The Many Books of Philip of Side

Philip was a native of Side, a city of Pamphylia. Troilus the sophist also came from there, and Philip boasted that he was a close relative of his. He was a deacon, and so he was admitted to familiar friendship with John Chrysostom, the bishop. He worked hard at literature, and besides gaining considerable learning, he built up a large collection of books in every branch of knowledge. Writing in the Asiatic style, he became the author of many treatises. Among them he attempted a refutation of the emperor Julian’s treatises against the Christians, and he compiled a Christian History, which he divided into thirty-six books. Each of these books filled several volumes, so that altogether they came to nearly a thousand, and the mere summary of contents of each volume was as long as the volume itself. He has titled this work not an Ecclesiastical History but a Christian History, and he has gathered into it a great mass of very mixed material, wishing to show that he is not ignorant of philosophy and science. For it contains a jumble of geometrical theorems, astronomical speculations, arithmetical calculations, and principles of music, along with geographical descriptions of islands, mountains, forests, and various other matters of little importance. [a]

By forcing such irrelevant details into connection with his subject, he has made his work very loose, and in my opinion useless to the unlearned and the learned alike. The uneducated cannot appreciate the loftiness of his language, and those who are really competent to judge condemn his tiresome repetition. But let everyone judge these books for himself according to his own taste. All I will add is that he has confused the order of time in the events he describes. After telling what took place in the reign of the emperor Theodosius, he goes straight back to the times of the bishop Athanasius, and he does this sort of thing often. But enough has been said about Philip. We must now tell what happened while Sisinnius was bishop.