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Crisis of the Third Century

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 This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2011)



 The divided Empire in AD 271.
The Crisis of the Third Century, also known as Military Anarchy or the Imperial Crisis, (AD 235–84) was a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression. The Crisis began with the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus at the hands of his own troops, initiating a fifty-year period in which there were at least 26 claimants to the title of Emperor, mostly prominent Roman army generals, assuming imperial power over all or part of the Empire. 26 men were officially accepted by the Roman Senate as emperor during this period, and thus became legitimate emperors.
By 268, the Empire had split into three competing states: the Gallic Empire, including the Roman provinces of Gaul, Britannia and (briefly) Hispania; the Palmyrene Empire, including the eastern provinces of Syria Palaestina and Aegyptus; and the Italian-centered and independent Roman Empire, proper, between them. Later, Aurelian (270–75) reunited the empire; the Crisis ended with the ascension and reforms of Diocletian in 284.
The Crisis resulted in such profound changes in the Empire's institutions, society, economic life and, eventually, religion, that it is increasingly seen by most historians as defining the transition between the historical periods of classical antiquity and late antiquity.[1]


Contents  [hide]
1 History
2 Economic impact 2.1 Breakdown of internal trade network
2.2 Increased localism
3 See also
4 Notes
5 Sources
6 Further reading

History[edit]
Roman imperial dynasties
Crisis of the Third Century

Chronology
Barracks Emperors 235–284
Gordian dynasty 238–244
Valerian dynasty 253–261
Gallic Emperors 260–274
Illyrian Emperors 268–284
Caran dynasty 282–285
Britannic Emperors 286–297
Succession
Preceded by
Severan dynasty Followed by
Diocletian and the Tetrarchy
The situation of the Roman Empire became dire in AD 235, when emperor Alexander Severus was murdered by his own troops. Many Roman legions had been defeated during a campaign against Germanic peoples raiding across the borders, while the emperor was focused primarily on the dangers from the Sassanid Persian Empire. Leading his troops personally, Alexander Severus resorted to diplomacy and paying tribute in an attempt to pacify the Germanic chieftains quickly. According to Herodian this cost him the respect of his troops, who may have felt they should be punishing the tribes who were intruding on Rome's territory.[2]
In the years following the emperor's death, generals of the Roman army fought each other for control of the Empire and neglected their duties in preventing invasions from foreigners. Provincials became victims of frequent raids by foreign tribes, such as the Carpians, Goths, Vandals, and Alamanni, along the Rhine and Danube Rivers in the western part of the Empire, as well as attacks from Sassanids in the eastern part of the Empire. Climate changes and a rise in sea levels ruined the agriculture of what is now the Low Countries, and forced tribes to relocate in order to find food.[3] Additionally, in 251, the Plague of Cyprian (possibly smallpox) broke out, causing large-scale mortality which may have seriously affected the ability of the Empire to defend itself.
After the loss of Valerian in 260, the Roman Empire was beset by usurpers, who broke it up into three competing states. The Roman provinces of Gaul, Britain and Hispania broke off to form the Gallic Empire. After the death of Odaenathus in 267, the eastern provinces of Syria, Palestine and Aegyptus became independent as the Palmyrene Empire, leaving the remaining Italian-centered Roman Empire-proper in the middle.
An invasion by a vast host of Goths was beaten back at the Battle of Naissus in 268. This victory was significant as the turning point of the crisis, when a series of tough, energetic soldier-emperors took power. Victories by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus over the next two years drove back the Alamanni and recovered Hispania from the Gallic Empire. When Claudius died in 270 of the plague, Aurelian, who had commanded the cavalry at Naissus, succeeded him as the emperor and continued the restoration of the Empire.
Aurelian reigned (270–275) through the worst of the crisis, defeating the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Palmyrenes, the Persians, and then the remainder of the Gallic Empire. By late 274, the Roman Empire was reunited into a single entity, and the frontier troops were back in place. More than a century would pass before Rome again lost military ascendancy over its external enemies. However, dozens of formerly thriving cities, especially in the Western Empire, had been ruined, their populations dispersed and, with the breakdown of the economic system, could not be rebuilt. Major cities and towns, even Rome itself, had not needed fortifications for many centuries; many then surrounded themselves with thick walls.
Finally, although Aurelian had played a significant role in restoring the Empire's borders from external threat, more fundamental problems remained. In particular, the right of succession had never been clearly defined in the Roman Empire, leading to continuous civil wars as competing factions in the military, Senate and other parties put forward their favoured candidate for emperor. Another issue was the sheer size of the Empire, which made it difficult for a single autocratic ruler to effectively manage multiple threats at the same time. These continuing problems would be radically addressed by Diocletian, allowing the Empire to continue to survive in the West for over a century and in the East for over a millennium.
Economic impact[edit]



