Arethas of Caesarea (circa 860 – circa 939) was the Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. In 1912 a Greek schola, Sōcratēs Kougeas, pointed out (in the periodical, Neos Hellenomnemon, Νέος Ελληνομνήμων, 1912, starting at p. 472) a reference to Slavs in scholium written by Arethas in the chronicle of patriarch Nicephorus (in a manuscript written in 932). That scholium discusses the Slavic invasion of Greece:
“On the fourth year of his reign [Nicephorus] took place the transfer of Patras of the Peloponnesus, our country, from the Calabrian city of Rhegium to the ancient city of Patras. For it had been driven away or rather forced to migrate by the nation of the Slavs when they invaded the First and Second Thessaly and in addition the country of the Aeniantes and that of the Locrians, both the Epiknemidian and Ozolians, and also ancient Epirus, Attica and Euboea and the Peloponnesus, driving away and destroying the noble Hellenic nations.”
“They [the Slavs] dwelt there from the sixth year of the region of Maurice [587/588] to the fourth year of that of Nicephorus [805/806] at whose time the governor for the Peloponnesus was sent to the eastern part of the Peloponnesus, from Corinth to Malea, because that part was free of Slavs. One of these governors, a native of Lesser Armenia, and a member of the family called Skleroi, clashing with the Slavic tribes, conquered them in war and obliterated them completely and enabled the ancient inhabitants to recover their own. For the mentioned emperor, having inquired where the colony was, reestablished the people not he ancient soil and granted to Patras, which was a bishopric before this, the prerogatives of a metropolis.”
The above confirms much of what had been written in the (presumably later) Chronicle of Monemvasia which is why Kougeas set the two texts side by side above.
Copyright ©2016 jassa.org All Rights Reserved