Suda τ 134: Ταρσοὶ καλάμων. οἱ δὲ Λαζοὶ βόθρους ὀρύξαντες καὶ δόρατα τοῖς βόθροις ἐγκαταπήξαντες ταρσοῖς καλάμων καὶ ὕλῃ μὴ βεβαίαν ἐχούσῃ βάσιν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸ ἐπιφερόμενον ἄχθος ὀλισθαινούσῃ, τὰ στόματα τῶν ὀρυγμάτων ἐκάλυψαν· καὶ χοῦν ἐπιβαλόντες τά τε παρ’ ἑκάτερα χωρία γεωργήσαντες καὶ πυροὺς σπείραντες ἐτροπώσαντο τοὺς Ῥωμαίους. Ταρσοὶ καλάμων παρ’ Ἡροδότῳ ἡ τρασιά (πρασιά mss), οὗ ἐξήραινον τὴν πλίνθον.Footnote 1
Frames of reeds. ‘The Lazi, having dug pits and securely fixed spears within them, concealed the openings of the holes with frames of reeds and material that has no firm foundation but would give way to any load placed upon it; and having thrown earth on top and tilled the ground to either side and sewn wheat, they put the Romans to flight.’ Frames of reeds in Herodotus are the drying-rack, where they used to dry bricks.
This entry in the Suda comprises three elements. First, the lemma Ταρσοὶ καλάμων, compared with the usual format of the lexicon, is atypical (though not unparalleled) both in being a two-word phrase and in lacking an explanatory gloss. The word ταρσός most frequently denotes various artefacts with a flat and/or interwoven structure, such as screens, baskets and mats, and by extension is used figuratively of surfaces that resemble wickerwork or basketry.Footnote 2 The phrase ταρσοὶ καλάμων or καλάμου is otherwise attested, with somewhat different meanings, in only three ancient authors: Herodotus, Thucydides and Aeneas Tacticus.Footnote 3 Second, an anonymous extract from an unidentified historical work supplies a sample usage of the headword phrase, in this instance a military ruse in which wicker screens are instrumental in concealing pits dug by the Lazi prior to an engagement with the Romans. The historical setting, the style and language of the extract, along with the known sources and methodology of the compiler(s) of the Suda, indicate that the quotation belongs to a classicizing historian of Late Antiquity. These issues will be examined below. Third, as testimony to an alternative meaning of ταρσοὶ καλάμων, the compiler adduces a gloss on Herodotus’ Histories, which he drew from an earlier glossary of Herodotean usages.Footnote 4 Here two problems arise. The definition of a drying-rack for bricks indicates that the original glossarist (and in turn the Suda compiler) did not in fact understand Herodotus’ technical description.Footnote 5 In any case, the reading πρασιά, transmitted in all codices of the Suda, and accepted by Adler, should undoubtedly read τρασιά.Footnote 6
The focus of interest will be the second component of Suda τ 134. This excerpt from a late antique classicizing historian has had a chequered and oddly inconsistent history. The first to comment on its possible provenance was Gottfried Bernhardy, in his annotations to Thomas Gaisford's edition of the Suda in 1853, where he expressed the view that the excerpt derives from the historical work of Priscus of Panion. Bernhardy offered no argumentation, though subsequent scholarship on the Suda has shown that his intuition is not to be taken lightly.Footnote 7 This proposal had no immediate impact. It appeared too late for consideration in Karl Müller's influential edition of Priscus in the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (1851).Footnote 8 However, on Bernhardy's authority, Ludwig Dindorf admitted the excerpt into his collection of fragmentary Greek historians for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (1870), in which it is one of three excerpts from the Suda assigned to Priscus by ‘incerta coniectura’.Footnote 9 Subsequently, Ada Adler noted Bernhardy's ascription of the excerpt to Priscus in the apparatus to her magisterial edition of the Suda (1935).Footnote 10 Adler neither endorsed nor denied the attribution, though major advances in understanding the compositional history of the Suda since Bernhardy's day now permitted confidence that, whoever its author might be, this fragment had found its way into the Suda via the Excerpta Constantiniana (see below). When Fritz Bornmann prepared a new edition of Priscus (1979), he included Suda τ 134 among the ‘fragmenta dubia’ (n° 67*), citing Bernhardy (via Adler) but not Dindorf.Footnote 11 Despite its current inclusion in the canon of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Bornmann's edition never enjoyed popularity and is otherwise rarely cited. Around the same time, but independently, Barry Baldwin (1980) was tempted to agree with Bernhardy in assigning the fragment to Priscus on the grounds of language, style and content, but conceded that these criteria were not decisive, at least in isolation.Footnote 12
