A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Probably, though, he was a bureaucrat or civil servant in the fourth‐century administrative hierarchy, for that is the background of nearly every Latin historical writer of the period, including the breviarists Aurelius Victor and Eutropius. The former came from a petit bourgeois North African background and had risen through the civil bureaucracy until a timely decision to back Julian against Constantius II opened the position of consularis Pannoniae II to him, setting him on a career that would even win him an urban prefecture under Theodosius (Bird 1984, 1994). Eutropius was a contemporary of Victor, was from Gaul, and was perhaps of a slightly more elevated background. He served as magister epistularum, joined Julian’s campaigns, and then pursued a career in the East where he served under Valens and governed Asia as proconsul in 370 (Bird 1993).

  The two men had in common more than their career trajectories: They produced strikingly similar works, each of real though limited utility for modern historians. Victor’s Caesares is written in a convoluted, not to say tortured, syntax designed to show off the author’s intellectual attainments – a classic case of trying too hard. Running from the first emperor to the reign of Constantius II, it is particularly useful for the hints it gives of chronology in the otherwise poorly datable first half of the fourth century. Eutropius’s Breviarium, more popular than Victor’s because its Latin is astoundingly simple, became the most influential textbook of Roman history ever produced. Dedicated to the emperor Valens, it was just the sort of thing that the Pannonius subagrestis could have benefited from, with a lightly didactic tone that, nevertheless, whisks one from Romulus to the present in a hundred short pages. More elegant, though equally dependent on the Kaisergeschichte, is the so‐called Epitome de Caesaribus, a late fourth‐century production that may reveal traces of Greek influence in its Latin text. Like Victor’s and Eutropius’s works, it is an intermittently valuable witness to otherwise poorly attested emperors, though like them, its reliability is hard to control for. An Annales written by Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, Roman senator and reluctant rebel against Theodosius, is attested in two honorific inscriptions (CIL 6: 1782; 6: 1783 = ILS 2947–48) that record his career. Literally thousands of pages have been devoted to constructing out of this single inscribed line a magnificent work of genius that influenced every extant text of the fourth and fifth centuries, standing as a monument to the last pagans of Rome (e.g. Paschoud 2006; Ratti 2010; but Flavianus has since the late 1980s been a sort of patron deity of Paschoud’s revived Historia Augusta colloquia). Every positive argument adduced for this phantom work has been comprehensively exploded (Cameron 2010, pp. 627–690), but it is likely to haunt scholars for decades to come. If the epigraphically attested Annales were ever more than an aristocrat’s squib or feuilleton, they were most likely a breviary of the EKG/Victor/Eutropius variety, perhaps on Republican rather than imperial history.

  Towering over all these works, real and imagined, stands the figure of Ammianus Marcellinus, with Ambrose, Jerome, and the young Augustine the finest Latin prose writer of the century, and also the most eccentric. A balanced bilingual in Greek and Latin, he was nevertheless a Greek‐speaker by birth, from an Antiochene family well connected to either the civilian or military bureaucracy. Quondam miles et Graecus (“a Greek, once a soldier,” as he famously calls himself), he began a promising career as a protector domesticus, as did many other privileged young men of his generation. The scholae domesticorum served as a de facto officer training corps for the Constantinian empire, and no doubt it was there that Ammianus began to shape his knowledge of Roman history. In the scholae, young men of staggeringly diverse backgrounds (provincial gentry, Frankish princelings, exiled royals from Persia and the Caucasus, sons of illiterates who had prospered in the ranks and risen in the world) were provided a common set of references and a received narrative to orient them to the history of the world they would govern – like its dedicatee Valens, they would have found Eutropius most instructive. Ammianus, however, took his historical interests much further and developed as profound a knowledge of republican and imperial history as it was possible to acquire in the fourth century. In that lies one paradox of his Res Gestae, for though he often thought in Greek, and one struggles with his Latinity until the Greek substructure becomes clear, his whole framework of historical reference is Roman. His exempla, his moralizing, his arguments from analogy are all drawn from a Roman past, not a Greek one; and though in many places he seems to be arguing against political discourses current in the Greek world (both Eunapius and the consummate courtier Themistius are obvious targets), he attacks them with Roman weapons and disregards the polis‐land repertoire of contemporary sophists (Kelly 2008; Kulikowski 2012).

