On Goulet's chronology of Eunapius' life and works

Abstract

In the centennial JHS, R. Goulet proposed a radical revision of the chronology of the life and literary productions of Eunapius of Sardis. Briefly stated, Goulet argued that Eunapius had arrived as a student in Athens in 364, rather than 362, and identified the later date with the terminus of the first ἔκδοσις of Eunapius' History, the publication of which he placed not before 395. This date, in turn, forced him to explain references in Eunapius' other known work, the Vitae Sophistarum, to post-364 events that had already been treated in the History, as anticipatory allusions integrated into accounts of earlier affairs. Though Goulet's reconstruction has as yet gone unchallenged, its infirm foundation of hypothesis supported by special pleading collapses beneath the weight of the evidence at hand.