Up to as recently as 1980, therefore, the excerpt in Suda τ 134 had consistently featured in scholarship on Priscus, even if no study had assessed all aspects of the attribution. Thereafter, this fragment suffered a kind of editorial damnatio memoriae. Bornmann's edition was almost immediately overtaken, at least in anglophone scholarship, by Roger Blockley's more accessible presentation of the texts (a compilation of older editions) and English translations of fourth- and fifth-century fragmentary historians (1981–3). Suda τ 134 does not occur among the Priscan fragments assembled by Blockley, nor is it listed in his concordance of previous editions. Blockley briefly notes that he has excluded Suda τ 134, citing without further comment an earlier study by Edward Thompson.Footnote 13 On further inspection, one finds that Thompson (1947) had brusquely rejected the three Suda entries appended to Dindorf's edition, but without offering a word of explanation or argument.Footnote 14 The excerpt is also omitted from the most recent edition of Priscus by Pia Carolla (2008), which is in other respects the most comprehensive and learned. Suda τ 134 is nowhere mentioned and does not even find a place in Carolla's long conspectus of ‘fragmenta dubia’, despite her familiarity with Bornmann's contribution to Priscan scholarship. In a brief review of previous editions, Carolla implies that she largely followed Blockley's judgement on this matter.Footnote 15 Accordingly, since the historical excerpt in Suda τ 134 has been included in some editions of Priscus (Dindorf, Bornmann) and excluded or passed over in silence by others (Blockley, Carolla), while the merits of its ascription to Priscus have never been scrutinized, the issue justifies investigation. Furthermore, this excerpt appears to have gone unnoticed in historical scholarship, even in specialist studies of Roman-Lazi relations or warfare in Late Antiquity, and the opportunity to signal its existence to historians, regardless of its possible or likely provenance, provides an additional justification for this enquiry.Footnote 16
The excerpt describes how a Roman military intervention in Lazica suffered defeat on account of a stratagem employed by the Lazi. The author explains that the Lazi dug pits (βόθροι) and embedded spears within them (δόρατα … ἐγκαταπήξαντες), presumably projecting from their floors and/or walls, and then concealed the openings of the pits with ‘frames of reeds’ (ταρσοῖς καλάμων) and other unspecified flimsy material (ὕλῃ), which they covered over with soil (χοῦν ἐπιβαλόντες). Beyond the lexical curiosity of ταρσοὶ καλάμων, the vocabulary and phraseology are generic and furnish neither technical information nor criteria diagnostic of authorship. The preserved text does not elaborate on the size or number of the pits, but the expedient of ‘tilling the ground to either side and sewing wheat’ (τά τε παρ’ ἑκάτερα χωρία γεωργήσαντες καὶ πυροὺς σπείραντες) in order to erase all trace of their existence implies both a large-scale enterprise and sufficient forewarning of the route and timing of the Roman approach. If the success of this ruse depended on crop growth sufficient to conceal the terrain, then an obstacle or defensive barrier prepared at least six to eight weeks in advance should be envisaged; if, however, the objective was merely to give a uniform impression of land under cultivation, then a couple of weeks might have sufficed. The author's specification of ‘wheat’ (πυρός), if an authentic detail, rather than a faster-growing cereal such as millet, may suggest that rate of maturity was not crucial, but the numerous variable and imponderable factors—agrarian, environmental and military—caution against over-reading the text.
