Research questions

What does the story of a dog that can perform incredible feats in front of a stunned audience have to do with a late antique work of universal history? In his Chronographia, written in the 6th century AD, the author John Malalas covers biblical and Ancient history as well as the contemporary history of his own time. In his historical narrative, he often strings together thematically unrelated episodes, raising the question of the narrative’s coherence. But even late antique historical works that offer a more consistent narrative, such as Procopius’ Persian Wars, offer numerous deviations from the main storyline. This leads to the following principal questions with regard to late antique historiographical works: Why did the authors regularly include digressive passages in their historical works that provide additional geographical or mythical information which is not necessarily needed? How can obviously implausible miracle stories such as the one about the talented dog be compatible with a historiographical work that is intended to convey historical facts? According to which principles did the authors compile their texts and for which audience did they create such works?

The text corpus

The present project seeks to answer these key questions by analysing the narrative form of digression, i.e. the deviation from the main storyline. The research looks at a representative sample of late antique Greek historiographical works from the 5th to the early 7th century AD. These can be classified into three different, but not strictly separated, groups: (1.) writings that are modelled on classical historiographical works and deal with an epoch, a theme or specific characters; these are the works of the authors Zosimus, Procopius, Agathias and Theophylact Simocatta; (2.) chronicles, i.e. universal histories such as the Chronographia by Malalas, which tell the story of the creation of the world from a Christian perspective and reach up to the time of the author; and (3.) church histories, which also offer a Christian view of historical events and are focused on the development of the still-young Christian church and its institutions; these are the writings of Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Philostorgius and Evagrius Scholasticus.

Innovations

For the first time, these writings – which have so far often been regarded as mere religious-historical source material – are being considered first and foremost as literary works. The aim of the project, therefore, is to understand and explain the narrative techniques and stylistic features of late antique Greek historiography. The results of the project work will provide new insights for the fields of Classical Philology, Ancient History, Byzantine and Literary Studies.