Description

Best known for his longest excerptum about Attila and the Huns, Priscus Panita survives mostly in Excerpta Constantiniana de legationibus. He describes with an impressive amount of details a Byzantine embassy and the secret plot to kill Attila in 448/449 A.D., when Priscus himself was involved in a scary situation. He also investigates Theodosius II's age around other borders, such as Caucasus and Aegypt.After a new collation and full reconsideration of all manuscripts, this critical edition provides a complete demonstration of the stemma codicum and an accurate apparatus, both philological desiderata for long. The text is plain and fluent, a good example of V century A.D. rhetorical prose, with a wide range of loci similes in classic authors and a special skill for variatio. From a historical point of view, some nations from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa find in Priscus a unique source for their roots.