories sur­ vives in three later Byzantine compilations of enormous size, which we shall encounter often from now on. The first, already mentioned, is the so-called Bibliotheca (" Library") of Photius, which probably dates from 845 . 1 An enthusiastic scholar who served twice as patriarch of Constantinople (858-6 7 and 8 7 7-86), Photius compiled the Bibliotheca to describe his reading, which included Zosimus and four of the lost classicizing histories. Despite the title that later scholars gave his work, Photius seems to have owned only about half of the four hundred or

1 See Treadgold, Nature; but cf. Wilson, Scholars, pp. 93-1 1 1 ; Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism, pp. 205-35; and Treadgold, "Photius."

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80 The Early Byzantine Historians so books he reviewed. He says that he worked hastily, with the help of a sec­ retary, while preparing to leave on an embassy, and that he was fulfilling a request from his brother, who wanted a memento of him during his absence. Photius' descriptions, which vary in length and reliability, were apparently compiled in three ways: from memory, by referring to a copy of the book, or by having his secretary copy reading notes that Photius had taken earlier. The Bibliotheca also includes biographical sketches of many writers, drawn either from their own works or from a lost dictionary of authors. This dic­ tionary, now conventionally called the " Hesychius Epitome, " drew on two main sources: another dictionary of secular writers by the sixth-century scholar Hesychius of Miletus entitled Name-Finder and a Greek translation of St. Jerome's history of Christian writers, Famous Men. The Hesychius Epitome seems to have been compiled by the ninth-century scholar Ignatius the Dea­ con shortly before Photius used it in 845 . 2 It included biographies of three of our lost classicizing historians, all presumably derived from Hesychius. Our second Byzantine source for these historians is a tenth-century ency­ clopedia, traditionally known as the Excerpta, compiled at the order of the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (reigned 9 1 3-59). 3 This work was an immense anthology of excerpts from earlier authors classified under fifty­ three subject headings. Of these we have nearly all of " On Embassies" (divided into sections on Byzantine embassies to foreigners and foreign embassies to Byzantium), and parts of " On Plots against Monarchs, " "On Proverbial Teach­ ings, " and "On Virtues and Vices. " Each section of the Excerpta consists of almost exact quotations of varying lengths, in their original order and some­ times with a few words of introduction. It includes excerpts from three of our lost classicizing historians. Our third source for these historians, perhaps slightly later in date than the Excerpta, is another tenth-century encyclopedia called the Suda ("Moat, " possibly meaning a defense against ignorance). 4 Compiled by an unknown scholar or scholars, it has some thirty thousand alphabetized entries of many different kinds. Its entries on rare words or exotic subjects are quoted from sources that include four of our lost classicizing historians, sometimes iden­ tified by name and sometimes not. The Suda quotes historians not from their original texts but from extracts made for the Excerpta, though the Suda drew

2

See below, pp. 273-78 and n. 1 3 7 . See Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism, pp. 323-32; Wilson, Scholars, pp. 1 43-45; and Brunt, "On Historical Fragments," especially pp. 483-85. Wilson, p. 1 43, translates Excerpta IV, p. 222. 1 2 (Il£pt yvwJ.ltK&v cbrocr'toJ.ltcrJ.la:rwv; cf. Excerpta IV, p. v n. 1) as "On Gnomic Statements. " Strictly speaking, arrocrwJ.ltcrJ.la'twv should derive from arrocrwJ.lisw ("muzzle"), but the excerptors seem rather to have been thinking of arrocrwJ.la'tisw ("teach by dictation"); perhaps we should read arrocrwJ.l(a't)tcrJ.llhwv. 4 See Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism, pp. 343-45; Wilson, Scholars, pp. 1 45-47; and Zecchini, Lessico. 3

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upon the complete Excerpta, not just the fraction o f i t that has reached us. The Suda also includes three of our lost historians among its biographical entries on writers, which evidently derive from the same Hesychius Epitome that Photius used for his Bibliotheca. Careful sifting and comparison of the Suda, the Excerpta, the Bibliotheca, and other sources by generations of scholars have given us some idea of what these lost histories were like. Eunapius of Sardis

Since even Ammianus had scarcely any influence on Greek writers, the real founder of the new school of Greek classical historians was Eunapius of Sardis. About twenty years younger than Ammianus, Eunapius was born into a prominent pagan family in the middle-sized city of Sardis in western Anatolia, probably in 34 7. 5 He began his studies in his home town with his cousin's husband, the pagan philosopher Chrysanthius. 6 At the age of fifteen, probably in 362, Eunapius sailed to Athens to continue his educa­ tion. There he studied with the famous Christian rhetorician Prohaeresius, who had retired to private teaching because of Julian's law forbidding Chris­ tians to teach rhetoric publicly. After four years at Athens, Eunapius wanted to go on to Egypt, perhaps to study medicine, but at the insistence of his parents he returned to Sardis. 7 There he resumed his studies with Chrysanthius and taught rhetoric. 8 Apparently Eunapius continued teaching in his home town for the rest of his life, though he traveled a bit in the general vicinity. He became a friend of the pagan medical writer Oribasius of nearby Pergamum, who had been the emperor Julian's personal physician. Exiled by Valens after 364 but released before 3 78, Oribasius attended Eunapius' relative Chrysanthius on his deathbed around 380. 9 Oribasius was one of several pagan friends who persuaded Eunapius to write a history, and to assist in 5 On Eunapius, see Penella, Greek Philosophers, pp. 1-9; Sacks, "Meaning" (though his contention that the original edition of the history extended to 404 seems excluded by the references to it in Eunapius' Lives, dated by Penella to 399); Blockley, Frag­ mentary C/assicising Historians I, pp. 1-26; and Liebeschuetz, "Pagan Historiography," pp. 1 7 7-20 1 . 6 Eunapius, Lives XXIII. 1 , 500, and VII.4.5, 477 (on Chrysanthius' wife). 7 Eunapius, Lives X. l .2, 485, and X.8. 1-3, 493. In the unlikely event thatjulian's ban on Christian teachers was still enforced for several months after his death, Eunapius could have arrived at Athens in September not of 362 but of 363, and in that case been born in 348. 8 Eunapius, Lives XXII1.3 . 1 5- 1 6, 502-3. 9 On Oribasius' exile, see Eunapius, Lives XXI . l .5-2.4, 498-99; and Penella, Greek Philosophers, pp. 1 1 3-14. Chrysanthius died soon after some general disasters that are presumably to be identified with the Battle of Adrianople and its aftermath (Lives XXIII.6. 1-10, 504-5).

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the work, the physician prepared detailed notes from his own memories of Julian. 10 Eunapius' History to Continue Dexippus began in 270, where Dexippus of Athens' Short History left off, and was divided into fourteen books. Today we know of it from quotations in the Excerpta and Suda, passages in several other historians, a short description by Photius, and the New History of Zosimus, who according to Photius did little more than abridge Eunapius. 1 1 Zosimus devotes roughly four books of his history to the years covered by Eunapius, those from 270 to 404 . 1 2 If Zosimus added very little of his own and divided his work into books roughly as long as those of his principal source, his abridgment kept a proportion of around one to four. Including the other fragments, which overlap somewhat with Zosimus, we may now have about a third of Eunapius' work. Eunapius' history appeared in two editions. He mentions the original ver­ sion in his surviving Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, which he probably finished in 399. 13 There he refers his readers to his History for descriptions of events as late as 39 1 , and expresses his intention to write another edition of the History to cover events as early as 395-96. 14 Consequently the terminal date of the original version of the History must have been between 391 and 395. Probably it was the death of Theodosius in 395, because Eunapius stated in his History's preface that his chronological divisions would be the reigns of emperors, not the dates by years or even days that he accused Dexippus of citing obsessively. 1S Although some modern scholars have conj ectured that Eunapius produced his History in several installments, he called his edition of 404 "new, " thus implying he had written just one edition that was older. He started the first edition at a time when he thought Julian's deeds were in some danger of being forgotten, and he claimed not to have dallied in his writing. 16 He may

10

Eunapius frs. 1 and 1 5 . See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 97-106 (analysis), and II, pp. 3-150 (edition, translation, and notes). 1 2 Zosimus 1.47-V.25 (some allowance being made for the loss of the end of Book I and the beginning of Book Il). 1 3 For the date, see Penella, Greek Philosophers, p. 9, referring to Lives VII. 5.6, 479. 1 4 Cf. Eunapius, Lives VI. 1 1 . 1-7, 472 (referring to his history's account of the destruction of the Serapeum in 391), and VII.3.3-5, 475-76 (mentioning his inten­ tion to add to his history an account of Alaric's invasion of Greece in 395/96). Cf. Penella, Greek Philosophers, pp. 9-1 3 . Like Penella, I am not persuaded by the arguments of Barnes, Sources, pp. 1 1 4-23, that the original edition was composed soon after 3 78. 1 5 Eunapius fr. 1 and Paschoud, "Preface. " 1 6 Eunapius frs. 15 and 1 . 11

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therefore have begun composing his original edition in 395, since its deni­ gration of Theodosius might have been risky while that emperor still lived. Eunapius must have finished this first edition around 397, before beginning his Lives of the Sophists. After writing those Lives, a collection of short biographies of learned men including his teachers Chrysanthius and Prohaeresius and his friend Oribasius, Eunapius prepared a new edition of his History. He concluded it, according to Photius, with the death of the empress Eudoxia in 404. In this edition Eunapius deleted some of the most strongly anti-Christian sentiments in the first version, either out of caution or in hope of reaching a wider audi­ ence. Photius says Eunapius made these deletions so negligently that they sometimes rendered his work unintelligible. 1 7 Perhaps he simply crossed out passages in his manuscript and left a scribe to recopy the text without them. Nothing that remains of Eunapius' History appears to date from after 404, with the possible exception of one passage preserved in the Excerpta. This extract, which refers to a murder that took place around 402, describes how the murderer bought one of the provincial governorships that were shame­ lessly sold "under the empress Pulcheria. " Pulcheria enjoyed a large measure of power from 4 1 4 to 423, and could not have been safely denounced before the latter date. 18 Yet Eunapius is unlikely to have put off for twenty-five years preparing a revision of his History that he had planned as early as 399. Even if he had, he would surely have continued the revision at least to the death of Arcadius in 408. Probably, then, the bored excerptor working for Constantine VII five cen­ turies later mistook Eunapius' reference to "the empress" of 402 to mean Pulcheria rather than Eudoxia. 19 In that case, Eunapius seems to have taken the opportunity of Eudoxia's death in 404 to produce his new edition, which criticized her for corruption in this and at least two other passages. 20 He may well have died before he could continue his work down to Arcadius' death in 408, which would have suited his preference for dividing history by imperial reigns. More a rhetorician than an historian, Eunapius was intelligent but limited in his outlook. He traveled relatively little, lived in a provincial town, and

1 7 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 77 Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians II, pp. 1-3 . Photius describes the new edition (the one he read) as covering the same period as the original edition, apparently because he stopped comparing the two too soon to notice that the original edition ended nine years earlier. 1 8 Eunapius frs. 72. 1-2. 1 9 Such is the conjecture of Blockley, "Ending, " pp. 1 70-76; and Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 5-6. (Since Pulcheria was born in 399, a reference to her in Eunapius' text soon before this point may have aided the confusion.) For a defense of the Excerpta's reference to Pulcheria, see Paschoud, Cinq etudes, pp. 1 69-75. 20 Zosimus V.24. 1-2 and 25.4. =

84 The Early Byzantine Historians associated with a small circle of mostly pagan intellectuals. As far as we can judge, his history was of the same general type as that of Ammianus, but less skillful and shorter by about a third. 21 Like Ammianus, Eunapius treated the period before his own lifetime briefly, disposing in a single book of the eighty­ five years from 2 70 to Julian's accession as Caesar in 35 5 . 22 In his preface to Book 11, Eunapius announced he would now begin to write at greater length, because regard for Julian "forces me to dwell upon his deeds. " 23 If Eunapius' coverage of the next forty-nine years was fairly uniform, his original edition would have had twelve books, like the history of Dexippus that it continued, while Eunapius' new edition would have covered the years from 395 to 404 in two more books. Book I was carelessly composed, even for an account that Eunapius says was meant just to " summarize the essential events. " 24 He clumsily interrupted his account of Aurelian's campaign against Palmyra to make a digression on the oracles that had favored Rome as long as it had been pagan. 25 To make Constantine win his major victories while he was a pagan, Eunapius claimed that the emperor had converted to Christianity only in 326, so as to obtain forgiveness for executing his wife Fausta and his son Crispus after pagan priests had pronounced such sins inexpiable. 26 Though in this case Eunapius' professed disdain for chronology helped him perpetrate an anti-Christian distortion, his other attacks on Constantine and his sons were largely true. Eunapius had some reason for his claim that Constantine's movement of troops away from the frontiers had undermined the empire's defenses. 2 7 He also had good grounds to blame Constantius 11 for the massacre of his relatives in 33 7, and to accuse Constans of homosexual liaisons with corrupt barbarian advisers. 28

2 1 Though Eunapius' history had fourteen books to Ammianus' thirty-one, Eunapius' books were most likely comparable in length to those of his follower Zosimus, which are about half again as long as Ammianus' unusually short books. 22 For Paschoud's view that Eunapius' first edition began earlier, see n. 1 18 below. 23 Eunapius fr. 1 5 . 24 Eunapius fr. 1 5 . 2 5 See Zosimus 1.57-58, with the commentary o f Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. 1 73-75. 26 Eunapius frs. 9. 1 and 4 and Zosimus 11.29. For commentary see Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. 234-40. 2 7 Zosimus 11.34. For a qualified endorsement of these views (attributed to Zosimus but evidently going back to Eunapius), see Luttwak, Grand Strategy, p. 2 1 8. In fact, the deterioration of the frontier forces was a long process that at most began with Con­ stantine; cf. Treadgold, Byzantium, pp. 1 0, 1 1, and 200-201 ; and Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. 252-53 . 2 8 Zosimus 1 1.40 and 42. On these charges, see Barnes, Constantine, pp. 261-62, and A thanasius, pp. 34-35 and n. 2 and 1 01 and n. 1; and Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. 264-66 and 267-68. Note that both Eunapius and Zosimus assumed that any decent person, pagan or Christian, would consider homosexual acts immoral.

