The Library
1774 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
501–600
6 works
c. 535–536
Greek
Ho Monogenes
Attributed to Justinian I · c. 482 – 565
A short hymn, sung at every Byzantine liturgy since, compressing the whole Chalcedonian settlement into one sentence: the immortal Word became flesh of the Theotokos, was crucified, and trampled down death by death, being one of the Holy Trinity.
c. 550, before his patriarchate
Greek
John Scholasticus · d. 577
The canons of the councils and the fathers rearranged out of chronological order and under fifty subject headings, so that a bishop with a question could look it up instead of reading everything.
c. 540–560
Greek
Oecumenius
The earliest surviving Greek commentary on Revelation, read almost entirely as already fulfilled in the incarnation and the passion rather than as a map of the future. The woman clothed with the sun is Mary; the thousand years are the present age.
c. 545–553
Greek
Procopius of Caesarea · c. 500 – c. 565
Eight books on Justinian's campaigns in Persia, Africa, and Italy, by the secretary who accompanied Belisarius through most of them — including the fullest ancient description of a pandemic, the plague that reached Constantinople in 542.
c. 565
Greek
Chronographia
John Malalas · c. 491 – c. 578
World history from Adam to Justinian in eighteen books, written in the spoken Greek of the streets rather than the literary language, and cheerfully mixing myth, scripture, chariot-racing factions, and what people were wearing.
c. 575–582
Greek
Agathias · c. 530 – c. 582
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.
601–700
2 works
c. 611
Greek
Andrew of Caesarea
Revelation read on three levels at once — literal, moral, and spiritual — with the millennium taken as the present age of the church rather than a coming one, and Gog and Magog as nations still to appear.
c. 628–638
Greek
Theophylact Simocatta
The reign of Maurice and the Balkan and Persian wars, written in prose so mannered that later Byzantines used it as a style exercise. It opens with a dialogue in which Philosophy introduces History, and contains the earliest Western notice of the Turks and of China.
801–900
5 works
c. 800–815
Greek
Breviarium
Nicephorus of Constantinople · c. 758 – 828
A deliberately plain history of the years 602 to 769 — the Persian war, the Arab conquests, the two sieges of Constantinople, and the iconoclast emperors — written without the moralising and the chronological apparatus that fill Theophanes.
c. 858–878
Latin
Anastasius Bibliothecarius · c. 810 – c. 878
The papal librarian, who knew Greek in a Rome where almost nobody did, translating the acts of councils, the Greek lives of the saints, Maximus, and the Dionysian scholia — and writing prefaces explaining to Latin readers what they were about to encounter.
c. 850–886
Greek
Joseph the Hymnographer · c. 816 – 886
A Sicilian who was captured by pirates on the way to Rome, spent years enslaved on Crete, and on returning wrote hymns for very nearly every day of the Byzantine year — several hundred canons, more than any other author.
c. 883; earlier material revised
Greek
Attributed to Photius of Constantinople · c. 815 – c. 893
Church canons and imperial laws arranged together under fourteen headings, so that a bishop could see at once what the church required and what the state enforced, and where the two did not agree.
c. 885–886
Greek
Attributed to Photius, for Basil I
An introduction to a projected revision of the law, whose second and third titles define the emperor and the patriarch as the two parts of one body politic — the emperor guarding what exists, the patriarch alone entitled to interpret the canons and to speak freely to the emperor about the salvation of souls.
901–1000
1 work
c. 950–961
Greek
Anonymous, commissioned by Constantine VII
History from 813 to the writer's own day, commissioned by an emperor about his own dynasty — so the iconoclast emperors are monsters, Michael III a drunk, and Basil I, who murdered his way to the throne, a providential deliverer.
14 of 1774 works