 Emperor Diocletian. With his rise to power in 284, the Crisis of the Third Century ended and gave rise to the Tetrarchy.
Internally, the empire faced hyperinflation caused by years of coinage devaluation. This had started earlier under the Severan emperors who enlarged the army by one quarter[citation needed] and doubled the legionaries' base pay. As each of the short-lived emperors took power, he needed ways to raise money quickly to pay the military's "accession bonus" and the easiest way to do so was by inflating the coinage severely, a process made possible by debasing the coinage with bronze and copper.
This had the predictable effect of causing runaway rises in prices, and by the time Diocletian came to power, the old coinage of the Roman Empire had nearly collapsed. Some taxes were collected in kind and values were often notional in bullion or bronze coinage. Real values continued to be figured in gold coinage, but the silver coin, the denarius, used for 300 years, was gone (1 pound of gold = 40 gold aurei = 1000 denarii = 4000 sestertii).[citation needed] This currency had almost no value by the end of the third century, and trade was carried out without retail coinage.
One of the most profound and lasting effects of the Crisis of the Third Century was the disruption of Rome's extensive internal trade network. Ever since the Pax Romana, starting with Augustus, the empire's economy had depended in large part on trade between Mediterranean ports and across the extensive road systems to the Empire's interior. Merchants could travel from one end of the empire to the other in relative safety within a few weeks, moving agricultural goods produced in the provinces to the cities, and manufactured goods produced by the great cities of the East to the more rural provinces.
Large estates produced cash crops for export, and used the resulting revenues to import food and urban manufactured goods. This resulted in a great deal of economic interdependence between the empire’s inhabitants. The historian Henry Moss describes the situation as it stood before the crisis:

