Theophylact’s history marks the abrupt termination of an immensely long historiographical convention. No one continued Theophylact, even though two centuries later Nicephorus began his very different style of history from 602. He was the contemporary of the author of the so-called chronicon Paschale, a world chronicle beginning with creation and culminating in the Persian triumph of the emperor Heraclius in 628. It was patronized by patriarch Sergius. Each year was itemized with many years also including historical events. As it approached the author’s lifetime the record became more extensive (Whitby and Whitby 1989). The last entry for 628 includes two lengthy documents. As with Theophylact, the Chronicon Paschale also marked the end of a historiographical line. There were no such chronicles being written in Greek after the 630s. Both Theophylact and the Chranican Paschale's author were younger contemporaries of Evagrius, who wrote his Ecclesiastical History in the 590s at Antioch, carrying on a tradition which stretched back to Eusebius of Caesarea (below, §3) and in which successive generations of historians had earlier continued each other (Whitby 2000). Yet, no one continued Evagrius either. Another historiographical tradition had come to a sudden halt by the early seventh century, the next known ecclesiastical historian being Sergius in the late eighth/early ninth century.
Evagrius, Theophylact, and the Paschal Chronicler represent the culmination of different threads of history writing in Greek which had developed and been sustained side by side over the previous three centuries. Why such different forms of representing the past should all cease around the same time is a question ripe for more detailed analysis. One recent proposal (Meier 2004) is that a rapid succession of natural catastrophes, especially the great plague of the early 540s, focused the overwhelming attention of historians on God's providence. Even Procopius, so it is argued, could no longer indulge in classical affectation but attributed events solely to God, thereby blurring the boundary between sacred and secular history. His successors followed suit until the different historiographical traditions of Theophylact (secular) and Evagrius (sacred) became one and the same. Besides the possible impact of economic and social catastrophe, the contributing factors clearly include the gradual decline of interest in classical literary culture and the quality of education, as well as the wealth required to sustain them (Whitby 1992: 353-358). Exacerbating these factors in the seventh century was the loss of Egypt and Syria to the Arabs and their ensuing cultural transformation. The advent of Islam proved particularly problematic for any historiographical model based on linking the Christian God's providence with worldly success (Whitby 2000: lx; 2003: 492).
At precisely the same time as the historical compositions of Theophylact and the Chranican Paschale, at the other extremity of the Mediterranean Isidore the bishop of Seville (560-636) in Visigothic Spain was producing his influential encyclopedia of classical learning, the Etymalagies, which included a section on ‘‘History.'' Isidore defined history as simply ‘‘the narration of what took place in the past'' (Orig. 1.41.1), before outlining the first historians (42), the usefulness of history (43), and its three narrative forms: diaries, histories (contemporary times), and annals (previous times) (44). Moses, as the author of the Pentateuch, was the first historian, as he was for Evagrius (Histaria Ecclesiastica 5.24), and his history commenced with the creation of the world. For Isidore, the first of the pagan historians was the preHomeric Dares the Phrygian, read in the Latin translation composed in the fifth or sixth century, but passed off as a work of the first century bce. Dares was followed by Herodotus and Pherecydes of Athens, the author of genealogies of the gods (D. Hal. AR 1.13). Both Isidore, who was educated in a cathedral school at Seville, and Theophylact, who was educated in a rhetorical school at Alexandria, shared a common Christian understanding that history encompassed the whole of the known world and the whole of recorded time from creation to the present.
The Etymalagies exerted enormous influence on the culture of ensuing centuries throughout western Europe, not least on the writing of history. Traditionally, the story of Isidore’s influence has been set in the context of new and primitive notions of history emerging in the ‘‘dark ages’’ from a decrepit and exhausted Roman culture, then flowering into more elaborate forms characteristic of the ‘‘middle ages.’’ A similar but separate process was followed in the East with its own ‘‘Byzantine dark age.’’ It was considered that histories such as that of Theophylact were written by highly educated litterateurs for a similarly educated audience, while chronicles such as the Chronicon Paschale or the one compiled by Isidore himself (Martin 2003) in 615, were written by ill-educated monks for an audience of simpler taste and learning. Now, however, the historiographical landscape of Theophylact and Isidore’s day looks completely different.
‘‘The explosion of late antiquity’’ (Giardina 1999) neatly encapsulates what has been occurring in the study of the period from the third to the seventh centuries in recent times. ‘‘Late Roman,’’ ‘‘early medieval,’’ and ‘‘early Byzantine’’ have all been subsumed into ‘‘late antiquity,’’ the notion that from Ireland to Iran in those centuries a common Christian culture unified, transformed, and displaced its diverse predecessors everywhere. Yet ‘‘late antiquity’’ is a modern invention just like the categories it has replaced. For the readers and writers of history there was not only transformation but also discontinuity, rupture, and decline (cf. Cameron 1999). In terms of historiography, the past now needed to be recaptured and reshaped as it had itself become a catalyst for change (Bowersock 2001: 2-3).
History was now for everyone, not just a literary elite. History was everywhere, and the past explained everything. It was not to be found only in self-conscious literary works labeled ‘‘history.’’ It was in the ceremony and formal panegyric of the imperial court (Nixon 1990), the liturgy of the local church, the saints’ lives and exegesis to which the Christian community was exposed, and it was memorialized in public and private iconography. The streets of cities large and small were graced with various representations of local identities and historical scenes, present and past. In sixth-century Constantinople, for instance, visitors to the imperial palace could stop and stare at the representation in the entrance hall of the victories of the emperor Justinian (527-565) over the Vandals and Goths in the 530s (Procop. Aed. 1.10.15-20), or they could view the mural depicting the rise of the emperor Justin (518-527) to power (Zachariah of Mitylene, Ecclesiastical History 8.1). A century earlier the ecclesiastical historian Socrates (Historia Ecclesiastica 1.38; 2.38) highlighted the living history on the city’s streets, while another ecclesiastical historian, Theodoret, commented (HE, praef) that ‘‘When artists paint on panels and on walls the events of ancient history, they alike delight the eye, and keep bright for many a year the memory of the past.’’ He went on to proclaim the superiority of historians because they ‘‘substitute books for panels, bright description for pigments, and thus render the memory of past events both stronger and more permanent, for the painter’s art is ruined by time.’’
The Christian calendar and its sacred scripture provided a daily history lesson for the entire congregation (August. Doct. Christ. 2.27). Events in the Christian story were commemorated, particularly the memorial of martyrs of different eras, as well as various other public events including past natural disasters such as earthquakes. Year in, year out, the congregation heard an account of the event or person being commemorated. Sermons frequently reinforced and elaborated the historical background to the daily liturgy. They also explicated the various books of the Bible, which became the single book of history for all Christians, but it was a history whose chronology and content had to be agreed on and explained (Cameron 1999: 3). Part of that chronology included particular calculations about determining the end of time (eschatology) and the final ‘‘thousand years’’ of the world (millenarianism). While most Christians learned their history by word of mouth, it was the written history which mattered according to Isidore. The traditional Latin and Greek histories continued to be written, copied, and read, in both East and West. At the same time, there developed new Christian ways of writing and thinking about the past.
World History
