Editing Leo’s Letters Someday

Back in March 2022, my book The Manuscripts of Leo the Great’s Letters: The Transmission and Reception of Papal Documents in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages came out. This is a book that does what it says on the tin — over 468 pages (plus bibliography and indices) I discuss hundreds of manuscripts that represent dozens of letter collections that include letters of Pope St Leo the Great. It is based on my PhD dissertation (Edinburgh, 2015) but expanded and cleaned up — errors fixed, manuscripts added, letter collections added, and so on and so forth. I found lots of really interesting material in the years of revision!

The reviews have started to come out, first in Plekos, where there’s some really valuable feedback for improving my work for the edition alongside general appreciation, and this, “He makes a compelling case that a new edition of the letters is long overdue.”

Most recently, it’s been favourably reviewed by The Bryn Mawr Classical Review as well, where the reviewer says, “We can only hope that a new edition of Leo’s letters, informed by the scholarship on display on this book, will appear before long.”

Mark DelCogliano — @MarkDelCogliano — retweeted BMCR’s link to the review the other day and tagged me, asking if I was planning on doing the edition. This Tweet got 5 likes. Coling Whiting — @CM_Whiting — also retweeted the BMCR review. So I ran a 24-poll as to whether I should go forward with editing Leo’s letters. This got 24 votes, 22 of which were Yes.

I’ve been thinking lately about a next major thing, next book project. There’s a recent invitation to translated Cassiodorus’ Institutiones for non-academics. I will do that. There are older book ideas — a companion to John Cassian, a book about the Rule of St Benedict, maybe rework my Christmastide lectures on the incarnation and become a theologian.

But the project I’ve been building towards. The thing that consumed me for so long was this. The Letters of Pope Leo the Great, sitting around with no complete critical edition since 1753. Now, there are partial editions since them, some of them very good — so far as they go. But none of them has the entire corpus of Leo’s letters, and none of them is perfect (so edition is, of course).

The correspondence includes 173 items sent to and from Leo. The largest edition since 1753 is that of Eduard Schwartz in the 1930s in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, vol. 2.4, bringing together 115 of the letters. Among the various different modern editions, however, twenty-three have received no critical edition. Helpfully, all twenty-three fall under a conceptual umbrella (potentially false, but I see no escape) of letters pertaining to church discipline and canon law. They would come together with twelve more letters on similar topics as a discrete set within the wider corpus and could, with prolegomena, form volume 1 of the complete correspondence for Corpus Christianorum Series Latina.

Everything else — the so-called “dogmatic” letters — would fill volume 2.

Straightforward, I guess. Except that I need to figure out which manuscripts to definitively eliminate. And then collate the texts of all the letters. And then work on redaction. And all of this in the midst of a highly contaminated tradition. And so forth.

The obstacle to doing this edition?

Time. I am a stay-at-home dad who teaches part-time online. I don’t have the time necessary to sit with Leo’s letters and let them sink into me to redact the text.

Do I?

Nothing is lost (when you write a book)

I have written a book, called The Manuscripts of Leo the Great’s Letters: The Transmission and Reception of Papal Documents in the Middle Ages. It is a transformed, expanded, sifted, revised, revised, revised version of that which was once my PhD dissertation. It is over 500 pages of words, including the index that I made for it. Brepols will publish it this year, DV.

In a sense, this book has been eleven years in the making, since I started my PhD in 2011, and now it is 2022. In another sense, it took from 2015 when I graduated until today for this book to be completed, for it to be transformed and revised and made ready for public consumption. I once felt like there was a certain amount of “wasted time” because I wasn’t actively working on this book.

However, that is false. It is true that I had no plans to publish a book based on my dissertation until some time in 2018-19 when I was employed at UBC as an Assistant Professor Without Review in Latin Language and Literature. But those years were not wasted, as far as the book is concerned (they weren’t wasted in other ways, of course).

