A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

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  PART TWO

  LITERARY FORMS

  CHAPTER NINE

  Classicizing History and Historical Epitomes

  Michael Kulikowski

  The Greeks and Romans followed strict and consistent rules of genre when writing about the past. They did not, however, have a consistent vocabulary with which to describe their genres, which poses difficulties for the modern historian trying to describe them and the lines between them (Burgess and Kulikowski 2013, pp. 1–62; 2016). Alongside historical biography, which was shaped by the contours of an individual’s life even when organized thematically, there was a major division between what we may call chronicle and history. The former genre, which existed in Greek from at least the fourth century BCE, and in Latin from the first century BCE, had as its primary purpose the recording of dated events over a relatively long period of time, in a way that allowed large historical periods to be apprehended rapidly and distant events to be correlated with one another. History, by contrast, which went back to Herodotus and Thucydides in Greek and to Livy in Latin, told a story of greater or lesser chronological length, but at a considerably more leisurely pace; moral purpose and narrative thrust might vary but always went beyond the simple presentation of events in sequence. In the later first century CE, these long traditional histories began to share space with much shorter breviaria (epitomes or abbreviated histories), which at first took the shape of abridgments of Livy, like that of Florus and others. Sometimes as short as a chronicle, breviaria lacked that genre’s overarching chronological focus, often organized by reign rather than annalistically.

  We will leave chronicles aside in the following discussion and focus instead on histories and breviaria, both in Greek, where we can trace a continuous tradition throughout late antiquity, and in Latin, where the evidence for history on the grand scale is much poorer. Beginning in the third century, as the empire became more and more Christian, church history emerged as a genre in its own right. Greek and Latin authors who imitated older, classical traditions of history‐writing strove, with partial success, to exclude neologisms associated with the religious changes of the later empire and cleave to pre‐Christian models of what was and was not a suitable topic for serious history; as late as the sixth century, a Christian author like Procopius would introduce references to priests and monks as if they were slightly exotic creatures with which readers might not be familiar. At its most extreme, the Greek classicizing impulse went so far as to exclude language that was not yet in use when Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon were writing (a habit of the Second Sophistic milieu from which many history writers emerged). Other authors might admit neologisms that reflected the passage of time and the realities of the Roman imperial polity, but without altering the canon of appropriate historical topics, sticking to the political and military affairs that had always been the focus of proper history and perpetuating classical nomenclature for neighboring peoples (Scythians for Huns, Massagetae for Goths, Parthians for Persians and so on).

  The majority of such history is in Greek, because the great Trajanic author Cornelius Tacitus was both apex and abortive endpoint of Latin historiography on the grand scale. Although the fourth‐century histories of Ammianus Marcellinus represent a nearly equal pinnacle of literary and imaginative qualities, they belong as much to the Greek as to the Latin tradition (Wilamowitz‐ Moellendorf 1907, p. 201; Norden 1909, pp. 646–650). Too little survives of other putative classicizing histories in Latin to say much about them, while the claims made for a lost Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus (Ratti 2010) are at best wildly exaggerated, at worst borderline demented (demonstrated in Cameron 2010, pp. 627–690). Late antique Latin historiography, Ammianus aside, is thus almost exclusively a matter of chronicles, breviaria, and church history.

  The Greek tradition, by contrast, is both abundant and lively right down to the early seventh century, when Greek historiography went into hibernation for several hundred years. Much of this classicizing Greek tradition survives only in fragments, for a series of reasons. One is that the well‐known transition from papyrus roll to codex culled the ranks of third‐ and fourth‐century authors. Thereafter, the cost of writing materials ensured that authors whose appeal did not conform to later tastes tended to be palimpsested: The sixth‐century Ethnica of Stephen of Byzantium refers to a great many historians whose work was unknown to the Greek Middle Ages. In the West, the majority of the Greek heritage had probably disappeared before the Carolingians conquered the heartlands of western classical culture, which left the survival of the rest very much dependent upon the shifting tastes of Middle Byzantine antiquarians. The Myriobiblion or Bibliotheca of the Constantinopolitan patriarch Photius, of disputed ninth‐century date (Treadgold 1980; Markopoulos 2004); the collections of historical excerpta compiled on the instructions of the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (Toynbee 1973, pp. 575–605); and the maddeningly eclectic encyclopedia known as the Suda – all are among our best testimony for, and sources of text from, the classicizing historians of late antiquity. Our dependence on middle Byzantine tastes come with certain problems. There is a preference for the exemplary and the improving, for the clever folkloric anecdote, and for whatever helps point a moral agreeable to the Christian, Constantinople‐centric world in which the antiquarians worked. In evaluating the fragmentary historians, therefore, we need to account, not so much for deliberate misrepresentation on the part of the Byzantine compilers, but rather for the distortion that follows from selection criteria that we only partially understand. The selection of fragments that happens to be extant can have a serious impact on how one interprets an author’s larger work and purpose, as one can see in the discussion of Olympiodorus below.

