The series Kleine und fragmentarische Historiker der Spätantike, directed by B. Bleckmann and M. Stein (Düsseldorf), has the aim of making lesser and fragmentary historians from Late Antiquity available for teaching and research purposes. Focusing mainly on Greek and Latin historians until c. a.d. 600, it provides a new edition of each text, based on inspection of the manuscripts, thus not merely reprinting an earlier publication. The series often offers the first edition for more than a century, since some of the texts in the volumes under review have not been edited since Mommsen's fundamental Chronica minora of the 1890s. The editions are accompanied by an introduction, a German translation and a commentary. Each printed book comes with a free digital copy in the form of a searchable pdf. This is supposed to replace the index, absent from the printed volumes — a choice that one could quarrel with.

The first volume under review offers a new text of the chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine. A continuation of Jerome, the work was very popular and Prosper himself circulated several editions, the last one in 455. The manuscript tradition is therefore suitably complex. The editor, M. Becker, offers a slightly different reconstruction of the original version published by Prosper from the one offered by Mommsen. More text is now relegated to the apparatus as interpolation. Many of the editorial choices seem justified, and the present text is also much more user-friendly than Mommsen's. Nevertheless, there is still room for a fundamental change of perspective, as the aim is still to reconstruct the very words of Prosper. Yet Becker's introduction shows well that these may be beyond our reach. What we can trace, however, is the development of different versions in different places, with Africa being especially important for the reception of Prosper. These are of interest in their own right.

In a second area the edition also remains true to previous scholarly practice, namely the choice not to publish Prosper's epitome of Jerome's chronicle that preceded his own work. As a consequence, we are still unable to read Prosper's chronicle in the narrative context he intended for it, even if M. Becker and J.-M. Kötter refer to it in the commentary and introduction. These are both lucid and helpful and do a good job teasing out what is suggested by Prosper and the changes in perspective between the two main editions of 433 and 455. By and large, the interpretation of the chronicle offered here stands in the tradition of S. Muhlberger's seminal work (The Fifth-Century Chroniclers: Prosper, Hydatius, and the Gallic Chronicler of 452 (1981)).

The commentary has as its main aim to clarify the text and is very helpful in that respect. Only rarely did this reviewer expect some more discussion (216: the date of the settlement of Aquitaine has been widely discussed; 268: there is extensive literature in English on the Vandal persecution). One of the continuations of Prosper is edited in a sort of appendix to the volume, the so-called Laterculus regum Vandalorum et Alanorum, which uses the reigns of the Vandal kings as its chronological framework. There is less difference with Mommsen in this edition than in that of Prosper. At any rate, it would be worthwhile to study the entire evolution of the Prosper tradition, which for the moment still remains largely buried in Mommsen's edition.

The second volume collects four consularia, that is, annotated consular lists: the Consularia constantinopolitana, consularia which extend down to 468; hypothetical consularia that served as a source for the church historian Socrates of Constantinople, writing c. 439, called the Fastenquelle; and two more consularia fragmentarily preserved in P. Berol. 13296 and in a papyrus in the Pushkin Museum (the so-called ‘Alexandrian world chronicle’, which is also a title now used for the so-called Excerpta Latina barbari). For most classicists such works may sum up the characteristics ‘minor’ and ‘fragmentary’, but they were widely circulating works of reference whose information filtered into narrative histories. Except for the Fastenquelle, these texts have recently been re-edited by R. Burgess, with the aid of J. Dijkstra (The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana (1993); AfP 58 (2012), 273–301 and Millennium Jahrbuch 10 (2013), 39–114). If the editors largely follow him for the last two texts, they prefer a partial return to Mommsen for the Consularia constantinopolitana, refusing for example to add the missing summations of the years. They also argue against the high number of recensions that Burgess identified.

The idea that Socrates relied on a single chronographic source was first proposed by F. Geppert in 1898 (Die Quellen des Kirchenhistorikers Sokrates). I do not think it is felicitous to edit a text that is solely identified on the basis of Quellenforschung, without it being explicitly cited by Socrates or any other source — a condition for the edition of fragmentary texts in the tradition of Felix Jacoby. Indeed, such an identification must always remain hypothetical and relies on a set of suppositions, in this case that Socrates used a single source. Yet alternatives have been argued for. R. Burgess has demonstrated that part of the chronographic material in Socrates derives from an edition of the Consularia constantinopolitana and that he also used a continuation of Eusebius (Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian Chronography (1999)), whilst I have argued that Socrates used a variety of chronographic sources (JbÖByz 54 (2004), 53–75). B. Bleckmann himself (165–7) also notes a change in character and an increased recording of ecclesiastical events towards the end of the fourth century. Such arguments obviously do not prove that the idea of a unitary source is incorrect, but it shows that a series of alternative reconstructions are available. With a text now edited, we run the risk of scholars taking the Fastenquelle for a real text.

The third volume gathers three works that list Roman emperors. The Origo gentis Romanorum was added in the Carolingian period to the manuscript of the so-called Chronograph of 354 and is therefore usually edited in that context. It is also known as the Chronica urbis Romae or the Breviarium vindobonense, showing that there is still some room for late antique scholars to agree on standardised names. Again, there is a recent edition by R. Burgess (Roman Imperial Chronology and Early-Fourth-Century Historiography: The Regnal Durations of the So-Called ‘Chronica Urbis Romae’ of the ‘Chronograph of 354’ (2014)), and the edition and commentary are in constant dialogue with him. The editors build a strong case that Origo gentis Romanorum was indeed the original title for this work that traced Roman rulers from Picus to Licinius. The commentary is exemplary, if maybe too rigorously scholarly in outlook. Indeed, the Origo sometimes lists bizarre information, for example about famous gluttons who not only overate, but also consumed unusual items. The commentary brushes this aside as an invention, but recent history knows of individuals who ate strange things, such as Michel Lotito, a Frenchman (d. 2007) who was estimated to have eaten nine tons of metal during his life. Obviously, many of the details reported in the Origo are exaggerated, but there may be more to these entries than mere invention.

The second work is a section of the calendar of Polemius Silvius, his list of Roman emperors from Caesar to Valentinian III and his summary of history. This will now become the edition of reference, because it takes a newly discovered manuscript into account. Given the focus on historiography, it is understandable that this edition only publishes the two sections of the calendar that are historical in nature. Yet they were never intended as independent works and were part of a larger compendium of knowledge. A very detailed examination of language and style (especially prose rhythm) rehabilitates Polemius Silvius somewhat as a writer. The last text is a set of imperial biographies from Valentinian I to Theodosius II, the edition of which does not deviate much from Mommsen's text. As it does not contain much original information, its interest lies rather in signalling the existence of such brief summary accounts.

The series KFHist is one of the projects that is currently transforming the study of late antique historiography. Until recently, most attention went to preserved narrative histories like Ammianus Marcellinus and Procopius. Chronicles tended to be neglected, as were other minor genres. This situation now belongs to the past, due to editorial projects like this one, the Translated Texts for Historians series and the inclusion of ecclesiastical historians in series such as Sources chrétiennes. With late antique historiography in all its variety becoming more accessible, it is to be hoped that literary and historical studies will complement the mainly philological focus of the past years and explore new approaches to the genre. As a sign of the work still to be done, one can signal that narratological analysis, very much practised in the study of classical historiography, is rarely applied to its late antique counterpart. Such studies can only be performed once we have good access to the texts. Setting a high philological standard and substantially improving our understanding of the individual texts, KFHist provides a secure starting point for a new look at the genre that is long overdue.