Warren T. Treadgold

A work very much in the style of its predecessor The Early Byzantine Historians, this volume covers Byzantine historians from Trajan the Patrician in the early eight century to Nicetas Choniates in the early thirteenth.

While Treadgold stresses continuities with the earlier period, he also notes various changes, such that historians now being more likely to be high officials, personally acquainted with the emperors they wrote about, more likely to summarize the work of predecessors rather than writing original material, and, perhaps remarkably, more likely to attempt to write in the classical Attic language of Thucydides. Church history disappears as a separate genre, and instead "secular" historians pay more attention to ecclesiastical matters.

Again, there's an awful lot of writers to keep track of, and approaching the book as a reference work rather than reading it from cover to cover might have been a good idea.… (more)

An interest in history carries a risk of becoming interested in historians, which is how I ended up reading this. It covers historians from the Roman East from the end of the 3rd century to the beginning of the 7th, with the greatest attention paid to Eusebius, Ammianus, and Procopius, but lesser lights, often perserved only fragmentarily, are also treated. Treadgold summarizes what's known about the historians' lives and describes their works.

I found the minor historians hard to keep straight - it doesn't help that of forty historians treated, five were called John - and the book is perhaps less suited for reading cover to cover as I did than for dipping into to learn about a particular historian that catches your interest.

Treadgold is refreshingly willing to pass value judgements, both on the historical reliability and literary quality of the works, and on the moral qualities of the historians. His conclusion that historical and literary merit tended to go together is perhaps slightly suspect, but encouraging for someone who might one day get around to reading Ammianus or Procopius, but probably never, say, John Malalas.… (more)

This book should be subtitled "Bitter, party of one". While Treadgold does raise some legitimate issues with the state of higher education like administrative overhead, cost of education, and student debt, many of the philosophical concerns he raises just come across as, well, a bit whiny. Students have to undertake a broad education beyond just their major courses? Of course, as one of the key philosophical underpinnings of a university education is the preparation of informed and engaged citizens. Pluralism is valued on college campuses? It's called a UNIVERSity for a reason. Universities exist to broaden the horizons of society, so lamenting that they are doing just that seems both uninformed and a bit silly. It's clear he's not to pleased with the progress that American higher education has seen in the past several decades--but his raging against the machine is unlikely to have an impact on things that are so core to the industry. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.… (more)