front cover of Apocalypse. An Alexandrian World Chronicle
Apocalypse. An Alexandrian World Chronicle
Pseudo-Methodius
Harvard University Press, 2012
This volume contains two texts that crossed the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the first works composed in response to the Arab invasions and the establishment of the Muslim empire in the seventh century. In a matter of decades, it was translated from its original Syriac into Greek and from Greek into Latin. (Both the Greek and Latin texts are presented here.) The Apocalypse enjoyed immense popularity throughout the Middle Ages, informing expectations of the end of the world, responses to strange and exotic invaders like the Mongols and Turks, and even the legendary versions of the life of Alexander the Great. An Alexandrian World Chronicle (Excerpta Latina Barbari) was considered important by no less a humanist than Joseph Scaliger. He recognized it as a representative of an early stage in the Christian chronicle tradition that would dominate medieval historiography. The original Greek text may have been a diplomatic gift from the court of Justinian to a potential ally among Frankish royalty, translated two centuries later by the Franks themselves in their efforts to convert the pagan Saxons. In addition to presenting a universal chronicle with a comprehensive ethnography and geography, the Excerpta offer a Euhemeristic narrative of the gods and another account of Alexander.
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Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch
Reconstructing a Lost Historian
Benjamin Garstad
Harvard University Press, 2022
Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch undertakes the exciting, if laborious, task of assembling clues and piecing back together a book that has disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works. But it does not merely add another author to the bibliography of antiquity and place him in fourth-century Antioch. It shows how the gods could be reduced to historical characters, the powerful goddess of luck turned into a pitiful victim of virgin sacrifice, and respected emperors defamed as despots—and, in sum, how the writing of history could be exploited for partisan purposes. We see how people in what we consider the distant past thought about their own history, and how they discussed momentous political and social issues across a seemingly insurmountable divide in a period of existential crisis.
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