  But such inherent contradiction is not all that gives Ammianus his enduring appeal – his outlook on the empire is so beguiling that to escape it, once read, requires a conscious effort. Like Tacitus (and like Gibbon, who admired both authors), Ammianus searches for the human motivations that make history, mainly the discreditable ones – the mistakes, the venalities, the self‐regard that render this sublunary world so disappointing a place. As is not the case with Tacitus, it is possible to distinguish a theology of sorts in Ammianus’s pages, a genuine belief in the working, if not of gods, then of inexorable forces outside human control (Camus 1967, pp. 133–238; Meslin 1974; Rike 1987). Ammianus’s gods punish; they never reward. In all of this it is possible to see elements of the man’s own thwarted career, but the biographical fallacy is fatally easy to indulge in the case of Ammianus and we need to guard against practicing amateur psychology upon an author whose apparent self‐revelation is at times actively deceptive (cf., e.g. Matthews 1989 and Barnes 1998).

  The Res Gestae once began where Tacitus ended, at the death of Domitian. Whether the original composition was in 31 or 36 books (Barnes 1998), the first tranche of these had already disappeared when the grammarian Priscian was writing in the sixth century, and only the final 18 were extant, numbered 14 through 31 in the received tradition. These 18 books cover the years between 353 and 375/378, which suggests that Ammianus’s accounts of the second and third centuries must have been quite cursory (attempts to prove where the text assumed its present fullness are necessarily speculative and none has been successful). The extant text of book 14 picks up just as the usurper Magnentius has been defeated and the hideous agens in rebus Paul the Chain is charged with rooting out and chastising his supporters. Ammianus goes on to cover the disaster of the Caesar Gallus’s brief tenure of power, the supposed usurpation of Silvanus in Gaul (15.5), Constantius’s triumphal entry into Rome (16.10, a famous set‐piece), and the endless wars with Persia on the eastern front (18–19). In many of these events, Ammianus was a direct participant, and he inserts himself into the first‐person narrative with a vividness unique to Latin historians. Ammianus’s first hero is his commanding officer Ursicinus, and he goes to great lengths to whitewash his character, as in the assassination of Silvanus, and to present him as a victim of Constantius’s implacable suspicion; Ammianus can even portray a promotion as a deliberate slight (Thompson 1947, pp. 42–55). In Ammianus’s account of the eastern campaigns, his eyewitness perspective is peculiarly gripping, revealing both the efficiency of the Roman army and the banality of cruelty in its world. The description of the siege and fall of Amida in books 18 and 19 is perhaps the least stylized such account to survive from antiquity (Lenski 2007). But parallel to these eastern events, the main hero of the extant books is emerging in the shape of the Caesar Julian, the figure on whom Ammianus pinned his highest hopes and expectations. He sees his hero’s flaws, not least his addiction to ostentatious and otiose sacrifices and an impetuosity that could be as costly as it was magnificent, but he either fails to notice or does not mind the bitter malice that renders the emperor’s own writings such heavy going for a modern reader.

  The rest of the Res Gestae follows the emperor’s ill‐fated Persian invasion, and the military history of the Roman Empire could not be written as it nowadays is if
that account did not exist. Ammianus had at one point evidently decided to end his history there, with the emperor’s heroic if pointless death, the parlous extraction of the army from Persia, and the sad anticlimax of Jovian’s reign (Heather 1999), which the historian treats as a hollow sham. It was after the Persian campaign that he himself left the army. A pagan, perhaps even an apostate like his hero Julian (Barnes 1998), he may have felt his prospects limited after the accession of yet another Christian ruler, but even before that his career had not prospered as had other protectores of his generation: Two slightly older contemporaries, Jovian and Valentinian, had risen to the purple after all. Instead of active service, he traveled, collecting materials for his history, living for extended periods in Antioch and then in Rome. We do not know when he began writing, or where, but he altered his original plan to stop with Julian, perhaps in light of the grotesque hecatomb that was Adrianople. Books 26–30 lack the precision and control of the earlier sections, but they have the same power to shape the historical imagination and have duly done so: the thuggish but soldierly Valentinian, the thick‐witted paranoiac Valens, the improbable perfection of the elder Theodosius under whose son Ammianus was writing. Then, at the end, comes the monographic book 31, a fully rounded account of the circumstances that led to Adrianople, portrayed not as divine punishment but as a tragic train of human incompetencies (see Lenski 1997; Kulikowski 2012). The empire would recover, Ammianus says: It always had before. He himself died in the 390 s, possibly without putting the finishing touches on his history. Brilliant though it is, it found no audience, no continuators, no posterity. Ammianus was simply too difficult, and too subtle. With few models of his own, he served as a model for no one. Eutropius, by contrast, proliferated in a rich manuscript tradition and two separate Greek translations, all with a long future serving as a primer of Roman history that lasted right into the eighteenth century.