Along these roads passed an ever-increasing traffic, not only of troops and officials, but of traders, merchandise and even tourists. An interchange of goods between the various provinces rapidly developed, which soon reached a scale unprecedented in previous history and not repeated until a few centuries ago. Metals mined in the uplands of Western Europe, hides, fleeces, and livestock from the pastoral districts of Britain, Spain, and the shores of the Black Sea, wine and oil from Provence and Aquitaine, timber, pitch and wax from South Russia and northern Anatolia, dried fruits from Syria, marble from the Aegean coasts, and – most important of all – grain from the wheat-growing districts of North Africa, Egypt, and the Danube Valley for the needs of the great cities; all these commodities, under the influence of a highly organized system of transport and marketing, moved freely from one corner of the Empire to the other.[4]
Breakdown of internal trade network[edit]
With the onset of the Crisis of the Third Century, however, this vast internal trade network broke down. The widespread civil unrest made it no longer safe for merchants to travel as they once had, and the financial crisis that struck made exchange very difficult with the debased currency. This produced profound changes that, in many ways, would foreshadow the very decentralized economic character of the coming Middle Ages.
Large landowners, no longer able to successfully export their crops over long distances, began producing food for subsistence and local barter. Rather than import manufactured goods from the empire's great urban areas, they began to manufacture many goods locally, often on their own estates, thus beginning the self-sufficient "house economy" that would become commonplace in later centuries, reaching its final form in the Middle Ages' manorialism. The common free people of the Roman cities, meanwhile, began to move out into the countryside in search of food and better protection.
Made desperate by economic necessity, many of these former city dwellers, as well as many small farmers, were forced to give up hard-earned basic civil rights in order to receive protection from large land-holders. In doing so, they became a half-free class of Roman citizen known as coloni. They were tied to the land, and in later Imperial law their status was made hereditary. This provided an early model for serfdom, the origins of medieval feudal society and of the medieval peasantry.
Even the Roman cities themselves began to change in character. The large, open cities of classical antiquity slowly gave way to the smaller, walled cities that were common in the Middle Ages. These changes were not restricted to the third century, but took place slowly over a long period, and were punctuated with many temporary reversals. However, in spite of extensive reforms by later emperors, the Roman trade network was never able to fully recover to what it had been during the Pax Romana (27 BC – AD 180) of the first century AD. This economic decline was far more noticeable and important in the western part of the empire, which was also invaded several times during the century. Hence, the balance of power clearly shifted eastward during this period, as evidenced by the choice of Diocletian to rule from Nicomedia in Asia minor, putting his second in command Maximian in Milan. This would have considerable impact on the later development of the empire with a richer, more stable eastern empire surviving the end of Roman rule in the west.
While Imperial revenues fell, Imperial expenses rose sharply. More soldiers, greater proportions of cavalry, and the ruinous expense of walling in cities all added to the toll. Goods and services previously paid for by the government were now demanded in addition to monetary taxes. The steady exodus of both rich and poor from the cities and now-unremunerative professions forced Diocletian to use compulsion; most trades were made hereditary, and workers could not legally leave their jobs or travel elsewhere to seek better-paying ones.
Increased localism[edit]
The decline in commerce between the Imperial provinces put them on a path towards increased autarky. Large landowners, who had become more self-sufficient, became less mindful of Rome’s central authority, particularly in the Western Empire, and were downright hostile towards its tax collectors. The measure of wealth at this time began to have less to do with wielding urban civil authority and more to do with controlling large agricultural estates in rural regions, since this guaranteed access to the only economic resource of real value — agricultural land and the crops it produced. The common people of the Empire lost economic and political status to the land-holding nobility, and the commercial middle classes waned along with their trade-derived livelihoods. The Crisis of the Third Century thus marked the beginning of a long gradual process that would transform the ancient world of Classical antiquity into the medieval one of the Early Middle Ages.
See also[edit]
Bagaudae
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Brown, P, The World of Late Antiquity, London 1971, p. 22.
2.Jump up ^ " Herodian says "in their opinion Alexander showed no honourable intention to pursue the war and preferred a life of ease, when he should have marched out to punish the Germans for their previous insolence" (Herodian vi.7.10).
3.Jump up ^ Southern, Pat. "Third Century Crisis of the Roman Empire", BBC History, February 17, 2011
4.Jump up ^ H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages, p. 1.
Sources[edit]
Hekster, O., Rome and its Empire, AD 193-284 (Edinburgh 2008) ISBN 978 0 7486 2303 7
Klaus-Peter Johne (ed.), Die Zeit der Soldatenkaiser (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2008).
Alaric Watson, Aurelian and the Third Century (Taylor & Francis, 2004) ISBN 0-415-30187-4
John F. White, Restorer of the World: The Roman Emperor Aurelian (Spellmount, 2004) ISBN 1-86227-250-6
H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages (Clarendon Press, 1935, reprint Oxford University Press, January, 2000) ISBN 0-19-500260-1
Ferdinand Lot, End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages (Harper Torchbooks Printing, New York, 1961. First English printing by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1931).
Further reading[edit]
Crisis of The Third Century, Hugh Kramer.
Map, University of Calgary.
The Crisis of The Third Century, OSU.


