SOURCE: Barnes, Timothy D. “The Impartial Historian” and “Reality and Its Representation.” In Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality, pp. 1-19. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Barnes explores how reliable Ammianus is as an historian and discusses the divergent critical evaluations of his work.]

At the close of his history, Ammianus Marcellinus described himself as “a soldier and a Greek” (31.16.9). He was born about 330 into the local aristocracy of one of the cities of Roman Syria or Phoenicia, and his father was probably a career soldier who rose to a position of some importance in the reign of the emperor Constantius, who ruled the East from 337 to 361 (Chapter VI). Ammianus entered the Roman army as an officer in an élite corps around 350 and first appears in his narrative as extant in the year 354 (14.9.1, 11.5). It is not known how long he served beyond 359, when he disappears from his narrative after escaping from Amida when the Persian king took it by storm and returning safely to Antioch (19.8.5-12).

Ammianus reappears in his narrative in 363, when his use of the first-person plural indicates that he joined Julian's expedition into Persia at Circesium (23.5.7, cf. 6.30) and returned to Antioch with the defeated Roman army after its failure (25.10.1: Antiochiam venimus). After 363, however, Ammianus disappears from his narrative completely, except for isolated first-person statements that reveal that he was residing in or near Antioch in 372, no longer a soldier (29.1.24, 2.4), and a remark that implies that he was still there in 378 (31.1.2).

Subsequently, Ammianus traveled in Greece, where he saw a ship carried almost two miles inland near Mothone in Laconia by the tsunami of 21 July 365 (26.10.19), saw at least part of the coasts of Thrace and the Black Sea (22.8.1, 27.4.2), and probably traversed the Balkans, seeing the bones of Romans and Goths killed in fighting near Marcianople in the autumn of 377 (31.7.16).¹ He had also toured Egypt (17.4.6, 22.15.1) before he came to Rome, probably shortly after 380. There, it is plausibly inferred from the bitterness with which he refers to the event (14.6.19), he had the misfortune to be expelled as a foreigner during a food shortage, probably in 384 on the orders of Symmachus as praefectus urbi.²

Ammianus was a Greek, his native language was Greek, and he thought in Greek (Chapter VII). Yet he wrote a history on an enormous scale in Latin, which covered a period of almost three centuries, from the accession of the emperor Nerva in 96 to the disastrous Battle of Adrianople on 9 August 378 and its immediate aftermath, probably in a total of thirty-six books (Chapter III). Only the second half of the Res Gestae has survived. The extant part begins in the middle of the historian's account of the activities of the two emperors during the campaigning season of 353 (14.1.1), and it occupies six hundred pages in modern critical editions. It is by far our fullest, most precise and most reliable narrative source for military campaigns and political events at the imperial court in the fourth century.³ Hence Ammianus has inevitably provided the basis for all modern narrative accounts of the period from 353 to 378. He has also pervasively influenced all modern interpretations of the period, including those by innovative historians who refuse to give narrative sources their traditional privileged position.⁴

Ammianus' history is thus fundamental to modern understanding and interpretation of the fourth century. All the more necessary, therefore, to investigate its strengths and weaknesses, its biases, its literary quality—in short, to ask how Ammianus depicts a period that is usually seen through his eyes. Ammianus has traditionally been regarded as belonging to the select canon of great historians who have penned reliable and impartial histories of their own times. Edward Gibbon included in his “vindication” of the last two chapters of the first volume of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which analyzed the development of Christianity down to the early fourth century in a manner that offended many of his Christian contemporaries, an assessment of the “character and credit” of the ecclesiastical historian Eusebius of Caesarea, whom he disparaged and compared unfavorably with Ammianus, and three early modern historians whom he greatly admired:

Since the origin of Theological Factions, some historians, Ammianus Marcellinus, Fra-Paolo, Thuanus, Hume, and perhaps a few others, have deserved the singular praise of holding the balance with a steady and equal hand. Independent and unconnected, they contemplated with the same indifference, the opinions and interests of the contending parties; or, if they were seriously attached to a particular system, they were armed with a firm and moderate temper, which enabled them to suppress their affections, and to sacrifice their resentments. In this small, but venerable Synod of historians, Eusebius cannot claim a seat.⁵

The three “independent and unconnected” historians whom Gibbon names with Ammianus reflect his own interests and predilections—and one of them conspicuously lacks the qualities for which Gibbon commended him.

Gibbon had praised de Thou as “a moderate philosopher” in his second commonplace book in the early 1770s.⁶ Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was a moderate Catholic who supported political accommodation with protestants and was one of the drafters of the Edict of Nantes in 1598 granting toleration to the Huguenots. His History of His Time, which covers the period from 1543 to the early seventeenth century and was frequently reprinted in French and English after its original publication in Latin in Paris between 1604 and 1620, was placed on the index of forbidden books by the Spanish Inquisition.⁷

David Hume (1711-1776) was a friend whom Gibbon admired deeply both as a philosopher and a historian.⁸ His History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, first published in three separate pairs of volumes between 1745 and 1762, commended itself to Gibbon by both its Tory standpoint and its distinguished style, which enabled it to remain a standard work for more than a century,⁹ and Gibbon alluded to Hume as a preeminent Scotsman in terms that tempted a modern historian of Rome to indulge in a rare moment of self-revelation.¹⁰