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In Book 11 Eunapius began his history in earnest with Julian's accession as Caesar in 355. Like Ammianus, Eunapius believed that when julian appeared "everything took a turn for the better for the Romans. " 29 Nonetheless, in order to avoid resembling "those holding up torches in daytime, " the histo­ rian referred readers who wanted more details on Julian to the works of others, including the emperor himself. 30 Yet Eunapius sometimes added more color to Julian's exploits than Ammianus did, relating for example how Julian forced soldiers who fled during the Battle of Strasbourg to wear women's dresses. 3 1 In a melodramatic scene not in Ammianus, Julian revealed to a weeping German king that a son he believed was dead was actually safe in Roman custody. 32 A heading in the Excerpta implies that Book Ill opened after the Battle of Strasbourg in 35 7. Though after this point the book divisions are uncertain, Book Ill probably ended with Constantius' death in 36 1 . 33 Interestingly, Eunapius and Ammianus both quoted the same Greek verses predicting Constantius' death, allegedly heard by Julian in a dream at Vienne. 34 Book IV probably covered ]ulian's reign up to his Persian expedition. Not surprisingly, Eunapius seems to have written more than Ammianus about Julian's affini­ ties with learned pagans, like Libanius and Eunapius' friend and informant Oribasius. Book V appears to have described the Persian expedition itself. As noted above, the short parallel passages in Eunapius' and Ammianus' accounts of Julian's Persian expedition seemingly derived from a shared but minor source. 35 Eunapius filled a gap in Ammianus' information by including a plausible figure for the size of Julian's army-sixty-five thousand men. Here his source was presumably Oribasius. 3 6 Eunapius seems to have exagger­ ated Julian's success against the Persians even more than Ammianus did, and to have given julian at least as elaborate an obituary. 37 Like Ammianus, Eunapius condemned Jovian's treaty with the Persians as an unprecedented disgrace without quite declaring it had been unnecessary. Book VI probably opened with 364, when Valentinian and Valens suc­ ceeded Jovian, and had its own preface. 38 The joint reign of Valentinian and Valens presumably continued into Book VII, since it was too long and 29

30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37

38

Eunapius fr. 1 6. 1 . Eunapius fr. 1 7 and Zosimus III.2.4. Zosimus 111.3.5. Eunapius fr. 18.6 and Zosimus 111. 7 . 7 . See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, p p . 1 58 n. 3 7 and 1 59 n. 47. Zosimus III.9.6; Ammianus XXI.2.2 (with two minor variants). See above, pp. 76-7 7 and n. 1 3 2. Zosimus III. 1 3. 1 ; cf. Paschoud, Zosime IL l, pp. 1 09-1 1 . Zosimus III.29 . 1 ; cf. Eunapius fr. 2 8 with Ammianus XXV.4. Eunapius fr. 30; cf. Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, p. 159 n. 47.

86

The Early Byzantine Historians

eventful for one book. Eunapius disliked Valens as much as Ammianus did, but showed somewhat more sympathy for the pagan usurper Procopius. Yet unlike Ammianus, who saw the pretender Theodore as an almost innocent victim of the THEOD- oracle, Eunapius depicted him as a charming but unsteady young man who deserved his fate, apparently because he allowed his faith in the oracle to ruin so many good men along with him. 39 In his Lives of the Sophists, Eunapius makes clear his opinion that plotting on the basis of an oracle was dangerous folly, even when, as in this case, the ora­ cle was correct. 40 He believed in portents, and recorded in his History how a pagan priest saved Athens from an earthquake and tidal wave in 3 7 5 by making a sacrifice to Achilles in accordance with a dream. 41 If Eunapius kept to his preference for dividing history by imperial reigns, Book VIII may have begun in 3 7 5 with the death of Valentinian and the acces­ sion of his sons Gratian and Valentinian 11 in the West. Eunapius divided blame for the catastrophe at Adrianople in 3 78 between Valens' officers, who shamefully took bribes of Gothic linens, slaves, concubines, and catamites, and the Goths, who ungratefully broke their agreements and plundered Thrace. Lacking Ammianus' insight that the Roman extortion had pro­ voked the Gothic rebellion, Eunapius saw only immorality on both sides. 42 Curiously, he also ascribed Valens' defeat and death to disregarding the advice of his virtuous general Sebastian not to fight, though Ammianus says Sebastian had imprudently advised fighting before Gratian could arrive. Here Eunapius was probably swayed by his admiration for Sebastian, whom he compared to the Colossus of Rhodes. 43 Book IX may have begun with the accession of Theodosius in 3 79. Eunapius showed none of Ammianus' solicitude for Theodosius, whom he saw as corrupted by power to the point of causing the empire's ruin. He found Theo­ dosius greedy, venal, lazy, easily deceived by eunuchs and barbarians, and devoted to luxurious banquets, shows, and games. Much like Ammianus, Eunapius also thought the Western emperor Gratian was misguided and irresponsible. In Eunapius' History, Gratian was overthrown by the usurper Maximus mainly because the emperor refused to assume the pagan title of Pontifex Maximus. A pagan priest accordingly prophesied: "Very soon there will be a Pontifex-Maximus. "44

39

Eunapius fr. 39 and Zosimus IV. 1 3.2-15; cf. Ammianus XXIX. 1 .8-9 and 28-38. Eunapius, Lives VII.6.3-9, 480 (where Eunapius obviously agrees with the philosopher Maximus). 4 1 Zosimus IV. 1 8. 4 2 Eunapius fr. 42 and Zosimus IV.20. 5-7; cf. Ammianus XXXI.4.9-1 1 and 5. 1-8. 43 Eunapius fr. 44 and Zosimus IV.22.4-24.2; cf. Ammianus XXXI. 12.4-7 and 1 3 . 1 8. On Sebastian, who was a Manichaean and died in the battle, see Paschoud, Zosime II.2, pp. 3 79-83. 44 Eunapius fr. SO and Zosimus IV.35 .2-3 7. 1 . 40

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Perhaps Book X opened with Maximus' accession in 383, Book XI just after Maxim us' death in 388, and Book XII with the usurpation of Eugenius in 392. Eunapius offered no defense of Maximus, who was a Christian, but praised the virtues of the pro-pagan Eugenius and his pagan general Arbogast. 45 According to Eunapius, the usurper and his general lost to Theodosius only because after an initial victory they let their army eat dinner and rest, where­ upon their less self-indulgent enemies took them by surprise. 46 In Eunapius' opinion Theodosius won his victories only by luck, or because he temporarily bestirred himself. The historian thought Theodosius' measures against pagan­ ism directly caused the disastrous barbarian invasions after 395. 47 Book XII and the first edition of the history probably ended with Theodosius' death. Eunapius apparently began the new part of his second edition with 395 and Book XIII. In his view all the ministers of Theodosius' languid sons Arcadius and Honorius were thieving rogues who damaged the empire further. In par­ ticular, the historian thought Honorius' mentor Stilicho in the West and Arcadius' adviser Rufinus in the East were equally treacherous, rapacious, and corrupt. Thus Rufinus deliberately invited Alaric's Goths to pillage Greece, though the goddess Athena and again Achilles helped save Athens. When Stilicho arrived in Greece to fight the Goths, he and his army, debauched by soft living, loose women, and comic performances, simply looted whatever the Goths had left. 48 Few contemporary officials or officers escaped Eunapius' ire. According to him, the eunuch Eutropius, who overthrew Rufinus as the power behind the Eastern throne, was even worse than his predecessor: ugly and mali­ cious as well as greedy and corrupt, with henchmen and sycophants as bad as he was. Eutropius fomented a failed rebellion in Africa against Stilicho's Western Roman government. Stilicho enviously murdered the man who had foiled that revolt and, like Eutropius, rejoiced at the ruin of Roman citizens. Then the barbarian general Ga'i nas, angry at losing his share of Eutropius' ill-gotten gains, incited barbarian soldiers to pillage Anatolia and made this his excuse for killing Eutropius and seizing power himself. In Constantinople a Christian mob burned many of Ga'inas' barbarian troops in a church, an act that Christians should have considered a sacrilege. Eunapius may have begun Book XIV with 400, when he found a hero in the pagan barbarian general Fravitta. Through good discipline Fravitta 45 On Maximus, see Zosimus IV.43.2-3 and 46.3. On Eugenius and Arbogast, see Eunapius fr. 58 (though 58.2 was evidently modified by the Christian Eustathius, copied by John of Antioch) and Zosimus IV.S3-S4. 4 6 Zosimus IV.S8; cf. Eunapius fr. 60 (again evidently altered by Eustathius and copied by John of Antioch). 47 Zosimus IV.S9. 4 8 Zosimus V.S-7; cf. Eunapius fr. 64 (where Eustathius or possibly John of Antioch has clumsily altered Eunapius' criticism of Stilicho).

88 The Early Byzantine Historians speedily restored the Roman army, and by his devotion to the pagan gods he drove out Ga'inas to be killed by the Huns. The noble barbarian was however murdered on the orders of John, reputed to be the lover of Arcadius' empress Eudoxia, by the hand of the depraved and licentious Hierax, whom Eunapius claimed to have rebuked to his face. 49 Hierax was one of those who bought governorships in order to plunder the provinces, apparently with Eudoxia's approval. 5 0 Eunapius went on to denounce the rioting at Constantinople over the deposition of John Chrysostom as the city's patriarch, the uselessness of Christian monks, judicial corruption under Eudoxia, and the fire set by Chrysostom's supporters, which miraculously spared statues of Zeus and Athena. Next came !saurian raids that could easily have been stopped had the Roman commander not yielded to luxury, lust, and greed, though he escaped the penalty he deserved by bribing the empress. 51 The history ended with Eudoxia's death from a miscarriage in 404, which Eunapius must have deemed condign punishment. 5Z Though Ammianus also overdoes his moralizing at times, Eunapius was less restrained and more obtuse, and made far less effort to be impartial. He saw Julian and Fravitta as martyred paragons, and his treatment of Theodosius and Stilicho was so relentlessly hostile as to render their successes almost incomprehensible. According to Eunapius, Athens, a city where he knew many potential informants, was twice saved from destruction by pagan mir­ acles alone. He prided himself on his disregard for dates, even though he apparently wrote in more or less chronological order. 5 3 While making some attempt to cover Western events, he concentrated lopsidedly on the East, especially after 395, when he complained of the difficulty of obtaining news from the West. 54 Strangely for a rhetorician, Eunapius seems to have invented few if any speeches, though he wrote long passages of empty verbiage, most of which Zosimus sensibly excised. 55 Eunapius' style was too mannered and pompous

49 Eunapius fr. 7 1 .2-4. A parallel passage was evidently on a page missing from our manuscript at Zosimus V.22.3-23. 1 ; Zosimus V. 18.8 supplies the rumor that John was the real father of Theodosius 11, Arcadius' supposed son by Eudoxia. 5 0 Eunapius fr. 72. 1-2 (under Eudoxia, not Pulcheria; cf. p. 83 above). Zosimus' parallel passage was presumably in the lacuna mentioned in n. 49 above. 5 1 Zosimus V.25; on the commander, Arbazacius, see Eunapius fr. 7 1 . 1 , which, being from the Suda and therefore unplaced, may well belong here instead of where Blockley puts it; cf. PLRE 11, Arbazacius 1 . 5 2 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 7 7. 53 Eunapius fr. 1 . 5 4 Eunapius fr. 66.2. 55 E.g., Eunapius frs. SO and 66. 1 , both from the Excerpta's " On Proverbial Teachings. "

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even for Photius, who thought many of its expressions better suited to oratory than to history. Photius was particularly annoyed by Eunapius' overuse of neologisms with the suffix -odes ("-like"), such as "'rooster­ like,' 'more deerlike, ' and 'more piglike,' and again 'hawklike,' 'crowlike,' and 'monkeylike, ' and 'riverlike tears, ' and similar expressions. " 56 Such excesses probably explain why later Byzantines never ranked Eunapius with fourth-century pagans like Libanius and Julian as models of formal prose. Though Eunapius was at least a competent writer, he seems to have lacked most of the skills of an historian. His friends pressed on him a task he would not have chosen for himself, which he discharged as a duty, primarily to the memory of Julian. 5 7 Even about Julian Eunapius was reluctant to write at length, and instead referred his readers to the writings of others. 58 Eunapius seems to have done little research, and his sources, especially for events within living memory, appear mainly to have been tendentious reports by other pagans he had met at Sardis. While Ammianus evidently sought an audience that included Christians, Eunapius wrote chiefly if not exclusively for pagans who shared his opinions. His history showed most zest when he was abusing those he hated, principally Christians and libertines, two groups he tended to identify with each other. His work gained some currency among Christians mainly because it was the sole record in Greek of recent secular events. Once Zosimus had put most of its contents into a more economical and convenient form, the original history became rare and eventually was lost. Olympiodorus of Thebes

