Zacharias Rhetor

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Ammonius

Zacharias of Mytilene (Ζαχαρίας ό Μιτυληναίος; c. 465,

ecclesiastical historian
.

Life

The life of Zacharias of Mytilene can be reconstructed only from a few scattered reports in contemporary sources (the accounts are also partly conflicting – for example, some Syrian authors have "

pagans in connection with the Horapollo affair. It was also there he met Severus, who was later to become a notable patriarch of Antioch
.

In 487, Zacharias travelled to

terminus ante quem for his death. He was certainly alive in 536, as he took part in the Synod
in Constantinople that year.

Works

Zacharias composed several works in

ecclesiastical history that was probably completed towards the end of the 5th century. The document, dedicated to Eupraxius, a dignitary, contains valuable historical material and describes the time period from 451 to 491. It was used by Evagrius Scholasticus
for his own history. Zacharias also composed three biographies of
Manichaeans
.

Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor

While all original versions of Zacharias's ecclesiastical histories were later lost, a truncated and revised

Amida. This anonymous author, who has been commonly known as Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, incorporated it in Historia Miscellanea, a 12-book compilation of ecclesiastical
histories. Pseudo-Zacharias's edition of Zacharias's ecclesiastical history, constituting books 3–6, is also usually known as Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor.

The first English translation of Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor was not published until in 1899 under the title The Syriac Chronicle by F. J. Hamilton and E. W. Brooks.

Byzantine Texts, edited by J. B. Bury. A new English translation was published by Liverpool University Press in 2011 under the title The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor: Church and War in Late Antiquity. Edited by Geoffrey Greatrex and translated into English by Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, it consists of a translation of books 3-12 of Historia Miscellanea; a second volume is planned for the translation of books 1–2.[when?
]

Literature

Editions and translations

Secondary sources

  • P. Allen: Zachariah Scholasticus and the Historia Ecclesiastica of Evagrius. In: JTS 31 (1980), p. 471–488.

References

  1. ^ Grillmeier, Alois; Hainthaler, Theresia (1975). Christ in Christian Tradition Tomos 2-3. Mowbrays. p. 15. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
  2. ^ Available as a free download. [1]