The excerpt does not clarify how exactly these pits enable the Lazi to ‘put the Romans to flight’ (ἐτροπώσαντο τοὺς Ῥωμαίους).Footnote 17 Fifth- and sixth-century historical narratives and military treatises provide sporadic reports of similar traps and ambushes involving concealed pits and trenches prepared in advance on the battlefield, primarily as a means of disrupting or halting the attacks of opposing cavalry.Footnote 18 The most famous episode is the defeat and death of the Sasanian shah Pērōz at a battle against the Ephthalites in Gurgān in 484, as variously recorded in East Roman and oriental sources, which broadly concur that the Ephthalites destroyed the Sasanian cavalry by luring them into a giant concealed trench or, in one version, pits or ditches. The most detailed and well-known account in Greek is that of Procopius, who relates that the Ephthalite king selected a plain which the invading Sasanian army would have to cross and there ‘made a deep trench of sufficient breadth … and by placing reeds over the trench and heaping earth upon the reeds, he thereby concealed it on the surface’.Footnote 19 In the following century, Gregory of Tours reports that, prior to a major battle near the River Unstrut in 531, the Thuringi sought to impede the Frankish cavalry: ‘in the field where battle was to be joined they dug ditches, the openings of which they covered over with closely-packed turf and made the field appear level.’Footnote 20 Maurice's Strategicon, completed in the 590s, prescribes several stratagems for engineering the terrain of the battlefield in advance of an all-cavalry engagement. Some of these broadly resemble the contrivance outlined in the excerpt in form, implementation and/or purpose. Maurice observes that some peoples in the past have dug a large ditch and ‘covered this with thin timber, grass and soil, so that the appearance of the ditch was as one and the same with the adjacent ground and in no way differed from it, nor indeed did they leave the excavated soil lying beside it, lest anything should seem amiss’; he cites the fate of Pērōz as an exemplum and this appears to be his primary inspiration.Footnote 21 A closer analogy can be drawn with Maurice's subsequent specifications for ‘round pits called “horse-breakers” (ἱπποκλάσται) dug here and there, which have a diameter of around one foot and a depth of two or three feet, and with sharp stakes inserted inside them. These are dug in alternate rows and not in straight lines, positioned about three feet apart from one another on all four sides … for the full length of the battle line’.Footnote 22 Maurice also recommends the construction of such ‘small pits fitted with pointed stakes’ as part of the defences of encampments.Footnote 23 The closest ancient parallel to Maurice's ‘horse-breakers’ is the so-called lilia, which Caesar employed in his perimeter defences during the siege of Alesia in 52 b.c.—these comprised eight rows of pits, which were likewise three feet deep, fitted with a stake and placed obliquely in a quincunx pattern, three feet apart. The only significant difference appears to be that lilia were also ‘covered with osiers and brushwood to conceal the trap’.Footnote 24 Pits of similar design and serial alignment have been identified at several sites on the northern frontiers of Roman Britain.Footnote 25 In general, these spiked pits resemble trous de loup or ‘wolf holes’ variously used as anti-cavalry devices, defensive obstacles or mantraps in European warfare from the Middle Ages to the mid nineteenth century, and in the Far East into the late twentieth century. The military context of the concealed spiked pits prepared by the Lazi—whether as traps on a battlefield or defences of a stronghold—is not known, though the implied setting of tillable cropland arguably better suits the former scenario.Footnote 26 In any case, while this survey makes no claim to comprehensiveness, the configuration and objective of the Lazian pits seem consistent with a range of tactical expedients documented in different martial cultures of Late Antiquity, which in turn have distant antecedents in the classical period.