First, 2015-2016. I was employed as Ralegh Radford Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome. My research program was focussed on a particular selection of manuscripts of early papal letters (some of Leo’s predecessors). I spent months lurking in the Vatican Library and made trips to the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome, and Lucca, Vercelli, Milan. I also analysed a few of the Vatican Library’s Leo manuscripts I hadn’t had time for during the PhD. All of this research informs the book, in fact, even the material not related to Leo because it enables me to better situate Leo and the transmission of his letters in the wider context of papal letter transmission in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

Then 2016-17, a year certainly not lost in the most important areas of life, for my eldest son was born in 2017! This year I was a Teaching Fellow in Late Roman History at the University of Edinburgh. I thought I was on intimate terms with Late Roman History when I finished my PhD. After teaching it for a full year, I definitely was. I revised the chapters on late antique history with great confidence. Moreover, my ongoing research into matters related to Leo and his letters further strengthened the knowledge base when I got around to revising the book.

Then 2017-18, the year I was Barker Priory Library Fellow at Durham University. My research project was a study of the canon law manuscripts of Durham Cathedral Priory Library, particularly from the time of William of St-Calais onwards. This is when my knowledge of medieval canon law really went deep. Manuscripts I viewed that year are in my book precisely because of this opportunity, manuscripts of Collectio Lanfranci and Gratian’s Decretum as well as a few other unique items from Durham Cathedral Priory, and a deeper, richer appreciation for the High Middle Ages.

And then I went to UBC, during which time I began revising the thesis into a book in earnest.

Everything has been useful. All of my teaching and research inform what I do and how I do it and what I know and how I argue and what makes the cut to be included in my final writing.

Nothing has been lost.

Provided by Durham Priory Library Project – a collaboration between Durham University and Durham Cathedral

Was Late Antiquity an age of spirituality?

Before I launch into this post, I’d like to make it clear that I greatly admire the work of Kurt Weitzmann and have enormously profited from the book Age of Spirituality, which the Metropolitan Museum Art has available as a free download. Now, onto the show.

Sometimes, when I read titles of articles and books about Late Antiquity, and sometimes even the content, I get the impression that there are people out there who imagine Late Antiquity to have been uniquely religious, or particularly “spiritual” — that there was a spiritual ferment in the years 284-641 (or earlier, if you take on the timeline of Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity).

I am not sure that this is true. (And I hope I’m not constructing a strawman. Hopefully my academic colleagues are aware of this. It’s mostly just an impression.)

When I say that, I am not saying that Late Antiquity is not an age of spirituality. I mean that the designation is misleading. When we talk about this as an age of spirituality, there is an unspoken assumption that “classical antiquity” was not. Allow me to articulate, first, why we might think this, and second, why I think “classical antiquity” was as “spiritual” as Late Antiquity.

Why might we think that Late Antiquity was more spiritual?

The nature of the evidence for religious activity in Late Antiquity leads us to think this way, I believe. One of main cultural events of Late Antiquity was the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, and hot on its heels came the rise of Islam. Cultural historians have to deal with these two facts, and, since Islam and Christianity are both still lived religions, the evidence for each in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is still available.

I know Christianity a lot better than Islam, and its history in the period is better documented, anyway. Two things about evidence for late antique Christianity give it an edge over other ancient religious traditions. First, it neither went underground nor ceased existing. The traditional Roman priesthoods all died out in Late Antiquity. No more sacrifices were made. No new hymns were written. The monuments were no longer maintained. Christianity, on the other hand, kept going.

Second, in the Early Middle Ages, the gatekeepers of knowledge were monks. Now, as anyone who has read Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, knows, monks loved them some Virgil and Ovid. They read and copied the “pagan classics.” But, by and large, given the expense involved in making a book, they read and copied Bibles, liturgical books, ascetic/mystical treatises, and the Church Fathers. As a result, we simply have more knowledge about the religious experience of Late Antiquity because people were copying it down.

Related to this is the fact that, although many things about Late Antiquity are foreign to us (very few people have any desire to live on a pillar in the Syrian desert, for example), because of Christianisation, the spiritual texts of Late Antiquity seem familiar to us. Their religious experience looks like what we expect religious experience to look like because, even if fewer and fewer of us in western academia are professing Christians, we frame our religious language and experience in these same terms — or in an explicit rejection of them.

Ancient pagans, on the other hand, don’t fare nearly as well. Most surviving ancient Latin texts are Late Antique in the first place. More Augustine survives than any other ancient Latin author. I believe St Jerome comes in second place. Late Antique Latin texts dwarf their classical predecessors for quantity. As a result, even if pagan religious experience were not foreign, we simply have less of it to deal with.