Pietro Sarpi (1552-1623) is a very different character. He was a servite friar who enjoyed the protection of the city of Venice in political battles against contemporary popes: he wrote about the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century with passion, not detachment, and no one now would seriously claim any degree of objectivity for his Istoria del concilio tridentino, which was first published in London in 1619 under the anagrammatical pseudonym Pietro Soave Polano and “represent[s] the Council of Trent as being solely a conspiracy against reform of the church.”¹¹ Gibbon read Sarpi in his youth: his early commonplace book of 1755 commends him as “one of the most learned men of his time.”¹² In the first volume of Decline and Fall, Gibbon adduced a rescript of Diocletian (without giving the relevant reference to the Codex Justinianus) “on the respectable authority of Fra-Paolo” and praised him most warmly as “in learning and moderation … not inferior to Grotius.”¹³ And in the penultimate chapter of his sixth volume he delivered a final and highly commendatory verdict: Sarpi was a “worthy successor” of the “noblest historians,” the Florentines Guicciardini and Machiavelli, and this trio, together with Davila, “were justly esteemed the first historians of modern languages, till, in the present age, Scotland arose to dispute the prize with Italy herself.”¹⁴

Literary taste and intellectual fashions have changed greatly since Gibbon's day. Although his Historia delle guerre civili in Francia, published in Venice in 1630, went through some two hundred printings in several European languages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Enrico Caterino Davila (1576-1631) is today completely forgotten. Hume's philosophical works are still read with profit, but not his history of England; de Thou is generally ignored, except by historians with a professional interest in the sixteenth century;¹⁵ and Sarpi's voluminous tomes remain unopened even by those who proclaim his supreme importance as an intellectual figure.¹⁶

Gibbon's library contained two copies of Hume's history and the historical works of Sarpi and de Thou in both French and their original language of publication (Italian and Latin, respectively).¹⁷ He had naturally read Ammianus long before he penned his Vindication, but at the time of its composition he was already at work on the next installment of his history, whose second volume draws heavily on the Res Gestae.¹⁸ Gibbon pays Ammianus a series of fulsome tributes that, although justly both famous and familiar, will bear yet another repetition. For they show how little the prevailing estimate of Ammianus changed during the next two centuries. When Gibbon considered the ecclesiastical politics of the reign of Constantius, he gave Ammianus a privileged position as an unbiased witness:

The sentiments of a judicious stranger who has impartially considered the progress of civil or ecclesiastical discord are always entitled to our notice; and a short passage of Ammianus, who served in the armies, and studied the character, of Constantius, is perhaps of more value than many pages of theological invectives.¹⁹

When he came to Julian, Gibbon appealed to “the unexceptionable testimony of Ammianus Marcellinus” and commended the intrinsic value of his account of the reign both in general and in particular:

The philosophic soldier, who loved the virtues without adopting the prejudices of his master, has recorded, in his judicious and candid history of his own times, the extraordinary obstacles which interrupted the restoration of the Temple of Jerusalem.²⁰

And when he reached the accession of Theodosius, he bade Ammianus an emphatic and moving farewell:

It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary.²¹

Gibbon was not blind to the subjective and personal elements in Ammianus: he noted “the sarcasm of an impartial historian” and argued that in the two angry digressions on the city of Rome “the judicious reader” would “perhaps detect the latent prejudices and personal resentments which soured the temper of Ammianus himself.”²² Gibbon sensed that there was an apparent contradiction between the impartiality of historical judgment that he prized so highly and the often emotional style of the historian, but he made a rigid distinction between the content of Ammianus' work and his manner of presentation: “The sincerity of Ammianus would not suffer him to misrepresent facts or characters, but his love of ambitious ornaments frequently betrayed him into an unnatural vehemence of expression.”²³ Leading Roman historians and Latin scholars in Wilhelmine Germany wrote in virtually identical terms. Otto Seeck declared Ammianus to be cool and unbiased in his judgments, unmoved by the religious conflicts of his time, a pagan whose beliefs were purely theoretical, not a living creed.²⁴ Hermann Peter contrasted the “rhetorical whitewashing” of Ammianus' account of Julian's victory at Strasbourg with “the calm and moderation which constitute the main feature of his being.”²⁵

Gibbon's high estimate of Ammianus as an impartial historian has continued to be shared and repeated by most who have written about both the historian and the Roman Empire in the fourth century until very recently: Hugo Jones, for example, saluted him as “a great historian, a man of penetrating intelligence and of remarkable fairness.”²⁶ One of the most lucid and precise statements of this traditional view can be found in M. L. W. Laistner's Sather Lectures of 1947, whose intelligent chapter on Ammianus remains worth reading and pondering. Laistner picked out “conspicuous fairmindedness” as Ammianus' salient characteristic and pronounced that, apart from a general and undisguised dislike of Germans, he displays an obvious bias on only two matters:

One of these is the description of Roman society, which is a kind of satire inspired by a long-established literary tradition and perhaps by the rigors of his earlier life; the other is a bitter outburst near the end of his work against the whole tribe of lawyers. Was this invective … inspired merely by certain general notions aroused by observing frequent malpractices in the administration of justice? It may be so, but it is tempting to imagine that behind his vitriolic bitterness lay some personal experience of having been bested by a smart attorney.

With his sensitivity to Latin, Laistner recognized the tendentious nature of Ammianus' excursus on Rome and lawyers (14.6.2-26; 28.4.6-35; 30.4.3-22), and Ammianus himself confesses his personal animosity against lawyers when he refers to the indignity that he had suffered at their hands in the East (30.4.4: super eius indignitate … quam in illis partibus agens expertus sum). Nevertheless, Laistner accepted the prevailing scholarly estimate of the quality of Ammianus' narrative without enquiring whether personal animus, concealed in apparently judicious language rather than openly avowed, could be a pervasive feature of his work.²⁷

Gibbon's favorable assessment of Ammianus has recently received a full and able restatement in John Matthews' large book of 1989, which conveys its main message in its very title. The Roman Empire of Ammianus argues both that the historian depicted the society in which he lived fairly and accurately and that the Roman Empire of the second half of the fourth century really was as Ammianus depicts it:

It will be obvious that he is a wonderfully eloquent witness of almost every aspect of the life and society of his times. In breadth of interest, wealth of circumstantial detail and power of observation, he rivals any other Greek or Roman historian known to us from any period, and outclasses most. As contemporary historians, only Thucydides and possibly Polybius have any prior claim to our admiration, and Ammianus' world is so much vaster, its political structures more forbidding, and its cultural complexity far greater than theirs: all seen with the observant eye of an individual fascinated by all forms of human conduct, a still living challenge to the modern historian of his age.²⁸

Moreover, a subsequent essay by Matthews defends the accuracy of Ammianus' excursus on lawyers, which Laistner diagnosed as the product of personal resentment: it argues that the historian described “the real world” in which he lived, that “his accounts of it are full of precisely observed detail, which often occur when the rhetoric is most intense,” and that the rhetorical aspects of his narrative method should not be overrated in relation to the circumstantial.²⁹ Thus, although Matthews concedes the force of Ammianus' rhetoric, he consistently emphasizes the “precisely observed detail” over the possibility that such details may be subservient to rhetoric and prejudice.

