ZONARAS

Form: Ioannes.

A Greek historian, who lived at Constantinople as chief of the imperial bodyguard and first private secretary to the emperor under Alexius I, Comnenus. He next became a monk, and composed a history of the world down to 1118 A.D., divided into eighteen books. Its value consists in its exact quotations from lost works of earlier writers, especially from those of Dio Cassius, referring to the Empire. The history of his own time he recorded as an eye-witness.