Excerpta Latina Barbari
The name Excerpta Latina Barbari, by which the work is now conventionally known, is derived from the description of its first editor, Joseph Justus Scaliger.
"[c] The unflattering epithet Barbarus Scaligeri ('Scaliger's barbarian') may be given to the unidentified author or translator, but is also used as a name of the chronicle.
[7] The scholarly consensus is that the earliest stage in the composition of the Excerpta took place in Alexandria and that it attained its final form during the reign of Justinian I (r. 527–565).
[e] Burgess allows that it may have been completed in the late 5th century, but argues that the work which was expanded into its final form under Justinian must have been updated already during the reign of Justin I (r. 518–527).
[2][5][8] This date was based on the addition, in the translation, of the Trojan legend of Frankish origins.
[12] The historian Carl Frick also argued that Latin contained characteristics typical of Merovingian Francia.
E. A. Lowe in the 1950s and Jean Porcher [fr] in 1967 revised this dating on paleographic and artistic grounds, narrowing its location to the abbey of Corbie and pushing forward its time period to the late 8th century.
[23] It is written in a distinct variety of Caroline minuscule pioneererd by Abbot Maurdramnus, who governed Corbie in 772–781.
The latter attribution was an educated guess based on a monk's erroneous interpretation of the description of Victor's actual chronicle in Isidore of Seville's De viris illustribus.
[29] Garstad sees the Excerpta as a transitional work between the bare Chronici canones of Eusebius and the fuller Chronographia of John Malalas.
[j] While the Excerpta survives basically complete (if only in translation), the Chronographia and Consularia are fragmentary.
[31] Structurally, the Chronographia contains the same three parts (based on the same sources) as the Excerpta, but it also includes additional texts.
[18] Walter Goffart, discussing the flow of Greek works to Italy or Merovingian Francia, where many were translated in the 6th or 7th century, includes the Excerpta alongside the Frankish Table of Nations, the Book of Synods, the Codex Encyclius, the ruler lists used in the Chronicle of Fredegar and the original model for the ioca monachorum collections.
The appearance of a Greek text from the east and its translation into Latin in the west in what is traditionally considered the "Dark Ages" is not unprecedented.