The traditional estimate of Ammianus that has held sway from Gibbon to Matthews confronts the obvious problem that this supposedly impartial and dispassionate historian writes with unusual violence and ferocity. How can a method of expression that so often distorts and contorts the phrase, the sentence, even the paragraph, be reconciled with Ammianus' postulated serenity of historical judgment? Appeal has naturally been made to modern artistic and literary analogies. Jacques Fontaine depicted Ammianus as a “romantic historian” comparable to Chateaubriand, while simultaneously arguing that the subjective and emotional elements in his text reflect the world in which he lived, and hence do not impair the lucidity, equanimity or detachment of his historical judgments.³⁰ But that is to treat the contradiction as if it were unimportant and to avoid rather than to solve a real problem.

When Sir Ronald Syme came to Ammianus at the age of sixty as a result of his newly discovered interest in the Historia Augusta, he immediately and instinctively recognized the problem:

At the outset an historian proclaims that he will tell the truth. What else was he to say? The profession belongs to standard convention. …

With Ammianus the thing is not a mere convention. Rather an obsession and a passion. It is insistent and pervasive. Truth and honesty will not be found in the court and the councils of the Caesars. …

Ammianus was a truthful man. His portrayal of Julian verges on panegyric, but conveys pertinent criticism and permits a balanced estimate. Elsewhere he is dominated by a number of prejudices. He has nothing good to report of the lower classes, for example. In general, emotion (of the more honourable sort), the importance of the theme, and the style he has elected impel him to exaggeration. That has happened to other historians.

The History (as extant) depends largely on his own experience and meditation: the memoirs of an old soldier developed, adorned, and reinforced by other information. … His own testimony is firm, valid and not to be discounted.³¹

Syme's analysis, although explicitly reasserting the traditional estimate of Ammianus as an impartial historian, also consciously subverts it. For Syme sees distortion not merely in a handful of passages and in Ammianus' confessed predilection for Julian, but as a pervasive and characteristic feature of the Res Gestae: although Syme's Ammianus was at heart “a truthful man,” he is nevertheless “dominated by a number of prejudices,” and he habitually exaggerates under the influence of emotion, theme, and style.

Some years after Syme wrote, the traditional assessment of Ammianus was subverted in another, even more troublesome, fashion. Tony Woodman adduced the third of the brief paragraphs quoted from Syme to redeem the reputation of Velleius Paterculus, whose history, dedicated to M. Vinicius during his consulate in a.d. 30, has usually been regarded as sycophantic and mendacious. Specifically, Woodman claimed that Syme's verdict on Ammianus “could with equal justice be applied to the Tiberian portion of Velleius' narrative.”³² Syme immediately protested against this revaluation of Velleius, for the obligation to produce panegyric does not excuse mindless repetition of the official version of events when it is patently false—and Velleius' language reflects the propaganda and rhetoric of the government of Tiberius while Sejanus was his chief minister.³³ As concerns Ammianus, the parallel is valid in at least one particular. Ammianus' loyalty to and partiality for his old commander Ursicinus inevitably recalls that of Velleius for his old commander-in-chief Tiberius.³⁴ Hence Woodman's misguided attempt to rescue the reputation of Velleius as a historian indirectly impugns that of Ammianus. The comparison of the two writers poses an awkward and unavoidable question: can the traditional estimate of Ammianus withstand scrutiny in the light of modern techniques of both historical research and literary criticism? It has in fact begun to crumble. Half a century ago, a classic of modern literary criticism offered a fundamental reassessment of Ammianus, which most historians of Late Antiquity have been strangely reluctant to apply consistently to the evaluation of his narrative.³⁵

.....

Erich Auerbach published his classic study Mimesis in 1946, and it was superbly translated into English by Willard Trask in 1953.³⁶ Unfortunately, Trask rendered Auerbach's subtitle in a way that has unintentionally misled many readers and some critics. What is rendered into English as The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is subtly, but significantly, different from Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Whereas the original German means “reality (as) represented in western literature” with emphasis on the first noun, the English version replaces the noun qualified by a participial adjective by two nouns and thus shifts the emphasis from “reality” to its “representation.” It is mistaken, therefore, to criticize Auerbach as if his book were exclusively a work of literary criticism.³⁷ On the contrary, as Rene Wellek noted in an important and influential review, Auerbach always moves beyond the analysis of style “to reflections on the attitude of a writer toward reality and his technique of reproducing it” and thence to “reflections about periods and cultures, social conditions and assumptions,” so that his book “can be viewed as a short history of the human condition.”³⁸ For it is a study of the development of Western culture from its twin roots in Homer and the Old Testament to the twentieth-century novel.