[hide]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Ancient Roman wars


Wars of the Roman Republic
Roman–Etruscan Wars ·
 Roman–Latin wars ·
 Roman–Hernician wars ·
 Roman-Volscian wars ·
 Samnite Wars ·
 Pyrrhic War ·
 Punic Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Illyrian Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Macedonian Wars (First, Second, Third, Fourth) ·
 Roman–Seleucid War ·
 Galatian War ·
 Achaean War ·
 Jugurthine War ·
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 Servile Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Social War ·
 Sulla's civil wars (First, Second) ·
 Mithridatic Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
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Wars of the Roman Empire
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 Domitian's Dacian War ·
 Trajan's Dacian Wars ·
 Parthian Wars ·
 Persian Wars ·
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 Wars of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire
 

Military history


  


Categories: Crisis of the Third Century
3rd century in the Roman Empire







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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century















Crisis of the Third Century

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search



 This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2011)



 The divided Empire in AD 271.
The Crisis of the Third Century, also known as Military Anarchy or the Imperial Crisis, (AD 235–84) was a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression. The Crisis began with the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus at the hands of his own troops, initiating a fifty-year period in which there were at least 26 claimants to the title of Emperor, mostly prominent Roman army generals, assuming imperial power over all or part of the Empire. 26 men were officially accepted by the Roman Senate as emperor during this period, and thus became legitimate emperors.
By 268, the Empire had split into three competing states: the Gallic Empire, including the Roman provinces of Gaul, Britannia and (briefly) Hispania; the Palmyrene Empire, including the eastern provinces of Syria Palaestina and Aegyptus; and the Italian-centered and independent Roman Empire, proper, between them. Later, Aurelian (270–75) reunited the empire; the Crisis ended with the ascension and reforms of Diocletian in 284.
The Crisis resulted in such profound changes in the Empire's institutions, society, economic life and, eventually, religion, that it is increasingly seen by most historians as defining the transition between the historical periods of classical antiquity and late antiquity.[1]


Contents  [hide]
1 History
2 Economic impact 2.1 Breakdown of internal trade network
2.2 Increased localism
3 See also
4 Notes
5 Sources
6 Further reading

History[edit]
Roman imperial dynasties
Crisis of the Third Century

Chronology
Barracks Emperors 235–284
Gordian dynasty 238–244
Valerian dynasty 253–261
Gallic Emperors 260–274
Illyrian Emperors 268–284
Caran dynasty 282–285
Britannic Emperors 286–297
Succession
Preceded by
Severan dynasty Followed by
Diocletian and the Tetrarchy
The situation of the Roman Empire became dire in AD 235, when emperor Alexander Severus was murdered by his own troops. Many Roman legions had been defeated during a campaign against Germanic peoples raiding across the borders, while the emperor was focused primarily on the dangers from the Sassanid Persian Empire. Leading his troops personally, Alexander Severus resorted to diplomacy and paying tribute in an attempt to pacify the Germanic chieftains quickly. According to Herodian this cost him the respect of his troops, who may have felt they should be punishing the tribes who were intruding on Rome's territory.[2]
In the years following the emperor's death, generals of the Roman army fought each other for control of the Empire and neglected their duties in preventing invasions from foreigners. Provincials became victims of frequent raids by foreign tribes, such as the Carpians, Goths, Vandals, and Alamanni, along the Rhine and Danube Rivers in the western part of the Empire, as well as attacks from Sassanids in the eastern part of the Empire. Climate changes and a rise in sea levels ruined the agriculture of what is now the Low Countries, and forced tribes to relocate in order to find food.[3] Additionally, in 251, the Plague of Cyprian (possibly smallpox) broke out, causing large-scale mortality which may have seriously affected the ability of the Empire to defend itself.
After the loss of Valerian in 260, the Roman Empire was beset by usurpers, who broke it up into three competing states. The Roman provinces of Gaul, Britain and Hispania broke off to form the Gallic Empire. After the death of Odaenathus in 267, the eastern provinces of Syria, Palestine and Aegyptus became independent as the Palmyrene Empire, leaving the remaining Italian-centered Roman Empire-proper in the middle.
An invasion by a vast host of Goths was beaten back at the Battle of Naissus in 268. This victory was significant as the turning point of the crisis, when a series of tough, energetic soldier-emperors took power. Victories by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus over the next two years drove back the Alamanni and recovered Hispania from the Gallic Empire. When Claudius died in 270 of the plague, Aurelian, who had commanded the cavalry at Naissus, succeeded him as the emperor and continued the restoration of the Empire.
Aurelian reigned (270–275) through the worst of the crisis, defeating the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Palmyrenes, the Persians, and then the remainder of the Gallic Empire. By late 274, the Roman Empire was reunited into a single entity, and the frontier troops were back in place. More than a century would pass before Rome again lost military ascendancy over its external enemies. However, dozens of formerly thriving cities, especially in the Western Empire, had been ruined, their populations dispersed and, with the breakdown of the economic system, could not be rebuilt. Major cities and towns, even Rome itself, had not needed fortifications for many centuries; many then surrounded themselves with thick walls.
Finally, although Aurelian had played a significant role in restoring the Empire's borders from external threat, more fundamental problems remained. In particular, the right of succession had never been clearly defined in the Roman Empire, leading to continuous civil wars as competing factions in the military, Senate and other parties put forward their favoured candidate for emperor. Another issue was the sheer size of the Empire, which made it difficult for a single autocratic ruler to effectively manage multiple threats at the same time. These continuing problems would be radically addressed by Diocletian, allowing the Empire to continue to survive in the West for over a century and in the East for over a millennium.
Economic impact[edit]