Another reason, however, has to do with our own prejudices, Christian on one hand and Enlightenment on the other. Neither position does justice to non-Christian religious experience in antiquity. The Christian prejudice, for example, explains the relatively rapid Christianisation in Late Antiquity because paganism was empty and dead, just a bunch of formal rituals and such. Now, not only is this untrue of late antique paganism (consider the Neo-Platonist experience), it is untrue of classical religion as well.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, discounts the religious element of classical antiquity. My first-year philosophy professor completely disregarded the religious elements of Plato, downplaying them as having any real bearing upon his philosophy. We like talking about people who challenged traditional religion without acknowledging that perhaps they have their own distinct religious experience from which their challenge arises. Instead, we imagine the Greeks and Romans as a bunch of Enlightenment rationalists (E R Dodds has put this to rest in The Greeks and the Irrational).

It is my contention — and it certainly needs more research to be proven and publishable in an academic forum — that classical antiquity, and archaic antiquity, had its own meaningful, distinct religious experience. It was every bit as spiritual as Late Antiquity.

Post-Script

Another angle is: What about unspirituality in Late Antiquity? What do we say of authors who seem largely secular such as Ammianus? Or Christians like Sidonius who write verse populated by pagan deities?

Why I am lead admin at Read the Fathers

7th-c fresco from when Curia became a church, now in the museum at Cripta Balbi, Rome

There is a website called Read the Fathers, and it sets out a reading plan that renews every seven years to read big chunks of most of the significant ancient Christian writers, ordered according to the old Victorian Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. The original seven-year cycle ran from December 2012 to the end of November 2019. In December 2019, there was interest (from my brother) to start the cycle again, but the original administrators did not want to carry on the job (understandably).

So I took it on.

I have chosen to be the lead admin at Read the Fathers for a few reasons: my research and teaching, the usefulness of the project, and a desire to adapt the website to promote greater engagement with ancient Christianity.

My research and teaching

I research ancient Christianity for a living. The medieval manuscripts I read are not chosen willy-nilly. While I often focus on papal letters or canon law, the main thrust of the texts I research is that they are in some way related to the lived religion of late ancient Christianity. My Ph.D. dissertation was a study of over 300 manuscripts, all of which transmit letters of Pope Leo the Great (pope, 440-461), one of the chief agitators for the Council of Chalcedon in 451. My first post-doc was an analysis of manuscripts containing select letters of a few of Leo’s predecessors. Besides Leo, I have an article about the sixth-century Syriac historian John of Ephesus, and I am working on an article about the reception of Evagrius of Pontus’ demonology by John Cassian in the 400s.

I am a Classicist: a Latinist and Roman historian. The focus of my research is late antique Christianity.

It just makes sense, then, that I should read as many late antique Christian texts as I can. By reading more and more ancient Christian writings, I become better able to integrate the texts I focus on directly in my research — usually canon law or monastic — into their own context and the history of ideas. By reading more of these writings, I see what distinguishes one writer from another more clearly. I become a better reader of Leo, Cassian, John of Ephesus, by becoming a reader of Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian.

Furthermore, I even get to teach ancient Christianity sometimes. As a Ph.D. student I taught “Christianity Before Constantine” and “The History of Christianity As a World Religion Before 1453”. As Teaching Fellow in Late Roman History, I taught one explicitly religious course — “The Bishop and City of Rome in Late Antiquity” — but ancient Christianity was part of “The Emperor in the Late Roman World” and “Crisis, Continuity, and Culture in the Fifth Century,” besides the lecture I gave on early Christianity in the survey course about the Roman Empire.

Reading “the Fathers” will do nothing but profit such teaching. Indeed, it even gives valuable context and discussion for teaching Greek and Roman mythology!

Choosing to be the lead admin will give me impetus not to put reading and re-reading these texts off to another day.

The Usefulness of the Project

I have always been something of a “Classics evangelist.” I love ancient (and medieval) literature. I love Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Euripides, Sophocles, Seneca, Plato, et al. I think they are worth reading in and of themselves. I also think that understanding the classics helps us understand our own culture, since we are in some way heirs of the ancient Greeks and Romans (neither are we the only heirs, nor are the ancient Greeks and Romans the only ancestors of “western” culture — but the point stands).

