The Nicene Age · AD 313–400

Socrates Scholasticus

b. c. AD 380 Constantinople; d. after 439 (held at the timeline’s ceiling) · Layman · Advocate · Church historian · Constantinople

The Nicene Age

Who Socrates Scholasticus was

A layman of Constantinople who wrote the continuation of Eusebius that the archive quotes forty-four times — seven books covering 305 to 439 — and who could not, until now, be dated from the archive’s own data. Almost everything known about him comes from his own prefaces: his teachers were the grammarians Helladius and Ammonius, former pagan priests who had fled Alexandria after a riot; he travelled to Paphlagonia and Cyprus; and he set out to continue Eusebius because Eusebius had cared more for the emperor than for the truth. He is unusually fair to the Novatianists, which has led some scholars to place him inside that communion — recorded as a scholarly view, not a fact. Two things are genuinely disputed: his dates (birth c. 380 or 380–390; death after 439, variously to c. 450) and whether ‘Scholasticus’ rightly belongs to him at all, since Photius omits the title and there is no evidence he practised law. Held at the archive’s AD 400 ceiling, as Augustine, Jerome and Chrysostom are.

Common questions

When did Socrates Scholasticus live?

Socrates Scholasticus is dated b. c. AD 380 Constantinople; d. after 439 (held at the timeline’s ceiling) in the archive, which places Socrates Scholasticus in the Nicene Age (AD 313–400). The dating is traditional and approximate; the archive marks it as uncertain rather than fixing a year the sources do not give.

What did Socrates Scholasticus write?

Socrates Scholasticus has 1 catalogued writing in the archive: Ecclesiastical History, in seven books.

Which early sources mention Socrates Scholasticus?

Socrates Scholasticus is named in 2 primary-source passages catalogued here, drawn from Cassiodorus and Epiphanius Scholasticus and Photius of Constantinople. Every passage is quoted from a named public-domain translation, earliest first.

Where was Socrates Scholasticus from?

The archive associates Socrates Scholasticus with Constantinople.

Writings (1)

Ecclesiastical History, in seven books

c. AD 439–443, covering 305–439
When the Church is at peace, there is nothing for the church historian to relate.

Earliest witness · Byzantine minuscule tradition (11th c. onward)

Read the interlinear source text →

Primary-source mentions (2)

Every passage below is quoted from a named public-domain translation, earliest first.

Historia Tripartita (Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret compiled into one)

c. AD 550
[The Latin West read Socrates for a thousand years through this compilation, made at Vivarium in the sixth century.]
Cassiodorus and Epiphanius Scholasticus · Historia Tripartita

The Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartita, a single Latin narrative woven c. AD 550 by Cassiodorus and Epiphanius Scholasticus out of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret — the form in which the three Greek historians were read in the medieval West. Edited by Walter Jacob and Rudolf Hanslik, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 71 (1952).

Bibliotheca, codex 28 (Photius reads the Ecclesiastical History)

c. AD 855
[Photius summarises the seven books — notably WITHOUT the cognomen ‘Scholasticus’, which is the ground of the modern doubt about it.]
Photius of Constantinople · Bibliotheca cod. 28 · source text

Connected in the archive

People

Named alongside Socrates Scholasticus in the sources

These figures are placed with Socrates Scholasticus by the record — in a council roll, a martyr-act, a letter or a history — without Socrates Scholasticus naming them in return.

Events in this lifetime

Place

Places served

The one place the sources put Socrates Scholasticus.

  1. 1Constantinople

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