The Description of Marcian, the Emperor of the Council of Chalcedon, in Evagrius Scholasticus’s Ecclesiastical History as an Example of the Influence of Neoplatonic Thought Structures on Christian Literature

Abstract

Christianity in the first centuries made great use of various elements of classical culture, especially Neoplatonism. One interesting example of this is the Ecclesiastical History by Evagrius Scholasticus, a late sixth-century author working in Antioch. In the case of Evagrius’s description of Emperor Marcian (†457), the author uses not only the letters of the Neoplatonizing bishop Synesius of Cyrene, but also expressions from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana written by Flavius Philostratus, which was used in the third and fourth centuries in anti-Christian propaganda. The author of the article expands on the above theme to show that Evagrius was familiar not only with classical works but also with pagan polemical works against Christianity. Evagrius himself was a Christian and a close collaborator of the bishop of Antioch, but it is likely that in the upper strata of Antioch, one could still find pagans who were tolerated also by the church authorities.