So also for the Church Fathers. If you are interested in intellectual history and how “we got here”, you can’t just jump from Aristotle to Descartes, or (if you’re a Protestant of a certain variety) from the Apostles to Martin Luther, or, indeed, from Augustine to Aquinas. Knowing the movers, shakers, and shapers of the ancient Christian tradition puts the medieval and modern traditions into clearer focus, I believe.

For Christians, reading ancient Christianity is a way of coming to grips with one’s own heritage, with the thoughts and lives of the people involved in forming a New Testament canon, in articulating the foundational doctrines of Christian theology, in bodying forth liturgy, monasticism, canon law. Whether one accepts the forms of ritual, living, and believing of the ancient Christians is, in a certain way, beside the point. I know a Catholic who says that one must first know “orthodoxy” before rejecting it if one is to be a proper heretic.

Since I believe in the project — read seven pages of Patristics a day for seven years and good things will happen to you — I am willing to keep it running.

The Future of the Project

I have taken on this project, finally, because I want to give it a future. Right now, we are trying to come up with solutions for setting the calendar free so that new readers can join with the Apostolic Fathers whenever they want, and start the seven-year cycle as they please.

My other desire for the project is to slowly transform it into an open access encyclopedia of ancient Christianity. To that end, I have attempted recruiting my Patristics network to write introductory posts that will serve as the heart of the encyclopedia (only one person has said yes). It strikes me that it would be great to have an up-to-date, high-quality, scholarly website that not only gives readers a reading plan for the Fathers and a blog to discuss the Fathers but also solid information on the Fathers.

Hopefully in the next seven years I’ll get that sorted out.

Coming to grips with late antique Christianity

Fifth-century mosaic from San Paolo fuori le Mura, Rome

I once heard an anecdote about a colleague who (I think) said that Constantine’s revisions of the imperial postal system were more significant than his conversion to Christianity. This may, in fact, be true, depending on how you define your terms. However, it is the case that, overall, coming to grips with Christianity will help you understand late antiquity better than knowing the imperial postal system.

If you begin with the Tetrarchy and Diocletian, you will need to have some grasp of who Christians are and why the Roman government disliked them for understanding the persecution.

If you begin earlier with the Third Century Crisis and are interested in Latin literature, the fact that we have so little Latin literature from the second century will throw you into the arms of Cyprian of Carthage and his letters.

Beginning with Constantine there is a conversion of the upper classes, and these are the people who produce or for whom are produced most of the stuff that survives from antiquity — fancy houses, poems, philosophical treatises. Their religion is thus not inconsequential. And they eventually do become Christians — we can learn about the last pagans of Rome (to cite the title of a book by Alan Cameron)

And if you are interested in Later Latin Literature, Christianity is all over the place. Some of the greatest poets of Late Antiquity write explicitly religious poetry. It would be a shame to study the world of late antiquity (to cite the title of a Peter Brown book) and miss out on Prudentius and the other Christian epicists. Likewise the Greek verse of Gregory of Nazianzus, or the sublime Syriac poetry of Ephrem and his luminous eye (to cite a Sebastian Brock title).

While the rise of western Christendom (to cite Peter Brown again) is a major feature of the study of the Mediterranean world in Late Antiquity (Averil Cameron this time), I admit one should be perspicacious. There is a lot to grapple with.

Consider the realm of texts: Augustine of Hippo is the ancient Latin author with the largest surviving corpus, for one thing. We have more Christian letter collections from Late Antiquity than the non-Christian ones from preceding centuries. Indeed, Christians love books — sermons, letters, poems, long theological tractates, canon law documents, apologies, polemics, biographies, hagiographies, liturgies, and so forth, flow forth in abundance in Late Antiquity in Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Coptic.

Material culture is also a big realm, from Spain and even Britain in the West to Mesopotamia in the East, the Roman Empire and its Persian neighbour has its fair share of physical remains, some of them the large, mosaic-encrusted churches of Ravenna, others the foundations of churches in Salamis on Cyprus. This is not to mention the myriad smaller objects of Christian origin — ivories, icons, Bibles, Bible covers, communion vessels, etc.

