The late antique Christian chronicle preserved as theExcerpta Latina Barbaricontains a brief, but extraordinary notice on the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar; many of its unusual details can be understood in the contexts of traditional stories about Nebuchadnezzar and the interests of the work itself. The best clue to the meaning of the passage on Nebuchadnezzar is theExcerpta's closely parallel passage on Alexander the Great. In theExcerptaNebuchadnezzar and Alexander reflect one another and in a sense compete with one another. Many of the odd details of the notice on Nebuchadnezzar can be explained as directing the reader toward this parallelism. The parallelism itself seems to serve two purposes. First, to provide symmetry to theExcerpta's idiosyncratic account of world history in which Alexander liberates the world conquered by Nebuchadnezzar. And second, to show Nebuchadnezzar subtly outdoing Alexander, so that Alexander's encounter with the God of the Jews, as it is found in theExcerpta, can be provided with an implicit interpretation and characterization.

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Byzantine education was based on a reading of Homer, and so mythological themes were of perennial interest to the learned society of Byzantium. Byzantine scholars had access to the ancient works of systematic mythography, but they also made their own contributions to the understanding of myth, even if not in a distinct genre of mythography. They had been taught by St. Basil that moral instruction might be found in myth, and by Eusebius of Caesarea that the gods of myth were defunct kings. So, much of the common stock of Byzantine mythographic knowledge was contained in the chronicle tradition, and practically all of it can be traced back to the chronicle of John Malalas. His first five books are preoccupied with what must strike us as odd and idiosyncratic stories of gods and heroes, including a particularly extensive and influential account of the Trojan War, but they were the norm in Byzantine literature. Mythographic material might also be found in lexica and encyclopedias, poetic descriptions of statuary, the lore of Constantinople, and even the Dionysiaca of Nonnus. John Tztetzes and Eustathius, in what amounted to Homeric commentaries, gave a historical background to Homer’s work indebted to Malalas and employed allegory to tease out deeper meanings in the epics. The later Byzantine centuries cultivated a poetic tradition that returned to Homer and Troy—with varying degrees of faithfulness—for its plots, characters, and themes, and even found room for translations of French treatments of the matière de Troie.

Joseph Justus Scaliger dubbed the text of Parisinus Latinus 4884, the sole surviving witness to a Merovingian Latin translation of a now lost Greek world chronicle, the Excerpta Latina Barbari. The name was essentially a judgement on the linguistic abilities of the translator, but it is suggestive. What is there in the chronicle to appeal to the ‘barbarian’ inhabitants of Gaul? An answer to this question can offer some insight into the provenance of a neglected, but intriguing text. It will be proposed that the Greek original of the Excerpta was composed as a gift for the Austrasian king Theudebert I and was intended to elicit his aid in the war against the Ostrogothic rulers of Italy. The translation is another matter. It seems to have been undertaken about two centuries later in the context of the missionary push to the north and east from Frankish territory.

Faunus-who-is-also-Hermes is one of the composite god-kings dealt with in the polemical Christian 'Picus-Zeus narrative' of the fourth century. Th e narrative of his life is based on the Biblical account of Joseph, along with the elaborations on Joseph's life in Hellenistic Jewish fi ction. Whereas Joseph is a virtuous hero, however, Faunus-Hermes is a villain who practices sorcery and usurpation and ultimately induces men to worship him as a god. Th e Hellenistic novels and especially the philosophical considerations of Philo of Alexandria accentuate the ambiguities in Joseph which might allow a bad character to be developed out of his good character. Th e Clementine Recognitions, moreover, off er an understanding of history and human character according to which good and evil come in contrasting and inimical pairs. Altogether, the use of Joseph as a model for Faunus-Hermes allows the author to subtly introduce a moral message in what seems to be a blunt and unadorned history.