Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with

the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College College London and the LMU in Munich, online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode Past Masters, Byzantine historiography.

Regrets, I've had a few, and not too few to mention.

I might start with that unnecessary second helping at dinner last night

and finish with every article of clothing I wore between the years 1977 and 1989.

Frankly, this podcast is also an inexhaustible source of potential regret. Many of the puns I've made, some of the puns I almost made and

thought better of, okay that hasn't actually happened, but it might at some point. And of course things I didn't

cover but really should have covered, given my without

any gaps slogan.

At the top of this list would be Herodotus and Thucydides, towering intellectuals of ancient

Greece whose approach to writing history could and really should have been part of the story of classical philosophy.

Their work has directly or indirectly influenced all later European historians, including historians of philosophy like me.

I'm not going to fill that gap retrospectively in this episode, but I am going to look at a few of the Byzantine historians who read Herodotus and Thucydides and Thucydides and carried on their legacy.

History writing is among Byzantine's greatest cultural achievements, and perhaps the genre of

medieval Greek literature that is best studied in modern scholarship.

Beginning in late antiquity, a series of intellectuals compiled and summarized the works of earlier historians,

sometimes adding material of their own.

The tradition goes down to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans and beyond, with

Calco Condelyse, a student of the philosopher Pliton, writing a chronicle in the 1480s.

This was not the only time that history and philosophy were found in such close proximity.

Two central figures in the story were telling in this series are, if anything, better known as historians than as contributors to the history of philosophy.

...