Moreover, Christianity is a complex phenomenon. Are we looking at the beliefs and writings and practices of the educated elite? What about the urban poor? What about different modes of belief amongst different Christian bodies? Bishops? Laypeople? Rome? Antioch? Nisibis?

In fact, there’s so much, whether you like Christianity or not, how could you help but take an interest in it if you’re interested in Late Antiquity?

Teaching Later Latin

Nothing says ‘Later Roman Empire’ like giving the Tetrarchs a hug

Before I get going on this post, I feel obliged to state that I have loved teaching the “core” canon of Classics this year — in Latin: Horace and Ovid, in Greek: Theocritus, in English translation: Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and a variety of Greek authors for Greek and Roman Myth (Hesiod, the tragedians, Homer, the Homeric Hymns, Apollodorus, et al, et al.). Nevertheless, teaching one’s own narrower focus brings with it a special pleasure all its own.

Last term, I got to teach, as literature, a selection of Ausonius’ verse epistles to Paulinus in Latin class, and Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae in English in Latin Epic. For one week, all I taught was “later” Latin literature. I put “later” in quotation marks because very often, what we mean by “later Latin literature” ends in the Early Middle Ages, at which point Latin was still really only in middle age (ha). Anyway, it was an exciting week.

First of all, Late Antiquity is where I have been most thoroughly invested for many years now. My research may range as late as the 1400s, and my background has certainly prepared me for teaching Aeschylus or the world of Augustan Rome, but the world, history, culture, and authors of Late Antiquity are where I am most comfortable. It is a pleasure to teach from a position of being comfortable with the context and the material in a deep way.

Second, I can bring my research to bear on the texts. I can say that ‘such and such’ is a feature of later Latin without recourse to grammars or histories of Latin. I know it is because I have seen it with frequency in a number of different authors from the fourth through sixth centuries. I can comment on the piling up of superlatives, for example, as being part of contemporary courtesy. Amongst bishops, even your worst enemy is dilectissimus frater — ‘most beloved brother’.

The third point is likewise related: I got to share with people the things I have learned, and that itself is a great delight. So I talked about how the quotation from Paulinus in Ausonius, about the names of different kings, is itself an example of the jewelled style (and pointed them to Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style). I talked about how allusion works in these authors, and the kind of learned game they are playing with their readers, especially Ausonius (referencing Aaron Pelttari, The Space that Remains). Teaching Claudian, I got to talk about the prefaces and what they mean poetically and metapoetically, and this was great. There was a certain amount of allusion and intertextuality throughout it all (says my wife, ‘Don’t you lecture on that all the time?).

The fourth point is pedagogical: I got to expand their idea of Latin literature. For the Latin students, they saw that grammar and vocabulary can remain ‘classical’ while style goes in new directions. They were thus given a window in both the difference and similarity of later Latin with its classical forebears. Most Latin students never read much of anything later than Apuleius (if that). Thus, they were exposed to a greater breadth of Latin than is usually on offer, and I think this will only help them, even if the rest of their lives they read nothing but ‘classical’ Latin authors.

For the epic students, it was much the same. They got to see that Latin literature doesn’t just suddenly stop. Indeed, one  of my wider aims throughout the course was tying together disparate strands of Latin and world literature. Not only did they read Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian, they also had lectures talking about Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Statius, et al., and I tied in not only Latin epic’s relationship with Greek epic but also with themes in Gilgamesh and Mahabharata. In terms of reception, I brought Virgil to the early moderns. So Claudian was actually central to part of my wider pedagogy, which is: (although) Virgil is amazing (and you should know him), and these other epics area part of the same poetic tradition or human experience.

The back of my Oxford Classical Text of Ausonius boasts that there are over 100 volumes in the series. Later Latin literature, even when restricted to the later 100s to 800s, encompasses far more Literature than that. It’s worth introducing students to it.

Two Fulgentii for the price of one

In my latest post for the Durham Priory Library Recreated project blog, I discuss the insufficiencies of the old Durham Cathedral catalogue and point out the library’s manuscripts with works by Fulgentius. Both of him. Enjoy!

