Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume II/Socrates/Book VII/Chapter 27
Chapter XXVII.—Voluminous Productions of Philip, a Presbyter of Side.
Philip was a native of Side; Side is a city of Pamphylia. From this place also Troïlus the sophist came, to whom Philip boasted himself to be nearly related. He was a deacon and thus admitted to the privilege of familiar intercourse with John Chrysostom, the bishop. He labored assiduously in literature, and besides making very considerable literary attainments, formed an extensive collection of books in every branch of knowledge. Affecting the Asiatic style,[1]
he became the author of many treatises, attempting among others a refutation of the Emperor Julian’s treatises against the Christians, and compiled a Christian History, which he divided into thirty-six books; each of these books occupied several volumes, so that they amounted altogether to nearly one thousand, and the mere argument[2]
of each volume equalled in magnitude the volume itself. This
composition he has entitled not an Ecclesiastical, but a Christian History, and has grouped together in it abundance of
very heterogeneous materials, wishing to show that he is not ignorant
of philosophical and scientific learning: for it contains a medley of
geometrical theorems, astronomical speculations, arithmetical
calculations, and musical principles, with geographical delineations of
islands, mountains, forests, and various other matters of little
moment. By forcing such irrelevant details into connection with his
subject, he has rendered his work a very loose production, useless
alike, in my opinion, to the ignorant and the learned; for the
illiterate are incapable of appreciating the loftiness of his diction,
and such as are really competent to form a just estimate, condemn his
wearisome tautology. But let every one exercise his own judgment
concerning these books according to his taste. All I have to add is,
that he has confounded the chronological order of the transactions he
describes: for after having related what took place in the reign of the
Emperor Theodosius, he immediately goes back to the times of the bishop
Athanasius; and this sort of thing he does frequently. But enough has
been said of Philip: we must now mention what happened under the
episcopate of Sisinnius.
Footnotes
[edit]- ↑ This was a heavy, redundant, and turgid style deprecated by rhetoricians of the better class from the time of Cicero onwards. Cf. Cicero, Brut. XIII. 51; Quinctilian, Instit. Orat. XII. 10, and Jerome, ad Rustic. (125. 6).
- ↑ ὑπόθεσις = lit. ‘subject’ or ‘substance’; the contents, or as later, called the argument, or summary of contents.