Soon after Eunapius had composed his history of the East up to 404, momen­ tous events overtook the West, where Rome fell to the Visigoths in 4 1 0. The tottering Western empire of the early fifth century found its chronicler in Olympiodorus, whose life can be reconstructed from the fragmentary but tantalizing evidence only through a good deal of guesswork. 59 He was prob­ ably born around 3 70 at Thebes (modern Luxor) in Upper Egypt, where he seems to have belonged to the Hellenized class of decurions of that mostly

56

Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 7 7; cf. Eunapius fr. 7 1 .2 for "crowlike" and "roosterlike." Eunapius fr. 1 5 . 5 8 Eunapius fr. 1 7 and Zosimus III.2.4. I cannot agree with Buck, "Reign, " p. 45, that Eunapius wrote "propagandistic historical fiction, " which besides exaggerating the distortions in Eunapius' text assumes that most of these distortions came from Eunapius himself rather than his sources, the reverse of what I think likely. 59 On Olympiodorus, see Thompson, "Olympiodorus"; Matthews, "Olympi­ odorus"; Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 27-47; Liebeschuetz, " Pagan Historiography, " pp. 20 1-6; and Treadgold, "Diplomatic Career." 57

90 The Early Byzantine Historians Coptic-speaking city. Presumably he acquired his secondary education in his home town. He was an unapologetic but not strident pagan. Apparently Olympiodorus studied philosophy in the late 390's at Athens. There he formed firm friendships with two fellow students, Leontius of Athens and Hierocles of Alexandria, both of whom became famous philosophers. 60 Though Olympiodorus kept his interest in philosophy, after his studies he seems to have returned to Thebes, where he probably served on the city council, married, adopted a son, and devoted himself to poetry, which he considered to be his real profession. Yet early in the fifth century he must have made his way to Constantinople, perhaps seeking an audience for his poems in its literary circles. In the capital Olympiodorus apparently learned Latin and came to the attention of the Eastern Roman government, which soon employed him as a diplomat. 61 An affable character, for twenty years he owned a remarkable parrot, which could sing, dance, call people by name, and do other tricks that transcended barriers of language and custom. 62 The government probably realized that a pagan representative would be better able than a Christian to win the confidence of pagan foreigners and even of pagan Romans, especially in concluding treaties and swearing oaths by pagan gods. In 4 1 2, early in the reign of Theodosius 1 1 , Olympiodorus went on an embassy to the Huns and to a certain Donatus, probably a Roman who had deserted to them. After a rough voyage, presumably across the Black Sea and up the Danube, the ambassadors reached the Huns' principal king, Chara­ ton. Some of the Byzantine envoys seem to have arranged Donatus' murder by breaking a sworn promise of immunity that they had given him. Olym­ piodorus, who considered Donatus' murder reprehensible, was left with the unenviable task of mollifying the enraged king with gifts from the emperor. Then the embassy returned to the capital. 63 Around 4 1 6 another perilous sea voyage brought Olympiodorus back to Athens, seemingly as a member of a government commission empowered to choose the city's new professor of rhetoric. Olympiodorus obtained the appointment for his friend Leontius, who at first was reluctant, perhaps because he was a philosopher rather than a rhetorician. 64 Later that year Olympiodorus seems to have visited the Great Oasis (modern Al Kharga) in the Egyptian desert, perhaps on a government assignment to investigate raids 60

See Treadgold, " Diplomatic Career, " pp. 7 1 0-12. Since Olympiodorus' main education was in Greek and the only probable indi­ cations of his whereabouts before 425 put him in the East, the suggestion of Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, p. 27, that he served the Western Roman court seems very unlikely. 62 Olympiodorus fr. 35. 6 3 Olympiodorus fr. 1 9. 6 4 Olympiodorus fr. 28. 61

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by the Blemmyes t o the south. 65 Apparently after revisiting his home town of Thebes, he returned to Constantinople. Around 4 1 9 the emperor evidently sent Olympiodorus on a new mission to make a treaty with the Blemmyes. After still another terrible sea voyage, during which his beloved parrot seems to have died when the ship was struck by a meteorite (Olympiodorus calls it a "star"), the ambassador made his way up the Nile to Thebes and the border town of Syene (modern Aswan) . When he asked the Blemmyan chieftains for permission to meet them, they con­ sulted their diviners, who after the appropriate divination advised them to welcome him. The chieftains therefore sent priests to accompany Olympi­ odorus into their country, where he journeyed for five days south of the Roman border, visited the principal towns, and negotiated a satisfactory agreement. After triumphantly completing his mission, Olympiodorus seems to have returned to Thebes to find that his adopted son had just died. Much dis­ tressed, the ambassador apparently visited his old school friend Hierocles at Alexandria. Hierocles was moved by this conjunction of the lucky embassy and sad bereavement to dedicate a treatise to console his friend. Its sub­ j ect was, appropriately, On Providence and Fate, and the Relation of What We Control to the Divine Power. It now survives only in another review in Photius' Bibliotheca. 66 In 421 Athenai:s, the daughter of Olympiodorus' other school friend Leon­ tius, married the emperor Theodosius II and took the name Eudocia. Though by this time Leontius had died and Eudocia had converted from pagan­ ism to Christianity, being connected with the powerful empress must have aided Olympiodorus in his diplomatic career. In 424 he apparently sailed to Italy along with an Eastern expedition meant to install Valentinian Ill as emperor of the West. As a representative of the Eastern government, Olym­ piodorus probably had orders to report back to his superiors on Western affairs. The expedition succeeded, and the ambassador seems to have sailed from Aquileia to Rome for the official proclamation of Valentinian in 425 . Olympiodorus admired Rome's monuments and wealth, and was espe­ cially impressed by the Western general Boniface. 67 Presumably over some months, Olympiodorus gathered detailed information on the West, mostly by talking with prominent people, many of them pagans. 68 He probably

65

Olympiodorus fr. 32. Cf. Olympiodorus fr. 35; Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 2 14, 1 7 1b; and Treadgold, "Diplomatic Career," pp. 720-23. 6 7 Olympiodorus frs. 40-43. 68 See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 34-35; and Treadgold, "Diplomatic Career, " pp. 723-26. 66

92 The Early Byzantine Historians finished writing his work before 427, when Boniface was declared a public enemy and ceased to be a suitable subject for the unreserved praise Olympi­ odorus accorded him. By then Olympiodorus would have been nearing sixty. Nothing is known of his later life and death. Even if uninspired as a thinker or writer, Olympiodorus had the talents and versatility of a good diplomat. His history, of uncertain title, was both sub­ stantial and circumstantial, covering eighteen years in twenty-two books. 69 Photius describes and summarizes it in his Bibliotheca, and his epitome shows that Olympiodorus was Zosimus' main if not exclusive source after Eunapius' history ended. 70 Though this section of Zosimus' history corresponds to only the first fifth of Photius' summary of Olympiodorus, Zosimus summarized in far more detail than Photius did. At a rough estimate, Zosimus reduced Olympiodorus' narrative to about a quarter of its original length, whereas Photius compressed it to about a fortieth. 71 While two of the church his­ torians also used Olympiodorus, the compilers of the Excerpta and the Suda never made extracts from his work, perhaps because they shared Photius' low opinion of its style. 72 What survives of Olympiodorus' history can hardly be more than a tenth of the original. Its narrative, which began with the year 40 7 and dealt mainly with the West, did not directly continue Eunapius' history, which ended with 404 and dealt mainly with the East. Yet Olympiodorus presumably knew of Eunapius' work, which had become the standard treatment in Greek of the times before his own. Olympiodorus opened his history with a digression on the earlier career of the Western general Stilicho, beginning with 395, when Eunapius ceased to cover Western events in any detail. 73 Moreover, Olympiodorus included a good deal of material on the East, no doubt more than sur­ vives today. Therefore Olympiodorus' history could be considered a sort of continuation of that of Eunapius, and Zosimus used it as such. 74 In a general preface, Olympiodorus mentioned his homeland, his profes­ sion as a poet, and his pagan religion, and observed that he had written not a

69 See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 107-12 (analysis), and II, pp. 1 5 1-220 (edition, translation, and notes). 7 0 Note that Zosimus V.27. 1 cites Olympiodorus by name once, disagreeing with him on one point but implying that he was usually reliable. 7 1 So Paschoud, "Debut, " 186-88, who supposes that Olympiodorus' books were comparable in length to the short books of Ammianus. If instead they resembled the longer books of Zosimus, Zosimus summarized at a ratio of about 1 : 6 and Photius at about 1 : 60. 7 2 Since nothing from Olympiodorus' accounts of his embassies appears in the Exccrpta's "On Embassies," we can be fairly sure that the lost parts of the Excerpta had nothing from Olympiodorus either. 73 Olympiodorus fr. 1 . 7 4 Cf. Buck, " Dexippus. "

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history but "raw material for a history, " which he addressed to Theodosius II (reigned 408-50) . Next came the introductory digression on Stilicho, from his appointment as guardian of the Western emperor Honorius in 395 to his victory over the Goths in 406. Then the main narrative described how a revolt in Gaul in 407 kept Stilicho from joining the Visigothic king Alaric to annex Illyricum to the Western empire. This may have concluded Book I. Endorsing Stilicho's appeasement of Alaric, the historian deplored the intrigues of the minister Olympius that led Honorius to execute Stilicho in 408. Olympiodorus' laudatory obituary of Stilicho would have made a fitting conclusion to Book II. The execution of Stilicho and the subsequent purge of his allies and murder of his son seemed to Olympiodorus godless acts that proved catastrophic for the Western empire. He blamed Olympius and Honorius for failing either to win over or to ward off Alaric, who invaded Italy and besieged Rome. Yet the historian ascribed the deaths of the otherwise praiseworthy Stilicho and his widow Serena to their earlier plundering of pagan temple treasures. According to Olympiodorus, as Alaric's siege reduced Rome to starvation, Pope Inno­ cent I was ready to allow secret prayers to the gods by pagan priests, but they refused, insisting that only public prayers could avail. The historian reported that, in collecting the payment Alaric demanded to raise the siege, the peo­ ple of Rome melted down a statue of the goddess Virtue, who thereupon deserted them. In 409, in the midst of complicated negotiations with Alaric, Honorius dis­ missed Olympius because of his disastrous policies. Olympiodorus praised the pagan barbarian general Generidus, who accepted a command in Dalmatia only after Honorius revoked a law forbidding pagans to hold office. The his­ torian blamed the breakdown of negotiations with Alaric on the stupidity of the Roman government in the absence of the gods' guidance. Olympiodorus added a long digression on revolts in Gaul and Britain between 407 and 409. The narrative then returned to Italy and Alaric's second siege of Rome later in 409, which led to the proclamation of Alaric's nominee Attalus as emperor in the city. Olympiodorus criticized Attalus and his partisans for making arro­ gant speeches, which offended the gods and caused Attalus' downfall. In the last part of the history summarized by Zosimus, Rome faced starvation again as Honorius' forces cut off its supplies, and Alaric deposed Attalus and sought peace with Honorius in the middle of 410. At this point our main source for Olympiodorus' text becomes Photius' summary, which is much abbreviated and sometimes slightly rearranged. It preserves scarcely anything of Olympiodorus' description of Alaric's third siege, capture, and sack of Rome, though the church historians Philostorgius and Sozomen preserve somewhat more. 75 Of Alaric's invasion of southern

75

See Olympiodorus frs. 6-1 1 .

94 The Early Byzantine Historians Italy and death later in 4 1 0, Photius mentions only the story of a miraculous statue that stopped Alaric at the Strait of Messina but was later destroyed by a stupid official. Rather more remains of Olympiodorus' account of how a rebellion in Gaul by its general Constantine collapsed in 4 1 1 and the Gallic noble Jovinus raised a fresh rebellion later that year. Olympiodorus con­ cluded the first ten books of his history by reporting on his embassy to the Huns in 4 1 2. Book XI began a new part of the work with an agreement between Honorius and Athaulf, Alaric's successor as Visigothic king, under which Athaulf defeated and killed the rebel Jovinus in 4 1 3 . When this treaty broke down, Athaulf was wounded by the valorous Roman general Boniface. After this came the consulate of Honorius' new favorite Constantius in 4 1 4, with Athaulf's marriage to Honorius' half-sister Galla Placidia, whom the Visigoths had captured at Rome. Very little survives from the history on the second usurpation of Attalus in 4 1 4-15 sponsored by Athaulf, but somewhat more on Athaulf's assassination in 4 1 5 and the repopulation of the city of Rome after its sack. 76 Then Olympiodorus described his visit to Athens, when he obtained the professorship for his friend Leontius. Apparently at Athens the historian heard Leontius' son Valerius tell an old story about miraculous statues in Thrace that had protected the frontier from barbarian attack until a stupid governor removed them, letting in the Goths, Huns, and Sarmatians. 77 After recording the treaty with the Visigoths under which they returned Placidia to Honorius in 4 1 6, Olympiodorus described the Great Oasis in Egypt. He mentioned the marriage of Placidia to Constantius in 4 1 7 and the death of the Visigothic king Vallia in 4 1 8 before reporting on his own mission to the Blemmyes of Nubia. During Constantius Ill's brief reign with Honorius in 42 1 , Olympiodorus recounted that the pagan priest Libanius was about to defeat the barbarians by magic when Constantius executed him at the insistence of Placidia. 78 The historian included an ambivalent obituary of Constantius, but deplored Honorius' exiling Placidia in 422, when her only remaining partisan was Olympiodorus' hero Boniface. After the usurper John took over the Western empire on Honorius' death in 423, the historian described the expedition sent by Theodosius 11 that deposed John. Remarks on the city of Rome and on places along the Italian coast visited by Odysseus seem to have belonged to Olympiodorus' account of his voyage to Italy. The history ended with the installation of Valentinian Ill as emperor and Placidia as regent in 425.