 Emperor Diocletian. With his rise to power in 284, the Crisis of the Third Century ended and gave rise to the Tetrarchy.
Internally, the empire faced hyperinflation caused by years of coinage devaluation. This had started earlier under the Severan emperors who enlarged the army by one quarter[citation needed] and doubled the legionaries' base pay. As each of the short-lived emperors took power, he needed ways to raise money quickly to pay the military's "accession bonus" and the easiest way to do so was by inflating the coinage severely, a process made possible by debasing the coinage with bronze and copper.
This had the predictable effect of causing runaway rises in prices, and by the time Diocletian came to power, the old coinage of the Roman Empire had nearly collapsed. Some taxes were collected in kind and values were often notional in bullion or bronze coinage. Real values continued to be figured in gold coinage, but the silver coin, the denarius, used for 300 years, was gone (1 pound of gold = 40 gold aurei = 1000 denarii = 4000 sestertii).[citation needed] This currency had almost no value by the end of the third century, and trade was carried out without retail coinage.
One of the most profound and lasting effects of the Crisis of the Third Century was the disruption of Rome's extensive internal trade network. Ever since the Pax Romana, starting with Augustus, the empire's economy had depended in large part on trade between Mediterranean ports and across the extensive road systems to the Empire's interior. Merchants could travel from one end of the empire to the other in relative safety within a few weeks, moving agricultural goods produced in the provinces to the cities, and manufactured goods produced by the great cities of the East to the more rural provinces.
Large estates produced cash crops for export, and used the resulting revenues to import food and urban manufactured goods. This resulted in a great deal of economic interdependence between the empire’s inhabitants. The historian Henry Moss describes the situation as it stood before the crisis:

