From Constantine to Julian: Pagan and Byzantine Views: A Source History (review)

Short Notices 345 Lieu, Samuel N. C , and Dominic Montserrat, ed., From Constantine to Julian: Pagan and Byzantine Views: A Source History, London a N e w York, Routledge, 1996; paper; pp. xxi, 285; R.R.P. US$23.95,£13.99. Collections of source material are most useful both for teachin research when they draw together short passages from a wide range of sources, like Prentice-Hall's series Sources and Documents in the History of Art, or when, as here, they group together short, relatively inaccessible works on a c o m m o n theme and publish them in their entirety. It also helps if there is an obvious target audience. This volume should serve researchers well, and advanced undergraduate history courses concerned with source criticism. Of the five sources two are Latin and quite short, the Anonymous Valesianus pars prior (Origo Constantini), a classicisin account especially of the political and military career of Constantine by a contemporary, and the anonymous panegyric on Constantine (Pan. Lat.. VII (6)) delivered at Trier in 310 A D after the suicide of Maximianus at Marseilles. The three Greek texts each f i l l over thirty pages in translation. There is the anonymous PreMetaphrastic Life of Constantine, the 'Guidi-Vita' (BHG 364) of the ninth or tenth century which includes the main Christian legends about Constantine. The encomium of Constantius and Constans by the pagan fourth-century teacher of rhetoric Libanius (Oratio LIX), delivered in 344, naturally avoids discussion of religous issues. The Passion of Artemius, dating from before the ninth century, tells of the 'martyrdom' of this close supporter of Constantius w h o had brought the relics of the Apostles Andrew, Luke and Timothy to Constantinople and, as dux of Egypt, had despoiled the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. In this version he was killed in Antioch by 346 Short Notices Constantius' cousin Julian soon after his accession in 361. The work is a mixture of fiction and material drawn from the ecclesiastical historians. Artemius is identified with the saint whose relics, translated to Constantinople, gave rise to miraculous healing of hernias and testicular and genital diseases, as commemorated in the seventh-century Miracles of St Artemius recently translated, with reprinted Greek text, by Crisafulli and Nesbitt (Brill, 1997). The five texts published here were chosen to temper the laudatory picture of the ecclesiastical historians, starting with Eusebius of Caesarea, and to complement the accounts of the pagan Zosimos and twelfth-century John Zonaras, both largely dependent on the lost classicizing history of the fourth-century pagan Eunapius. A list of editions and translations of the various sources for the period is supplied, together with a chronology of the main events and a scholarly bibliography. The introduction explains the lost and surviving sources for the period and then each text is provided with a substantial introduction giving the historical context and extensive notes. Besides the editors contributors to the volume are Frank Beetham, M . H. Dodgeon, Jane Stevenson and Mark Vermes. A n n Moffatt Department of Art History Australian National University Martin, A. Lynn, Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Diseases in t 16th Century (Sixteenth Century Studies 28), Kirksville, Missouri, Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996; cloth; pp. xiv, 268; 9 tables, 4 graphs; R.R.P. US$35.00. In Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the 16th Cen ...