The Last Athenian Historian: Laonikos Chalkokondyles

Extract

From The Roman to the Turkish conquest of Greece, a period of sixteen centuries, Athens produced only three historians: Dexippos, Praxagoras and Laonikos Chalkokondyles. Of the two first only meagre fragments have come down to us; indeed, of the three treatises of Praxagoras, The Kings of Athens, composed when he was only nineteen, his History of Constantine the Great, written at the age of twenty-two, and his maturer study of Alexander, King of Macedon, only a summary of the second, amounting to two pages, has been preserved by that omnivorous reader, Photios, in his Library. Such juvenile histories cannot, however, have had much greater value than prize essays, conspicuous rather for their correctness of style than for any seasoned judgment. But we may regret that only thirty-five pages of the three works of Dexippos, The Events after the Death of Alexander, The Historical Epitome, which went as far as the time of Claudius II. in 268, and The Scythian Affairs, have survived. For Dexippos was an author of a very different type, a man of affairs as well as of letters, the type of historian of which we have familiar examples in England in Grote and Macaulay, in Clarendon and Bryce. A worse writer, but a better general, than his model, Thucydides, he defeated the Goths when they invaded Athens, on which occasion a Gothic leader urged the sparing of the Athenian libraries, in order that the Athenians might unfit themselves for the arts of war by much study of books! After these two historians, who flourished, Dexippos in the third, and Praxagoras in the fourth centuries, no Athenian took their place till, in the second half of the fifteenth, Laonikos Chalkokondyles composed the extant ten books of his history, one of the most interesting and valuable productions of the mediaeval Greek intellect.