Priscus, Malchus and Candidus and the destabilization of the East Roman Empire under the Emperor Leon I

The aim of the article is to analyse the extant fragments of the works of classicizing historians Priscus of Panium, Malchus of Philadelphia and Candidus of Isauria and to answer the question, how they presented and interpreted the reign of the emperor Leon I. It is obvious that all these authors, as far as we can recognise it in the extant fragments of their works or in later historians (Procopius, Evagrius, Theophanes, Zonaras, Xanthopoulos) deemed the reign of Leon I as a period of an internal struggle for power between the emperor and other mighty personalities. Priscus seems to create a multifaceted picture, while his interpretations are not limited to the purely personal explanatory models, but sometimes point to the structural political factors. Malchus tends to attribute all problems of this government to the emperor’s moral deficiencies. Candidus writes with an apologetic intention: he wants to justify the political rise of the Isaurians. One can conclude that these three classicizing historians saw the deepest reasons for the destabilization of the empire under Leon I in his individual failure as a politician. Keywords · Classicizing Historians of Late Antiquity, Priscus of Panium, Malchus of Philadelphia, Candidus of Isauria, Emperor Leon I