The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284-813

This hefty volume provides the first complete English translation of the Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor. Working over the course of fifteen years, Cyril Mango, Emeritus Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford, and Roger Scott, Reader in Classical Studies at Melbourne, have performed a great scholarly service. Although the Chronicle covers the period from the beginning of the reign of Diocletian to that of Byzantine Emperor Michael I, its particular importance to historians is for the period from 602 to 813. Theophanes relied almost completely on earlier historical writings which he tended to paraphrase or plagiarize. In his contribution to the introduction, Scott examines the treatment of Theophanes’ extant sources such as Procopius, and observes that the chronographer “generally reflects the source accurately” (xci) and makes sensible selections. For the period from 602, however, Theophanes’ sources are largely lost, making the Chronicle one of the most important records of the political and ecclesiastical history of the seventh and eighth centuries, the so-called Byzantine Dark Ages.

Theophanes, who died in 818, founded the Monastery at Mount Sigriane in Propontus where he excelled as a copyist and calligrapher. He was a staunch defender of icons, but also a critic of emperor Nicephorus I. In assembling the Chronicle, Theophanes continued the work of his friend George Synkellos, whose Chronography begins with Adam and ends with Diocletian. George requested that Theophanes continue the enterprise and gave him materials he had collated. It remains a question for Mango how much of the work is Synkellos’s and how much Theophanes’, although most scholars are convinced that Theophanes was responsible for the principle labor of composition. The massive dossier was assembled between 810 and 814 while Theophanes suffered from acute kidney disease.

The ambitious compilation draws on at least twenty major sources, including ecclesiastical histories, a local history of Alexandria, even possibly a lost Arian history. Borrowings from the epic poems of George of Pisidia occasionally retain their iambics. The systematic account demonstrates interest not only in the Byzantine empire, but also in the Christian East under Muslim domination. For his information about the Arabs and their Christian subjects, Theophanes relied on a Greek translation of a Syro-Palestinian source also used by the Syriac historian Dionysios of Tel-Mahre (d. 845). Theophanes is unique among Byzantine historians in relying on a foreign source. Mango’s introduction directs much effort to identifying Theophanes’ source material. Typography and symbols in the translation signal the places where the editors detect shifts in underlying sources.

The Chronicle’s yearly entries consist of a dating template listing annus mundi (occasionally supplemented by year of the incarnation), and reigns of political and ecclesiastic leaders including Persian emperors and Arab Caliphs, followed by a narrative of the year’s key events. Because of the chronographic scheme of the entire work, story lines are often disjoined into various entries, and Theophanes follows a number of stories at once. The choppy nature of the genre insures that no one will sit and read through the text from cover to cover, but the work becomes an invaluable reference for the modern historian.

Although for reasons of space the editors do little toward presenting Theophanes’ historiographical contribution within middle Byzantine cultural and intellectual history, the Chronicle gives an excellent sense of the compiler making the fabric of history in the complex weaving of many threads. The work itself emerges as a monument to the cultural renaissance of the early ninth century, characterized by a near mania for encyclopedism and systematization, particularly in monastic and ecclesiastical circles. The translation facilitates an understanding of Theophanes’s place among his contemporaries, George Synkellos, Theodore of Studios, and the Patriarch Nicephorus.

Working from the 1883 critical edition of de Boor, occasionally emended, Roger Scott translated the Chronicle to 601/2; Mango translated the...