As is natural with a work of genius and profound originality, Mimesis was seriously misrepresented by reviewers and commentators. Ernst Curtius, for example, appealed to Otto Regenbogen for the proposition that one of Auerbach's two main theses was that only modern realism broke through the ancient doctrine of the three styles,³⁹ even though Auerbach had expressely asserted that “the rule of differentiated styles cannot possibly apply” to the account of Peter's denial of Christ in the Gospel according to Mark, since the depiction is “entirely realistic” and the mingling of styles “was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature.”⁴⁰ When Auerbach penned a dignified reply to Curtius, he not only corrected his critic's misapprehension about his view of stylistic doctrines, but also explained the nature of his book: his method (he asserted) was not sociological; what he had offered was an interpretative essay written by a particular individual in a particular situation at a particular date.⁴¹

Ammianus' history, too, was written by a particular individual in a particular situation at a particular date, but it also claims to describe the world in which he lived. From Ammianus, Auerbach selected for discussion an episode in Book XV, which he thereby made famous.⁴² In his review of the English translation of Mimesis, Wellek commended Auerbach for selecting passages “known to only a few specialists” and posed a question that was obviously not intended to be rhetorical when he asked “Who has read the gruesome story of the arrest of Peter Valvomeres in Ammianus Marcellinus?”⁴³ Ammianus' account of the arrest of Peter Valvomeres (15.7.4-5) provides both the title and the starting point of the third chapter of Auerbach's book. In his discussion of this episode, as throughout Mimesis, Auerbach combines literary criticism with general verdicts about the temper of the age:

The incident is so treated that it produces a strongly sensory impression—to such an extent in fact that many readers will feel it unpleasantly realistic. Ammianus has oriented it entirely towards gestures: the compact crowd set against the imposing prefect as he domineers over them. This element of the sensory and the gestural is prepared for from the first—through the choice of words and similes …—and reaches its climax in the scene at the Septemzodium when Leontius, sitting in his carriage with flashing eyes confronts the “snakily” hissing mob like an animal tamer, unmoved as they rapidly vanish. A riot, a solitary man trying to quell it by the power of his eyes, then stepping in—some harsh words, a ringleader's muscular body raised high, finally a flogging. Then all is quiet, and, by way of conclusion, we get a rape and the subsequent capital punishment.

For Auerbach, the world of Ammianus is a grim world, and the historian himself a profound pessimist:

Everywhere human emotion and rationality yield to the magically and somberly sensory, to the graphic and the gestural. …

Ammianus' world is somber: it is full of superstition, blood frenzy, exhaustion, fear of death, and grim and magically rigid gestures; and to counterbalance all this there is nothing but the equally somber and pathetic determination to accomplish an ever more difficult, ever more desperate task: to protect the Empire, threatened from without and crumbling within. …

With glittering words and pompously distorted constructions language begins to depict the distorted, gory, and spectral reality of the age. …

Grotesque and sadistic, spectral and superstitious, lusting for power yet constantly trying to conceal the chattering of their teeth—so do we see the men of Ammianus' ruling class and their world. …

Judged by classical standards, the style, both in diction and syntax, is overrefined and exaggeratedly sensory; its effects are powerful, but distorted. Its effects are as distorted as the reality it represents. Ammianus' world is very often a caricature of the normal human environment in which we live; very often it is like a bad dream. … Striking only in the sensory, resigned and as it were paralyzed despite its stubborn rhetorical passion, his manner of writing history nowhere displays anything redeeming, nowhere anything that points to a better future, nowhere a figure or an act about which stirs the refreshing atmosphere of a greater freedom, a greater humanity.⁴⁴

This analysis contains an inherent contradiction. Does Ammianus' style faithfully reflect the world that he describes? Or does it turn it into a “bad dream” that caricatures and distorts it? Auerbach appears to assert both these mutually incompatible propositions. What is “the normal human environment in which we live”? Is Auerbach's “we” here the human race in general or modern western men and women? It is necessary to distinguish between the literary analyses in Mimesis and its historical interpretations.

John Matthews has already drawn this distinction in a paper with the programmatic title “Peter Valvomeres, Re-arrested.”⁴⁵ Matthews accuses Auerbach of being evasive and scores easy points against some of the historical assumptions that underlie his literary observations, particularly against Auerbach's claim that Ammianus fails adequately to indicate the social and historical context of the riot that the prefect Leontius suppressed. Yet, like most who have recently written about Ammianus, Matthews accepts the central contention of Auerbach's analysis—that “the prime quality of the passage is the pictorial imagery.” Nor does Matthews reject Auerbach's diagnosis of the relation between Ammianus' text and the historical reality that it depicts. For Matthews argues that Ammianus' emphasis on pictorial effect and gesture corresponds to central aspects of public life in Late Antiquity: hence, where Auerbach emphasizes the elements of unreality and distortion, Matthews contends that in the fourth century both reality and social relations “conform to a theatrical mode of expression.”⁴⁶ In this attempt to establish that “reality and social relations” conformed to “a theatrical mode of expression” in the fourth century, however, Matthews blurs an important distinction that Auerbach had emphatically asserted. Auerbach acknowledged that Ammianus resembled Tacitus in certain ways, but he saw a fundamental difference between both the historical reality and its representation in the two historians: “a comparison with Tacitus (he wrote) serves to show how much stronger the magical and the sensory has become at the expense of the objectively rational.”⁴⁷ For Matthews, in contrast, the similarities outweight the differences. In his hands, Ammianus' representation of reality becomes dramatic in the sense of depicting historical action in the manner of a tragedy, as Tacitus does. For Matthews, the arrest of Peter Valvomeres, like other episodes in Ammianus, “is presented almost like a scene from a play, the contrasting emotions and postures of the sides preparing for the dialogue between the central characters.” Matthews sees dramatic action in Ammianus, not merely dramatic tableaux: “the urban prefect Leontius approaches the rioting crowd almost as if in a crowd scene from a Shakespearean play, addressing the mob leader man to man, in a confrontation of startling intimacy.”⁴⁸