76

Olympiodorus frs. 14, 24, 25, and 26. Olympiodorus frs. 27 and 28; on these two vexed passages, see Treadgold, " Diplomatic Career," pp. 7 1 5-18. 7 8 Olympiodorus fr. 36. 77

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Olympiodorus' work must have been a peculiar one, as Photius noticed and its author himself acknowledged by calling it "raw material for a history." If it had a subject, it was the empire's relations with the barbarians, which was about all that its accounts of Western events and Eastern embassies had in common. If it had a theme, it was the crisis and recovery of the Western empire, though this had nothing to do with many of its digressions. Even when complete, the history can hardly have included a continuous narrative of Eastern affairs. Photius describes Olympiodorus' style as "clear, but insipid, careless, and falling into commonplace slang, so that the work is not even worthy to be accounted a history." 79 Possibly Olympiodorus expected another Eastern author to write a full history to continue Eunapius, combining readily acces­ sible Eastern material with the more obscure information Olympiodorus had gathered on his travels in East and West. Such an expectation might explain the colloquialisms and carelessness Photius found in the prose style, but is hard to reconcile with the history's length and dedication to Theodosius 11. In fact, from a practical point of view Olympiodorus' style had its mer­ its. Photius admits that it was clear, if commonplace. While it was probably much easier to read than the more rhetorical prose of formal history, Photius observes that portions of it were dramatic, and even melodramatic. Its depic­ tions of leading personalities like Stilicho, Generidus, Constantius, and Boniface seem to have been lively and detailed. Unlike Eunapius, Olympi­ odorus included Latinisms and even quotations in Latin, dates by consular years, topographical information, and statistics for sizes of armies, distances, sums of money, and other items. 80 His composition was essentially annalis­ tic, and perhaps precisely so, because his first ten books averaged exactly two per year from 407 to 4 1 2 and his remaining twelve books averaged just one per year from 4 1 3 to 425. Olympiodorus' writing was not entirely without stylistic pretensions. He divided his history into books, and grouped the books into a decad and a dodecad. He composed more than one preface, and quoted at least one line of verse, apparently his own, on the city of Rome: "One house is like a town­ the city has a myriad. " 81 He may even have invented a few speeches in the approved Thucydidean fashion. 82 Though such touches might suggest that Olympiodorus himself had planned to turn his material into a finished his­ tory but died before he could do so, this possibility would raise the question

79 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 80, 56b. 1 5-1 7 Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians 11, p. 1 52. 80 See Thompson, "Olympiodorus, " pp. 47-50; Matthews, "Olympiodorus," pp. 85-88; and Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 3 7-38. 8 1 Olympiodorus fr. 4 1 . 82 Cf. Zosimus V I. 1 , 7.3, and 8 . 1 -2. =

96 The Early Byzantine Historians of why he allowed his work to be circulated as it was, as his preface shows he did. Perhaps the best explanation of these anomalies is that Olympiodorus wrote primarily for the emperor Theodosius, his wife Eudocia, his sister Pulcheria, and their officials. The most important of those officials was the master of offices Helio, who had led the Eastern mission to Rome in 425 that apparently included Olympiodorus. 83 Olympiodorus' work would thus have been a semiconfidential report on his government missions, especially in the West. Though long, it was meant to be intelligible and interesting enough that the emperor and others might actually read it. It made at least implicit recommendations for Eastern government policy: toleration of pagans, strong support for the Western Roman government, and concili­ ation rather than confrontation with barbarians when possible. Especially if such counsels prevailed, Olympiodorus foresaw a bright future for the Roman Empire in both East and West. 84 The future of the Western empire, if not the Eastern, proved to be far grimmer than Olympiodorus had hoped. The Eastern government was also less tolerant of pagans than he advised, though it was fairly supportive of the West, and quite conciliatory toward the Huns and other barbarians for some time. The West nonetheless foundered. Not having written the sort of elegant history that would appeal to learned contemporaries or a learned posterity, Olympiodorus can never have had many readers, though a few later historians used his work for information they could find nowhere else, and Photius clearly found it of interest despite his contempt for its style. Modern historians have reason to regret the loss of Olympiodorus' work, because even what remains of it is an excellent source. Yet it seems to have been more an internal government briefing than a regular history.

Priscus of Panium

The next important secular historian was Priscus, born around 4 1 0 at the small town of Panium on the Thracian coast of the Sea of Marmara. 85 Alone among the early Byzantine historians whose work survives to any extent, Priscus cannot be securely identified as either a pagan or a Chris­ tian from what remains of his work or any other source. Apparently he

83

Olympiodorus fr. 43. Cf. Matthews, Western Aristocracies, pp. 3 7 7-88; and Treadgold, " Diplomatic Career," pp. 729-33 . 8 5 On Priscus, see Thompson, History, pp. 9-14; Baldwin, "Priscus," pp. 1 8-6 1 ; and Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I , pp. 48-70, and " Development," pp. 289-3 12. 84

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kept his religious beliefs t o himself, thinking either that professing Chris­ tianity would be unsuitable for the sort of secular history he wrote or that professing paganism might harm his career. The latter seems much more likely, especially because his two younger contemporaries Malchus and Can­ didus wrote secular histories without bothering to conceal that they were Christians. Priscus was well educated in rhetoric, philosophy, and the law, probably at Constantinople, and evidently practiced law in the capital. 86 Soon he became a friend of Count Maximinus, probably the same Maximinus who in 435 had been one of four commissioners assigned to compile the Theodosian Code. Perhaps young Priscus served under him as a clerk who collected and excerpted the laws. Fourteen years later, in 449, Maximinus asked Priscus as a special favor to accompany him on an embassy from Theodosius II to Attila, king of the Huns, who was making ever more threatening demands. 87 This embassy was to accompany Attila's ambassador Edeco on his return journey. The earnestness of Maximinus' request, and Priscus' apparent reluc­ tance to comply with it, indicates that both of them expected the embassy to be difficult and dangerous. Whatever they suspected, they were not told that Theodosius' government had suborned Edeco to assassinate Attila during the embassy. The only one of the Roman ambassadors who knew about this plot was the interpreter, Vigilas. Priscus' account of his embassy, preserved in vivid detail in the Constantinian Excerpta, is justly famous. After crossing Thrace, the ambas­ sadors rested at Serdica (modern Sofia), where Maximinus and Priscus were puzzled when one of the Huns in their party referred to the plot obliquely. Passing through the wide border territory that Attila had devastated, they were ferried across the Danube in canoes, while Edeco sent ahead to Attila and (they later learned) informed him of the plot. On their arrival at Attila's camp, they were astonished to find that the Huns already knew their private instructions from the emperor and were ordering them to return. Though Maximinus was discouraged and ready to leave, Priscus arranged with one of the leading Huns for them to see Attila. The king was curt, replying to their wishes for his good health by predicting the Romans would have what they wished for him. Yet he let them go on to his palace, somewhere in the Hungarian plain, while he made a detour to

86

For a plausible case that Priscus was a lawyer, see Greatrex, " Lawyers, " pp. 150-5 1 . Thompson, History, p . 102, and Baldwin, " Priscus, " p . 2 1 , identify the ambassador (PLRE II, Maximinus 10) with the commissioner (PLRE II, Maximinus 6, and proba­ bly also Maximinus 5 and 7). Though Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, p. 48, distinguishes the two on the ground that the ambassador was a military man, his achievements were as much diplomatic as military, and he was a close friend of the civilian Priscus. 87

98 The Early Byzantine Historians celebrate one of his frequent marriages. On their way Priscus and Maximinus had to take refuge from a thunderstorm in a village governed by a widow of Attila's brother, who sent them food, which they accepted, and beautiful women, whom they politely declined. After a further journey they had to wait for Attila at another village, where they joined another embassy from the Western emperor Valentinian Ill. Both embassies traveled together to Attila's palace, only to be kept waiting again. Maximinus sent Priscus to request an audience from Attila's second in com­ mand. At the Hun's door, the historian met and spoke with a Greek who had been captured by the Huns but continued to live voluntarily among them. Priscus claims to have answered the refugee's criticism of corruption in the empire with an eloquent defense of Roman law. After soliciting the help of Attila's principal wife, Priscus chatted disconsolately with his fellow ambas­ sadors from the West, until finally Attila invited all of them to a banquet. The entertainment lasted from the afternoon well into the night and included singers and j esters, but the ambassadors left early to avoid drinking too much. After another banquet, Attila sent them home with further demands and an ambassador of his own. Only on returning to Constantinople did they learn of the assassination plot and understand why their reception had been so strange. Maximinus, obviously grateful to Priscus for his help on this embassy, seems to have engaged him for the next several years as a secretary or adviser. Some months after the embassy to Attila, in the spring of 450, Theodosius sent Maximinus to Isauria, apparently with Priscus, to secure the country against the insubordinate Eastern general Zeno the !saurian. Almost at once, however, the emperor cut Maximinus' mission short on hearing Attila was about to attack the Western empire. Theodosius sent an embassy to the West, apparently under Maximinus with Priscus as his assistant, to advise Valentinian Ill to appease Attila. Though soon after the embassy departed Theodosius died in a riding accident, Maximinus and Priscus went on to the West and reached Rome. Evidently they met Valen­ tinian and his leading general, Aetius, and Priscus mentioned seeing Aetius' adopted son. 88 When Maximinus and his assistant returned the next year to the East, the new emperor, Marcian, whom Priscus admired, sent them overland to Upper Egypt to fight raiders from the Nubian tribes of the Blemmyes and Nubades. Passing through Damascus, Maximinus and his aide met the East­ ern frontier commander, Ardabur, son of the principal Eastern general Aspar, 88 See Thompson, History, pp. 220-21 . Note that Priscus fr. 1 7 refers to Theodosius' sending advice to Valentinian, presumably by means of an embassy, while Priscus fr. 20.3 says that "we," evidently Maximinus and Priscus, were then on an embassy at Rome. The Excerpta omits this embassy because that work deals with embassies only between the empire and foreigners, not between the two parts of the empire.

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whose love of mimes and j ugglers seems to have disgusted Priscus. 89 In Egypt Maximinus defeated the Blemmyes and Nubades, who sued for peace in 453. Their chieftains agreed to a hundred-year peace treaty with Maximinus, but began raiding again when the general suddenly died. 90 After the death of his friend and employer, Priscus made his way down the Nile to Alexandria, which he found wracked by riots over the deposition of the city's Monophysite patriarch Dioscorus. The Egyptian commander Florus, apparently Maximinus' successor, punished the rioters by suspending the city's grain dole and closing its theaters and baths. When the Alexandrians petitioned Florus to end their punishments, Priscus persuaded him to do so, and the riots subsided. 91 Priscus then returned to Constantinople, where he served as a deputy of Marcian's powerful master of offices Euphemius, whom the historian praised for his wisdom and eloquence. 92 When Marcian died in 45 7, Priscus had reservations about the new emperor, Leo I, and appears to have retired from government service but continued living in the capital. This was probably the time when Priscus taught rhetoric, wrote rhetorical exercises, prepared his collected letters for publication, and composed his history. 93 Priscus seems to have been an intelligent, prudent, and practical man, and an astute, sober, and straightforward writer. His history, though absent from Photius' Bibliotheca, figures prominently in the Excerpta and Suda. The Excerpta calls it a " Byzantine history" or "Gothic history, " and the Suda terms it "Byzantine history and affairs under Attila in eight books"; here each source seems to be describing the work's contents rather than quoting its title. Priscus found a certain readership, because direct or indirect quotations from him appear in at least a half-dozen later historians. Though we lack a summary of his history, we seem to have between a quarter and a third of his original text, depending on how long he made his books and how many of the fragments conjectured to be his are genuine. 94 The surviving fragments run from the accession of Attila, which occurred around 438, to the assassination of the generals Aspar and Ardabur in 4 7 1 . Another fragment that may well be from Priscus refers to the accession of the Western emperor Nepos in 4 74 . Given Priscus' strong interest in Attila, his formal starting point probably was the Hunnish king's accession, though he also included some background by way of introduction. Seemingly Priscus 89

Cf. Priscus frs. 19 and 26. Priscus fr. 2 7. 9 1 Priscus fr. 28. 1 . 9 2 Priscus fr. 33.2. 93 See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians II, p. 222, citing Suda n 2301 and Evagrius 1. 1 7. 94 See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 1 1 3-23 (analysis), and II, pp. 22 1-3 7 7 (edition, translation, and notes). 90

100 The Early Byzantine Historians concluded his work with the death of the Eastern emperor Leo I in 4 74. Yet Priscus appears to have finished writing after Basiliscus' usurpation ended in August 4 76, since he wrote candidly about Basiliscus' disastrous expedition against the Vandals. The historian, who may then have been in his sixties, is not heard of again. Priscus probably began his Book I with a preface explaining that his his­ tory's subject was the relations between Attila's Huns and the empire. He summarized the Huns' earlier history, from their appearance north of the Black Sea in the 3 70's to Attila's succession along with his brother Bleda around 438. Evidently Priscus contrasted Attila's ferocity with the timidity of Theodosius II, who came to be dominated by his chamberlain Chrysaphius. While the Huns kept attacking and extorting more tribute, Theodosius dismissed two officials Priscus seems to have admired, the chamberlain Antiochus in 439 and the prefect Cyrus in 44 1 . 95 Book II may have opened with the Huns' raid on the Eastern empire in 44 1 . In 44 7 the Huns made a more serious attack, overrunning most of Thrace and frightening the emperor into levying what Priscus considered an extortionary tax to pay still more tribute. The next year Attila continued to demand money and the return of those who had fled from him. So matters stood in 449, when Chrysaphius laid the abortive plot to assassinate Attila by means of the embassy of Maximinus and Priscus. Priscus' record of this embassy until its return to Constantinople must have taken up most if not all of Book Ill. Book IV, labeled as such in the Excerpta, seems to have begun with Attila's revealing his knowledge of the plot and demanding that the emperor surrender Chrysaphius as the plotter. By the beginning of 450 another embassy from Theodosius bought off Attila again. Next the emperor sent Maximinus to fight Chrysaphius' rival Zeno, though the campaign was interrupted by the news of Attila's threatening to attack the West. At this point Theodosius II's death probably ended Book IV. Book V seems to have opened with a laudatory report on the earlier career of the new emperor Marcian, who executed Chrysaphius and stopped paying the Huns tribute. Priscus approved of both measures. The history's attention then shifted to the West. Attila, claiming that Valentinian's sister Honoria had agreed to marry him, invaded first Gaul and then northern Italy, where he sacked Aquileia. Priscus probably concluded this book with Attila's death from a hemorrhage in 453 while celebrating one of his marriages. According to Priscus, that very night "a divinity" revealed to Marcian in a dream that Attila's bow was broken. 96

95 See Priscus frs. 7 and 8 (marked as not certainly Priscan); Greatrex and Bardill, "Antiochus," pp. 1 80-93; and (on Cyrus) Alan Cameron, " Empress, " pp. 254-70. 9 6 Priscus fr. 24. 1 . Since the source of the fragment, Jordanes, was a Christian who seems to believe the story, it suggests rather than proves that Priscus was a pagan.

