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P. Herennius Dexippus: The Greek World and the Third-Century Invasions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Fergus Millar
Fergus Millar
Affiliation:
The Queen's College, Oxford, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
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Extract

The legend of the Scythians and the books of Athens, with Petrus Patricius' comments on it, raises precisely the most crucial question about the culture and society of later Antiquity: what was the relationship between the all-pervasive literary culture of the time, with its obsessive and apparently sterile fascination with the classical past, and men's conduct in the world ? The question cannot of course be answered. If we wished to stress the positive and vital aspects of Imperial Greek culture, we could partly avoid answering it by concentrating on a few figures of real intellectual stature in the second to early fourth centuries, and thereby pointing to a number of fields in which the Greek Renaissance saw significant, sometimes revolutionary, progress. Ptolemy, Galen, Diophantus, Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry and Eusebius all in their different ways marked an epoch in the intellectual history of Europe. Even a man of much lesser originality, Cassius Dio, provided the Byzantine world with its definitive account of the history of Rome. But we can also try, if not to answer the question properly, at least to raise some themes directly relevant to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 59 , November 1969 , pp. 12 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Fergus Millar 1969. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

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78 Eunap., Vit. Soph. 487.

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126 Zos. I, 39, 1.

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130 Ibid. p. 717, Bonn.

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