The Shakespearean analogy is deeply misleading. It confuses two distinct senses of the word theatrical—and it ignores the profound differences between what could be seen on the dramatic stage in Tacitus' day and in the fourth century.⁴⁹ If Tacitus and Ammianus are both “theatrical,” they are so in two very different ways (Chapter XV). Ammianus focuses not on the development of plot or the internal attitudes, emotions, and motives of the historical actors, as Tacitus does, but on the visual aspects of the historical drama, and he presents the drama itself not as a developing plot, but as a series of dramatic tableaux, that are discontinuous even when they succeed one another closely.⁵⁰

Like contemporary poets, Ammianus practices what Michael Roberts has called “the jeweled style.”⁵¹ The analysis that Roberts gives of Ammianus' famous description of Constantius' triumphal entry into Rome in 357 (16.10.4-12) can be applied to many scenes in his work, including the arrest of Peter Valvomeres: “the effect is of a series of brilliantly eye-catching but discrete visual impressions, which in part by their very brilliance deter the viewer from attempting to piece together the individual scenes into a coherently ordered whole.”⁵² If this analysis of Ammianus' method of presenting reality and historical events is correct, it raises the question of how far this stylization has distorted his depiction of historical reality. For such stylization must operate at the unconscious and semiconscious levels as well as the conscious. The historian's representation of reality cannot be, as Gibbon asserted, merely a matter of surface rhetoric. Nor may it simply be assumed that his distorted style and presentation faithfully reflect an unpleasant and distorted historical reality. Auerbach made that assumption, and it could be correct, but such an assumption needs to be proved before being made the basis of either a historical or a literary interpretation.

Do the findings of historical research confirm Ammianus' essential veracity or call it into doubt? Much recent work on both Ammianus and the fourth century either delivers or implies a negative verdict on one whom Arnaldo Momigliano characterized as “the lonely historian,”⁵³ a designation that subtly emphasizes the disjunction between the historian and the world he depicts.

Edward Thompson's slim volume of 1947 marked a watershed in historians' approaches to Ammianus. Although Thompson reiterated that “the general accuracy of Ammianus' monumental work even in matters of the minutest detail cannot seriously be called in question,”⁵⁴ he demonstrated how unfair in general, and how misleading and even inaccurate in detail, is Ammianus' account of the actions and policies of the emperor Constantius. Thompson's specific arguments were too often a priori and too often based on unexamined assumptions, yet he established two central facts about the Res Gestae beyond all reasonable doubt. The first was that Ammianus' account of Constantius' court and military policies is colored by his admiration for his commanding officer and friend Ursicinus.⁵⁵ Thompson showed that there is good reason to believe that Ammianus has exaggerated the merits of Ursicinus and that sympathy for the general after he was dismissed as magister militum led the historian to his hostile view of the emperor, which was then strongly reinforced by his admiration for Julian, whose propaganda against Constantius he sometimes repeats.

Second, as a Marxist and a Communist, Thompson was sensitive to Ammianus' class bias. Thompson recognized a textbook bourgeois when he read one. He did not invent the idea that the historian was a curialis by legal origin and status: Wilhelm Ensslin had already argued in 1923 that curial status helps to explain Ammianus attitudes and Weltanschauung.⁵⁶ But Thompson detected the attitudes of a curialis in so many passages that it seemed impossible any longer to doubt that Ammianus belonged to the “upper middle class,” the curial class that was both “oppressed and oppressive,” and that his status as a curialis provided a basis for understanding both his career and much in his history.⁵⁷

The task of reassessing the quality of Ammianus as a historian has subsequently been prosecuted with vigor by several scholars with very different approaches.⁵⁸ Yet not all such enquiries have applied the relentless logic that such a reevaluation requires. In the 1970s, although Roger Blockley produced both a monograph on the historiography and political thought of Ammianus and a series of articles in which he consistently called the historian's factual accuracy into question, he too often appealed to Ammianus' political and moral assumptions or invoked the copying of rhetorical models as omnibus explanations for postulated distortion rather than employing all the available evidence to prove specific inaccuracies, unfair bias, or the suppression of relevant facts.⁵⁹ Moreover, despite the implications of his arguments about individual episodes, Blockley paradoxically reaffirmed the traditional general estimate of Ammianus as a sincere and honest historian, “faithful to the truth.”⁶⁰

Some recent assessments of Ammianus have been markedly more critical. In 1979, Chantal Vogler published an analysis of the administration of Constantius in which she was perforce compelled to evaluate the main sources for his reign: she stigmatized Ammianus' account of Constantius' dealings with his Caesars as a mass of subjective impressions requiring correction because the historian was carried away by his sympathies for Julian, and she observed that “historical truth does not always win.”⁶¹ In a monograph on Ammianus published in 1983, Thomas Elliott correctly identified some cases of gross distortion, although he formulated his case too brusquely and sometimes too carelessly to convince others that he was right.⁶² In particular, the thesis argued by Elliott (following Salvatore D'Elia)⁶³ that Ammianus is a pagan apologist who treats Christianity unfairly was answered by David Hunt in an article that was hailed as a definitive refutation⁶⁴—prematurely, since its central arguments are demonstrably fallacious.⁶⁵

Most recently, John Drinkwater has called the historian's bluff over his account of the alleged rebellion of Silvanus, which he helped to suppress (15.5.15-34).⁶⁶ Although Ammianus' account of this “reluctant usurper” has always been accepted largely at face value,⁶⁷ there are strong grounds for scepticism. Admittedly, it very quickly came to be accepted that Silvanus proclaimed himself Augustus at Cologne (15.5.16) and reigned for twenty-eight days.⁶⁸ But the alleged usurpation leaves no trace whatever in the Roman imperial coinage of nearby Trier.⁶⁹ Hence Silvanus never minted coins in his name. That fact implies that in reality he never laid claim to the imperial power: paradoxically, once that is granted, most of Ammianus' account of the suppression of Silvanus becomes more (not less) plausible.⁷⁰