  A consideration of Greek classicizing histories needs to begin with Dexippus of Athens, a third‐century author whose work survives in sufficiently large fragments to allow a confident assessmen
t (FGrH 100; Millar 1969; Janiszewski 2006, pp. 39–54, 109–113, 145–149; Martin 2006; Mecella 2013). Publius Herennius Dexippus came from a prominent Athenian family and had a career in local government marked out by his personal and familial prestige (he was eponymous archon in the early 250 s). During the “Scythian” invasions of the third century, he was one of the locals who rallied the city to repel the marauders in a gesture of self‐help. His posthumous prestige rested more on his historical writings than on his political career, and his style, much admired by the Byzantines, accounts for the survival of his work in substantial excerpts; excitingly, he is a rare ancient historian whose corpus has recently been expanded by new discoveries. He is known to have written three works, including a Chronichè historía, or Súntomos historikós, composed either in the 270 s (Janiszewski 2006, p. 52) or a decade or two earlier (Millar 1969). This was universal history in multiple books, a genre popular with Greek authors since the Second Sophistic and reaching its apogee with the Romaiká of Cassius Dio under the last Severans. Dexippus’s contribution ran from an uncertain starting date down to the reign of Claudius II (r. 268–270), probably covered a millennium of history, and was perhaps organized by the annual archonships of Athens. Dexippus also wrote a Tà metà Aléxandron in four books, borrowing liberally from his predecessor Arrian of Nicomedia, and a Skuthiká, recounting the third‐century invasions by Goths, Heruls, and other generic “Scythians” in at least three books. It is not always possible to assign the extant fragments precisely to one or another of Dexippus’s works, but the sieges recounted in the fragments preserved by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and in the newly published papyrus fragments from Vienna, are all almost certainly from the Scythica (Martin and Grusková 2014a, 2014b; Mallan and Davenport 2015). In general, Dexippus affects a Thucydidean tone of cautious observation, suitable in a man who had personally participated in public affairs. The selection bias of our excerptors may give more of a military cast to the history than it possessed in reality, and while the Scythica must certainly have concentrated on the Balkan wars of the 250 s–270 s, there is no reason to think it was quite so heavily concerned with sieges as we once thought – there is considerable war of maneuver in the new fragments.

  The achievement of Dexippus was recognized already in antiquity. Whereas writers like Asinius Quadratus, Nicostratus of Trebizond, or Onasimus are barely more than names to us – and were no more than that to their fourth‐century successors – Dexippus was used by quite a number of them. Ammianus Marcellinus certainly knew Dexippus, and the author of the Historia Augusta drew on him for what little genuine information can be extracted from his dismal biographies of the later third‐century emperors. Eunapius of Sardis, however, went much further, and took the close of Dexippus’s histories as the starting point for his own fourteen‐book History, which survived down to the time of Photius in two editions. The first edition was written in the direct aftermath of Adrianople as a sort of “instant history” of how the empire had come to so awful a pass; the latter ran into the early fifth century, with some of its anti‐Christian bile perhaps expunged, whether by Eunapius himself or a later bowdlerizer (Barnes 1978; Blockley 1981, pp. 1–26; Blockley 1983, pp. 2–151; Baldini 1984). Eunapius, sadly, is not a patch on his third‐centry predecessor, and that does not simply reflect our having more of Eunapius from which to recoil. Where Dexippus is precise, Eunapius is grandiloquent; where Dexippus is careful, Eunapius is slapdash. Indeed, the explicit contempt that he directs toward precision in chronology – “what do dates add to the wisdom of Socrates” (frag. 1, Blockley 1983) – is matched by his practical neglect of it in the surviving fragments.

  Eunapius is, nonetheless, one of the main controlling sources we possess for events of the fourth century, both in the fragments preserved by Constantine Porphyrogenitus and in the large stretches of Zosimus’s Historia Nova that merely abridge Eunapius and deflate the soaring rhetoric and Atticisms of the original. (Zosimus, as Photius, Bibl. Cod. 98, says, essentially copied out Eunapius rather than actually writing history himself.) Because Zosimus is so literal, we can be more certain of the overall contents of Eunapius’s work than of Dexippus or those other fragmentary authors who survive mainly in excerpts. This makes it possible to see the moralizing priggery and shrillness that are the hallmarks of the historian. No one – emperor, courtier, or otherwise – escapes a withering judgment. All are cowardly or envious or deceitful in various ways. Until Julian. The pagan emperor is, for Eunapius, an object of what can only be called devotion; he knew Julian’s companion, the doctor Oribasius of Pergamum, and used the latter’s notes on the emperor’s campaigns. The emperors that succeeded the pagan martyr come in for renewed scorn: Valens for his blindness and incompetence and Theodosius for what Eunapius regards as lamentable softness on the barbarian enemy. While this perspective underpins just about everything in the text, Eunapius and Zosimus’s witness to him serves to check the narrative of Ammianus where they overlap. Likewise, the survival of a text written so close to the events at Adrianople gives us a much better sense of the range of immediate reactions to that shattering Roman defeat.

