The production of complex literary narrative requires economic and physical security. In Late Antiquity, the economic and physical security that most of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had enjoyed since the time of Augustus came to an end. It was for that reason that the period witnessed the rise and triumph of the chronicle as the primary vehicle for the transmission of historical knowledge. A chronicle was, in essence, a list of successive years, and included one or more brief notices concerning events that had occurred during each year. It differed little, either in content or in form, from the annales maximi that the pontifex maximus had kept at Rome during the republican period. Roman historiography ended, therefore, much as it began, and we are forced to rely upon various sparse chronicles for our knowledge of much of the period c. ad 300-750, particularly for events in the west.
Fortunately, the different political fortunes of the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire insured that the production of complex historical narrative did not cease at the same time throughout the empire as a whole. The production of complex historical narrative in the west seems to have ceased with the work of Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whose history covered the period from c. ad 395 to 425. There was a long hiatus then, before the production of the next complex historical narratives by bishop Gregory of Tours (c. ad 538-94) and the English monk Bede (c. ad 673-735). Writing c. ad 594, Gregory produced his Historiae Francorum in ten books, which formally began with the creation of the world and ended with events in ad 591, although they focused mainly on the period after AD 573. He is our only source for the work of Frigeridus, which has not itself survived. Working c. ad 731, Bede produced his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in five books, beginning with the first invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar in 55 bc and ending in ad 731, although he focused mainly on the period after ad 596. The works of Gregory and Bede are, however, the exceptions that prove the rule - namely, that the composition of complex historical narrative in the west ceased during the early fifth century. Furthermore, they are national
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Histories, and did not preserve the wide-ranging geographical coverage of their classical ancestors.
In contrast (although not all their works have survived), a succession of eastern authors produced an almost continuous series of complex narratives in Greek, until Theophylact Simocatta composed c. ad 630 his account of the reign of the emperor Maurice (ad 582-602). The Arab invasions and successive civil wars then intervened to cause a relative literary dark age in the east also, so that the next surviving historical text in Greek is the Breviarium that Nicephorus, patriarch of Constantinople (ad 806-15), seems to have composed in the ad 780s, covering the period AD 602-769. For the most part, however, it reads like a series of confused and disjointed notes, with large gaps in its coverage. Even though the author eschews the strict form of a chronicle, the work is no better than the chronicles that he seems to have used as his main sources for much of the period.
As far as historiography was concerned, therefore, Late Antiquity was not a period of great innovation. Such innovations as did occur were forced by social and political change rather than by theoretical considerations. Nevertheless, two innovations stand out. The first was the invention of religious or church history. This is not to claim that the great historians of the classical period had entirely neglected religion in their works, or that they had been reluctant to impose their religious views upon their readers; but they had not focused so narrowly upon the history of one specific cult, nor had they been so relentless in their determination to reinterpret everything in accordance with their religious viewpoint.
The development that forced the invention of church history was the rise of Christianity and the religious tensions that accompanied this rise. It began as a form of apologetic against paganism - that is, a justification and defense of Christianity against its pagan critics - and continued in that vein into the early fifth century, when it was gradually transformed into an apologetic against rival Christian factions. Christian historians attempted to reply to two main pagan arguments against Christianity, the first being that it was a recent innovation, in contrast to the antiquity of the traditional religious and philosophical belief systems, and the second being that Christian atheism and immorality aroused the displeasure of the gods and so brought disaster on the wider population. It is arguable that the need to reply to the first inspired the development of the chronicle - an attempt to synchronize different chronological systems and prove thereby that Moses and the prophets of the Old Testament had lived long before the originators of Greek religion or philosophy - and that the need to reply to the second resulted in the development of the detailed church history - a demonstration of how the state prospered when the church prospered also. It is no accident that Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, often known as the father of church history, actually devoted most of his career to the composition of apologetical works in a stricter sense, rather than to historical works (Kofsky 2000).