The time is thus ripe for a systematic investigation of the structure, nature, and quality of Ammianus' Res Gestae, which combines literary and historical approaches. In the chapters that follow, the formal structure of the Res Gestae and its arrangement of material are laid out (Chapters III-V). Next, the historian's origin, social status, culture, and attitudes are investigated (Chapters VI-IX). Third, Ammianus' presentation of both the main historical actors and several supporting characters in the period for which the history is extant are assessed (Chapters X-XIII). Then it is asked how Ammianus interpreted the whole sweep of Roman history and what he expected of the future (Chapter XIV). In conclusion, Ammianus is compared briefly with two other great historians: Tacitus, whom he had read and whom he imitated in various ways, and Macaulay, who uncannily resembles him as a historian (Chapter XV). The aim is to provide a companion to Ammianus on the model of Sir Charles Firth's classic companion to Macaulay's History of England, which concentrated on the modern historian's fundamental historical beliefs and his manner of depicting persons and events.⁷¹

Notes

1. The precise location seems to be uncertain: Wanke, Gotenkriege (1990), 157-60.

2. Alan Cameron, JRS [Journal of Roman Studies] 54 (1964), 28. The expulsion of peregrini from Rome is explicitly attested in 384: Symmachus, Ep. 2.7; Ambrose, De Officiis 3.7.47-51, cf. J.-R. Palanque, REA [Revue des Etudes Anciennes] 33 (1931), 349-52, 355, who points out that a similar expulsion is not documented during any of the other known food shortages of the late fourth century. Ammianus complains that, while the practitioners of the liberal arts, though very few in number, were all expelled, the fans and pretended fans of mimae were allowed to remain, together with 3,000 dancing girls, their accompanying choruses, and their trainers (14.6.19).

3. For a full appreciation of the scope and virtues of Ammianus' narrative, see Matthews, Ammianus (1989), 33-228.

4. See, recently, Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, a.d. 284-430 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), esp. 19-21, 73-74, 85-89, 133-37. Much greater independence of Ammianus is shown by Peter Brown, whose classic World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971) seems to mention him only twice and very briefly (115, 120).

5. E. Gibbon, A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1779), 110-11; The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. P. A. Craddock (Oxford, 1972), 299.

6. English Essays (1972), 203.

7. The multifarious editions of the History are catalogued by S. Kinser, The Works of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (The Hague, 1996), 6-78.

8. Decline and Fall, 7.308, n. 101 (B) = 3.1057, n. 89 (W) (quoted at n. 14). See also 1.255, n. 90 (B) = 1.251, n. 86 (W); English Essays, 338 (I, 2: “Mr. Hume told me,” etc.). References to Gibbon's Decline and Fall are given by volume and page numbers in both the 1926-1929 reprint of J. B. Bury's “revised library edition” in seven volumes, which is often styled the second edition (London, 1909-1914) (B), and the critical edition in three volumes by David Womersley (London, 1994) (W).

9. See, for example, the appreciative notice by Leslie Stephen, Dictionary of National Biography 10 (London, 1921 [1892]), 215-26.

10. Syme, Ammianus (1968), 22. n. 3, quoting Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 3.47 (B) = 1.1001 (W): “Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas, and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.”

11. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church² (Oxford, 1974), 1236-37, cf. H. Jedin, Der Quellenapparat der Konzilgeschichte Pallavicinos: Das Papstum und die Wiederlegung Sarpis im Lichte neuerschlossener Archivalien (Rome, 1940); Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 2 (Freiburg, 1957), 441-44.

12. English Essays (1972), 23-24.

13. Decline and Fall, 2.52, n. 139 (B) = 1.492, n. 137 (W); 2.148, n. 187 (B) = 1.580, n. 186 (W): the first quotation is taken from Gibbon, Vindication (1779), 12-13 = English Essays (1972), 238.

14. Decline and Fall, 7.308, n. 101 (B) = 3.1057, n. 89 (W).

15. See, W. McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance (Princeton, 1989), 70-72; B. B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York, 1991), 4, 81, 83, 97, 169-71.

16. G. Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays, 1978-1996 (London/Boston, 1996), 4: “I have, a dozen times, slunk by Sarpi's leviathan history of the Council of Trent (one of the pivotal works in the development of western religious-political argument).” J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston, 1970), 126, makes the less momentous claim that “Sarpi was a far greater historian than Livy.”

17. G. Keynes, The Library of Edward Gibbon², St. Paul's Bibliographies No. 2 (Dorchester, 1980), 156, 245, 267.

18. On Gibbon's use of and attitude toward Ammianus, see D. Womersley, The Transformation of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (Cambridge, 1988), 169-81.

19. Decline and Fall, 2.380 (B) = 1.793 (W).

20. Decline and Fall, 2.485 (B) = 1.890-91 (W).

21. Decline and Fall, 3.128 (B) = 1.1073 (W).

22. Decline and Fall, 2.262 (B) = 1.686 (W); 3.311-18 (B) = 2.175-81 (W), where Gibbon blends and paraphrases Ammianus 14.6 and 28.4.

23. Decline and Fall, 2.264, n. 18 (B) = 1.687, n. 16 (W).

24. O. Seeck, RE [Revista Ecclesiastica] 1 (1894), 1851.

25. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst: Geschichtschreibung und Plagiat im klassischen Altertum (Leipzig/Berlin, 1911), 403.

26. Jones, LRE 116.

27. M. L. W. Laistner, The Greater Roman Historians (Berkeley, 1947), 141-61, 181-83: the passage quoted occurs on p. 158.

28. Matthews, Ammianus (1989), 228.

29. J. F. Matthews, Cognitio Gestorum (1992), 57.

30. J. Fontaine, BAGB (1969), 417-35, esp. 418: “ce vieil officier, lucide, équanime, moralisateur, un peu distant.” Fontaine rejects the application of the favorite term “baroque” to Ammianus, and he has recently tried to relate his style to a “Theodosian aesthetic” (Cognitio Gestorum [1992], 27-37).