The events described in the excerpt in Suda τ 134 are not otherwise recorded, but the circumstances allow confidence with regard to the period and context. The Lazi are infrequently attested from the first century a.d. as one of the constituent tribes of the Colchians. Originally inhabiting the south-western coastal strip of Colchis, by the fifth century the Lazi had subsumed or subjugated the neighbouring peoples and emerge as the dominant kingdom of the western Transcaucasus. The creation of Lazian hegemony appears to date back to the fourth or possibly late third century, but its development and chronology cannot be reconstructed in detail.Footnote 27 In Roman sources from the fifth century onwards, the terms Lazi/Λαζοί and Lazica/Λαζική supersede Colchi/Κόλχοι and Colchis/Κολχίς as the contemporary ethnic and political-geographic designations, though the older terminology persists as archaizing synonyms in classicizing literature. In the wider context of Roman-Sasanian rivalry for control of the Black Sea coast throughout the later fifth and sixth centuries, Roman military and diplomatic initiatives centred upon Lazica as their main regional client and a strategic bridgehead, even if the Lazi periodically sought short-term advantage by shifting allegiance from the Roman to the Persian sphere.Footnote 28 During the five centuries between the first impact of Roman imperialism in 65 b.c. and the mid fifth century a.d., direct Roman military presence in Colchis/Lazica was restricted to coastal garrisons, seemingly abandoned c. 258 a.d. and only selectively reoccupied from the Tetrarchic period.Footnote 29 Thereafter the heightened threat posed by Sasanian territorial ambitions occasionally required Roman forces to penetrate the interior, though such operations were infrequent and their opponents were typically Persian expeditionary armies. Hostilities between the Romans and the Lazi themselves occurred in only two brief periods: in the mid 450s and 541-8/9 (see below). We are therefore searching for a fragmentary classicizing historian of the fifth or sixth century, with an interest in events in western Transcaucasia.
Scholarship on the sources and compositional history of the Suda provides a basis for identifying anonymous citations or at least permits a narrowing of the field.Footnote 30 It has long been recognized that the compiler of the Suda (c. 1000) derived its numerous quotations from historical authors not by first-hand acquaintance with their original works but rather though intermediary compilations. In particular, Carl de Boor's extensive Quellenforschungen of the Suda demonstrated that the most common category of historical excerpt, clearly distinct in form and character from historical data transmitted via earlier lexica, scholia or biographical dictionaries, was drawn from the Excerpta Constantiniana, the 53 thematic volumes of historical extracts recently compiled at the direction of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913–59), with the overwhelming majority of texts quoted anonymously. Adler endorsed and expanded de Boor's analysis, and subsequent studies of the textual traditions of individual authors have provided additional corroboration and refinements. There is no reason to suspect that Suda τ 134 is the result of different source materials, selective criteria and/or methodologies.Footnote 31 The compiler of the Suda made use of only a small number of volumes of the Excerpta. Of those fully or partly preserved, he drew material from De uirtutibus et uitiis and De legationibus, but not De insidiis or De sententiis. In addition, he had at his disposal volumes of the Excerpta that have not survived but are known through cross-references in the extant volumes. The Suda is therefore an indirect and selective witness to the contents of these lost volumes.Footnote 32 Among these de Boor identified material likely to have derived from the second half of De uirtutibus, as well as the Περὶ στρατηγημάτων, Περὶ ἐκκλησιαστικῶν and Περὶ ἀνδραγαθημάτων, and possibly one other volume concerned with warfare.Footnote 33 As the quotation in Suda τ 134 is not found in the extant volumes of the Excerpta, it must come from a historical work that was excerpted in one of the lost volumes.Footnote 34 The subject matter of a military ruse points to the Περὶ στρατηγημάτων, even if any attempt to reconstruct the scope and content of this volume is necessarily conjectural.Footnote 35
