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  • The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor: Church and War in Late Antiquity
  • Edward Watts
The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor: Church and War in Late Antiquity Geoffrey Greatrex, ed., Robert Phenix, Cornelia B. Horn, trr., with contributions by Sebastian P. Brock and Witold Witakowski. Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 55. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 562. ISBN 978-1-84631-494-0.

Ecclesiastical historians writing about eastern events in the period extending from the death of Theodosius II to the accession of Justinian have suffered from relative scholarly neglect. This is particularly true when compared to the amount of attention given to both Eusebius and their earlier contemporaries Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret. While each of these has been the subject of recent monographs, the understudied historians of the later fifth and early sixth century have often been uncritically mined for information or relegated to footnotes with their artfulness and literary abilities left largely under appreciated. For no writer is this more true than Zachariah Scholasticus, a productive and skilled author whose Ecclesiastical History offers a nuanced and thematically coherent narrative of the reigns of Marcian, Leo I and II, and Zeno. In recent years there has been a growing appreciation of the work of Zachariah (for example, Philippe Blaudeau’s excellent Alexandrie et Constantinople (451–491) [Rome, 2006]), but the text itself has remained somewhat inaccessible. The editors and translators of this volume now offer a strong new treatment of Zachariah that combines recent scholarship with an accurate and updated translation of both his Ecclesiastical History and the larger Miscellaneous History of Pseudo-Zachariah in which Zachariah’s text is preserved. The result is an important new book that will enhance our appreciation of both men and increase our understanding of the period they describe.

The project that Greatrex, Phenix, Horn, Brock, and Witakowski undertook was a difficult one. The work they treat is a twelve-book chronicle, called by the editors of this volume a Miscellaneous History, assembled in Amida around 568/9 by a figure known only as Pseudo-Zachariah. This document recounted events from the beginning of time until the author’s own lifetime. Though Pseudo-Zachariah supplemented it slightly with additional material, Zachariah Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History [End Page 369] forms the narrative core of the work and provides nearly all of the material for books three through six. Pseudo-Zachariah then assembled the remainder of his Miscellaneous History out of a group of other sources to which he had access.

The extensive and thorough introduction by Greatrex, which is supplemented by a contribution from Witakowski, explains the relationship between these two texts while also familiarizing readers with the concerns and methods of their authors. Zachariah and Pseudo-Zachariah are given equal attention. The thirty-page discussion of Zachariah Scholasticus provides the most extensive and up-to-date analysis of his career and writings currently available. Zachariah’s corpus includes the Ecclesiastical History and a set of biographies that are preserved in Syriac as well as two anti-Manichean works and a philosophical dialogue preserved in Greek. Their diverse subject matter and languages of preservation mean that these works are seldom considered together. Greatrex has done an admirable job of surveying the relevant scholarship and assembling a comprehensive and comprehensible portrait of Zachariah. This should serve as a basic point of reference to which scholars working on Zachariah will now turn for information.

The discussion of Pseudo-Zachariah undertaken by Greatrex and Witakowski overcomes a different set of challenges. Whereas Zachariah has left a long textual trail beyond his Ecclesiastical History, Pseudo-Zachariah is an anonymous figure whose other writings (if there were any) are lost. After comparing Pseudo-Zachariah with his contemporary John of Ephesus, the editors then move on to a detailed consideration of his sources, the way in which he exploited them, and how this process of composition should influence our understanding of his text. The Pseudo-Zachariah who emerges is primarily a compiler of materials whose welding of stories and accounts has little of the thematic coherence of Zachariah’s Ecclesiastical History. Even so, the great diversity of useful materials that Pseudo-Zachariah has preserved makes his compilation extremely...

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