  With Ammianus, Latin historiography on a grand scale effectively comes to an end. The fragments of Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus and Sulpicius Alexander that are preserved in Gregory of Tours’s sixth‐century Historiae have some of the grandeur that we associate with the classicizing tradition, but they are too few and lack too much context to be reliably identified as belonging to it. What little fifth‐century history was produced in Latin was church history, much of it translation from the Greek or hypertrophied breviaria like Orosius’s Historiae. Sidonius explicitly disclaims any willingness to write a history of his times (a good thing – a lost history by Sidonius would generate a fantasist cottage industry à la Flavianus). By the time of Gregory of Tours, writing at the end of the first Merovingian century, the world had entirely changed and the bishop’s work was a strange hybrid alien to the developed late Latin genres. In the interim, Cassiodorus had produced both a consularia (which we can identify as his only because it is explicitly said to be) and a Gothic history, now lost. This latter was probably an overgrown breviarium, like the Getica that Jordanes wrote in Justinianic Constantinople after a brief consultation of Cassiodorus’s text (Christensen 2002). (Readers should beware prolific references in the scholarship to an Origo Gothica, whether it is attributed to Cassiodorus or not – it is a figment of germanisches Altertumskunde aiming to salvage some sort of primeval Gothic orality from Jordanes’s thoroughly Byzantine text.) Jordanes’s other work, a Romana, is little more than a reworked Eutropius, still more evidence that the breviarium is as characteristic a genre of late antiquity as the chronicle.

  The Constantinople in which Jordanes wrote was one of the few places in the East where writing in Latin made sense – the military of the era was still recruited in large measure from those parts of the Latin‐speaking Balkans that remained under imperial control, and by the 540 s there was a large cadre of Italian exiles awaiting the outcome of Justinian’s peninsular war. Elsewhere, though, the empire was becoming more and more Greek, Justinian’s novellae appearing in both languages and the law school at Berytus slipping as an unchallenged center of eastern Latinity. Jordanes was thus very much an exception, and eastern historiography, both secular and ecclesiastical, was predominantly and proudly Greek. But it was a changed historiography, the old classicizing form and manner surviving, but the matter becoming less stylized and more willing to acknowledge contemporary reality.

