The Diplomatic Career and Historical Work of Olympiodorus of Thebes

Abstract

Olympiodorus in the Roman Empire of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. An Egyptian, and a convinced but discreet pagan, he knew Greek, Latin, and evidently Coptic. He studied philosophy, wrote history and poetry, and pursued a public career as a diplomat. His diplomatic service included an embassy to the Huns in 412, at least one more embassy to 'barbarian tribes', and probably a mission in 424-5 from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Western Roman Empire. Although most of Olympiodorus' history is lost today, its fragments remain our chief source for the Western Roman Empire around the time Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410, and supply important evidence for the history of the Huns, the Nubians, and pagan intellectuals in the early fifth century.1 A good deal of guesswork is needed to reconstruct the outlines of Olympiodorus' history and life from incomplete and tantalizing scraps of texts. His history is one of many books in Greek summarized in the Bibliotheca of the ninth-century Byzantine polymath Photius. Photius' summary indirectly shows that Olympiodorus was the almost exclusive source for the last few years of the unfinished New History of Zosimus, compiled around the year 500. 2 Further fragments from Olympiodorus survive in the fifth-century ecclesiastical histories of Sozomen and Philostorgius, and possibly in the sixth-century Wars of Procopius.3 The many summaries of books in the Bibliotheca, an informal compilation that appears to be based largely on Photius' old reading notes, vary in length and quality.4 Photius disliked Olympiodorus' work, which he

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