GEORGE THE SYNCELLUS (GEORGIOS SYNKELLOS), of Constantinople, Byzantine chronicler and ecclesiastic, lived at the end of the 8th and the beginning of the 9th century A.D. He was the syncellus (cell-mate, the confidential companion assigned to the patriarchs, in reality sometimes little more than a spy) of Tara(u)sius, patriarch of Constantinople (784-806), after whose death he retired to a convent, and wrote his Chronicle of events from Adam to Diocletian (285). At his request, the work was continued after his death by his friend Theophanes Confes sor. The Chronicle, which is rather a chronological table (with notes) than a history, is valuable, in spite of its religious bias and dry and uninteresting character, for the fragments of ancient writers and apocryphal books preserved in it (e.g., considerable portions of the Chronicle of Eusebius).
Editio princeps, by J. Goar (1652) ; in Bonn Corpus scriptorum hist.
Byz., by W. Dindorf (1829). See also H. Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus, ii. 1 (1885) ; C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur (1897)