The Death of the Emperor Valens in the Greek Historiographic Tradition
There existed two initial versions of Emperor Valens' demise in the battle of Adrianople in 378. Socrates reports on both; so does his contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus in Latin. On the contrary, later Greek historians preferred the one which featured the victorious Visigoths burning Valens to death in a village (κώμη, with authors down to the 6thc.) or some stand- alone building (δωμάτιον, πύργος, οἴκημα, οἰκίσκος, οἰκία; sometimes location “in the fields” is specified). Already in the 5thc. the account was adorned with prophecies, both Pagan and Christian, the most popular with Christian authors being the escapade by St Isaakios, the founder of the Dalmatou monastery, who allegedly predicted Valens's death. One line of the tradition employs ἀχυρών (barn, storehouse for chaff), a rare word which might go back to a lost source, probably of the 5thc. It was supposed to provoke an allusion to the proverb ὄνος εἰς ἀχυρῶνα ἀπέδρα (the donkey fled to a barn). The assumed author should have been hostile to Valens, either due to his arianism, or anti-pagan attitudes. This line includes the George the Monk chronicle, but the only Greek codex of its original (unpublished) version contains a drastically abbreviated account of Valens' reign. Thus, χορτοβόλος appears instead of ἀχυρών. However, the Slavonic translation (Лѣтовникъ) has preserved this part of text in its entirety and in a more complete form than the second version, since only Лѣтовникъ has a sentence, which, according to the testimony of the Life of Isaakios (BHG 956) and the Epitome by John Zonaras, was present in George's source. This underlines the primary importance of the Slavonic translation for reconstruction of the original chronicle.