This is not to deny that other motivations may have been at play also, not least when paganism no longer posed a serious intellectual threat. Generally speaking, church histories served to prove that divine providence continued into the era of the writer, whether of Eusebius writing in the early fourth century or of one of his continuators subsequently; that God would protect his church, whether against pagan persecution (as in the pre-Constantinian era, or during the brief reigns of Julian ‘‘the Apostate,’’ ad 360-3, and the western usurper Eugenius, ad 392-4) or against heretics (whether Marcion or Mani during the pre-Constantinian era or Arius and Nestorius during the subsequent period). As time progressed, the growing tendency to identify church and state meant that the military setbacks suffered by the empire - that is, the loss of the western half of the empire to various barbarian groups during the fifth century and the loss of much of the eastern half of the empire to the Arab invaders during the seventh - posed a new challenge to the Christian historian, all the more so in that those invaders had been either heretics or non-Christians. There were two possible responses, although they were not always distinguished clearly. In the midst of the crisis itself, the temptation was to interpret the defeats and massacres as preludes to the end of time and the Second Coming of Christ (Reinink 2002). In hindsight, when the situation had stabilized once more, the response was that God still cared for his people, but that he had allowed their enemies to triumph over them in order to punish them for their sins.
The second major innovation concerns the method of calculating the year, the chronological system one needs to adopt before one can write a history. The Romans had traditionally identified each year by the names of the two consuls who held office during that year. Since the first consuls had only held office in 509 bc, this system could not be used to refer to years before that date. Furthermore, the last private person to hold the office was Basilius in ad 541. Many people used regional dating systems that counted the years since the formation of the relevant Roman province or the refoundation of a local town; but these systems were clearly unsuited for use in any work designed to appeal to a broader readership (Meimaris 1992). Regnal dating was common, but the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the rise of various successor states in the west meant that historians used different systems of regnal dating according to whether they wrote in Gothic Spain, Frankish Gaul, or in the Eastern Roman Empire. This made it difficult to coordinate sources from different regions; but the secular nature of this system also proved unappealing, since the preservation and transmission of historical knowledge increasingly fell to the clergy, especially the bishops. Most chroniclers adopted as their main chronological system AM dating (anno mundi, ‘‘in the year of the universe’’), which numbered the years from the creation of the universe (although several different systems were often used in parallel). There were several methods of calculating the initial year of creation in accordance with biblical data, so that the Alexandrian method dated it to 5500 BC (5492 bc in our Dionysian era) whereas the Byzantine method dated it to 5509 BC. AM dating predominated in the east, but ad dating (anno domini, ‘‘in the year of the Lord’’) eventually triumphed in the west. A Scythian monk at Rome, Dionysius Exiguus, used ad dating in the Easter table that he constructed in ad 525, and the spread of that table popularized his method, which numbered the years since the incarnation of Christ. It has recently been argued, however, that it was really Eusebius of Caesarea who had introduced this idea in his chronicle, and that Dionysius borrowed the idea from him without acknowledging this (McCarthy 2003). The most unusual system was developed in Ireland, where early medieval chroniclers distinguished one year from another by means of a kalend and ferial apparatus - that is, by identifying each year according to the day of the week on which January 1 fell. It has recently been argued that the anonymous author of the first Irish chronicle, the common ancestor of all the surviving Irish chronicles, continued an otherwise unattested translation by Rufinus of Aquileia of the chronicle of Eusebius, to which he had added this kalend and ferial system (McCarthy 2001). Hence Rufinus has been credited with this unusual system. It is more likely, however, that the kalend and ferial system was first used in a local Irish chronicle that had its origin in an Easter table and was then retrospectively applied to some version of Eusebius’ chronicle when someone decided to convert this limited local chronicle into a universal history by joining the two texts together ((O Crdinin 1983).
The lack of innovation during this period is revealed by the fact that many, if not most, of the surviving historical works were continuations of earlier works. This was true of both church histories and secular histories. Eventually, the production of complex narrative histories ceased altogether, and what remained were simply continuations of the chronicle of Eusebius. Even in the case of church history, most of the surviving texts aspire to be universal histories in the manner of Eusebius’ Church History - but again, as continuations of that history. There were few, if any, attempts at regional or local history. The nearest one gets to this were the biographies of bishops or collections of biographies of successive bishops. The so-called Historia Acephala seems to have originated as a biography of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (ad 328-73); and the Liber Pontificalis, a collection of biographies of the popes that was probably first compiled in the fifth century and updated at regular intervals thereafter, while not strictly a history of the church at Rome, provides the skeleton of such.
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