31. Syme, Ammianus (1968), 94.

32. A. J. Woodman, Velleius Paterculus: The Tiberian Narrative (2.94-131) (Cambridge, 1977), 55-56.

33. R. Syme, Roman Papers, 3 (Oxford, 1984), 1090-1104. Syme adduced Velleius' statement that the war against Tacfarinas in Africa, which lasted seven years, “auspiciis consiliisque eius [sc. Tiberius] brevi sepultum est” (2.129.4) as the clearest example of “mendacity in Velleius.” The phrase bellum/a sepultum/a, which Velleius also uses four times in his account of Augustus (2.75.1, 82.1, 89.3, 90.1) is now known to reflect contemporary official phraseology: the senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre proclaims that Piso tried to arouse a civil war by invading Syria after the death of Germanicus, although “all the evils of civil war had been buried by the numen of Augustus and the virtues of Tiberius” (lines 45-49, esp. 47: omnibus civilis belli sepultis malis).

34. Ammianus' partiality for Ursicinus was demonstrated by Thompson, Ammianus (1947), esp. 42-55—without noting the parallel.

35. The present work deliberately refrains from any general assessment of modern scholarly research into the Res Gestae: For guidance readers should consult the full and helpful bibliographies in Seyfarth's preface to his Teubner edition, 1.xxv-xlvii; Rosen, Ammianus (1982), 183-221 (more than 400 items); Matthews, Ammianus (1989), 554-71 (with an introductory discussion of earlier bibliographical surveys). On the date of composition, a compelling case that Ammianus completed the Res Gestae no later than 390 or 391 has been made by C. P. T. Naudé, AJAH 9 (1984, publ. 1990), 70-94; Matthews, Ammianus (1989), 17-27.

36. E. Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern, 1946); English translation by W. R. Trask, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953). In an epilogue, Auerbach defined his subject as “die Interpretation des Wirklichen durch literarische Darstellung oder ‘Nachahmung’” (494). Trask translates this as “the interpretation of reality through literary representation or ‘imitation’” (534), thereby concealing Auerbach's subtle shift from the abstract “Wirklichkeit” of the book's title to the concrete “das Wirkliche” in the epilogue.

37. On the historical or historiographical aspects of Mimesis, see esp. W. W. Holdheim, CLIO 10 (1981), 143-54; T. Bahti, After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature, ed. G. S. Jay and D. L. Miller (Univ. Ala., 1985), 127-45.

38. R. Wellek, Kenyon Review 16 (1954), 299; cf. C. Landauer, German Studies Review 11 (1988), 84: “Auerbach is constructing a model of Western culture which is all-inclusive.”

39. E. R. Curtius, Romanische Forschungen 64 (1952), 57.

40. Auerbach, Mimesis (1953), 41.

41. E. Auerbach, Romanische Forschungen 65 (1954), 5-15, 17: “ein Buch, das ein bestimmter Mensch, in einer bestimmten Lage, zu Anfang der 1940er Jahre geschrieben hat.”

42. Auerbach, Mimesis (1953), 50-60.

43. Wellek, Kenyon Review 16 (1954), 299.

44. Quoted from Auerbach, Mimesis (1953), 53, 53-54, 55, 56, 57, 59-60. Auerbach provided his own translation, which “attempts to preserve the strangely baroque style of the original” (51-52). The original reads as follows:

    dum has exitiorum communium clades suscitat turbo feralis, / urbem aeternam Leontius regens / multa spectati iudicis documenta praebebat, / in audiendo celerior, / in disceptando iustissimus, / natura benevolus / licet auctoritatis causa servandae / acer quibusdam videbatur et inclinatior ad damnandum. / prima igitur causa seditionis in eum concitandae vilissima fuit et levis. / Philoromum enim aurigam rapi praeceptum / secuta plebs omnis velut defensura proprium pignus / terribili impetu praefectum incessebat ut timidum, / sed ille stabilis et erectus / immissis apparitoribus / correptos aliquos vexatosque tormentis / nec strepente ullo nec obsistente / insulari poena multavit. / diebusque paucis secutis / cum itidem plebs excita calore, quo consuevit, / vini causando inopiam / ad Septemzodium convenisset, celebrem locum, / ubi operis ambitiosi Nymphaeum / Marcus condidit imperator. / illuc de industria pergens praefectus / ab omni toga apparitioneque rogabatur enixius, / ne in multitudinem se arrogantem immitteret et minacem / ex commotione pristina saevientem. / difficilis ad pavorem recta tetendit / adeo, ut eum obsequen … desereret / licet in periculum festinantem abruptum. / insidens itaque vehiculo / cum speciosa fiducia contuebatur acribus oculis / tumultuantium undique cuneorum / veluti serpentium vultus / perpessusque multa dici probrosa / agnitum quendam inter alios eminentem / vasti corporis rutilique capilli interrogavit, / an ipse esset Petrus Valvomeres, ut audierat, cognomento. / eumque, cum esse sonu respondisset obiurgatorio, / ut seditiosorum antesignanum olim sibi compertum / reclamantibus multis / post terga manibus vinctis suspendi praecepit. / quo viso sublimi / tribuliumque adiumentum nequiquam implorante / vulgus omne paulo ante confertum / per varia urbis membra diffusum / ita evanuit, ut turbarum acerrimus concitor / tamquam in iudiciali secreto / exaratis lateribus / ad Picenum eiceretur, / ubi postea ausus eripere virginis non obscurae pudorem / Patruini consularis sententia / supplicio est capitali addictus.

    (15.7.2-5)

    I have marked all the clausulae with a hasta [/]: my clausulation sometimes diverges from that of Seyfarth.)

45. Matthews, Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol/Oak Park, 1987), 277-84.

46. Matthews, Homo Viator (1987), 279. cf. Ammianus (1989), 460-61. The visual character of Ammianus' portrayal of persons and events was illustrated in a justly famous paper by R. MacMullen, Art Bulletin 46 (1964), 435-55.

