Chronicle of Peter of Alexandria
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Brief Survey of the Times from Adam to the Present,[1] known conventionally as the Chronicle of Peter of Alexandria, is a Byzantine history of the world from Creation to the reign of Leo VI the Wise.[2] It was completed sometime between Leo's accession in 886 and the coronation of his son, Constantine VII, in 908.[3]
The author of the Chronicle is described as "the Orthodox and Christian Peter of Alexandria", but is otherwise unknown.[2][4] Theologically he was a Chalcedonian and an iconophile. He was probably not writing in Alexandria, where there was a small Greek Orthodox community, but had likely relocated to Constantinople as a young man, as his fellow historian George Synkellos had relocated from Palestine.[3]
The Chronicle contains 26 chapters.[2] Peter's main source was the Bible. More than half the Chronicle is based on the Book of Genesis.[5] His use of the Alexandrian era, dating Creation to 5493 BC, may come from Panodoros of Alexandria, but it was already the standard Byzantine calendar in his time.[5] Peter had an interest in chronology, computing the time between the births of the biblical patriarchs and between biblical events.[4] For later history, he includes lists of rulers of Egypt and Rome.[4][5] He is the only known source for the number of times the emperors assumed the consulship between 630 and 886, after which Leo VI abolished the office.[6] He is also the unique Byzantine source for the claim that Prokopia, the wife of Emperor Michael I Rangabe, poisoned the Emperor Staurakios.[7]
The Chronicle is short: 32 pages in the manuscript,[5] 17 in its modern edition.[4] Only a single manuscript is now known, the former Coislinianus 229 now in Moscow. It has been dated on stylistic grounds to the 10th century.[4] Two other manuscripts are thought to be lost, one from the Escorial and another that was in Dresden during World War II.[5] The Dresden manuscript, Sächsische Landesbibliothek cod. Da. 52, was from the 13th century.[7] Zinaida Samodurova published the Chronicle from the Moscow manuscript in 1961 with a short introduction in Russian.[2][4] An English translation from the Greek has been made of the first six chapters.[8]