Eunapius in Athens

EUNAPIUS OF SARDIS' Vitae sophistarum (Giangrande 1956; hereafter VS) and the fragments of his now-lost History are of no small importance to students of late antiquity. Besides their direct testimony, comparison of these texts to othersmost notably to the Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, the Historia nova of Zosimus, and the anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus-has prompted lively debate over questions of Quellenforschung, which themselves often turn on reconstructions of the chronology of Eunapius' life and the publication of his works.1 To this debate Charles Fornara has contributed a series of articles concerned mostly with Ammianus but in one case focused on Eunapius and the reconciliation through emendation of what Fornara perceives as various anomalies apparent in Eunapius' account of the time he spent in Athens as a student of the sophist Proaeresius.2 Foremost among these anomalies and, indeed, the stimulus for his entire argument is what Fornara maintains (1989: 517-518) to be the absence from the VS of any but the most superficial treatment of events between 362 and 367, years accepted by most scholars as the termini of a five-year sojourn in Athens begun when Eunapius was fifteen and ending with his return to Sardis at the age of nineteen (Fornara thinks twenty necessarily follows from the commonly accepted dates).3 Fornara finds additional incongruities in Eunapius' departure from Athens at a time when Proaeresius, Eunapius' teacher throughout this supposed five-year period, was, if not on his deathbed, at least seriously ill (Fornara 1989: 518), and in Eunapius' characterization of himself as the student of the Sardian neoplatonist Chrysanthius-who had taught Eunapius before the latter's departure to Athens and with whom Eunapius, upon his return, resumed study--e catt56s;, wording which Fornara feels (1989: 519) implies a continuity at odds with an Athenian ntirlu ' azob (i.e., Proaeresius) KaOalep auts; yviotos, hie{yeTo gev laedateaCTno g tc; T1V A't'yurxov, Kcx. This change allows an abbreviation of Eunapius' stay in Athens, which, Fornara maintains, not only eliminates difficulties

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  Open Access•Francois Paschoud•Klio•1984

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• Eunapius' Epidemia in Athens

  Open Access•Charles W Fornara•The Classical Quarterly•1989

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• The Sacred Officials of the Eleusinian Mysteries

  Ronald S Stroud, Kevin Clinton•The American Journal of Philology•1975

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• The Sources of the Historia Augusta

  Peter White, T D Barnes•Phoenix•1980

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