Along these roads passed an ever-increasing traffic, not only of troops and officials, but of traders, merchandise and even tourists. An interchange of goods between the various provinces rapidly developed, which soon reached a scale unprecedented in previous history and not repeated until a few centuries ago. Metals mined in the uplands of Western Europe, hides, fleeces, and livestock from the pastoral districts of Britain, Spain, and the shores of the Black Sea, wine and oil from Provence and Aquitaine, timber, pitch and wax from South Russia and northern Anatolia, dried fruits from Syria, marble from the Aegean coasts, and – most important of all – grain from the wheat-growing districts of North Africa, Egypt, and the Danube Valley for the needs of the great cities; all these commodities, under the influence of a highly organized system of transport and marketing, moved freely from one corner of the Empire to the other.[4]
Breakdown of internal trade network[edit]
With the onset of the Crisis of the Third Century, however, this vast internal trade network broke down. The widespread civil unrest made it no longer safe for merchants to travel as they once had, and the financial crisis that struck made exchange very difficult with the debased currency. This produced profound changes that, in many ways, would foreshadow the very decentralized economic character of the coming Middle Ages.
Large landowners, no longer able to successfully export their crops over long distances, began producing food for subsistence and local barter. Rather than import manufactured goods from the empire's great urban areas, they began to manufacture many goods locally, often on their own estates, thus beginning the self-sufficient "house economy" that would become commonplace in later centuries, reaching its final form in the Middle Ages' manorialism. The common free people of the Roman cities, meanwhile, began to move out into the countryside in search of food and better protection.
Made desperate by economic necessity, many of these former city dwellers, as well as many small farmers, were forced to give up hard-earned basic civil rights in order to receive protection from large land-holders. In doing so, they became a half-free class of Roman citizen known as coloni. They were tied to the land, and in later Imperial law their status was made hereditary. This provided an early model for serfdom, the origins of medieval feudal society and of the medieval peasantry.
Even the Roman cities themselves began to change in character. The large, open cities of classical antiquity slowly gave way to the smaller, walled cities that were common in the Middle Ages. These changes were not restricted to the third century, but took place slowly over a long period, and were punctuated with many temporary reversals. However, in spite of extensive reforms by later emperors, the Roman trade network was never able to fully recover to what it had been during the Pax Romana (27 BC – AD 180) of the first century AD. This economic decline was far more noticeable and important in the western part of the empire, which was also invaded several times during the century. Hence, the balance of power clearly shifted eastward during this period, as evidenced by the choice of Diocletian to rule from Nicomedia in Asia minor, putting his second in command Maximian in Milan. This would have considerable impact on the later development of the empire with a richer, more stable eastern empire surviving the end of Roman rule in the west.
While Imperial revenues fell, Imperial expenses rose sharply. More soldiers, greater proportions of cavalry, and the ruinous expense of walling in cities all added to the toll. Goods and services previously paid for by the government were now demanded in addition to monetary taxes. The steady exodus of both rich and poor from the cities and now-unremunerative professions forced Diocletian to use compulsion; most trades were made hereditary, and workers could not legally leave their jobs or travel elsewhere to seek better-paying ones.
Increased localism[edit]
The decline in commerce between the Imperial provinces put them on a path towards increased autarky. Large landowners, who had become more self-sufficient, became less mindful of Rome’s central authority, particularly in the Western Empire, and were downright hostile towards its tax collectors. The measure of wealth at this time began to have less to do with wielding urban civil authority and more to do with controlling large agricultural estates in rural regions, since this guaranteed access to the only economic resource of real value — agricultural land and the crops it produced. The common people of the Empire lost economic and political status to the land-holding nobility, and the commercial middle classes waned along with their trade-derived livelihoods. The Crisis of the Third Century thus marked the beginning of a long gradual process that would transform the ancient world of Classical antiquity into the medieval one of the Early Middle Ages.
See also[edit]
Bagaudae
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Brown, P, The World of Late Antiquity, London 1971, p. 22.
2.Jump up ^ " Herodian says "in their opinion Alexander showed no honourable intention to pursue the war and preferred a life of ease, when he should have marched out to punish the Germans for their previous insolence" (Herodian vi.7.10).
3.Jump up ^ Southern, Pat. "Third Century Crisis of the Roman Empire", BBC History, February 17, 2011
4.Jump up ^ H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages, p. 1.
Sources[edit]
Hekster, O., Rome and its Empire, AD 193-284 (Edinburgh 2008) ISBN 978 0 7486 2303 7
Klaus-Peter Johne (ed.), Die Zeit der Soldatenkaiser (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2008).
Alaric Watson, Aurelian and the Third Century (Taylor & Francis, 2004) ISBN 0-415-30187-4
John F. White, Restorer of the World: The Roman Emperor Aurelian (Spellmount, 2004) ISBN 1-86227-250-6
H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages (Clarendon Press, 1935, reprint Oxford University Press, January, 2000) ISBN 0-19-500260-1
Ferdinand Lot, End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages (Harper Torchbooks Printing, New York, 1961. First English printing by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1931).
Further reading[edit]
Crisis of The Third Century, Hugh Kramer.
Map, University of Calgary.
The Crisis of The Third Century, OSU.