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Book VI perhaps began with the German uprising that defeated Attila's sons and wrecked their empire. Priscus then recounted his own journey to Egypt with Maximinus, Maximinus' death, and the riots at Alexandria in 453. In the next year came the dramatic story of the Western emperor Valentinian's murder of his principal general, Aetius. The year 455 saw Valentinian's own assassination, the revolt of Aetius' friend Marcellinus in Dalmatia, and the Vandals' sack of Rome. 97 Marcian's death in 45 7 presumably brought Book VI to a close. Book VII would then have begun with the accessions of Leo I in the East and Majorian in the West. Priscus described Majorian's abortive campaign against the Vandals, his murder by his general Ricimer in 46 1 , and the progressive disintegration of the Western empire. The historian also recorded the great fire of 464 at Constantinople, further negotiations with the sons of Attila, and flooding around the capital in 467. 98 The next item, which may have begun Book VIII, was the disastrous joint Eastern and Western expedition against the Vandals under Basiliscus in 468. After this came Leo's treacherous assassination of Aspar and Ardabur in 4 7 1 . The death of Leo in January 4 7 4, and the conquest of Rome five months later by Nepos, Leo's candidate for Western emperor, would have concluded the history at a year significant for both East and West. Since by the end of Priscus' eight books the Huns had ceased to be his main subject, as they had been at the outset, his original plan may well have been to conclude with Marcian's death in 45 7 after the Huns had been humbled. His history would then have had the time-honored number of six books and would as far as we know have included all his experiences in government service, which he surely wanted to record. When he outlived the next emperor, Leo, in 4 7 4, Priscus seems to have decided to bring his history up to date with two additional books, even though he was out of office and the Huns' importance had waned. Priscus' work had unmistakable historical and literary merits. 99 He often imitated Thucydides or Herodotus, but his style seems to have been fairly clear, if we allow for some damage in its transmission to us. He appears

97 I would assign Priscus fr. 39.2 (a reference by Stephen of Byzantium to Salona, citing Book VI of Priscus) to the beginning of Marcellinus' revolt in 454, not to Marcellinus' activities in 462-63 as Blockley and others have done. Since Priscus fr. 39.1 was obviously not Priscus' first mention of Marcellinus, the mention of Salona goes more naturally with the beginning of Marcellinus' rule there; moreover, assigning Stephen's citation to the later date leads to the improbable conclusions that Priscus did not end a book with the death of Attila, the most prominent figure in his history, and devoted just one book (Book V) to the eventful seven-year reign of Marcian. 98 On the date of the fire, see Whitby, Ecclesiastical History, p. 96 n. 139. 99 See Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 52-59; and Baldwin, "Priscus," pp. S0-56.

102 The Early Byzantine Historians not to have overindulged in inventing speeches. Though he avoided tech­ nical terms, his circumlocutions for them can usually be deciphered. His chronology was unobtrusive but sound. For all his classicism, he was ready to cite appropriate statistics, and his sums for tribute and payments for the expedition against the Vandals show his knowledge of government. His cov­ erage of events included many well-chosen details. He followed Thucydides and Xenophon in recounting his own experiences, which he rightly con­ sidered both important and interesting. Obviously he had a professional interest in diplomacy, and he correctly believed it was central to the history of his times. Without seeming conceited, Priscus gave a plausible impression of being a capable and loyal subordinate. No doubt he resented that Theodosius II and Chrysaphius had put him and Maximinus in an awkward and perilous position on their embassy to Attila. Probably Priscus gave Marcian credit for entrusting Maximinus with an important command and Priscus himself with a post in the bureaucracy, and perhaps Priscus resented losing his post under Leo I. Yet Priscus' judgments of Theodosius, Chrysaphius, Marcian, and Leo were all reasonable, and he kept his moralizing within bounds. His conversation with the Greek expatriate at Attila's court, though rhetorical and not to be taken as an accurate record, effectively makes two contrasting but compatible points in Thucydidean fashion: that the Roman courts were indeed corrupt, but that Roman laws were nonetheless preferable to the Huns' lawlessness. Given the interest, elegance, comparative brevity, and even relative popu­ larity of Priscus' history, its failure to survive in its original form is somewhat puzzling. It seems already to have been rare in the ninth century, when it failed to appear in Photius' Bibliotheca though it was very much the sort of book Photius liked and sought out. As always, chance must have played a part. Priscus' period, when barbarians bullied the empire, was not one the Byzantines would have remembered fondly, except for the defeat of Nestorian and Monophysite heretics, recorded by church historians but not by Priscus. Priscus' failure to continue and be continued by other historians in a tidy sequence may also have contributed to his history's loss along with the sec­ ular histories before and after his. Since his work seems to have been better than theirs, he may also have suffered from a sort of disrepute by associa­ tion. Yet even the fragments of his history can still be read with profit and pleasure. 100

10° For a less favorable judgment of Priscus, see Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 69-70, who criticizes him for failings that may simply reflect the skewed selection of his remaining fragments.

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Candidus and Malchus

By the late fifth century, after Priscus had enjoyed some apparent critical success, secular history had become established as an active and respected literary genre. The next secular historians included two contemporaries of whom we know very little, Candidus of Isauria and Malchus of Philadelphia. Their overlapping histories, mentioned in Photius' Bibliotheca and the Suda, survive only in scanty fragments. The Excerpta gives extracts from Malchus but not from Candidus. Since a number of articles in the Suda on the period covered by Malchus and Candidus could belong to either or neither of them, the relation of their two histories to each other can only be conjectured. 101 According to Photius, Candidus himself wrote that he was born in Isauria in southeastern Anatolia and served as "secretary to the most powerful among the Isaurians, " apparently meaning the !saurian emperor Zeno and his gen­ erals. Presumably Candidus lived in Constantinople during the period of !saurian dominance of the empire. Photius reports that Candidus was a Chalcedonian Christian, and that his history, in three books, began with the proclamation of Leo I in 45 7 and concluded with the death of Zeno in 49 1 . Photius found Candidus' style inferior and unsuitable for history, and his whole work a hodgepodge of "the most dissimilar materials." Photius' summary shows that, as we might expect of an !saurian, Candidus favored Leo I's policy of relying on !saurian troops and sided with Zeno against his many enemies. Malchus, again according to Photius, came from Philadelphia, which since Malchus ("King") is a Semitic name was probably Arabian Philadel­ phia (now Amman in Jordan) . The Suda calls Malchus a " Byzantine, " which usually meant a native of Constantinople but in this case must have meant a longtime resident. Photius and the Suda agree in terming Malchus a "sophist, " which usually meant a professional teacher of rhetoric. Photius found Malchus' work a model of historiography, declared its style to be beau­ tiful, dignified, and clear, and described its author as "not without Christian inspiration in his religion. " This last phrase probably indicates that Malchus made it plain he was a Christian but adopted a certain religious detachment as suitable for a classical history. 102 Quoting the title of Malchus' history as Byzantiaca ("Byzantine History"), Photius says that he read seven books of it, beginning with the seventeenth year of Leo I (473/74) and ending with the murder of the last Western 101 On Candidus and Malchus, see Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 7 1-85 and 124-27 (analysis), and 11, pp. 401-82 (edition, translation, and notes), and "Development"; and Baldwin, "Malchus. " 1 02 This is also the opinion of Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, p. 77, though Baldwin, "Malchus," p. 96, thinks "that Photius did not regard Malchus as a committed orthodox Christian. "

104 The Early Byzantine Historians emperor, Nepos (480) . Photius nonetheless found clear signs in the text­ presumably references by Malchus to treating earlier and later events-that the author had written other books before these seven and planned to write still more after them. Photius assumed that Malchus' death had cut his work short. The Suda, however, without giving the number of books in Malchus' history, describes it as beginning with the reign of Constantine and conclud­ ing with that of Anastasius. Presumably this means Malchus started with Constantine's arrival in the East in 324, which as the year of the founda­ tion of Constantinople would have made an appropriate beginning for a "Byzantine" history, and stopped, like Candidus, with 49 1 , the accession of Anastasius. If so, Photius' copy must have included only the middle part of Malchus' history, whose incompleteness led Photius to the mistaken deduc­ tion that the work was unfinished. A similarly truncated manuscript seems to have reached the later compilers of the Excerpta and Suda, because all their citations from Malchus belong to the years from 473/74 to 480. 1 °3 The Suda's article on Malchus himself was however better informed, because it went back by way of the Hesychius Epitome to the sixth-century dictionary of Hesychius. Since Photius had a manuscript that began and ended with complete books, what survived into the ninth century may well have been the middle volume of an original set of three. Given that the seven surviving books covered seven eventful years, Malchus may have adopted a strictly annalistic form, with Books I to VII covering one year each. Then the eleven years after 480 might have filled eleven more books, numbered VIII to XVIII. However, since Malchus can hardly have given such detailed annalistic treatment to the 1 50 years before 4 74, probably his account of that period formed a separate and shorter work, perhaps not divided into books at all. As a single book, it may have been little more than an epitome of the relevant parts of the histories of Eunapius, Olympiodorus, and Priscus. Probably Malchus completed and circulated this earlier book not long after 4 7 4, perhaps around 480. In any case, his later history was much longer than that of Candidus, and its fragments show that it criticized Leo I, Zeno, and lsaurians in general. Although Photius' silence implies that neither historian played a significant part in his own history, apparently both men were past childhood during the reigns of Leo I and Zeno, and both finished writing after 49 1 . Both their birth­ dates may therefore be conjecturally placed in the 430's. Which one was the

1 03 Malchus fr. 8, bracketed by Blockley as dubious, is unlikely to be from Malchus because it refers to the death of Zeno the Younger, which since he lived to late ado­ lescence and must have been born after 4 7 4 (because he did not succeed his brother Leo 11) would have occurred after 480.

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older and when they died we cannot tell, but we can guess which of them fin­ ished first. In the comparatively small literary community of Constantinople, two historians are unlikely to have written around the same time on the same period without learning of each other's existence, and their contrasting views indicate that one was responding to the other. Candidus' account of Zeno's reign probably appeared before that of Malchus because, being shorter and less elaborate, it could hardly have been intended to replace Malchus' history. Candidus would therefore have written soon after 49 1 , perhaps even before Anastasius purged the army of Isaurians in 492. Though Malchus probably wrote his account of the emperors up to Leo I before that date, he is likely to have completed his other books a few years after 492, in the hope that they would eclipse Candidus' work. Perhaps they did to some extent, aided by their superior style, convenient introduc­ tory summary, and conformity with most readers' distaste for Isaurians. We have less than a tenth of Candidus' short history, even if we add to the one article the Suda explicitly ascribes to him several others referring to his period and showing his characteristic !saurian sympathies. 104 Photius' summary of Candidus is concise but informative. Book I began with Aspar's promotion of Leo I as emperor in 45 7 and continued with the great fire of 464 and Basiliscus' expedition against the Vandals in 468. Candidus gave an account of the expedition's expenses that is independent of Priscus but compatible with him. 105 Then Candidus described Leo's quarrel with Aspar, which led to the emperor's alliance with Zeno and his Isaurians, then to the justifiable assassination of Aspar and hi s son Ardabur. According to Candidus, Leo wanted to will the empire to Zeno, by then his son-in-law, but left it to his grandson Leo 11 because Zeno was so unpopular. At Leo Il's accession with Zeno as eo-emperor in 4 74, Candidus inserted a digression on the Isaurians, including a demonstration that they were descended from Esau. Next came Zeno's temporary deposition by Basiliscus and Ramulus Augustulus' proclamation as emperor of the West, both in 475. Candidus' Book 1 1 recounted Zeno's exile, Basiliscus' usurpation, and Zeno's recovery of his throne in 4 7 6. Candidus seems to have depicted Zeno as a hero severely tested but finally rewarded by God. 106 Candidus probably wrote a 1 0 4 Of the fragments listed as Anonyma e Suda by Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians Il, pp. 4 74-82, I would tentatively assign to Candidus frs. 1 , 2, 4, S, and 7, along with Malchus frs. 9. 3, 9.4, and 10, which Blockley (p. viii) is unsure about attributing to Malchus. 1 0 5 Cf. Candidus fr. 2 (47,000 lbs. gold + 1 7,000 lbs. gold + 700,000 lbs. silver [equivalent to c. 39,000 lbs. gold, or with the two other figures to 103,000 lbs. gold] + unspecified additional sums from confiscations and the Western emperor Anthemius), with Priscus fr. 53 (a total of 1 30,000 lbs. gold, so that Candidus' unspecified sums could have equaled 27,000 lbs. gold). See also Treadgold, Byzantium, pp. 1 89-91 . 1 06 Cf. especially Zeno's short speech i n Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians II, pp. 4 78-79 (Anonyma e Suda fr. 4).

