The Diplomatic Career and Historical Work of Olympiodorus of Thebes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9366986 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Warren Treadgold (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 709-733 |
| Publication date | 2004-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The International History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0707-5332 • E-ISSN: 1949-6540 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07075332.2004.9641043 |
| OpenAlex | W2065797556 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 29 |
Olympiodorus in the Roman Empire of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. An Egyptian, and a convinced but discreet pagan, he knew Greek, Latin, and evidently Coptic. He studied philosophy, wrote history and poetry, and pursued a public career as a diplomat. His diplomatic service included an embassy to the Huns in 412, at least one more embassy to 'barbarian tribes', and probably a mission in 424-5 from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Western Roman Empire. Although most of Olympiodorus' history is lost today, its fragments remain our chief source for the Western Roman Empire around the time Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410, and supply important evidence for the history of the Huns, the Nubians, and pagan intellectuals in the early fifth century.1 A good deal of guesswork is needed to reconstruct the outlines of Olympiodorus' history and life from incomplete and tantalizing scraps of texts. His history is one of many books in Greek summarized in the Bibliotheca of the ninth-century Byzantine polymath Photius. Photius' summary indirectly shows that Olympiodorus was the almost exclusive source for the last few years of the unfinished New History of Zosimus, compiled around the year 500. 2 Further fragments from Olympiodorus survive in the fifth-century ecclesiastical histories of Sozomen and Philostorgius, and possibly in the sixth-century Wars of Procopius.3 The many summaries of books in the Bibliotheca, an informal compilation that appears to be based largely on Photius' old reading notes, vary in length and quality.4 Photius disliked Olympiodorus' work, which he
Ancient history · Barbarian · Byzantine architecture · Empire · Fell · Geography · Late Antiquity · Ninth · Roman Empire · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History
Classical Revivals and “Pagan” Art
The Livian Revival
Conclusion
The Frigidus
Correctors and Critics II
The Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus I
The Poem Against the Pagans
The “Pagan” Literary Revival
The Real Circle of Symmachus
Pagan Converts
Pagan Scholarship
Pagan Writers
Correctors and Critics I
Greek Texts and Latin Translation
From Constantius to Theodosius
Priests and Initiates
The Historia Augusta
Other Christian Verse Invectives
Macrobius and the “Pagan” Culture of his Age
The Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus II
Pagans and Polytheists
Algunas consideraciones sobre el peaje de las tropas de Saro y los bagaudas alpinos
Between Mysteries and Factions
The Last Pagans of Rome
Additional notes on a new book about the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century
Ritual Deposit at Bir Nurayet
Eine Origo Gentis Blemmyorum in den Dionysiaka des Nonnos von Panopolis
A Barbarian by Birth, Yet a Hellene in Everything Else”
The Audience of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Circulation of Books in the Late Roman World
| Citations per year | 1.81 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2024 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |