Translated Texts for Historians - Böcker

Bede’s aim in De Templo is stated in Chapter I: ‘That the building of the tabernacle and the temple signifies one and the same Church of Christ’. For anyone with an interest in mysticism or merely desiring spiritual nourishment, the reading of De Templo should prove a sublime experience and its own reward. This classic in Latin by an English saint is here made available in English for the first time since it was written nearly 1300 years ago.

This series is designed to meet the needs of students of ancient and medieval history and others who wish to broaden their study by reading source material, but whose Latin and Greek is not sufficent to allow them to do so in the original language. Pactatus' panegyric celebrates Theodosius' victory over the usurper Magnus Maximus, whose rebellion in Britain, murder of Gratian, and occupation of Gaul rent the Western Empire and threw the court of Milan into turmoil in the 380s.

The Chronicon Paschale is one of the major constituents of the Byzantine chronographic tradition covering the late antique period.

Around the year 350, a young orator and philosopher called Themistius delivered a speech to the Emperor Constantius II in Ancyra (modern Ankara). Themistius found great favour with the Emperor, who catapulted him into the Constantinople Senate in 355. He was similarly favoured by subsequent emperors – Jovian (363–64), Valens (364–78) and Theodosius (379–95). This volume presents translations of a selection of the speeches of Themistius, grouped into chapters that deal either with a key period in the evolution of his career or with a sequence of events of particular historical significance.

Among the peoples who occupied the territories of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century, the Vandals are notorious for their persecution of the Catholic inhabitants of Africa. By far the fullest narrative of their doings prior to the time of Justinian is that provided by Victor of Vita, who in 484 wrote the greater part of the work here translated.

Venantius Fortunatus, writing in the latter half of the sixth century, was not only a major Latin poet, but also an important historical figure. He travelled as a young man to seek patronage in the courts of Merovingian Gaul, writing both formal and informal poetry for three of the royal brothers, Sigibert, Charibert and Chilperic, and for many influential figures in ecclesiastical and secular life. His poems paint a picture of a literary, not merely literate, culture, which complement’s Gregory’s canvas of bloodthirsty dynastic feuding.

The first full-scale translation and commentary on Eutropius, whose Breviarium (Abbreviated History of Rome) was a major vehicle for transmitting knowledge of Roman history to people of the Middle Ages and beyond.

This is the first full-scale translation and commentary in English of Aurelius Victor’s De Caesaribus, which provides a brief survey of the emperors of Rome from Octavian Augustus in 30 BC to Constantius II in AD 360.

The first translation into English of one of Gregory’s eight books of miracle stories, which contains a series of anecdotes about the lives of confessors.

The first translation into English of one of Gregory’s eight books of miracle stories, which contains a series of anecdotes about the lives and cults of martyrs.

The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles makes accessible to a wide public sources vital for the reconstruction of events in the first Islamic century, covering the period which ends with the unsuccessful Arab siege of Constantinople, an event which both modern historians and Syriac chronographers see as making a decisive caesura in history. The general introduction enables a newcomer to the field to establish his bearings before tackling the texts.

The Pythagorean Life is the most extensive surviving source on Pythagoreanism, and has wider interest as an account of the religious aspirations of late antiquity.

The first translation into English of Life of the Fathers, a collection of twenty lives of saints which lives present a cross-section of the Gallic Church and are a counterpart to the secular society described in Gregory’s History of the Franks.

Caesarius was born in 469/70 and served as Bishop of Arles from 502 until his death in 542. Originally trained as a monk at Lérins, he devoted himself as Bishop to an ambitious programme of church reform and Christianization inspired by strict monastic standards of piety. Best known as a preacher, with a corpus of over 250 sermons, Caesarius also founded a monastery whose rule he composed and presided over several important church councils whose canons still survive. The documents included in this volume – most never before translated into English – vividly illustrate Caesarius’s career and the social and religious history of Provence at a time of far-reaching political change, during which the region was ruled by a series of Visigothic, Burgundian, Ostrogothic and, ultimately, Frankish kings.The ‘Life of Caesarius’, written shortly after his death by five clerics of his acquaintance, provides a first-hand record of the Bishop’s achievements as pastor, politician and wonderworker. The ‘Testament’ demonstrates Caesarius’s efforts to endow and protect his monastery and in the process furnishes valuable information about diocesan landholdings. The collection of twenty-four ‘Letters’ sent and received by Caesarius chronicles his relations with fellow aristocrats and bishops and illuminates a wide variety of topics, from penalties for incest to political intrigue among rival bishops. Taken together, these texts shed light on a region and period in which the Christian church, with its leaders, rituals and doctrines, was coming to play an increasingly important role in the daily lives not only of aristocrats and clerics, but also of ordinary men and women.The volume includes scholarly notes and an introduction.

This collection makes available in English for the first time the panegyric of Claudius Mamertinus (Panegyrici Latini XI/3), a substantial part of the treatise of John Chrysostom on St Babylas and against Julian (de S. Babyla c. Julianum et gentiles XIV-XIX), and Emphrem Syrus’ Hymns Against Julian.

This volume contains the first English translation of Bede’s allegorical commentary on the tabernacle of Moses, which he interpreted as a symbolic figure of the Christian Church. Written in the early 720s at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, On the Tabernacle (De tabernaculo) was the first Christian literary work devoted entirely to this topic and the first verse-by-verse commentary on the relevant portions of the Book of Exodus. On the Tabernacle was one of Bede’s most popular works, appearing in a great many manuscripts from every period of the Middle Ages.

This volume brings together many important historical texts, the majority of them (speeches of Themistius, the Passion of St Saba, and evidence relating to the life and work of Ulfila) not previously available in English translation.

Cassiodorus (c.485–585), Roman senator and consul, served in various high offices from c.505 to c.538, under the kings of the Ostrogoths, who had inherited the imperial administration of Italy. For long periods the Goths’ chief publicist, he compiled the state papers he had drafted, as their regime crumbled under Byzantine attack. This selection is the first translation to appear since 1886.

In The Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes the translator and commentator continues from the year AD 817, reached in his The Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes (Liverpool, 1992), and deals with the remaining ten biographies of the Liber pontificalis down to AD 886, when compilation ceased. The volume thus completes the translation, begun in The Book of Pontiffs (Liverpool, 1989), the first translation into any modern language apart from continuations written from the late eleventh century onwards.

Libanius of Antioch (AD 314–393) stands out as a fundamental source for the history of the Greek East in the fourth century AD. Drawn from the 1269 letters written between 355 and 365, the 183 letters presented here play an important role in making the age of Constantius II and Julian the Apostate the best-documented period of the ancient world.

From the perspective of the Hispano-Romans, the Visigoths who invaded Spain in the mid-fifth century were heretical barbarians. But Leovigild’s military success and Reccared’s conversion to Catholic Christianity led to more positive assessments of the Gothic role in Iberian history. John of Biclaro (c.590) and Isidore of Seville (c.625) authored histories that projected the Gothic achievements back on to their uncertain beginnings, transforming them from antagonists of the Roman Empire to protagonists of a new, independent Chistianity in Spain.

The History attributed to Sebeos is one of the major works of early Armenian historiography. Although anonymous, it was written in the middle of the seventh century, a time when comparable chronicles in Greek and Syriac are sparse. Sebeos traces the fortunes of Armenia in the sixth and seventh centuries within the broader framework of the Byzantine–Sasanian conflict. Comprising two volumes, part 1 (240 pages) is the translation and notes followed by part 2 (216 pages) which contains the historical commentary, this excellent publication will be of interest to all those involved in the study of Armenia, the Caucasus, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Middle East in late antiquity. It will be of particular value to Islamicists, since Sebeos not only sets the scene for the coming of Islam, but provides the only substantial non-Muslim account of the initial period of expansion.

Two texts are presented in English translation here. The first is what remains of a historical work Hilary wrote against two distinguished contemporary bishops, Valens and Ursacius, whose intervention on behalf of the Emperor Constantius Hilary thought disastrous. They throw a flood of light upon scenes of disarray, violence and betrayal in the Church life of the fourth century.

These five seventh-century religious texts cast light not only on the development of the church in Visigothic Spain and its internal politics, but also on its, at times troubled, relationship with the Visigothic state and the history of that state itself, particularly in the period when the Visigoths changed their adherence from Arian to Trinitarian Christianity.

This is a Syriac text written, in all probability, by an inhabitant of Edessa almost immediately after the conclusion of the war between Rome and Persia in 502–506 AD. Although that conflict is treated in other ancient texts, none of them can match ‘Joshua’ in his wealth of detail, his familiarity with the region where the hostilities occurred, and his proximity in time to the events. The Chronicle also vividly describes the famine and plague that swept through Edessa in the years immediately before the war. The work is a document of great importance for both the social and military history of late antiquity, remarkable for the information it provides on Roman and Persian empires alike.

Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, bishop of Vienne from c.494 to c.518, is known for his poetic works, but his Latin prose style has led to some neglect of his letters. This first complete translation of the letters into English gives access to an important source for the history of the Burgundian Kingdom in the early sixth century.

Focusing on the first and last years of Libanius’ Antiochene career (AD 354–388), this volume illustrates his great range of his rhetorical skills, while at the same time illuminating the intrigues of city politics and university life. The shorter speeches give unparalleled insights into problems of sharply contemporary relevance – teachers’ pay, student indiscipline and rioting, threats from the rival Latin curriculum, accusations of professional incompetence, as well as everyday details of academic life.

The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius narrates the history of the church from the start of the Nestorian controversy in 428 until the death of Evagrius’ employer, Patriarch Gregory of Antioch Gregory in 592. It is our best continuous account of these ecclesiastical events and provides an important narrative of disputes within the church in the fifth century, which includes substantial quotations from relevant contemporary documents, some of them unique.

These two texts are fundamental for the understanding not only of Neoplatonism but also of the conventions of biography in late antiquity. Neither has received such extensive annotation before in English, and this new commentary makes full use of recent scholarship. The long introduction is intended both as a beginner’s guide to Neoplatonism and as a survey of ancient biographical writing.