Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai

Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai (Greek: Παραστάσεις σύντομοι χρονικαί, "brief historical notes") is an eighth- to ninth-centuryByzantine text that concentrates on brief commentary connected to the topography of Constantinople and its monuments, notably its Classical Greek sculpture, for which it has been mined by art historians, in spite of its crabbed and elliptical Greek, full of solecisms, which has made interpretation ambiguous. Though it is virtually the only secular text from the Byzantine age of eclipse that preceded the Macedonian Renaissance, surviving in a single manuscript, its modern commentators have not esteemed it highly: Alan Cameron found it "so stuffed with such staggering absurdities and confusions (especially where Constantine is concerned) that it is seldom worth even attempting to explain them, much less sift out the few grains of historical fact behind them." A reviewer of its modern edition even called it "the Byzantinist's Historia Augusta". Classicists have been frustrated in not being able securely to identify in Parastaseis the great sculptures of Antiquity that had been removed to Constantinople by Constantine the Great and his successors, and which continued to represent continuity with the classical tradition by their prominent presence in Constantinople's public spaces.

Fire and damage took their toll, but enough remained to form the subject of Nicetas Choniates's little pamphlet On the Statues destroyed by the Latins, in which Nicetas described the destruction of the remaining statues by the Latin crusaders at the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

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