THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYa guide to Christian learning written at his Italian monastery of Vivarium in
Caiabria. The history of the Goths was written in Latin in Constantinople by
Jordanes, and has been the subject of important recent scholarship, though
recent years have seen a corrective to the previously strong influence of Jorda-
nes’s account on modern views about the Goths (Chapter 2).^16 A century ear-
lier Sidonius Apollinaris, as bishop at Clermont-Ferrand in Gaul, had deplored
barbarian rusticity and continued to compose verses in classical style. A host
of Gallic ecclesiastics in the fifth century, especially those connected with the
important monastic centre of Lérins, wrote extensive letters as well as theo-
logical works, and this was also the age of the monastic rules of John Cassian
and St Benedict. At the end of the sixth century, the voluminous writings
of Pope Gregory the Great, the lively History of the Franks and hagiographi-
cal works by Gregory of Tours, another bishop of Roman senatorial extrac-
tion, and the poems of Venantius Fortunatus, combine with other works to
provide a rich documentation for the west in that period. Two other great
figures in the intellectual and theological history of the early medieval west
were Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) and Bede (672/3–735), author of the
history of the English church. In 668 Theodore of Tarsus (602–690), an
easterner who had studied in Constantinople, became Archbishop of Can-
terbury, and established a school and scriptorium there for the copying of
manuscripts.
The Greek east was even more productive. Secular history continued to
be written in the classical manner, and although the works of several fifth-
and sixth-century writers survive only in fragments, we have all eight books
of the History of the Wars in which Procopius of Caesarea recorded Justini-
an’s wars of ‘reconquest’. Procopius is undoubtedly a major historian; in
addition, his Buildings, a panegyrical account of the building activities of
Justinian, provides an important checklist for archaeologists, while his scab-
rous Secret History, immortalized by Gibbon’s description of it, has provided
material for nearly a score of novels about the variety artiste who became
Justinian’s wife, the pious Empress Theodora (Chapter 5). With its greater
cultural continuity, the east was better able than the west to maintain a tradi-
tion of history-writing in the old style, and it continued until Theophylact
Simocatta wrote under the Emperor Heraclius about the Emperor Maurice
(AD 582–602).^17 Other writers, however, composed ecclesiastical history,
including in the fifth century Socrates and Sozomen, both of whom continued
Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History in Constantinople in the 440s, the Syrian Theo-
doret, bishop of Cyrrhus, and the Arian Philostorgius, whose work is only
partially preserved. In the late sixth century the tradition was continued,
again in Constantinople, by the Chalcedonian Evagrius Scholasticus, writing
in Greek, and the Miaphysite John, bishop of Ephesus, writing in Syriac.^18 The
Christian world-chronicle characteristic of the Byzantine period also begins
now, with the sixth-century chronicle of the Antiochene John Malalas, ending
in the year 563, and there are very many saints’ lives in Greek and Latin, and
sometimes in other languages such as Syriac, Georgian, Armenian or