Agathias Scholasticus (; 582

Agathias mentions being present in Alexandria as a law student at the time when an earthquake destroyed Berytus (Beirut). the students were transferred to Sidon. The dating of the event to 551: as a law student, Agathias could be in his early twenties, which would place his birth to . He is known to have served as pater civitatis ("Father of the City", effectively a magistrate) of Smyrna. He is credited with constructing public latrines for the city. While Agathias mentions these buildings, he fails to mention his own role in constructing them.

Myrina is known to have erected statues to honor Agathias, his father Memnonius, and Agathias' unnamed brother. He seems to have been known to his contemporaries more as an advocatus and a poet. There are few mentions of Agathias as a historian.

The work survives, but seems incomplete. Passages of his history indicate that Agathias had planned to cover both the final years of Justin II and the fall of the Huns but the work in its known form includes neither. Menander Protector implies that Agathias died before having a chance to complete his history. The latest event mentioned in the Histories is the death of the Persian king Khosrau I (); which indicates that Agathias was still alive in the reign of Tiberius II Constantine (). The emperor Maurice () is never mentioned, suggesting that Agathias was dead by 582. The dispersed neo-Platonists, with as much of their library as could be transported, found temporary refuge in the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, and afterwards— under treaty guarantees of security that form a document in the history of freedom of thought— at Edessa, which just a century later became one of the places where Muslim thinkers encountered ancient Greek culture and took an interest in its science and medicine.

Agathias's Histories are also a source of information about pre-Islamic Iran, providing—in summary form—"our earliest substantial evidence for the Khvadhaynamagh tradition", that later formed the basis of Ferdowsi's Shahname and provided much of the Iranian material for al-Tabari's History.

thumb|300px|A game of [[tabula (game)|τάβλι (tabula) played by Zeno in 480 and recorded by Agathias in circa 530 because of a very unlucky dice result for Zeno. The game is nearly identical to backgammon.]]

Agathias recorded the earliest description of the rules of backgammon, which he calls τάβλη (tabula) as it is still called in Greece, in a story relating an unlucky game played by the emperor Zeno. Zeno had a stack of seven checkers, three stacks of two checkers and two blots, checkers that stand alone on a point and are therefore in danger of being put outside the board by an incoming opponent checker. Zeno threw the three dice with which the game was played and obtained 2, 5 and 6. The white and black checkers were so distributed on the points that the only way to use all of the three results, as required by the game rules, was to break the three stacks of two checkers into blots, thus exposing them to capture and ruining the game for Zeno.

Editions and translations of the Histories

  • Bonaventura Vulcanius (1594)
  • Barthold G. Niebuhr, in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn, 1828)
  • Jean P. Migne, in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 88 (Paris, 1860), col. 1248–1608 (based on Niebuhr's edition)
  • Karl Wilhelm Dindorf, in Historici Graeci Minores, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1871), pp. 132–453.
  • R. Keydell, Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libri quinque in Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, vol. 2, Series Berolinensis, Walter de Gruyter, 1967
  • S. Costanza, Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libri quinque (Universita degli Studi, Messina, 1969)
  • J. D. Frendo, Agathias: The Histories in Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae (English translation with introduction and short notes), vol. 2A, Series Berolinensis, Walter de Gruyter, 1975
  • P. Maraval, Agathias, Histoires, Guerres et malheurs du temps sous Justinien (French), Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2007,
  • A. Alexakis, Ἀγαθίου Σχολαστικοῦ, Ἱστορίαι (in Greek) Athens, Kanakis Editions, 2008,

References

Further reading

  • A. Alexakis, "Two verses of Ovid liberally translated by Agathias of Myrina (Metamorphoses 8.877-878 and Historiae 2.3.7)", in Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101.2 (2008), pp. 609–616.
  • A. Cameron, 'Agathias on the Sasanians', in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 23 (1969) pp 67–183.
  • A. Cameron, Agathias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). .
  • A. Kaldellis, 'Things are not what they are: Agathias Mythistoricus and the last laugh of Classical', in Classical Quarterly, 53 (2003) pp 295–300.
  • A. Kaldellis, 'The Historical and Religious Views of Agathias: A Reinterpretation', in ', 69 (1999) pp 206–252.
  • A. Kaldellis, 'Agathias on history and poetry', in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 38 (1997), pp 295–306
  • W. S. Teuffel, 'Agathias von Myrine', in Philologus (1846)
  • C. Krumbacher, ' (2nd ed. 1897)
  • S. Smith, Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture: Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  • Poems by Agathias English translations
  • Agathias on the Persians: excerpts from History (English)
  • Gerald Bechtle, Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Rainer Thiel, Simplikios und das Ende der neuplatonischen Schule in Athen, Stuttgart, 1999 (in English).
  • Encyclopedia of Past Events