47. Auerbach, Mimesis (1953), 53.

48. Matthews, Homo Viator (1987), 279, 280.

49. For a brief description of these changes, see Roman Theater and Society, ed. W. J. Slater (Ann Arbor, 1996), 161-80.

50. J. Fontaine, Le Transformazioni della Cultura nella tarda Antichità: Atti del Convegno tenuto a Catania, Università degli Studi, 27 sett.-2 Ott. 1982 (Rome, 1985), 795-808. He attributes to Ammianus an “optique nécessairement théâtrale, voire, si l'on ose ce néologisme, amphithéâtrale” (803).

51. M. Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1989), esp. 132.

52. M. Roberts, Philologus 132 (1988), 183.

53. A. Momigliano, Annali della Scuola Superiore Normale di Pisa, Classe di lettere e filosofia, Ser. 3.4 (1974), 1393-1407.

54. Thompson, Ammianus (1947), 40.

55. Thompson, Ammianus (1947), 40-55.

56. Ensslin, Ammianus (1923), esp. 4-6.

57. Thompson, Ammianus (1947), 2, 15, n. 6, 68, 81-85, 128-29, followed by R. Pack, CP [Classical Philology] 48 (1953), 80-85; G. A. Crump, Ammianus Marcellinus as a Military Historian (Historia Einzelschriften 27, 1975), 5-13; N. J. E. Austin, Ammianus on Warfare: An Investigation into Ammianus' Military Knowledge (Collection Latomus 165, 1979), 12-13; T. D. Barnes, Reading the Past (1990), 62.

58. Esp. C. P. T. Naudé, Ammianus Marcellinus in de Lig van die Antieke Geskiedskrywing (Diss. Leiden, 1956); Acta Classica 1 (1958), 92-105 (battles and sieges); Demandt, Zeitkritik (1965); Rosen, Studien (1970); Bitter, Kampfschilderungen (1976): for critical comments on some of Rosen's main arguments, see N. J. E. Austin, Historia 22 (1973), 331-35; G. Calboli, Bollettino di Studi Latini 4 (1974), 67-103. J. Szidat, Cognitio Gestorum (1992), 107-16, has recently argued that exaggeration does not lead Ammianus to distort historical reality in any important way.

59. R. P. C. Blockley, AJP [Amercian Journal of Philosophy] 93 (1972), 437-50: Ammianus was “strongly influenced” by Julian's propaganda and hence “must be used with caution”; Latomus 31 (1972), 433-68: Ammianus' account of Gallus is “suspect on grounds both literary and historical”; Ammianus (1975); Phoenix 31 (1977), 218-31: the account of the Battle of Strasbourg is shaped so as to produce “a microcosm of Ammianus' overall attitude toward Roman-German relations”; Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 2 (Collection Latomus 168, 1980), 467-86: Ammianus had an “almost paranoid dislike” of Constantius.

60. Blockley, Ammianus (1975), 100, 101, 136.

61. C. Vogler, Constantius II et l'administration impériale (Strasbourg, 1979), 44.

62. Elliott, Ammianus (1983), cf. J. M. Alonso-Núñez, JRS [Journal of Roman Studies] 76 (1986), 328: “Elliott has exaggerated the bias introduced by Ammianus in his narrative, to reach the surprising conclusion that he was not an impartial historian. … His verdict that Ammianus was a pagan apologist and thus an anti-Christian historian representing the pagan reaction is completely distorted.” That does not do justice to Elliott's recognition of how bias can be disguised (Ammianus [1983], 12-13, with a telling modern analogy).

63. Elliott, Ammianus (1983), 205-21, cf. S. D'Elia, Studi romani 10 (1972), 372-90, partly anticipated by A. Selem, Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale 6 (1964), 224-61.

64. E. D. Hunt, CQ, N.S. 35 (1985), 186-200: heartily commended by Matthews, Ammianus (1989), 435-51, 546, n. 22, 547, n. 32-33.

65. See Reading the Past (1990), 75-82; CP 88 (1993), 67-70; Chapter IX.

66. J. F. Drinkwater, Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 7 (Collection Latomus 227, 1994), 569-76.

67. Syme, Ammianus (1968), 5, 11. Unlike many others, Syme correctly allowed for the lacuna in 15.5.30.

68. Julian, Orat. 1, 48bc; Pan. Lat. 3(11).13.3; Eutropius, Brev. 10.13; Jerome, Chronicle 239^d Helm; Epitome 42.10.

69. RIC 9.165-67. The contrast to the revolt of Poemenius against Magnentius in 353 is striking (ib. 164-5). It need hardly be added that CIL 10.6945 = ILS 748 (Aversa) cannot be a milestone of Silvanus.

70. Drinkwater, Studies in Latin Literature, 7 (1994), 575-76, suggesting that Ursicinus had Silvanus killed “out of self-interest.”

71. C. Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay's History of England, ed. G. Davies (London, 1938). Macaulay's unfair denigration of the Duke of Marlborough and William Penn and his white-washing of his hero William III had been exposed in a series of essays by John Paget published between 1858 and 1860 and later collected together in book form as The New “Examen” (Edinburgh/London, 1861). Although the great historian's reputation all but obliterated Paget's criticisms at the time, as Winston Churchill complained in the preface to his reissue of his book ([Halifax, 1934], ix-xv), their basic validity is now taken for granted by all who write about Macaulay: Firth, Commentary (1938), 263-76; H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Romantic Movement and the Study of History (London, 1969), 8-9; J. Clive, Not by Fact Alone (New York, 1989), 72.

References to Ammianus Marcellinus are normally given as bare numbers in parenthesis in the main text (e.g., 14.1.1). The text of Ammianus used or quoted is that of the Teubner edition by W. Seyfarth (Leipzig, 1978), unless a deviation is explicitly signaled.

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