106 The Early Byzantine Historians description of the fire at Constantinople under Basiliscus, which destroyed many houses and a library of 1 20,000 volumes in the courthouse called the Basilica, or Imperial Stoa. 107 The same book also described dissension among Christians at Antioch, the deposition of Romulus in the West by Odoacer, and the various plots and revolts that Zeno faced and overcame until 484. Book Ill began with the rebellion in that year by Zeno's fellow !saurian and erstwhile ally Illus, whom the emperor defeated and executed in 488. After narrating other events that Photius does not specify, the book and the history concluded with Zeno's death in 49 1 . These three books therefore covered eighteen, nine, and seven years respectively, giving prominence to Zeno and becoming more detailed as they neared the time of writing. Photius criticizes Candidus' use of poetic words in prose and the clumsy construction of his sentences, while acknowledging that in some places his style improved. The implication is that Candidus' literary education was defective, as the Byzantines would have expected of a rustic !saurian. Candidus' inclusion of ecclesiastical events in a mainly secular history is interesting, though it would have been necessary if he was to give an intelligible explanation of the largely Monophysite opposition to the essentially Chalcedonian Zeno. While Candidus obviously felt solidarity with his !saurian employers and compatriots, Zeno must in fact have had much political skill to survive so many serious conspiracies without reliable allies. Of Malchus' work, besides the short summary by Photius, we have frag­ ments in the Excerpta and Suda that probably amount to something over a tenth of the seven books that survived into the middle Byzantine period. The first fragment describes a visit to Constantinople in 4 73 by an obscure Arab chieftain, whom according to Malchus Leo I treated with ill-advised indul­ gence. Probably in an obituary, Malchus condemned Leo as rapacious, greedy, and evil. Malchus also condemned Zeno as cowardly and corrupt, if less cor­ rupt than Leo. 108 Though what Malchus thought of Basiliscus is uncertain, the historian found Zeno's execution of the usurper's wife and children to be unjust. Like Candidus, Malchus recorded the fire under Basiliscus, noting its destruction of many pagan statues, including the Aphrodite of Cnidus. The passages from Malchus preserved in the Excerpta describe embassies to and from the new ruler of Italy, Odoacer, the deposed Western emperor Nepos, the two Gothic chieftains Theoderic the Amal and Theoderic Strabo, and the Vandal king Huneric. Malchus agreed with Theoderic the Amal's

10 7 See Malchus fr. 1 1 , where Zonaras' statement that "Malchus too" (mt 6 MaA.xo�) mentioned the fire shows that the preceding material in lines 1-9 came from another author, presumably Candidus. On the Basilica, which was located above the Basilica Cistern that survives today, see Janin, Constantinople, pp. 1 5 7-60. 1 0 8 Malchus frs. 5 and 1 6.

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charge that Zeno had betrayed him, and blamed Zeno for cowardice in aban­ doning a planned campaign against Theoderic. The Amal's raids across the Balkans and seizure of Dyrrhachium in 479 were recorded in detail. The lat­ est fragments refer to the failed revolt against Zeno by his general Marcian in late 4 79 and early 480. Malchus' Book VII concluded later in 480 with the murder of Nepos in a conspiracy organized by Glycerius, the emperor whom Nepos had himself deposed in 474. Malchus was a perceptive historian, and not entirely unfair to Zeno, who resorted to some unsavory tactics in his desperate struggles with his enemies. Malchus' invented speeches were short and to the point. While ready to use technical terms when they were needed for clarity, Malchus followed the Byzantine affectation of using ancient Greek names for contemporary places, calling Constantinople "Byzantium" and Dyrrhachium "Epidamnus" as if he were Thucydides. As Photius observes, Malchus' style was harmonious and readable. Yet what remains of his narrative does little to enliven an inher­ ently suspenseful story. His bias against Zeno and apparent reluctance to explain theological disputes kept him from dramatizing Zeno's many perils and remarkable escapes, as Candidus evidently did. 109 Because nothing remains of the earlier and later parts of Malchus' his­ tory, his sources can only be guessed. Even if he wrote in response to Candidus' history, he cannot have relied much on a far briefer work with which he sharply disagreed. As a man of learning with access to the libraries of Constantinople-including the Basilica before it burned-Malchus pre­ sumably read some histories written before his time; but they would have helped only for his introductory summary. Otherwise he must have con­ sulted various people and documents. His history seems not to have been very popular, if we can judge by the failure of most of it to survive for long. Its prolixity was probably one reason, especially because it described events without much appeal for later readers. Moreover, like its predecessors, it was soon superseded by other works derived from it. Count Zosimus

We know little about Zosimus, the sole secular historian of this time whose work we have more or less complete. 1 10 The contents of his New History, as he entitled it, show he was an ardent and embittered pagan. His chosen

10 9 For a somewhat more favorable judgment, see Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, pp. 74-77 (though on p. 75 his remark on Malchus' use of place names is presumably a slip, since it describes the reverse of Malchus' actual practice). See also Baldwin, "Malchus," pp. 102-7. 1 10 On Zosimus, see Paschoud, Cinq etudes and Zosime I, pp. vii-cxi; and Liebeschuetz, "Pagan Historiography, " pp. 206-15.

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dialect was standard literary Greek rather than Attic; his style is passable; and his education seems to have been adequate but not excellent. Photius knew of his career only what the title in our own manuscript tells us: Zosimus held the rank of count (comes) and was a retired treasury official (advocatus fisci) . Since the New History is obviously unfinished, its author presumably died while writing it during his retirement. In two of its few passages that can be confidently ascribed to Zosimus him­ self instead of his sources, he refers to a quadrennial tax repealed in 498 as no longer in effect, and to pantomime dancing abolished in 502 as still causing trouble. Therefore death probably interrupted his work around 501 , when pantomime dances set off rioting that led Anastasius to abolish them the following year. l 1 1 If Zosimus retired at about age sixty and began writ­ ing his history soon afterwards, he was born in the 430's, like Candidus and Malchus. The Excerpta repeatedly calls him Zosimus of Ascalon, a small city on the coast of Palestine near Gaza. 1 12 As a plainspoken treasury official, the histo­ rian can hardly be the same as the professor of rhetoric Zosimus of Ascalon, who wrote a rhetorical treatise in verse and commentaries on Lysias, Demos­ thenes, Isocrates, and Thucydides. Yet this rhetor is said to have lived under Anastasius like the historian, and may well have been a relative of his, since at the time Zosimus was an uncommon name usually linked with either Ascalon or nearby Gaza. If both of these Zosimi were grandsons of another Zosimus who lived in the early fifth century and edited rhetorical works, the historian and the rhetor would have been first cousins. 1 1 3 I n his history Zosimus includes remarks o n the founding o f Constantinople in 324 that imply he lived in the city and was writing for readers who also resided there. l 14 As a retired official who must still have had friends in the bureaucracy, he seems to have had access to the state archives in the capital when he wrote. Apparently he supplemented Eunapius' accounts of battles among the tetrarchs with some numbers of soldiers he clumsily adapted from an archival document. The document actually catalogued the armies and

111

See Alan Cameron, " Date, " referring to Zosimus II.38.2-4 and 1.6. 1 . Excerpta 1. 1 , pp. 2 and 73; 1.2, p. 3 75. 1 1 3 See PLRE II, where Zosimus 6 is the historian, Zosimus 4 is the rhetor (cf. Hans Gartner in RE, ser. 2, XA [ 1 9 72] , cols. 790-95), and Zosimus 1 is the older scholar. Zosimus 5 may be the same as the rhetor, but seems too young to be the historian, since he was a student of Procopius of Gaza who was born c. 465 (PLRE Il, Procopius 8). The mysterious Zosimus 2, a sophist of Gaza, cannot be either the rhetor or the historian if he was executed by Zeno as reported by George Cedrenus. Zosimus 3, the sophist and correspondent of Aeneas of Gaza, may be the same as the rhetor or the executed sophist. 1 1 4 Zosimus 11.30-32. 1 . 1 12

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navies of all four tetrarchs in 3 1 2, but Zosimus applied its numbers to the men who fought in actual battles in 3 1 2 and 324. 1 1 5 We might conj ecturally reconstruct Zosimus' life as follows. He was born in the 430's at Ascalon into a prominent pagan family with scholarly connec­ tions, and received a standard literary education in his home town. He then obtained a post as a treasury official at Constantinople, which he held until he retired with the honorary rank of count near the end of the fifth century. Even if he concealed his paganism while he was in office, he inwardly seethed over what he saw as the empire's mismanagement under Christian rule. He may especially have lamented the loss of Rome to Odoacer in 476 and the disappearance of the last of the Western empire in 480. After retiring at Con­ stantinople, Zosimus began to write what was probably his first literary work, a history meant to show how Rome had ruined herself by abandoning her ancestral religion. Around 501 death overtook him. Zosimus' New History is divided into six books, of which Book VI is less polished and much shorter than the rest. Photius remarks of Zosimus: "One might say that he has not written a history but rather copied the history of Eunapius, differing only in abridging it and in the fact that he does not abuse Stilicho in quite the same way as Eunapius does. Otherwise he is more or less the same, especially in his slanders of the pious emperors." 1 1 6 Photius seems t o have realized that Zosimus covered both earlier and later ground than Eunapius had. Not many pages after observing that Eunapius began with the death of Claudius Gothicus in 270 and ended with the death of Eudoxia in 404, Photius writes that Zosimus began "with Augustus, as one might say"-a reasonable statement since Zosimus' chronological account begins with Octavian's reign as Augustus (27 BC-AD 14)-and ended with negotiations between Honorius and Alaric in 4 1 0. 1 1 7 Apparently with­ out noticing that Zosimus had relied on Olympiodorus after 404, Photius does allude to Zosimus' suddenly favorable attitude toward Stilicho, which mirrored that of Olympiodorus. Photius' brief review reveals nothing about Zosimus' source for the period before 270. That this source was the first edition of Eunapius' work has been suggested but seems unlikely. In comparing the two editions of Eunapius, Photius says that the second differed only in excising the most vehemently anti-Christian passages in the first edition. Though Photius must have 1 1 5 Zosimus I I . 1 5 . 1-2 and 22. 1-2. Cf. Treadgold, Byzantium, pp. 49-58, suggesting that Agathias may have used the same archival document in Constantinople later in the sixth century. Eunapius seems very unlikely to have had access in Sardis to this information (unlike his figure for the size of Julian's Persian expedition, which he presumably learned from Oribasius). 1 1 6 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 98, 84b.28-32. 1 1 7 Cf. Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 77 (Eunapius), 53b.36-54a.4, with cod. 98 (Zosimus), 84b.8-9 and 22-26.

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stopped comparing Eunapius' two editions before they ended, as he shows by overlooking that the second edition reached 404, he presumably did start comparing them at the beginning. There he would surely have noticed if Eunapius' second edition had deleted a long account of events before 270, most of which had no bearing on Christianity. Nor did Eunapius, who specified in his title and preface that he was continuing Dexippus, have any reason to compose and then discard an account of the events already covered by Dexippus. 1 18 Zosimus appears to have condensed Eunapius and Olympiodorus with­ out otherwise altering or harmonizing them. For example, with the year 404 Zosimus abruptly begins supplying consular dates and praising Stilicho, though earlier he gives no such dates and condemns Stilicho. Zosimus' sum­ marizing is so mechanical for the years after 270 that we should expect to find that he summarized a single source for the earlier years. The obvious can­ didate is Dexippus, whose Short History covered the whole period Zosimus needed and in manuscripts must often have formed a set with Eunapius' History to Continue Dexippus. Zosimus knew from Eunapius' title and subse­ quent preface that Eunapius accepted Dexippus as his main authority for events before 270. If Zosimus summarized Dexippus, this would explain why Zosimus' account becomes more detailed between 235 and 270, during Dex­ ippus' lifetime. Use of Dexippus would also explain why Zosimus' transition between his earlier source and Dexippus' continuer Eunapius is so smooth at 270, even though Zosimus' later transition between Eunapius and Olym­ piodorus is quite awkward. l 19 Therefore we should probably regard the first section of Zosimus as an epitome of Dexippus' Short History. What source or sources did Zosimus plan to use for the years after Olympiodorus' history ended in 425? Priscus, perhaps pagan and certainly critical of Theodosius 11, is a possible candidate, but Priscus' narrative seems to have started more than a decade later than Olympiodorus left off. Prob­ ably the best guess is Malchus, whose work covered all the necessary years with minimal overlapping with Eunapius and Olympiodorus, only unobtru­ sive Christian sentiments, and repeated criticisms of Leo I and Zeno, whom Zosimus also disliked.

