Wiener Studien 127/2014, pp. 101-120, 2014/07/01
Zeitschrift für Klassische Philologie, Patristik und lateinische Tradition
This paper presents a preliminary edition of two pages of a hitherto unknown historical text, recently discovered in four palimpsest folios of the Vienna ms. Hist. gr. 73. The two pages, deciphered with the use of spectral imaging, deal with the preparation for the attack on Greece during an invasion of “Scythians”, which can be identified with the so-called Herulian invasion of 267/8 A. D. into the Roman Empire, and the defensive measures taken against the invaders at Thermopylae. The recovered fragment sheds new light on the course of events and raises interesting prosopographic questions. On the grounds of content and style, there is reason to believe that it is part of the Scythica by the contemporary historian Dexippus of Athens.
