Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch: Reconstructing a Lost Historian (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780884024934)

Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch undertakes the exciting, if laborious, task of assembling clues and piecing back together a book that has disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works. But it does not merely add another author to the bibliography of antiquity and place him in fourth-century Antioch. It shows how the gods could be reduced to historical characters, the powerful goddess of luck turned into a pitiful victim of virgin sacrifice, and respected emperors defamed as despots--and, in sum, how the writing of history could be exploited for partisan purposes. We see how people in what we consider the distant past thought about their own history, and how they discussed momentous political and social issues across a seemingly insurmountable divide in a period of existential crisis.

Author: Benjamin Garstad
ISBN-10: 0884024938
ISBN-13: 9780884024934
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2022
Pages: 456
Format: Hardcover