1 1 8 I therefore disagree with the argument of Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. xl-xlvi, that Zosimus' source was the first edition of Eunapius, which in that case would have needed to begin not with 270 but with the Trojan War (like Dexippus). 1 19 For the view that Zosimus put together his account before 270 himself from several sources, see Blockley, "Was the First Book?"; but the sources Blockley tentatively identifies seem more likely to have been directly consulted by the more learned and sophisticated Dexippus than by Zosimus. The meager fragments of Dexippus' Short History (Jacoby, FGrH I IA, no. 100, pp. 454-56, mostly from Eunapius' preface) are of no use in solving the problem.

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I f Malchus had finished and distributed his work around 495 as a rej oinder to Candidus, its appearance may well have encouraged Zosimus to begin his New History. Armed with the histories of Dexippus, Eunapius, Olympiodorus, and Malchus, Zosimus could then have avoided much further research and simply condensed them, adding whatever comments he wished. While he would no doubt have inserted some bits of information as he reached the time that he and his acquaintances could remember, his method in what we have of his work shows a marked lack of originality. In his brief preface to Book I, Zosimus observes that Polybius had writ­ ten his history to show how the Romans had acquired their empire in "less than fifty-three years. " Zosimus agrees with Polybius that Rome's rise was the work of Fortune, but unlike Polybius he identifies Fortune with "the will of God, which attends our actions that favor justice." Yet Zosimus believed the Romans had now forfeited such divine assistance. 120 Later in Book I he declares that just "as Polybius described how the Romans founded their empire in a short time, I shall tell how by their sins in not much time they destroyed it. But this will appear when I come to that part of my history. " 121 Though here Zosimus is citing only the first few pages of Polybius' History, he may have read much more, especially because he seems to imitate Polybius' dialect and style. By giving his work the title New History, Zosimus apparently meant that he was writing a new history of Rome's decline to complement Polybius' "old history" of Rome's rise. l22 After this preface, Book I alludes briefly to Greek history from the Troj an War to the Roman conquest, next to the Roman civil wars from Sulla and Marius to the victory of Octavian, and then, at slightly greater length, to the emperors up to AD 1 92. Zosimus clearly disapproves of the Roman civil wars, the demise of the Roman Republic-which unlike Polybius he sees simply as an "aristocracy"-and the "tyranny" of the emperors, espe­ cially Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Commodus. Zosimus refers in passing to the Roman emperors' cruelty, but what seems to annoy him most is the introduction under Augustus of pantomime dancing and unspec­ ified "other things that have become the causes of many evils up to the present. " 123 With Commodus' death in 1 92, Zosimus expands his treat­ ment, condemning Didius Julianus for buying the empire, commending 1 20 Zosimus 1 . 1 ; cf. Polybius 1. 1 and 4. 121 Zosimus 1.57. 1-2. 1 22 This interpretation seems not to have been suggested before. Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. xx-xxi, rightly rejects not only the hesitant suggestion of Photius (Bibliotheca cod. 98, 84b.32-36) that the title meant the history was a new edition, but also the usual modern interpretation that it meant "contemporary history," which it was not. Paschoud argues that the title meant " history of a new sort" (i.e., militantly pagan); but, as Zosimus well knew, not he but Eunapius was the inventor of that sort of history. 123 Zosimus 1.6. 1 .

1 1 2 The Early Byzantine Historians Septimius Severus for punishing vices, and decrying Caracalla's fratricide and Elagabalus' debauchery. The New History then becomes one of the best of our few and bad sources for the complex upheavals of the third century. Probably following Dexippus, Zosimus begins to moralize a little less and to add more detail to his cursory narrative. He singles out Decius and Claudius Gothicus for praise, without mentioning Decius' persecution of the Christians. He pays most attention to the invasions of the Germans he calls "Scythians, " who had been the sub­ j ect of the Scythica of Dexippus and must also have received considerable attention in Dexippus' Short History. After the death of Claudius Gothicus­ or perhaps more precisely after the ephemeral reign of Claudius' brother Quintillus later in 2 70-Zosimus begins to summarize Eunapius, starting with the reign of Aurelian. 1 24 Sixteen pages missing from our only primary manuscript of the New History have taken with them the last part of Book I and the first part of Book 11, along with Zosimus' account of the years from 282 to 305. Most of the missing part for 282-84 can be supplied from two overlapping passages in the Suda and the later history of]ohn of Antioch, both of which indirectly depended on Zosimus. 1 25 Though Zosimus' whole narrative of Diocletian's reign is lost, Photius' summary shows that Book 11 opened with Diocle­ tian's accession in 284. 1 26 Thus Zosimus' divisions between books not only ignored the beginning of Eunapius' text but divided Eunapius' Book I, which extended to 355. By beginning his Book 11 with 284, Zosimus gave greater prominence than Eunapius to Diocletian, whom both pagan historians seem to have favored. 127 Zosimus followed Eunapius in beginning his Book Ill with 355 and the Caesarship of Julian, who was of course a hero for both historians. Zosimus' Book Ill describes Julian's reign first as Caesar and then as Augustus, append­ ing to it only the brief and ignominious interlude under ]ovian. Then Zosimus' Book IV runs from the accession of Valentinian I and Valens in 364, which Eunapius also seems to have adopted as a book division, to the

1 2 4 The point of division is after either Zosimus 1.46 or 1.47. For Zosimus' account of the years from 270 to 404, see also the summary of Eunapius on pp. 84-88 above. 1 2 5 See Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. xxviii-xxix and pp. 1 87-94. As we shall see on pp. 3 1 4-1 7 below, John of Antioch copied Eustathius of Epiphania, who had in turn consulted Zosimus. 126 Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 98, 84b . l 3-14. 1 2 7 Zosimus 11.7.2, 1 0.5, and 34. 1 are all favorable to Diocletian. This does not go without saying, because given his criticism of the early emperors as tyrants and his praise for Julian's humility, Zosimus (and Eunapius) might also have taken the view implied by Ammianus XV.S. 1 8, who found Diocletian, despite his piety and prudence, too much of an Oriental despot.

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death o f Theodosius I i n 395, where the first edition o f Eunapius' history evidently ended. Yet Zosimus' Book V continues right past the end of Eunapius' history in 404, making its awkward transition to follow Olympiodorus without begin­ ning a new book. Then Zosimus concludes his Book V not with the death of Arcadius in 408, as might have been expected, but in 409 with Honorius' rejection of Alaric's offer of peace, which Zosimus (presumably following Olympiodorus) thought should have been accepted. The unfinished Book VI breaks off in the middle of 4 1 0, about a month before Alaric sacked Rome. Photius confirms that his manuscript of the New History ended at the same point. 128 Zosimus doubtless prepared a plan of his book divisions before he wrote, because anyone else who made the divisions later would hardly have made Book VI so short. Probably the historian meant to conclude his work with 49 1 , with the death of Zeno and the accession of the current emperor, Anastasius, though Odoacer's deposition of Romulus in 476 or the death of the Western emperor Nepos in 480 are possible alternatives. If the New History had continued at the same pace as in Books III-V, it would have had ten books; but if it had given more space to more recent times, the total might have been twelve books, like Dexippus' history and perhaps the first edition of Eunapius. Thus we seem to have about half of what Zosimus had planned to write. While the New History cannot be ranked very high as either history or literature, it should not be condemned without some qualifications. Because all its main sources are lost in their original form, the possibility remains that Zosimus added material from additional sources we can no longer identify. Moreover, if he had been able to finish his work, he might well have polished his style, improved his analysis, and added more information even to his narrative before 4 1 0. As a source, the New History is important, and perhaps almost as informative as the texts on which it was based would have been. 129 Even if Zosimus contributed to the loss of those texts because posterity found his work more concise, comprehensive, and readable, he cannot fairly be blamed for that. Zosimus' style is uncluttered and unpretentious, and its occasional obscu­ rities should probably be blamed on the sources he summarized or on the unfinished state of his work. Since Photius liked Zosimus' style better than that of Eunapius and much better than that of Olympiodorus, Zosimus seems

12 8 Cf. Zosimus VI. 1 3.2 with Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 98, 84b.22-26. 129 Cf. Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians I, p. 26: If Eunapius' History survived complete, it would probably appear that Zosimus has preserved most of what was valuable in it. " "

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to have improved upon their prose. 1 30 He differed from the other classi­ cizing historians of his time by writing in the Hellenistic (Koine) Greek of Polybius and Diodorus rather than the ancient Attic dialect of Thucydides and Xenophon. No doubt Zosimus was trying to emulate the style of his model Polybius. Yet since Zosimus was a thoroughgoing traditionalist, he may also be suspected of lacking the confidence in his education to attempt the more difficult Attic dialect. A similar lack of self-confidence seems to show in his following his sources slavishly. His history is no more than the sum of its parts. Eustathius of Epiphania

A generation after Zosimus another compiler, Eustathius of Epiphania, wrote a history that is now lost in its original form and remains somewhat mys­ terious, though it was surely monumental and a large part of it probably survives. l 3 1 Partly secular and partly Christian, it was modestly entitled Chronological Epitome, though it filled two substantial volumes. The first vol­ ume covered events from Adam to the fall of Troy, while the second began with Aeneas and broke off after recounting the Persian capture of Amida in 503. The second volume contained nine books. 1 32 According to his younger contemporary John Malalas, Eustathius died sud­ denly after writing his description of the fall of Amida, though he had meant to continue beyond that point. On the plausible assumption that he planned to stop with the end of an imperial reign, he wrote and died at least a few years after Anastasius' death in 5 1 8. 1 33 Yet Eustathius was dead by 527, since

1 3° Cf. Photius, Bibliotheca cod. 98 (Zosimus), 84b.5-8 and 36-38; cod. 7 7 (Eunapius), 54a. 1 2-25; and cod. 8 0 (Olympiodorus), 5 6b . 1 4-29. 1 3 1 On Eustathius, who remains inadequately treated in the secondary literature, see Alien, "Early Epitomator"; and PLRE 11, Eustathius 10 (though the manuscript of Eustathius preserved on Patmos until 1 200 was evidently the epitome of josephus published by Alien, not the full history; cf. P. Maas, "Handschrift"). The theory of Mazzarino, Antico II, pp. 69-103, identifying Eustathius with the fragments of the so-called Anonymus post Dionem is elaborate but not well founded; cf. pp. 48-49 and nn. 4 and 5 above; and Cataudella, " Historiography, " pp. 43 7-40. For reasons that will become clear, most of my analysis of Eustathius appears below in the section "Malalas' sources" on pp. 246-56 and the section "John of Antioch" on pp. 3 1 1-29. 1 3 2 Cf. Evagrius V.24 with Suda E 3 7 46. 1 33 See Malalas XVI.9; Alan Cameron, "Date," p. 107; and Paschoud, Zosime I, pp. xi-xii. Although Evagrius 111.37 records that Eustathius died in 503, here he seems to have misunderstood Malalas. Eustathius is extremely unlikely to have died just when he came to record his own time (so that his history was unfinished only in the sense that he had hoped to live longer), and Zosimus' history, one of Eustathius' sources (Evagrius V.24), can hardly have reached Eustathius just a year or two after Zosimus left it unfinished.

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Malalas cited him as a source for the first edition of his own history, which must have been written in that year or very soon thereafter. Eustathius was a Christian, since he relied on many Christian sources and began his his­ tory with the Creation; and he was learned enough that he probably came from the decurion class of his small home town of Epiphania (now Hama) in central Syria. Eustathius was a good stylist in the Attic dialect, because he later won praise for his stylistic elegance from the competent Atticist Evagrius. Eva­ grius names twenty-one of Eustathius' sources, besides "countless others. " The named sources are the Bible, Josephus, the church historians Eusebius, Theodoret, Sozomen, and Socrates, and the secular historians Charax of Pergamum, Ephorus, Theopompus, Dionysius, Polybius, Appian, Diodorus, Dio, Herodian, Nicostratus of Trapezus, Dexippus, Arrian, Asinius Quadra­ tus, Zosimus, and Priscus. In another list of sources that appears also to come from Eustathius, Evagrius repeats the names of Diodorus and Arrian and adds those of Strabo, Phlegon, Pisander, Ulpian of Ascalon, Libanius, and Julian of Athens. Several of this total of twenty-seven authors, like Charax, Nicostratus, and Asinius Quadratus, are extremely obscure. l 34 Eustathius presumably knew some o f these authors only by way o f others­ Ephorus and Theopompus from their excerpts in Diodorus, for example. Probably Eustathius also drew on Heliconius of Byzantium's Chronological Epitome from Adam to Theodosius I, which is now lost but seems to have provided Eustathius with his peculiar title. Heliconius had however finished writing almost a century and a half earlier, and his history in ten books was presumably shorter (and better described as an epitome) than Eustathius' work, which had nine books in its second volume alone. Heliconius wrote too early to have read Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, or Priscus, all of whom were among Eustathius' sources. Eustathius also seems to have been Evagrius' source for a refutation of Zosimus that shows detailed knowledge of Roman history but cannot be borrowed from Heliconius, who wrote long before Zosimus. 135

1 3 4 On Eustathius' style, see Evagrius 1 . 1 9, III.25, and III.37; and Alien, " Early Epitomator, " p. 3 and n. 1 7. For Eustathius' sources, see Evagrius V.24 and 1.20. (Note that Evagrius mentions Eustathius' epitomizing other authors at 1 . 1 9, the pre­ vious chapter.) On the most obscure of these writers, see Schwartz in RE Ill (1899), cols. 21 22-23 (Charax of Pergamum); PLRE I, Nicostratus (Nicostratus of Trapezus, known only from Evagrius' list); and Schwartz in RE 11 ( 1 896), cols. 1 603-4 (Asinius Quadratus). 1 3 5 Cf. Suda E 85 1 (Heliconius) with Suda E 3 746 (Eustathius); and see above, pp. 48-49 and nn. 3-5 on Heliconius. For the refutation of Zosimus, see Evagrius III.40-41 ; its erudition, though not flawless, goes well beyond what could be expected of Evagrius himself.