[hide]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Ancient Roman wars


Wars of the Roman Republic
Roman–Etruscan Wars ·
 Roman–Latin wars ·
 Roman–Hernician wars ·
 Roman-Volscian wars ·
 Samnite Wars ·
 Pyrrhic War ·
 Punic Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Illyrian Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Macedonian Wars (First, Second, Third, Fourth) ·
 Roman–Seleucid War ·
 Galatian War ·
 Achaean War ·
 Jugurthine War ·
 Cimbrian War ·
 Servile Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Social War ·
 Sulla's civil wars (First, Second) ·
 Mithridatic Wars (First, Second, Third) ·
 Gallic Wars ·
 Caesar's invasions of Britain ·
 Caesar's Civil War ·
 End of the Republic (Post-Caesarian, Liberators', Sicilian, Fulvia's, Final)
 

Wars of the Roman Empire
Germanic Wars (Teutoburg, Marcomannic, Alemannic, Gothic, Visigothic) ·
 Wars in Britain ·
 Wars of Boudica ·
 Armenian War ·
 Civil War of 69 ·
 Jewish–Roman wars ·
 Domitian's Dacian War ·
 Trajan's Dacian Wars ·
 Parthian Wars ·
 Persian Wars ·
 Civil Wars of the Third Century ·
 Wars of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire
 

Military history


  


Categories: Crisis of the Third Century
3rd century in the Roman Empire







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Thirty Tyrants (Roman)

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The Thirty Tyrants (Latin: Tyranni Triginta) were a series of thirty rulers who appear in the Historia Augusta as having ostensibly been pretenders to the throne of the Roman Empire during the reign of the emperor Gallienus.
Given the notorious unreliability of the Historia Augusta, the veracity of this list is debatable; there is a scholarly consensus that the author deliberately inflated the number of pretenders in order to parallel the Thirty Tyrants of Athens.
The Historia actually gives 32 names; however, because the author (who wrote under the name of Trebellius Pollio) places the last two during the reigns of Maximinus Thrax and Claudius II respectively, this leaves thirty alleged pretenders during the reign of Gallienus.
The following list gives the Thirty Tyrants as depicted by the Historia Augusta, along with notes contrasting the Historia Augusta's claims with their actual historical positions:

Chapter in
 Historia Augusta
Name
Notes about historicity
2 Cyriades never claimed Imperial dignity
3 Postumus accurate placement
4 Postumus Junior youth; probably never existed[1]
5 Laelianus accurate placement
6 Victorinus contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
7 Victorinus Junior youth, contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
8 Marius accurate placement
9 Ingenuus accurate placement
10 Regalianus accurate placement
11 Aureolus accurate placement
12 Macrianus accurate placement
13 Macrianus Junior accurate placement
14 Quietus accurate placement
15 Odaenathus never claimed Imperial dignity
16 Herodes youth, never claimed Imperial dignity
17 Maeonius never claimed Imperial dignity
18 Balista never claimed Imperial dignity
19 Valens probably never claimed Imperial dignity
20 Valens Superior contemporary of Decius, not Valerianus
21 Piso probably never claimed Imperial dignity
22 Aemilianus probably never claimed Imperial dignity
23 Saturninus probably fictitious
24 Tetricus Senior contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
25 Tetricus Junior youth, contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
26 Trebellianus probably fictitious
27 Herennianus youth, never claimed Imperial dignity, possibly fictitious
28 Timolaus youth, never claimed Imperial dignity, possibly fictitious
29 Celsus probably fictitious
30 Zenobia female, never claimed Imperial dignity,
31 Victoria (or Vitruvia) female, never claimed Imperial dignity,
32 Titus admittedly not contemporary with Gallienus but Maximinus Thrax
33 Censorinus. admittedly not contemporary with Gallienus but Claudius II
Notwithstanding the author's pretensions regarding the time during which these persons aspired to the throne, this list includes:
two women and six youths who never claimed imperial dignity
seven men who either certainly or probably never claimed imperial dignity
three probably and two possibly fictitious persons
two pretenders admittedly not contemporary with Gallienus
three pretenders not contemporary with Gallienus
Leaving nine pretenders roughly contemporary with Gallienus. According to David Magie (the editor of the Loeb Classical Library edition of the Historia Augusta), at least some of these men issued coins.
See also[edit]
Crisis of the Third Century
Roman Emperor (Crisis of the Third Century)
List of Roman usurpers
Gallienus usurpers
Augustan History
Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ J. F. Drinkwater (1987). The Gallic Empire: Separatism and continuity in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire, A.D. 260–274, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, Stuttgart, ISBN 3-515-04806-5, p. 65.
External links[edit]
Historia Augusta: the Thirty Tyrants (Latin text and English translation)