The canon of authors selected for excerption in the Excerpta Constantiniana has been constructed from the indices auctorum affixed to extant volumes (De legationibus I, De uirtutibus) or, where the prologue is missing, identified from their contents (De legationibus II, De insidiis, De sententiis) or, for lost volumes, reconstructed from entries in the derivative Suda.Footnote 36 For present purposes it is sufficient to observe that, for the fourth to sixth centuries, the excerptors of Constantine VII utilized a sequence of classicizing histories that provided a continuous narrative of these three centuries. If we eliminate from this selection those authors whose works are fully extant (Procopius, Agathias, Theophylact Simocatta) and thus demonstrably not the source of the excerpt in Suda τ 134, half a dozen fragmentary candidates remain: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus, Candidus, Malchus and Menander Protector. To this list one could add the Chronicle of John of Antioch, though for fourth- and fifth-century events John's work is a derivative compilation, and thus merely represents an indirect (and now fragmentary) tradition to authors previously listed.Footnote 37
The possibilities are further reduced when we consider which of these authors wrote or might have written about warfare in Lazica. The results are in fact the same whether the inquiry is limited to this selection or encompasses all extant late antique classicizing historiography. In the fifth century, only Priscus meets this criterion. In the sixth century, Procopius and Agathias devote much space to military and diplomatic events in this region, but their works, preserved in full, of course offer no parallel.Footnote 38 The singularity of Priscus in this respect must be stressed. No other classicizing historian of the fifth century is known to have so much as mentioned the Lazi or Lazica, or shown the slightest interest in or knowledge of events on this geographical and cultural periphery.Footnote 39 This conclusion is based not merely on their extant fragments, an inevitably incomplete and unreliable guide, but also on the detailed summaries of their works in Photius’ Bibliotheca and in other indirect witnesses.Footnote 40 Furthermore, even if we extend the search to include other genres of Greek historical writing in Late Antiquity (chronicles, church history, hagiography), instances of the terms of Λαζοί and Λαζική, and references to this region in general, are strikingly rare.Footnote 41 In contrast, a survey of the remnants of Priscus’ work, which is generally agreed to have covered the period c. 433/4 to c. 474, suggests that he treated Roman-Lazi relations at length and in some detail, and had at his disposal good sources of information.Footnote 42 Four fragments concern military and diplomatic events relating to the Lazi in the 450s and 460s, for the most part unrecorded in any other source. In particular, Priscus is the unique witness to a Roman invasion of Lazica during a Roman-Lazi war in the reign of Marcian (see below).Footnote 43 Furthermore, Priscus states that he was himself involved in negotiations following this conflict, apparently in an official capacity, a role consistent with his extensive diplomatic experience. In this instance, he specifies that the Roman response to the Lazian envoys was formulated by Euphemius, magister officiorum, ‘who engaged Priscus the writer as a partner in the responsibilities of his office’ (ὃς καὶ Πρίσκον τὸν συγγραφέα τῶν τῆς ἀρχῆς φροντίδων ἐδέξατο κοινωνόν). Priscus probably served as Euphemius’ assessor.Footnote 44 His participation and autopsy therefore fulfilled the ideal qualifications for a classicizing historian, and also brought him into contact with documentation (treaties, official correspondence, memoranda) and well-placed informants.Footnote 45
Moving from historiography to history, the evidence again points to Priscus. The excerpt in Suda τ 134 reports an occasion on which the Lazi secretly devised concealed obstacles on a battlefield of their choice, apparently some time in advance of a Roman attack, and thereby defeated the Romans and forced them to flee. The historical record supplies only one plausible context for the events described. As previously observed, from Pompey's incursion into the Caucasus in 65 b.c. until the end of antiquity there are only two known episodes of hostility between the Roman Empire and the Lazi.Footnote 46 First, around the early to mid 450s a war broke out, in which Roman forces invaded Lazica and fought the Lazi, it seems unsuccessfully or inconclusively, whereupon the Romans withdrew and resorted to diplomatic means to compel the Lazi to submit (see below). Second, in 541 the Lazi grew disaffected with Roman suzerainty and invited the Persians to invade Lazica, though the more oppressive overlordship of the shah subsequently prompted the Lazi to revert to their former allegiance to the emperor in 548/9.Footnote 47 The evidence is overwhelmingly against locating our fragment within this second period of Roman-Lazian estrangement. The entire course of the protracted Lazic War (541–62), an extension of Roman-Sasanian conflict, is reported in great detail by Procopius and Agathias, whose historical narratives contain no trace of the incident described in Suda τ 134. Moreover, a Roman defeat at the hands of the Lazi is not consistent with the conduct or nature of this mid-sixth-century conflict. During the period in which the Lazi sided with the Persians against the Romans, military operations in Lazica occupied barely a few weeks of 541, during which a Persian expeditionary army expelled the Roman garrison from Petra. Whether the Lazi themselves participated in this siege is not stated but, in any case, there is no record of Roman forces taking the field or of their defeat in an engagement, or indeed of any combat between Romans and Lazi.Footnote 48
