The Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus II

For a variety of reasons Flavianus's lost Annales simply cannot play the role for which it has increasingly often been cast in recent years. But both Bleckmann and Paschoud insist that their argument for an ultimate Latin source for the Byzantine tradition is entirely independent of its identification as Flavian's Annales. Paschoud himself has of late begun to berate his critics for their failure to realize that this identification is no more than a distraction and a detail. The real issue is the necessity of postulating a lost Latin history—the identification of which as Flavian's Annales re...

For a variety of reasons Flavianus's lost Annales simply cannot play the role for which it has increasingly often been cast in recent years. But both Bleckmann and Paschoud insist that their argument for an ultimate Latin source for the Byzantine tradition is entirely independent of its identification as Flavian's Annales. Paschoud himself has of late begun to berate his critics for their failure to realize that this identification is no more than a distraction and a detail. The real issue is the necessity of postulating a lost Latin history—the identification of which as Flavian's Annales remains “seductive and plausible.” This chapter asks whether it is possible that we do in fact need to postulate a lost Latin history of the 4th century.