The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus - Coptic ...

INTRODUCTION
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Evagrius was born in about AD 535 in the small city of Epiphania,
located in the valley of the Orontes river in Syria II. This information,
like almost all of our knowledge about Evagrius, has to be deduced
from his own writings. 1 In his description of the Justinianic Plague
(iv.29), he comments that he was composing the chapter in the 58th year
of his life, when the plague had been prevalent for 52 years: counting
inclusively from 542, when Evagrius records that the plague reached
Antioch, this points to 593 as the year of composition, 2 and 535/6 as the
probable date of birth. Thus he was approximately the same age as the
future emperor Tiberius, and about 5 years older than the emperor
Maurice.
The family must have been moderately well-o¡, at the least, since
Evagrius received a prolonged and expensive education. He was already
attending an elementary teacher in 540, 3 when the invasion of Khusro I
devastated parts of his native province (iv.26). His parents were among
the crowds that thronged to the nearby city of Apamea, 50 kilometres to
the north, where the local bishop Thomas displayed the city’s relic of
the True Cross to reassure the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding
area in their hour of peril. The young Evagrius accompanied his
parents, but how much he remembered of his personal experience is
uncertain, since there were aids to his memory: Procopius also recorded
the event, and a picture survived in the church at Apamea down to 573. 4
1 The information is collected in PLRE III. 452^3.
2 This accords well with the date at which Evagrius terminated his history, the 12th year
of the emperor Maurice, i.e. 593/4 (vi.24), when he would have been in his 59th year.
3 Allen, Evagrius 1, speculates that Evagrius may use the phrase ‘attending an elementary
teacher’ as a loose synonym for being a child, but this is partly because she is inclined to
put his birth as late as 536/7. The accepted age for the start of schooling in the ancient world
is seven (H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb, New York,
1964, 358^9), so that, if he was born in 535/6, Evagrius would only have been ¢ve in 540,
but the evidence cited for the school-age is Quintilian and Juvenal and this western evidence
may not re£ect the practice in the Levant half a millennium later.
4 Wars ii.11.16^20; Evagrius iv.26.