Prices

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Priskos von Panion (Latin Priscus Panites ; * approx. 410/20; † around 474) was an Eastern Roman historian of the 5th century .

Life

Priskos served the Eastern Roman emperor and was comprehensively philosophical and rhetorical. Like every higher official, he was fluent in Greek and Latin according to his work, which was useful for his diplomatic missions. According to the Middle Byzantine lexicon Suda , he came from Panion in Thrace . At his request, he accompanied the Roman general Maximinus on several diplomatic missions (the exact role in which he was assigned is controversial). In addition to a trip to the Hunnenhof in 449, Priskos stayed in Rome in 450. In 452/53 he accompanied Maximinus to Egypt. After the death of Maximinus in 453, Priskos initially stayed in Egypt and then from 456 served the magister officiorum Euphemius in an advisory capacity, probably as an assessor (legal advisor). Such a position was generally associated with elevation to the middle ranks of the senatorial class; therefore it can be assumed that Priskos held the rank of vir spectabilis .

plant

After retiring from active service, Priskos wrote a work dedicated to contemporary history in Greek in eight books in the tradition of ancient historiography. The work as a whole is lost, but important parts - such as the famous, detailed report on his participation in a legation trip in 449 to Attila , the king of the Huns - have been preserved as (sometimes quite extensive) fragments . The exact title and period of the depiction are not known, but the earliest contemporary section describes the takeover of power by Attila and Bleda (around 433/34) and no known fragment goes beyond the year 471. Presumably the beginning of Attila's reign also represented the starting point chosen by Priscus; The most likely end date in research is the year 474 (death of Emperor Leo I ). In the fragments of the Priscus, neither the deposition of Romulus Augustulus nor Odoacer is referred to or alluded to, which is why it is often assumed that the work was finished before 476; however, later dates are also possible.

The surviving fragments give the impression that Priskos dealt primarily with Roman foreign policy, but this selection may also be due to the interests of the later compilers. Apparently the history of the Huns and their relationship to the Roman Empire was a focus of the work; but also the Roman-Persian contacts were dealt with by Priskos. His style was - typical of late antique historians - classicistic; so he anachronistically referred to the Huns as Scythians and the Persian Sassanids as Parthians . Literary models were obviously Herodotus and Thucydides , whose imitation ( mimesis ) he sought in an archaic art prose; the siege of Naissus by the Huns in 441 is even told in close reference to the siege of Plataiai described by Thucydides . This approach, which is intended to demonstrate the classic formation ( paideia ) of the author to the reader , sometimes blocks the view of what is actually happening. Priskos was nevertheless a keen observer and provides a wealth of important information that is largely believed to be reliable. Whether he was a Christian or a pagan is unknown; the lack of Christian references in the fragments can basically also be explained with his classicistic style.

In spite of the extensive loss of his work, Priskos can be regarded as one of the most important historians, at least of late antiquity; the passages from his work that have come down to us from other authors are very important sources for the history of the 5th century. The work was used, among others, by Euagrios Scholastikos and Jordanes (possibly conveyed through the lost Gothic story of Cassiodorus ), and probably also by Prokopios of Caesarea . The historian Malchos may have followed directly on from the work of the Priscus.

Text output

Entry in Clavis Historicorum Antiquitatis Posterioris (CHAP) .

  • Roger C. Blockley (Hrsg./Übers.): The Fragmentary Classicizing Historians of the Later Roman Empire . 2 vol., Liverpool 1981/83 (the current standard edition; Greek text with English translation in volume 2, pp. 222-377. Blockley uses a different numbering of the fragments than that of the older editions by Carl Müller and Ludwig Dindorf )
  • Pia Carolla (Ed.): Priscus Panita. Excerpta et fragmenta . Berlin 2008. (alternative edition to the Blockleys, which partly arranges the fragments differently and counts them as this as well as possible additional fragments; without translation and with Latin introduction and commentary; review by Dariusz Brodka on h-soz-kult )
  • Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum . Collegit, disposuit, notis et prolegomenis illustravit, indicibus instruxit Carolus Müllerus. ( Scriptorum graecorum bibliotheca , volumes 34, 37, 40 and 59) ( digitized version) (new editions 1875–1885, 1928–1938, reprint Frankfurt am Main 1975).

Translations

  • Ernst Doblhofer : Byzantine Diplomats and Eastern Barbarians. Sections of the Priskos and Menander Protector selected from the Excerpta de legationibus by Konstantinos Porphyrogennetos ( Byzantine historians 4) . Graz 1955 (German selection translation of the most important fragments).
  • John Given: The Fragmentary History of Priscus. Attila, the Huns and the Roman Empire, AD 430-476. Evolution Publishing, Merchantville (NJ) 2014 (current English translation of all fragments based on the edition by Pia Carolla).
  • Colin Gordon: The Age of Attila. Fifth-Century Byzantium and the Barbarians . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1960 (contains most fragments in English translation; online version ).

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Suda , keyword Priskos ( Πρίσκος ), Adler number: pi 2301 , Suda-Online .
  2. ^ In summary, Rohrbacher, The Historians of Late Antiquity , p. 88.
  3. ↑ Klaus Meister: Thucydides as a role model for historians. From antiquity to the present. Paderborn 2013, p. 93f.
personal data
SURNAME Prices
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Priscus (Latin)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Roman historian
DATE OF BIRTH around 410
DATE OF DEATH at 474