Sorting out your Fulgentii

Late Roman History and Canon Law

Last week, I had blood taken. As the nurse extracted it, and I looked the other way, she made small talk, presumably to keep my mind off the grotesque and bizarre occurrence underway. She asked if I was on my way to work (it feels like a triumph when people no longer assume I’m a student), and I said sort of, that I’m an academic and can work anywhere with a book and my laptop, and that I was headed for a café afterwards.

She asked what my research was.

I said that I research Durham’s medieval manuscripts of canon law.

I think her response was something of a crestfallen, ‘Oh,’ — that sounds boring, being the subtext.

I said that it’s can actually be very interesting. For example, when you read late antique papal letters, interesting questions come up: What do you do if someone who had been captured by barbarians comes back to Roman territory and finds his wife has remarried? Leo the Great (pope, 440-461) says that the first marriage stands (Ep. 159).

The nurse seemed unconvinced and wished me a good cup of coffee. Probably the least interested/impressed person I’ve ever told about my job.*

Sometimes, when I tell people the story from Leo’s letters, they respond, ‘Well, of course, the man wins.’ In fact, the same case came up during the episcopate of Innocent I (pope, 401-417), only in Innocent’s case it was a woman returning from captivity. He also ruled in favour of the first marriage — precedent for Leo in 458.

Now, there are important and interesting things going on with the canons of marriage here, I can assure you, including their relationship to Roman law and the development of sacramental theology.

However, those are not what I’m thinking about when I try to prove to people that canon law is interesting. Rather, I’m thinking: Hey! Look, canon law tells us about normal people! ‘Normal’ people are often voiceless in our sources, aren’t they? And, if we imagine canon law as merely a body of regulations, then we see only the bishops and councils. But why does Nicetas of Aquileia write to Leo about these cases, anyway?

Here we meet ‘normal’ people — the people of the Roman Empire who are having to put the pieces back together after the barbarians have left town. In this case, men who were legally (or presumed) dead return to Romania and have to fight for their legal privileges. This displacement of persons by barbarians is not uncommon — in other cases, we learn of people carried off as children who do not know whether they were baptised before their abduction by barbrians (see Leo I, Ep. 167).

In the case of Aquileia, I imagine that the displaced men presumed dead were carried by Attila in 452. The people who were abducted as children, mentioned in Ep. 167, have returned to Narbonne around 458. Are they victims of the Battle of Narbonne, 436/7? That would account for their return home as adults. I am not certain.

But here, in these two little incidents, canon law texts are giving us the human face of the Later Roman Empire and the post-430 disruptions that were occurring in people’s lives in western Europe. This is what makes canon law interesting.

*Medievalists, including one fellow who researches scholasticism, often act as though they are in awe of anyone who dares touch canon law with a ten-foot pole, given its complexity.

Late Antiquity in Medieval Durham

My latest post at the Durham Priory Recreated Project blog is about the various different Late Antique texts found in the priory library. In many ways, medieval Christianity is just a 1000-year reception of ancient Christianity. Enjoy!

The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. 1, by R. C. Blockley

The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus by R.C. Blockley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is volume one of Blockley’s study and edition/translation of Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus, and Malchus, four Greek-language historians writing in the fifth-century (although early stages of Eunapius may have been published in the later 300s). These historians only survive for us in fragments — quotations by later, Byzantine, authors, or use by other late antique and ‘Byzantine’ historians (not always with attribution).

They are important because the fifth century is a century of fragmented knowledge and history. So we need all the sources we can get. They are also important because they represent a particular genre of history writing of which we have but little from this era of Graeco-Roman history.

Blockley divides this volume into two parts: The Historians and The Fragments. In the first part, each historian is introduced in turn, providing plausible dates of publication, his background, what the original contours of the history would have been, what he was like as a stylists, what he was like as a historian, what we think his main concerns were, his relationship to Christianity, and how we know this; from what I can tell, the bibliography was up to date at time of publication (1981). These chapters are followed by a discussion of what ‘classicising history’ is and how we should classify these historians — not as ‘pagan’ (not all of them are) nor as ‘secular’ (that, too, is misleading) but as ‘classicising’; they are consciously writing in the tradition of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius.

Part two is a discussion of the same material from the other direction — what are the sources for our fragments, how do we know these fragments are from these historians, and then a brief summary of what each fragment includes.

This is a highly useful book, readable, fairly brief, and a good introduction to the sources edited and translated in volume 2.

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