  Perhaps the best example of these changes is Olympiodorus of Thebes in Egypt (Matthews 1970; Blockley 1981, pp. 27–47; Gillett 1993). He is preserved in fragments by Photius, but because of his slightly rough‐hewn style and his willingness to use Latin loanwords, he was much less to the patriarch’s taste than was the polished, if hollow, prose of Eunapius. But Olympiodorus was used by the Nicene Constantinopolitan Church historian Sozomenos and the anti‐Nicene Philostorgius, and also by faithful Zosimus in his fifth and sixth books. As Zosimus did with Eunapius, he follows Olympiodorus so closely that the two years between the breaking off of the former and the start of the latter are simply missing from Zosimus’s history. According to Photius (Bibl. Cod. 80), Olympiodorus began his 22 books in the year 407 and carried it forward to 425, when Valentinian III and Galla Placidia were placed on the western throne with the backing of an eastern army, to which expedition Olympiodorus was an eyewitness. More or less by chance, his work became the last detailed account of western imperial affairs that we know to have existed. Olympiodorus has long been a favorite of modern scholars because of his precision, his experience as an ambassador of the imperial court, and his personal involvement in many of the events he describes, not least travels in various parts of the empire where other late ancient writers tended not to venture, like the Great Oasis and the land of the Blemmyes, a five‐day march into the desert from Philae (frags. 32; 35,2, Blockley 1983). The fact that he admits technical vocabulary and declines to operate in a half fictional polis‐land is another mark in his favor, as is the charming detail of the singing, dancing, and talking parrot who was his companion for twenty years (frag. 35,1, Blockley 1983). More difficult is knowing quite what attitude he took toward the politics of his time, and this is in large part a function of his fragmentary survival. An easterner, a representative of the eastern court no less, he might have been expected to take a triumphalist approach to the successful eastern mission to prop up the west. Certainly the fragments preserved by Photius suggest that perspective, but a reading of Philostorgius introduces very real doubt: The last episode in the latter’s account of the western expedition is not the triumphant ascent of the nobilissimus Valentinian to the rank of Augustus, but rather the arrival of the rogue general Aëtius with 60, 000 barbarian mercenaries and the bloody pitched battle they fought against the eastern army – with the result that Placidia compromised with the cynical warlord and brought him into the empire’s military hierarchy (frag. 43,2, Blockley 1983). Did Olympiodorus want his readers to welcome the triumphant success of the imperial restoration? Or did he want to foreshadow the decades of violence that Aëtius and his rivals inflicted on the western empire? Was he hailing an ordo renascendi or was he reminding us it would all be in vain? In the fragmentary state of the evidence, there is no way of telling, an illustration of the sorts of difficulties we face with such sources.

  Later fifth‐century historians like Priscus of Panium (Blockley 1981, pp. 48–70) continued as much in the vein of Olympiodorus as in the older sophistic tradition. Priscus, who famously served on the embassy of Maximus to Attila’s court in 448, wrote a history in eight books about eastern affairs, though whether this was organized along the lines of a classicizing history or of a monographic account of the Hunnic wars is unclear. Unknown to Photius, he is instead preserved in large chunks by the Constantinian Excerpta, so we have to fall back on the Suda and the excerpts themselves for our understanding of the author. What they reveal is a figure after the Olympiodoran model, a rhetorician of skill who was nevertheless concerned to give verisimilitude rather than idealized classicism to his evidence. Certainly he is a more interesting writer than Malchus of Philadelphia (Blockley 1981, pp. 7
1–85), author of seven books of imperial history from Leo I’s death to the deaths of Julius Nepos and Zeno, though Malchus is highly esteemed by Photius for the elegance and clarity of his style. Malchus’s contemporary Candidus (Blockley 1983, pp. 464–473), an Isaurian historian under Anastasius, wrote an account of the reigns of Leo and Zeno, of which Photius gives a quite hostile account, approving only the author’s piety, not his style or historical skills.

  With Candidus and Malchus we move to the sixth century, where everything inevitably lies in the shadow of Procopius (Cameron 1985; Kaldellis 2004). This is not an unmixed blessing, as the vast bulk of the Justinianic writer distracts from the sometimes more interesting productions of Menander, Agathias, and Theophylact. That said, all these authors reflect, not merely the disappearance of the old sophistic model of history writing, but also an increasingly evident transition to a post‐Classical, medieval worldview. This manifests itself chiefly in the way that exotic and digressive matters are introduced to the story. Whereas the classicizing traditions of Ammianus and the fragmentary Greek authors at whom we have been looking turned to formal excursus as a way of including learned asides or technical discussion, Procopius tends to bury the same sort of material in folkloric guise. Thus Ammianus (18.7.4–5) might have an excursus on lions triggered by the geography of the Tigris valley, but he sets it off as a digression and alters his tone into that of the learned schoolroom. Procopius, by contrast, loads his digressions with stock motifs and folkloric topoi: In narrating the death of the shah Peroz in battle against the Hephthalites (Bella 1.4.1429), he introduces a sort of shaggy‐dog story about a great pearl beloved by, and lost with, the Persian king and then gives us the history of the pearl and an improbable tale of oysters and sharks. This reliance on folkloric motifs is something that we find also in the church histories of the period, and in the hypertrophied breviarium composed in Antioch by John Malalas at roughly this same time (Jeffreys, Croke, and Scott 1990; Meier, Radtki, and Schulz 2016).