In contrast, the military, historical and historiographic circumstances of the Roman-Lazi war in the 450s easily accommodate our excerpt. This war and related events are usually assigned to c. 456, but the original basis of this chronology is no longer valid and the conflict can be dated no more precisely than the reign of Marcian (450-7).Footnote 49 The causes of the war and the Roman objectives remain unclear. In subsequent peace negotiations the Romans objected to the joint kingship of Lazica shared by Gobazes I and his son. The nature of the dispute is obscure, but it seems that the Romans did not trust Gobazes and perhaps feared his defection to the Persians. Whatever the provocation, the threat to Roman interests was deemed sufficiently serious to prompt the first military intervention in Lazica in five hundred years.Footnote 50 Our knowledge of this war and its aftermath depends entirely on four fragments from Priscus’ history. It is possible that, in consequence, the Priscus-derived portion of John of Antioch's Chronicle also reported this conflict, but whether or not John chose to include this episode cannot be determined, as the section of John's work relating to eastern events under Marcian has in turn not survived.Footnote 51 All four of the Priscan fragments are preserved as excerpts in the Excerpta de legationibus and, in this context, were obviously selected for their diplomatic interest. In the absence of external sources, it is not possible to know if this thematic focus accurately reflects the actual importance of diplomacy in these events or the relative space and significance accorded to diplomacy in Priscus’ work. It is clear, however, that there are several and significant gaps in the episodic historical narrative into which the excerpt in Suda τ 134 might be inserted. A brief survey of the fragments is instructive. The first (33.1 Blockley/25 Carolla) begins by reporting that Roman forces had recently invaded Lazica, engaged in combat operations with the Lazi, and then withdrawn in order to plan a second campaign. For this new offensive the East Roman government considered alternative invasion routes, including a point of entry through Armenia that would require Persian permission or acquiescence. At the same time the Lazi appealed to the shah for assistance, but the Persians, then preoccupied with Hunnic incursions, appear to have valued peaceful relations with the Romans, even to the point of expelling Lazian refugees. It remains unclear whether the second Roman invasion actually occurred or was merely threatened.Footnote 52 The second fragment (33.2 Blockley/26 Carolla) reveals that Gobazes sent envoys to the Romans to sue for peace, presumably soon after the Persians had rebuffed his appeal. It is in this context that Priscus reports his personal involvement in the events. He provides details of the negotiations and Roman preconditions, whereby Gobazes agreed to stand down in favour of his son.Footnote 53 A subsequent fragment (44 Blockley/34 Carolla) reports a visit by Gobazes to Constantinople, apparently c. 465/6, which implies his eventual rehabilitation and a normalization of Roman-Lazian relations.Footnote 54 A further fragment (51.1 Blockley/41 Carolla), though brief and textually corrupt, reports a Lazian request for Roman military assistance c. 467 to curtail the depredations of the Suani, a tributary people to the north, whose separatism was supported by the Persians.Footnote 55
For the present purposes, the first of these fragments is the most promising and should be examined in more detail. The excerpt begins:
ὅτι τῶν Ῥωμαίων ἐς Κόλχους ἐλθόντων καὶ συμβαλόντων πόλεμον πρὸς Λαζούς, ὁ μὲν Ῥωμαϊκὸς στρατὸς ἐς τὰ σφέτερα ἐπανέζευξεν, καὶ οἱ ἀμφὶ τὰ βασίλεια πρὸς τὴν ἑτέραν μάχην παρεσκευάζοντο βουλευόμενοι, πότερον τὴν αὐτὴν ἢ τὴν δι’ Ἀρμενίας τῆς Περσῶν χώρας προσοίκου πορευθέντες ὁδὸν τὸν πόλεμον ἐπάξουσι, πρότερον πρεσβείᾳ τὸν μόναρχον τῶν Παρθυαίων πείσαντες· κατὰ γὰρ θάλατταν ἄπορον αὐτοῖς πᾶν ἐνομίζετο τὰς δυσχωρίας παραπλεῖν, ἀλιμένου τῆς Κόλχου τυγχανούσης.Footnote 56
After the Romans had gone into Colchis and waged war against the Lazi, the Roman army returned to its own territory, and the staff of the imperial palace set about preparing plans for another battle, deliberating whether in their prosecution of the war they should proceed by the same route or by one through the part of Armenia bordering on Persian territory, having first by diplomacy obtained the consent of the ruler of the Parthians; for they deemed it entirely impracticable to sail past the rough terrain by sea, as the land of the Colchians is without harbours.