  Along with Eunapius, a classicizing source probably contemporary to him had an outsized impact on the historical record while leaving only indirect evidence for its existence. There has long been a recognition that very late Byzantine universal breviaria like those of Zonaras (Banchich and Lane 2009) and Cedrenus preserve good information on the fourth century that confirms and supplements Ammianus and Eunapius but doesn’t seem to depend upon either of them, and that material on the third century in these late sources might potentially be just as valuable. The difficulty has always been threefold: The precise interconnection between the extant late Byzantine authors has never been properly worked out; there is every likelihood that, as with the Irish chronicle tradition, no clear stemma can be reconstructed because there is cross‐contamination among texts in each successive generation; and a suitably critical edition of most Byzantine texts has not yet been produced (this is changing, but our texts of George the Monk, Zonaras, Cedrenus, and Glycas remain deeply inadequate). That said, a careful study of Zonaras (Bleckmann 1992) seems to have demonstrated the existence of the long‐suspected common late antique source, despite lacking a fully probative display of manuscript collation and subsequent textual criticism. This source is generally called Leoquelle (after Leo Grammaticus, the traditional name of one of the texts that shows evidence of this source, though Leo has now been revealed as nothing more than a recension of Symeon the Logothete; Wahlgren 2006). It will have been written in good classicizing Greek, somewhere in the fourth‐century East. It ran parallel to both Dexippus and Eunapius, may or may not show familiarity with the latter’s history, and was certainly not identical with the work of either author. Where the narrative picked up is unclear (perhaps after Dio’s Romaiká petered out), but it ran down to Julian or Jovian. Despite vigorous, if also ludicrous, efforts to demonstrate that the Leoquelle was first composed in Latin and was, therefore, actually the lost Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus, there can be no question that the Leoquelle was Greek and that the content we can ascribe to it provides a genuine alternative to information found in Dexippus, Eunapius, and Ammianus. Unique information in the late Byzantine historians, or information shared by them in versions unfamiliar to the extant earlier sources, therefore needs careful evaluation on its own merits, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand as unusable because so late. That said, any systematic assessment of the good information preserved in Pseudo‐Symeon Logothetes, Zonaras, Cedrenus, and Glycas will have to await the publication of properly critical editions of those authors, only one of which (Wahlgren 2006) now exists.

  Apart from Eunapius and the Leoquelle, other third‐ or fourth‐century historians are revealed to us only in very exiguous fragments (Janiszewski 2006 covers most of them). To take one of the better examples, a Eusebius (FGrH 101) who has never been satisfactorily identified was the author of two substantial fragments pre
served in a Paris codex that deal with sieges in the Balkans and Gaul, though these events cannot be dated; whether they are the work of a Eusebius said by Evagrius Scholasticus (5.24) to have written a history from Augustus to Carus or of some other unattested Eusebius is unclear, but they reveal a classicizing author at home between the later third and later fourth centuries (Janiszewski 2006, pp. 54–77, with bibliography), very much in the same manner as the more broadly visible, if unidentifiable, Leoquelle.

  Dexippus, Eunapius, and, from what we can tell, their more shadowy analogues belong to a recognizable type of the later Second Sophistic. Though undoubtedly public figures with local careers in their contemporary world, they still moved in circles that fetishized the polis and its patriotism and that claimed as its heritage a pristine, if largely invented, Hellenism, prizing genres that stood in a direct and definable line with the practices of late Hellenistic predecessors. They were, in other words, the sorts of people whom Libanius laments leaving the schools of rhetoric for the schools of Roman law, their polis and its pride for Constantinople. The generation of Eunapius was the last in which such men would dominate the Greek literary scene, because their cultural centrality had greatly declined. In their place came new elites whose route to wealth, power, and prestige came from, and was sustained by, imperial service. While these new men could imitate and continue the stylistic mannerisms of the Hellenistic past, their outlook had changed dramatically, in keeping with their changed world. This meant that, by the fifth century, the sort of men who wrote history in Greek were little different from those who had long dominated the much poorer tradition of Latin historiography.

  As already noted, Latin historical writing on the grand scale seems to have stopped entirely with Tacitus. His rough contemporary L. Annaeus Florus pointed the alternative way forward with his epitome of Livy. From Florus on, this sort of breviarium was the most characteristic product of Latin historiography; if there was a living third‐century tradition of classicizing history, it has escaped us. (On the other hand, the consular Marius Maximus wrote biographies during the Severan period that were later sources of the Historia Augusta, and consularia did continue to be compiled during this period.) It is likely, if conjectural, that breviaria in the mode of Florus continued to be composed in the third century, but at some time in the middle of the fourth century, a breviarium by an unknown author emerged and had enormous significance for the future. Its existence was noticed and proven by Alexander Enmann in 1884 (whence it is known as the Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte, or EKG). The Kaisergeschichte itself is lost and probably did not long survive the fourth century, but its existence is proved irrefragably by a host of shared information and, crucially, shared errors among a variety of fourth‐ and fifth‐century authors (Eutropius, Aurelius Victor, the Historia Augusta, the Epitome de Caesaribus, Orosius, and so on). The success of Eutropius in particular rendered otiose the older Kaisergeschichte; hence its disappearance and our lack of information about its author.