11

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1 16 The Early Byzantine Historians Eustathius must therefore have done extensive research of his own. He could hardly have received his fine literary education, or consulted the works of authors as rare as Diodorus, Dio, Heliconius, Zosimus, or Priscus, in little Epiphania. While Eustathius may well have received his secondary school­ ing in Greek grammar and literature in his home town, he must then have gone on to one of the great cultural centers of the empire. For a Syrian, Antioch was the most natural choice, though Constantinople was also a possibility. Only three later authors mention Eustathius by name: John Malalas, Hesychius of Miletus, and Evagrius. Malalas was born at Antioch, lived there until about 527, and seems to have had personal knowledge of Eustathius' sudden death. Evagrius, who like Eustathius was born in Epiphania, lived and wrote at Antioch. Hesychius wrote at Constantinople, but the Suda entry derived from his dictionary shows that he knew only the second volume of Eustathius' history, though he realized from reading it that Eustathius had written on earlier times as well. Moreover, Hesychius attributed the reckon­ ing that Christ's resurrection occurred six thousand years after the Creation to "the Antiochenes, " apparently meaning Eustathius and Malalas. Other authors who seem to have used Eustathius' history were the obscure John of Antioch, evidently a native of that city, and Procopius of Caesarea, who was born in Palestine and spent several years in Syria. 1 3 6 Thus Eustathius probably worked, wrote, and died at Antioch, the only place his complete text is known to have been available. Evagrius, apart from passages in which he says Eustathius summarized others, cites him as a source first for the rise of Zeno in 466, and then for events between 479 and 503. These last years were too late to be covered by any of Eustathius' named sources, which ended around 474 with the history of Priscus. Most of the information that Evagrius attributes to Eustathius personally concerns Syria, Cilicia, or Isauria, all places within the general region of Antioch. Thus, including both his own experiences and those of older people he had met, Eustathius seems to have had some independent knowledge of events as early as 466, and more definite information by 4 79 . He also appears to have transmitted to Evagrius a strongly negative opinion of Zeno. 137

1 36 See above, n. 1 33 (Malalas, Evagrius), and below, pp. 272 (Hesychius) and 3 1 1-1 7 Oohn of Antioch, Procopius) . The fourteenth-century ecclesiastical historian Nicepho­ rus Callistus Xanthopulus appears to have had no direct access to Eustathius' work, since his only mention of Eustathius (Xanthopulus, History XIV.57) is clearly derived from Evagrius 1. 19. Cf. Gentz and Winkelmann, Kirchengeschichte, p. 142 n. 3 (not mentioning Eustathius, here or elsewhere). 1 37 Evagrius 11. 1 5 (466), III.26-27 (479-90), 111.29 (49 1), 111.37 (502-3), 1.19 and V.24 (Eustathius' repetition of other sources), and 111. 1-3 (Evagrius' negative opinion of Zeno, attributed to Eustathius by Alien, Evagrius, pp. 1 40-4 1 ) . For Evagrius' use of Eustathius, see Evagrius 1. 1 9, 111.3 7, and V.24; and Whitby, Ecclesiastical History, p. xxvi.

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Yet i f Eustathius lived at Antioch h e presumably had no direct contact with that emperor, and his vague charges of Zeno's supposed debauchery seem poorly informed. The real reason for his strong resentment may be that Eustathius had supported the usurper Leontius, who with the back­ ing of Illus had held Antioch for two months in 484. As a Chalcedonian, Leontius had gained the support of the Chalcedonian patriarch Calendion of Antioch, whom Zeno deposed as a result. Since Eustathius was proba­ bly a staunch Chalcedonian, like the overwhelming majority in his home town of Epiphania, he seems likely to have favored both Leontius and Calendion. 1 38 Curiously, neither Malalas, Evagrius, nor Hesychius mentions Eustathius' profession. Hesychius' biographies of authors almost always specified their professions, and Evagrius mentions that Priscus, Procopius, and Agathias were "rhetors, " evidently meaning lawyers, when listing them along with Eustathius among recent historians. 1 39 Evagrius and Malalas should have been able to read Eustathius' title and preface, which would normally have mentioned the author's professional position. Perhaps Eustathius was edu­ cated not in the law but in rhetoric or philosophy and, like Malalas later, entered the bureaucracy of the Diocese of the East at Antioch without ever obtaining a high rank. Since Eustathius seems not to have died young or moved on to another profession, he may have been cashiered for supporting Leontius in 484. Even if Eustathius was rehabilitated after 492, when Anastasius' government purged Zeno's supporters, any strong Chalcedonian would have fallen out of favor as Anastasius gradually revealed his Monophysitism. By the time the Chalcedonian Justin became emperor in 5 1 8, Eustathius was proba­ bly too old to reenter the bureaucracy. After his dismissal, he might have spent the rest of his life researching and writing his history as a private citizen at Antioch, perhaps supported by an income from estates around Epiphania. Given our exiguous evidence, any reconstruction of Eustathius' life must be speculative. Possibly he was born at Epiphania around 455, went to Antioch for his higher education around 4 70, entered the city's diocesan bureau­ cracy around 475, lost his post in 484, regained it briefly after 492, and died in the mid-520's. Though Eustathius probably lived to a fairly advanced

1 38 See Evagrius III.27 (Leontius' usurpation; cf. PLRE II, Leontius 1 7), I I I . 1 6 (Calendion's deposition for supporting Leontius), and III.34 (Chalcedonianism at Epiphania, which was so strong that the Monophysite Anastasius had to leave its Chal­ cedonian bishop in office for fear of violence). Cf. Elton, " Illus"; and below, pp. 326-27 and nn. 54-56. 1 39 Evagrius V.24. Cf. Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, s.v. p{J'tmp.

1 1 8 The Early Byzantine Historians age, any sudden death at Antioch in the mid-520's can plausibly be con­ nected with the catastrophic earthquake of 526. According to an estimate reported by Malalas, this disaster killed a quarter of a million people in and around the city, probably including more than half the urban population. 140 Though all these conjectures are uncertain, they at least fit the evidence we have. Eustathius was, with the possible exception of the obscure Heliconius, the first universal historian of the Byzantine period in the tradition of Ephorus, Diodorus, Africanus, and Dexippus. Though shorter than Ephorus' thirty books or Diodorus' forty, Eustathius' two volumes, one with nine books, probably made a longer history than Africanus' five books or Dexippus' twelve. Surely Eustathius' history was far longer than Eusebius' two-book Chronicle. Eustathius' many sources provided material for Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian history that could easily have filled two volumes by itself. Yet Eustathius chose to begin with the Creation, and to devote one of his two volumes to the period up to the Trojan War. He must have treated not only biblical history but Greek mythology at length. Eustathius was definitely interested in chronology. Evagrius attributes to him a chronological digression on the occasion of Anastasius' accession in 49 1 . In this passage Eustathius computed the numbers of years since Dio­ cletian, Augustus, Alexander the Great, Ramulus, and the fall of Troy. These numbers seem to have been compatible with the slightly later chronology recorded by Malalas. 141 Eustathius is probably also the source of the compu­ tation repeated by Malalas and Hesychius that Christ's resurrection occurred

1 4 0 Malalas XVII. 1 6. This estimate, even though it includes many who had come from out of town to celebrate Ascension Day and those who died in fires after the earth­ quake, is probably too high; but the mortality was certainly immense, and included Patriarch Euphrasius of Antioch (Malalas XVII.22). 1 4 1 Evagrius III.29 notes that Eustathius put Zeno's death (AD 49 1 ) 207 years after Diocletian's accession (AD 284, correctly), 5 32 years and 7 months after Augustus' accession (43 BC, the date adopted by Eusebius' Chronicle), 832 years and 7 months after the "reign" (death?) of Alexander the Great (343 BC instead of the actual 323, presumably because of a textual or arithmetical error of 20 years), 1 ,052 years and 7 months after "the kingdom of the Romans and Romulus" (563 BC, perhaps an error for 753), and 1 ,686 years and 7 months after the fall of Troy ( 1 1 9 7 BC) . Malalas includes no dates for Diocletian's accession or for Romulus. Malalas XV. 1 6 (as corrected from the Slavonic translation) dates Zeno's death to AM 6458, and Malalas X.2 dates Christ's birth to AM 5967, in the year 42 of Augustus, putting Augustus' accession in 43 BC, as in Eustathius. Malalas VIII.4 dates Alexander's death to AM 5593, or 375 BC instead of Eustathius' 343; since the discrepancy is 32 years, Alexander's age at his death, here Malalas seems to have confused Alexander's birthdate with his death date (at Malalas VII1.3.66, for "Ar;' read "AW with Chilmead). Malalas V. 38-39 Oeffreys 68-69) dates the fall of Troy during the reign of David in AM 4755-4795 ( 1 2 1 3-1 1 73 BC), compatibly with Eustathius. On Malalas' chronology, see E. Jeffreys, "Chronological Structures," especially pp. 1 14-18.

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exactly six thousand years after the Creation, in the year corresponding to our AD 3 1 . Eustathius' dating o f the Creation t o our 5 9 70 B C differed from the date of 5492 BC that had been established by the Alexandrian monk Annianus about a century earlier. Annianus had further reckoned that Christ was born fifty­ five hundred years after the Creation, in our AD 9, and that the Golden Age would begin six thousand years after the Creation, in AD 509. The unevent­ ful passing of the year 509 may well have been what inspired Eustathius to recalculate the chronology of world history, and perhaps even to compose his whole work. Eustathius maintained the world was almost five hundred years older than Annianus had thought, so that the fortunate event that hap­ pened six thousand years after the Creation was Christ's resurrection, not the beginning of the Golden Age. 142 Eustathius' unfinished history has probably become one of the most influ­ ential "lost" works of all time. Almost immediately after its author's death, John Malalas seems to have carelessly paraphrased it and passed it off as his own. Then Procopius, Hesychius, and Evagrius appear to have consulted Eustathius' history extensively. Finally John of Antioch seems to have virtu­ ally transcribed it, again circulating it under his own name. Since neither Photius nor the Excerpta had access to Eustathius' original work, it may already have been lost by the ninth century. Yet through Malalas and espe­ cially John of Antioch it heavily influenced later Byzantine historians, as we shall see later. 143 Even though Eustathius parted company with the other secular histori­ ans of his time by including Jewish and Christian material, and by going back even further in time than Zosimus, his style would have identified him as a classicizing historian. Eustathius evidently followed Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus, Malchus, and probably Candidus in writing in the revived Attic dialect of the Second Sophistic. While strictly speaking the Second Sophistic was over by the end of the third century, its stylistic conven­ tions continued to influence formal prose, including secular oratory and even some Christian sermons. A traditional pagan rhetorician like Eunapius natu­ rally strove to write good Attic Greek. The secular historians who succeeded him were also Atticists, including Eustathius and excluding only Zosimus. One convenient indicator of self-conscious Atticism is use of the dual num­ ber, an Attic form that could take the place of the plural for nouns, adjectives,

1 4 2 See Croke, "Early Development," especially pp. 34-36; Scott, "Malalas," p. 69 (on Hesychius); E. Jeffreys, "Chronological Structures, " pp. 1 1 1-23; and below, pp. 124-25 and n. 13 (on Annianus). 1 43 See below, the sections "Malalas' sources" on pp. 246-56 and "John of Antioch" on pp. 3 1 1-29 . Note the observation of Blockley, " Development," pp. 289-90, that later historians used Eustathius more extensively than has usually been recognized.

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1 20 The Early Byzantine Historians and verbs that refer to two of something. Spoken Greek had abandoned the dual centuries before, and even Thucydides and Xenophon barely use it. Unlike some other obsolete forms, such as the perfect tense or the opta­ tive mood, the dual added no nuance of meaning that could not easily be expressed without it. It was merely a sign that an author was Atticizing, and rather an easy one, because its few forms were not hard to memorize or to look up in an Atticist manual. Despite the loss of most of the texts of these clas­ sicizing historians, we find Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus, and Malchus all using the dual at least once. 1 44 Their fragments also show that their Atti­ cizing style led them into contortions and obscurities that made their prose difficult to read, and must have contributed to the limited circulation and final loss of their texts. The disappearance of the greater part of these classicizing histories should not however disguise their interest and significance. When Ammianus revived classical historiography in Latin, even though he did it well, no one took his parting advice and emulated him. When Eunapius revived classical historiography in Greek, despite the defects of his style and the stridency of his paganism, several others followed his example, and Christians were among them. Eunapius ended a century-long gap in classicizing historiog­ raphy in Greek that could easily have become permanent, like the gap in writing novels that seems to have begun around the same time in the third century. 1 45 Besides influencing contemporary church historians, Eunapius started a line of classicizing historians that was to stretch into the early seventh century.

1 44 Eunapius fr. 28. 1 .3 (8uE1v), Olympiodorus fr. 27. 1 1 (a11