The excerpt then proceeds to its main theme of the Roman embassy to the Sasanian court. This passage is clearly a summary of the previous course of the war for the purposes of introduction and context. This raises the possibility, indeed likelihood, that the text provides a precis of events already described in more detail in an earlier section, under a preceding year or campaigning season. Certainly this extremely cursory sketch of the start of the war and the Romans’ first offensive into Lazica seems incongruous in comparison to Priscus’ extensive treatment of its diplomatic conclusion, even taking into account his personal involvement in the latter stage. Such a preliminary recapitulation would also be consistent with the view of some scholars that Priscus ordered his narrative annalistically, collocating eastern and western events of each year, as evidenced in apparently split accounts of other topics or connected events.Footnote 57 Furthermore, we cannot exclude here the possible influence of the Constantinian excerptors, whose editorial interventions are typically most apparent at the beginnings and ends of excerpts, where they sought to tie up contextual and linguistic loose ends arising from the process of excerption. Blockley draws attention to other excerpts of Priscus in the Excerpta de legationibus in which a preceding ‘narrative of military activities has been reduced by the excerptor to brief notices’ in order to provide prefatory context to a diplomatic episode.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, the language of this section is beyond doubt that of Priscus.Footnote 59 This seems, therefore, to be either Priscus’ own or the excerptor's résumé of the historian's preceding account of the initial Roman invasion. The location, route and objectives of this campaign are unknown, though recent scholarship on the Roman military presence in the eastern Black Sea region suggests that in this period Roman bases along the northwestern coast of Lazica (at Pityus, Sebastopolis/Dioscurias and Ziganne) offered the most likely bridgeheads for military interventions in the western Caucasus.Footnote 60 In any case, there can be little doubt that the first Roman invasion of Lazica, which implicitly involved combat operations (or literally a ‘first battle’), had been unsuccessful or at least indecisive. This is clear from the Roman army's withdrawal to its own territory; the need for palace officials to draw up new plans for a second offensive; the deliberations concerning the difficulties of terrain and an alternative line of invasion by a more inland route, which by implication points to a failure or shortcoming of the previous attempt to penetrate the hinterland; and finally a resort to diplomacy and the highly unusual step of requesting assistance from the Sasanians in bringing the Lazi to heal. These historical and textual circumstances easily accommodate the excerpt in Suda τ 134, in which the Lazi go to great lengths to bar the passage of invading Roman forces, inflict a defeat upon the Romans and force them to retreat.
