• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Julian

see Biographical Glossary

Lactantius

c. 240–c. 320, a Latin rhetorician at Nicomedia, among whose many works is a polemic On the Deaths of the Persecutors which provides accurate details of imperial history in the third and fourth centuries, including the death of Decius in a Gothic war.

Olympiodorus of Thebes

Greek historian, before 380–after 425. Wrote a detailed history of the years 407 to 425 which, though now preserved only in fragments, was a major source for Sozomen, Philostorgius and Zosimus, and thereby central to our understanding of Alaric’s actions in Italy just before the sack of Rome.

Orosius

Christian priest from Spain who wrote a polemical History against the Pagans in seven books which continued down to 417 and argued, against pagans who saw Adrianople and the sack of Rome as divine anger for the imperial conversion to Christianity, that Rome had been much worse before the conversion.

Panegyrici Latini

collection of speeches in honour of emperors compiled in late fourth-century Gaul and including eleven panegyrics from the late third to the fourth century, many of which attest otherwise unknown imperial campaigns against barbarians beyond the frontiers.

Paulinus

deacon of the church of Milan and author in c. 422 of the Life of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, which helps establishes the sequence of events in 397.

Philostorgius

c. 368–c. 440, author of a now fragmentary Greek church history written from a homoean point of view, drawing on the (also now fragmentary) history of Olympiodorus and preserving otherwise unknown information on Ulfila.

Socrates

fifth-century lawyer and author of the earliest of several Greek church histories extant from the fifth century, continuing the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius. Socrates provides a great deal of unique information on the fourth and earlier fifth century, particularly on the eastern provinces.

Sozomen

fifth-century lawyer and church historian whose church history offers a parallel, and rather different, perspective to that of Socrates, with considerably greater interest in secular history, and much more evidence for western affairs, most of it drawn from the now fragmentary history of Olympiodorus.

Synesius

philosopher, and later bishop of Ptolemais, resident in Constantinople in the later 390s, where he wrote two treatises, De regno and De providentia, which are key to understanding the political manoeuvres at the eastern court surrounding the revolts of Alaric, Tribigild and Gainas.

Tacitus

senator and historian, c. 56–c. 118, author of histories of the early Roman empire and of the Germania, an ethnographic account of Germany and its gentes which provided early modern humanists with their most important material for inventing a Germanic, non-Roman history.

Themistius

c. 317–c. 388, Greek philosopher, rhetorician and spokesman for Constantius Ⅱ, Valens and Theodosius Ⅰ. The author of numerous works, several of his 34 surviving speeches are the best available evidence for imperial attitudes and policy towards the Goths.

Theoderet of Cyrrhus

c. 393–466, monk and bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, his church history drew on that of Socrates and preserves much information otherwise unknown.

Theodosian Code

compilation of imperial constitutions from 312–438, put together at the behest of Theodosius Ⅱ (r. 408–450), beginning in 429. It is our major source for the legislation of the later Roman empire and preserves a vast amount of historical detail on imperial administration and political history.

Zosimus

imperial bureaucrat in the later fifth or the early sixth century, author of a New History in six books, running from Augustus to 410, but concentrated on the later fourth century, and probably unfinished. The history drew heavily on Dexippus, Eunapius and Olympiodorus, and is our fullest evidence for their contents and for the history they recounted.

Biographical Glossary

Aequitius

tribune and relative