The University of Michigan Press publishes a re-edition of G.'s classical handbook written in 1960. Most pages are a facsimile to the original edition. Only a part of the introduction, notes and bibliography differ thanks to D.S. Potter's emendations. The critical reception of the first edition was mixed, but the success of the book lay in a strong educational purpose and the fact that it was written before the major works on Late Antiquity.
Indeed, thanks to its fluent style this book still works as an easy introduction for general public and undergraduate students. G.'s approach gave direct access to selected excerpts of Olympiodorus, Priscus, Malchus, Candidus and John of Antioch, set one after the other and intermingled with historical commentaries in order to form a kind of continuous narration. Two major reservations must, however, be pointed out. The six chapters deal specifically with the main political history, regrettably disregarding social and religious history, as already written about by J. Seaver in CW 54 (1961), 28. The sources are only emphasised by an oblique typeface, making it difficult to differentiate them from modern commentaries. This seems to be disastrous from an educational perspective.
At the time G. translated the excerpts, only Dindorf's and Müller's editions were available, but no English translation. Potter was able to make use of recent critical editions and English translations of all the authors thanks to R.C. Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Empire (1981–1983), U. Roberto, Ioannis Antiocheni Fragmenta ex Historia chronica (2005) and S. Mariev, Ioannis Antiocheni fragmenta quae supersunt (2008). Accordingly Potter makes critical remarks about G.'s use of older editions, giving in the notes alternative options by Blockley or Mariev (but not Roberto, clumsily misspelled ‘Roberti’ in the concordance chart, p. 193).
The most prominent feature of this new edition resides in the 47 pages of annotations, with which Potter manages to rejuvenate G.'s text by taking into account most of the recent historiography, not without reproducing some mistakes written by G. For instance, one should not read that the Visigoths were ‘fleeing before the expanding Hunnish power’ (pp. 28–9) after P. Heather (‘The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe’, EHR 110 [1995], 4–41). It is also a pity that Potter only expanded existing notes, without creating new ones, thus remaining within G.'s scientific frame.
Furthermore, while the bibliographical appendix may suit undergraduate students, it does not meet a scientific purpose. After a confusing list of editions of ancient texts (Roberto's edition is missing and Mariev's is wrongly located), Potter provides six pages of up-to-date bibliography, thus responding to criticism made about the first edition by C. Schuller in CPh 56 (1961), 207. The obvious choice of an exclusively English bibliography can justify the absence of major non-English references, like P. Sotiroudis, Untersuchungen zum Geschichtswerk des Johannes von Antiocheia (1989) or F. Paschoud, Eunape, Olympiodore, Zosime (2006). But with a whole chapter on the Ostrogoths, studies like P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (1997), are sharply missing.
