Conscious as they were of their classical and biblical past, the Byzantines wrote much history. Until the early 7th century a series of historians recounted the events of their own time in classicizing style, with fictitious speeches and set descriptive pieces, in a genre that owed much to the classical Greek historians Thucydides and Polybius. Procopius, Agathias, Peter the Patrician, Menander Protector, and Theophylactus Simocattes each took up where a predecessor left off. Thereafter this vein virtually ran dry for 250 years. The revival of cultural confidence and political power in the late 9th century saw a revival of classicizing ...(100 of 11129 words)