1988/01/01 by Peter Heather · 3 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Classical Antiquity Studies #Byzantine Studies and History #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/1088231
openalex publication_date 1988/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/11
SYNESIUS OF CYRENE'S De regno describes the threat that certain were posing to the safety of the state and recommends ways of countering it.1 There were of course no actual Scythians in Constantinople in ca A.D. 400, and scholars have been clear that this must be a disguised reference to a group of foreigners (barbarians) who were then playing a significant role in the affairs of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was an established literary conceit to equate tribal groups of the Migration Period (ca 375 onwards) with those known from classical historical sources such as Herodotus, so that Goths and Huns often appear as Scythians, Getes, or Massagetae.2 Taken with material from the other work Synesius wrote at this time, the De providentia, the anti-Scythian passages have been used to reconstruct the political manifesto of a party of supposed Hellenic nationalists led by one Aurelianus, of whom Synesius is known to have been a committed supporter. Two main policies have been ascribed to this party: the desire to purge the Eastern Empire's military hierarchies of barbarians, and an eastern nationalism which was content to see the western part of the Empire fall so long as the eastern half survived.3 More specifically, Synesius' attacks