Zeno flees to Isauria; Basiliscus seizes power
The Chronicle of Marcellinus Comes records under the consulship of Zeno Augustus for the second time alone (AD 475) that the emperor Zeno, trapped by the plots of his mother-in-law Verina and her brother Basiliscus, fled with his wife Ariadne (OCR 'Ariagne') to Isauria, and that the usurper Basiliscus seized Zeno's realm.
What this does and does not establish
A Latin chronicle written at Constantinople c. 518-534, used through Mommsen's 1894 edition (MGH AA 11) as Internet Archive OCR text (page images not checked); the English is an AI working translation. 'tetendit' (OCR 'teteudit') is Mommsen's emendation (the manuscripts read 'tendit'), and S reads 'mariagnae' for 'Ariagne'; the interleaved '10' is an OCR line number. Mommsen's foot note on the page cites Jordanes and Bede only for the second item of this year, not for this one; no Greek parallel column is printed. The retained passage does not explicitly establish the site of the relevant act. No occurrence region is assigned.
- Read through an AI working translation.
- Region
- No region assigned This collection has not fixed where the act took place. It is not a statement that the place is unknown.
- Theme
- Politics and institutions
- Kind of record
- Placed in a year. A source places this in one year. It is listed under that year; no day precision is invented.
How it is dated
- Date reference
- Indiction/consul heading (OCR line 7722): '475 XIII. ZENONIS AVGVSTI II SOLIVS.'
- How we use it
- Placed in the consular year under which Marcellinus enters it (as numbered by the editor). The listing uses year precision. Any finer dating belongs to the quoted passage; the chronicle can misplace events.
The date reference is this project’s reading of the source’s date. It may give an era name, a reign or a calendar in a normalised form rather than in the source’s own words; the dating notes say what the source prints.
Dating notes from the research record
Consular year to AD 475 per the heading index marcellinus-headings.json (one indiction/consul heading per year in order, indiction expected 13, read 13), matching the AD years Mommsen prints in the margin.
File names and line numbers in these notes, and in the limits above, refer to the project’s retained copies of the cited sources. Names such as calendar_headers are the project’s calendar look-ups, and “the investigator” is the research step that prepared the record.
Sources and quoted text
Line and character numbers under “Location” refer to the project’s retained copy of the source. For database rows, “Edition” names the batch of rows that was fetched together.
Source 1 · Supports the statement
Marcellinus Comes, Chronicon (Latin), ed. Th. Mommsen, MGH Auctores antiquissimi 11 (Chronica minora II), 1894
Marcellinus Comes (6th-century, Constantinople); critical edition by Theodor Mommsen (1894)
Quoted text (Latin)
1 Zeno imperator Verinae socrus suae et Basilisci fratris eius insidiis circumventus
cum Ariagne uxore sua profugus in Isauriam teteudit. regnum Zenonis Basiliscus tyran-
nus invasit.AI working translation into English; not official or authoritative
The emperor Zeno, trapped by the plots of Verina his mother-in-law and of Basiliscus her brother, fled with Ariadne his wife and made for Isauria. The usurper Basiliscus seized the realm of Zeno.
Source credit and reuse conditions recorded for this source: Source: Marcellinus Comes, Chronicon, ed. Th. Mommsen, MGH AA 11 (1894), Internet Archive OCR text. English renderings are AI working translations from the Latin.
Exact source version
e805805fe7b68265bd53e46c3152420178fa7275b1ed420804dfd243bfc628c9Checks and changes
Source checked 2026-11-05. An independent AI evidence review supports this bounded, attributed wording. That review does not guarantee historical truth. How records are checked
This is a corrected version of this record. During research, before this release, an earlier version was withdrawn after independent review and replaced by this one.
Revision sgap_auditfix_s1h_475_marc_1
Exact revision fingerprint
9ee707e134f7c23c4243cc7f46f9f207c4ee249b278e2b3501ac6afc37114f47