Peter the Patrician (Latin: Petrus Patricius, Greek: Πέτρος ὁ Πατρίκιος, Petros ho Patrikios; c. 500–565) was a senior Byzantine official, diplomat, and historian.

[2] His historical writings survive only in fragments, but provide unique source material on early Byzantine ceremonies and diplomatic issues between Byzantium and the Sassanids.

Peter was sent back to Italy with Athanasius, bearing letters to Theodahad and the Gothic nobles, and for a time it seemed as if the cradle of the Roman Empire would return peacefully to the fold.

Further clauses regulated cross-border trade, which was to be limited to the two cities of Dara and Nisibis, the return of fugitives, and the protection of the respective religious minorities (Christians in the Persian Empire and Zoroastrians in Byzantium).

In exchange for Persian recognition for the existence of Dara, whose construction had originally sparked a brief war, the Byzantines agreed to limit their troops there and remove the seat of the magister militum per Orientem from the city.

[15] As disagreements remained on two border areas, Suania and Ambros, in spring 562, Peter travelled to Persia to negotiate directly with the Persian Shah, Chosroes I, without however achieving a result.

He held the post until some time before 576, being appointed as comes sacrarum largitionum ("Count of the Sacred Largess") thereafter; in the same year, he also led an unsuccessful embassy to Persia to end the ongoing war over the Caucasus.

To John Lydus, a mid-level bureaucrat of the praetorian prefecture of the East, Peter was a paragon of every virtue, an intelligent, firm but fair administrator and a kind man.

[3] On the other hand, the late 6th-century historian Menander Protector, who relied on Peter's work for his own history, accuses him of boastfulness and of rewriting the records to enhance his own role and performance in the negotiations with the Persians.

[22] Peter wrote three books, all of which survive only in fragments: a history of the first four centuries of the Roman Empire, from the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Emperor Constantius II in 361 AD, of which about twenty fragments are extant (it has been suggested that the third-century material in this was taken from Philostratus[23]); a history of the office of magister officiorum from its institution under Constantine the Great (r. 306–337) to the time of Justinian, containing a list of its holders and descriptions of various imperial ceremonies, several of which are reproduced in chapters 84–95 of the first volume of the 10th-century De Ceremoniis of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (r. 913–959); and an account of his diplomatic mission to the Persian Empire in 561–562, which was used as a source by Menander Protector, and is found in Constantine's Excerpta.