Turning to stylistic and linguistic features, the brevity of the excerpt in Suda τ 134 obviously permits little scope for analysis, and again we cannot be sure of the extent to which the Constantinian excerptor and/or the compiler of the Suda reworded or abridged the original text.Footnote 61 Nevertheless, the evidence permits some observations. Baldwin drew attention to the influence of classical models, in particular Herodotus.Footnote 62 Although Herodotus (1.179.2) employs the key phrase ταρσοὶ καλάμων in a different context—reed matting layed in the interstices of brickwork—this well-known passage remains the most likely source of lexical inspiration.Footnote 63 Certainly the language of the excerpt hints at the author's broader debt to Herodotus’ text.Footnote 64 This is of potential significance inasmuch as numerous Herodotean echoes in the securely identified Priscan fragments show the ‘father of history’ to have been one of Priscus’ main stylistic models.Footnote 65 Beyond sharing a literary model, the excerpt does not exhibit any striking verbal parallels with fragments of Priscus, though this may simply reflect the one-off specificity of the vocabulary required to describe this stratagem. However, one mundane linguistic feature again points to Priscus. The phrase τά τε παρ’ ἑκάτερα χωρία, ‘the ground to either side’, inserts the prepositional phrase παρ’ ἑκάτερα between the noun and its article. This construction, regardless of case, number or gender, is extremely rare in classical and late antique historiography, to the extent that only two other instances can be identified: one in the famous fragment of Priscus concerning his mission to the court of Attila, the other in a Constantinian excerpt attributed to John of Antioch, but clearly derived from an earlier source, possibly Candidus.Footnote 66 In terms of the subject matter of the excerpt, the relatively small quantity of military material in the surviving witnesses to Priscus’ work has led some scholars to form a low opinion of Priscus as a military historian, even accepting that the survival and content of the fragments are conditioned by their transmission via the Excerpta de legationibus.Footnote 67 Whatever the validity of this assessment, the extant portion of Priscus’ work contains sufficient instances of military stratagems to infer his interest in and inclusion of such episodes, though whether to a greater or lesser degree than other late antique classicizing historians is impossible to determine.Footnote 68
To conclude: while in such cases of anonymous and decontextualized excerpts some doubt will inevitably linger, the attribution of the excerpt in Suda τ 134 to Priscus is very far from being a guessing game. The compositional history and Quellenforschung of the Suda narrowly limit the possibilities, while within late antique classicizing historiography the known chronology, content and geographical scope of Priscus’ work alone offer a plausible setting for this excerpt. In particular, the securely attributed Priscan fragments uniquely relate a Roman-Lazi war during the reign of Marcian (450–7), the only such conflict recorded, except for brief hostilities in the 540s, which are fully reported by Procopius and not compatible with the circumstances described in the excerpt. More specifically, one fragment of Priscus (33.1 Blockley/25 Carolla) alludes to an initial Roman attempt to invade Lazica that had apparently met with a rebuff, to such a degree that the Roman forces withdrew entirely and the East Roman government was forced to devise a completely new and unusual strategy for a second offensive. No other victory of the Lazi over the Romans is documented in any other source or period. Finally, though stylistic criteria cannot be decisive, Herodotean influences in the excerpt are typically Priscan, while one linguistic peculiarity is consistent with another specimen of Priscus’ diction. Accordingly, the excerpt in Suda τ 134 should be located in Priscus’ work, in which it describes the defeat of Roman forces in their first attempt to invade Lazica in the Roman-Lazi war of the 450s. Alternative scenarios require us either to posit a second account of the same war by a different but entirely unknown historian or to hypothesize another, otherwise undocumented Roman-Lazi war, in which the Lazi likewise inflicted a significant defeat on the Romans. Both options are not only intrinsically unlikely but also hard to reconcile with scholarship on the Excerpta Constantiniana, the Suda and/or late antique classicizing historiography. Assignment of this excerpt to Priscus would indicate that his account of the Roman-Lazi war, and potentially other fifth-century conflicts, perhaps entailed a more developed and detailed military narrative than the majority of the fragments, transmitted via the Excerpta de legationibus, might otherwise suggest. Given the thematic selectivity of this collection and its proportional significance in the fragmentary survival of Priscus’ work, diplomacy necessarily looms exceedingly large in the extant sample, but Priscus’ inclusion of other stratagems and episodes of rusé behaviour allows for the possibility that this textual wreckage gives an unbalanced impression of his interests or capabilities as a ‘military historian’. In any case, at the very least, this excerpt should be readmitted to future discussion of Priscus, from which it has been prematurely excluded, so that its importance and implications can be evaluated.
