Socrates Scholasticus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Byzantine church historian. For the famous ancient Greek philosopher, see Socrates. For this page, we will sometimes refer to "Socrates Scholasticus" as merely "Socrates".

Socrates Scholasticus was a Greek Christian church historian; born at Constantinople c. 380. The date of his death is unknown; even in ancient times nothing seems to have been known of the life of Socrates except what can be gathered from notices in his Historia Ecclesiastica ("Church History").

His teachers were the grammarian Helladius and Ammonius, who came to Constantinople from Alexandria, where they had been pagan priests. A revolt, accompanied by an attack on the pagan temples, had forced them to flee. This revolt is dated about 390.

That Socrates later profited by the teaching of the sophist Troilus is not proven. No certainty exists as to his precise vocation, though it may be inferred from his work that he was a layman. On the title-page of his history, he is designated as a scholasticus (lawyer).

In later years Socrates traveled and visited, among other places, Paphlagonia and Cyprus (Historia Ecclesiastica 1.12.8, 2.33.30).

[edit] The Historia Ecclesiastica

The history covers the years 305-439, and experts believe it was finished in 439 or soon thereafter, but in any case during the lifetime of Emperor Theodosius II, i.e., before 450. The purpose of the history is to continue the work of Eusebius of Caesarea (1.1). It relates in simple Greek language what the Church experienced from the days of Constantine to the writer's time. Ecclesiastical dissensions occupy the foreground, for when the Church is at peace, there is nothing for the church historian to relate (7.48.7). In the preface to Book 5, Socrates defends dealing with Arianism and with political events in addition to writing about the church.

Socrates seems to have owed the impulse to write his work to a certain Theodorus, who is alluded to in the proemium to the second book as "a holy man of God" and seems therefore to have been a monk or one of the higher clergy. The later historians Sozomen and Theodoret drew upon Socrates' work for their own histories.

The Historia Ecclesiastica was first edited in Greek by Robert Estienne, on the basis of Codex Regius 1443 (Paris, 1544); a translation into Latin by Johannes Christophorson (1612) is important for its various readings. The fundamental edition, however, was produced by Valesius (Paris, 1668), who used the Codex Regius, a Codex Vaticanus, and a Codex Florentinus, and also employed the indirect tradition of Theodorus Lector (Codex Leonis Alladi).