Download PDF | Warren Treadgold - The Early Byzantine Historians - Palgrave Macmillan (2007).
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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 covered 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.! I also have tried to write not just for scholars, 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 historians 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 Peloponnesian 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.?
The Byzantines also distinguished histories from panegyrics and hagiography, 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 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.
Byzantine historians, though sometimes led by their sources or circumstances to write hagiography or panegyric, usually avoided writing much about saints or reigning emperors. Byzantine histories are full of descriptions 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.©
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 “popularity” than Procopius seems irreconcilable with our possessing eighty-one Greek manuscripts of Procopius and two of Malalas.’ We should not even assume, as some scholars do, that Malalas and Marcellinus “are far more representative of widely held beliefs in the sixth century” than Procopius. Malalas’ history is probably plagiarized from one of the most learned of Byzantine historians, 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.® While most Byzantines were illiterate and read no history at all, literate Byzantines were much more likely to read Procopius than Malalas or Marcellinus.
Byzantine thinking had very little in common with today’s Postmodernism, 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 conditions that most specialists on early Byzantine historians have simply ignored it without comment.”
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 readers 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 lam 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.
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
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 classical 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 historians. 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 premodern 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 realize that during the Byzantine period the Greek-speaking world was usually smaller than it had been in Hellenistic and Roman times. Moreover, few readers 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 historiography. “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 comprehensive Christian chronicle and the first real history of the Christian Church.
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 Byzantine 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 earlier histories had incorporated even earlier works, Byzantine historians, like modern historians, reflected the influence of many authors whom they had never read themselves. !
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon
The line of major 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 major surviving work in prose.* He took as his theme not just the recent Persian Wars but all the conflicts between the Greeks and the peoples to their 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 themselves 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 479, 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 memories 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.
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 themselves 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.* 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.°
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 431 BC between the Athenian alliance and the Peloponnesian alliance led by Sparta.© 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 prevent 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 exiles recalled did he return to Athens. Not long afterward he died, leaving 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, including 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 479, 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 431 as the first year of the war, using different Greek systems of dating to mark it.”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 interruption. The part of his history beginning with 413 is in rougher shape than the rest, and it breaks off entirely in the middle of 411, 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.? 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.!° 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.!! 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.
Thucydides had the advantage over Herodotus of restricting himself to events within the memory of living informants. When he began work in 431, 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.
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 Cleon and Hyperbolus, the leading Athenian politicians at the time of his exile, who had presumably taken part in banishing him.!%
The overall impression given by Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War is pessimistic, 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 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. !4
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 expansionism, 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.!> 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.!© Thucydides, despite his service as a general, 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 interested 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 theory 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, 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 classicizing 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 naive. They correctly considered Thucydides 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 subject.
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.!7 An Athenian aristocrat, he was born around 430 and became one of the young followers of Socrates. In 401 Xenophon joined 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 411 to 362.
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 readership 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 prestige of the classical period during and about which they wrote, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon were to keep a unique popularity as the historians 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 necessary 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 stable, 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 different 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 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. Thucydides, 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 Koiné (“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 history 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 1069, and probably reached 340 BC before he died.!® 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 1184, until 144 in his own times.!?
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, whose Hellenica and Philippica (“Affairs under Philip”) brought the story down to the death of Philip of Macedon in 336.29 Theopompus’ two histories were in turn continued by four contemporary historians of Philip’s son and successor 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.2! These historians were in turn continued by Hieronymus of Cardia, 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.2” Hieronymus’ continuer was Phylarchus, probably of Athens, whose history ran from 272 to the death of his hero, the royal revolutionary Cleomenes III of Sparta, in 220 or 219.
As the Hellenistic world split into different states as distant as 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.?*
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 central 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 168. 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 original, 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 style is somewhat less felicitous than Xenophon’s, but his history is just as vivid, better composed, and more reflective. Though Polybius’ philosophizing 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 probably its literary quality, its philosophical bent, its author’s credentials as aman of action, and above all its subject, which particularly interested future generations 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 disappearance 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.2° He rewrote and combined 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 2123 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, “MuchLearned”) and Nicholas of Damascus, who wrote histories of such staggering length that they can hardly have been easier to use than their sources were.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus settled in Rome around 30 BC, just when Diodorus was completing his history there.2© Dionysius’ twenty large books of Roman Antiquities covered the history of Rome from its foundation, which he dated to 751, 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 Atticizing 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 Byzantine 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 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 John 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 companion 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.2? A Jew born in AD 37 or 38, Josephus was one of the leaders of the Jewish Revolt against the Roman rulers of Judaea 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.
Meanwhile the revival of the archaic Attic dialect, apparent in 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.2° Soon some attempt to write in the Attic dialect became almost mandatory for formal writing in Greek, and the Koiné 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 major Atticist historian was Arrian of Nicomedia, a consul and provincial governor under the emperor Hadrian (reigned 117-38).3! 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. Carefully 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, probably 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.°? Its twenty-four fairly short books, which began with the foundation of Rome and reached AD 117, were arranged by topics according 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.
In the early third century, a longer and more comprehensive Roman H istory was composed by Cassius Dio of Nicaea, who again moved to Rome and became a consul and governor before retiring to his homeland.*4 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.>° Africanus’ main concern 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 5502 BC, and continued his account up to AD 222. Africanus appears to have written a rather bald narrative centered on Jewish history, with occasional references to what was simultaneously happening in Greece. Though lost today, his work accomplished its aim of systematizing biblical chronology, because later authors copied its dates. Like most earlier and many later Christian writers, Africanus presumably used Hellenistic Koiné 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 180 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 270.36 Likewise lost is a chronicle by the polymath Cassius Longinus, probably aSyrian Greek, from the first Olympiad to the two hundred and forty-ninth, therefore from 776 BC to AD 217. 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 surviving 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.?® Dionysius of Halicarnassus named, along with “countless others,” nine historians so careless of their style that nobody could bear to read them to the end. Among them were Hieronymus, Phylarchus, and Polybius.?9 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 historiography 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 gradually shrank. The easiest way to produce a long history was to paraphrase the works of others, and if the result was a convenient reference work someone might even use it. Because contemporary histories were of current interest, 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.*9 At least one complete copy of Diodorus remained in the Byzantine imperial library in the fifteenth century.*!
On the whole, after Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon scholarly compilations seem to have been preserved at a better rate than contemporary 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 accident. 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 XH, which Photius found in his copy.4” This pattern suggests the loss of two (or possibly four) rolls within three centuries of Theopompus’ death. Book XII, though hard to find, turned up later in at 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 volumes.*? 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. Apparently 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 preserved historical texts show a pattern that suggests a habit of copying them into 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 cight-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 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 VU, 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. If our manuscripts derive from a set that also had three volumes, apparently the first (Books I-X) was dismembered, the second (Books XI-XVII) was preserved, and the third (Books XVIIJ-XXIV) was lost.4” 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 people’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 XINI-XVII, a vivid account of the Roman civil wars from 133 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 histotiography 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 Antiquity, earlier historiography consisted of Thucydides, probably Herodotus, possibly Xenophon, the Bible if the readers were Christians, and little if anything 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 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.4? 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 interest 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 useful, 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 historians, 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 latter. 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 historiography 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 formulas and an archaizing Attic style, and gave no special credit to innovation 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.
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