Socrates Scholasticus

Socrates Scholasticus was a Christian lawyer (scholasticus) in Constantinople who wrote, in the second quarter of the fifth century, an Ecclesiastical History covering the years 305 to 439 — a continuation of Eusebius's History down to his own time. He is our primary source for much of the history of the Church in the fourth and early fifth centuries: the Arian controversy after Nicaea, the Council of Constantinople, the careers of Athanasius, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria, and a wealth of detail about the life of the Church in the Greek-speaking East that no other source provides.

He writes as a lay observer without strong theological agenda, which makes him both less systematic and more candid than some ecclesiastical contemporaries. He is honest about his mistakes when he discovers them — he revised his first two books after finding better sources — and his curiosity extends to Novatianist and other marginal communities that other historians ignore. He is not formally venerated as a saint, but his historiographical contribution to the Church's self-understanding is indispensable.