Olympiodorus of Thebes

Abstract

It is customary to consider late Imperial historiography as a barren waste of meagre and inaccurate chronicles and incompetent rhetorical epitomes, all overshadowed by the giant figure of Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest literary genius, as E. Stein has called him (with some exaggeration), between Tacitus and Dante. In fact, however, the fifth century A.D. produced at least one writer who was, in the words of Niebuhr, ‘second to no historian even of the best ages in talent, good faith and wisdom; elegant and very pure in style, he justly acquired praise and glory both among contemporaries and succeeding ages’. Niebuhr was referring to Priscus of Panium in Thrace, but Priscus was a member of a school of historical writing which had been founded earlier in the fifth century by Olympiodorus, an historian of scarcely less merit than Priscus and author of what J. B. Bury called ‘a highly important work’. Since even Schmid-Stahlin are not able to refer to a single essay or mono-graph on Olympiodorus, it may not be amiss to assemble the facts which are known about him and to try to discover, so far as the scanty materials permit, what sort of man he was and what sort of work he produced.