Skip to content
Back to the Library

The Church Fathers · c. 575–582

The Histories

Agathias · c. 530 – c. 582

Read elsewhere

What it is

A continuation of Procopius by a working lawyer and poet, covering the last Gothic campaigns and the Persian war, and containing a long digression on Zoroastrian religion and Sasanian royal history drawn from the Persian archives.

Why it lasted

The best Greek account of Persian religion in the period, taken from official Persian records by a translator Agathias commissioned — a rare case of one empire reading another's own documents rather than its rumours.

Scripture it works from

Where to read it

Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.

These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.

Read next

Close to this one