Ecclesiastical History
A church history in six books covering AD 431 to 594, written at Antioch by a lawyer in the service of its patriarch. It is the fullest Greek narrative of the Council of Chalcedon and of the disputes over it during the following 140 years.
Read the text at tertullian.org ↗Book 2, on Marcian and the Council of Chalcedon ↗
Evagrius was born at Epiphania in Syria about 536 and worked at Antioch as an advocate (scholasticus) and adviser to the patriarch Gregory. His history begins with the Nestorian controversy and ends in the twelfth year of the emperor Maurice. For Chalcedon he writes some 140 years after the event, but he had the acts of the council in front of him and gives a long summary of them, and he quotes official documents in full, among them the Henotikon of the emperor Zeno.
He accepts Chalcedon and writes from that side. He is nevertheless careful to report the other: he often cites Zachariah the Rhetor, an opponent of the council, and at one point he argues that the two formulas “in two natures” and “from two natures” imply each other. His accounts of events in Alexandria and Antioch should be read beside the anti-Chalcedonian sources.
Cited in
- August AD 449, firm date
- October AD 451, firm date
- AD 482 to AD 519, firm date
- 27 December AD 537, firm date
- about AD 542 to AD 578, estimated date
- AD 553, firm date