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Thirty Tyrants (Roman)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

The Thirty Tyrants (Latin: Tyranni Triginta) were a series of thirty rulers who appear in the Historia Augusta as having ostensibly been pretenders to the throne of the Roman Empire during the reign of the emperor Gallienus.
Given the notorious unreliability of the Historia Augusta, the veracity of this list is debatable; there is a scholarly consensus that the author deliberately inflated the number of pretenders in order to parallel the Thirty Tyrants of Athens.
The Historia actually gives 32 names; however, because the author (who wrote under the name of Trebellius Pollio) places the last two during the reigns of Maximinus Thrax and Claudius II respectively, this leaves thirty alleged pretenders during the reign of Gallienus.
The following list gives the Thirty Tyrants as depicted by the Historia Augusta, along with notes contrasting the Historia Augusta's claims with their actual historical positions:

Chapter in
 Historia Augusta
Name
Notes about historicity
2 Cyriades never claimed Imperial dignity
3 Postumus accurate placement
4 Postumus Junior youth; probably never existed[1]
5 Laelianus accurate placement
6 Victorinus contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
7 Victorinus Junior youth, contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
8 Marius accurate placement
9 Ingenuus accurate placement
10 Regalianus accurate placement
11 Aureolus accurate placement
12 Macrianus accurate placement
13 Macrianus Junior accurate placement
14 Quietus accurate placement
15 Odaenathus never claimed Imperial dignity
16 Herodes youth, never claimed Imperial dignity
17 Maeonius never claimed Imperial dignity
18 Balista never claimed Imperial dignity
19 Valens probably never claimed Imperial dignity
20 Valens Superior contemporary of Decius, not Valerianus
21 Piso probably never claimed Imperial dignity
22 Aemilianus probably never claimed Imperial dignity
23 Saturninus probably fictitious
24 Tetricus Senior contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
25 Tetricus Junior youth, contemporary not with Gallienus but Claudius II and Aurelian
26 Trebellianus probably fictitious
27 Herennianus youth, never claimed Imperial dignity, possibly fictitious
28 Timolaus youth, never claimed Imperial dignity, possibly fictitious
29 Celsus probably fictitious
30 Zenobia female, never claimed Imperial dignity,
31 Victoria (or Vitruvia) female, never claimed Imperial dignity,
32 Titus admittedly not contemporary with Gallienus but Maximinus Thrax
33 Censorinus. admittedly not contemporary with Gallienus but Claudius II
Notwithstanding the author's pretensions regarding the time during which these persons aspired to the throne, this list includes:
two women and six youths who never claimed imperial dignity
seven men who either certainly or probably never claimed imperial dignity
three probably and two possibly fictitious persons
two pretenders admittedly not contemporary with Gallienus
three pretenders not contemporary with Gallienus
Leaving nine pretenders roughly contemporary with Gallienus. According to David Magie (the editor of the Loeb Classical Library edition of the Historia Augusta), at least some of these men issued coins.
See also[edit]
Crisis of the Third Century
Roman Emperor (Crisis of the Third Century)
List of Roman usurpers
Gallienus usurpers
Augustan History
Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ J. F. Drinkwater (1987). The Gallic Empire: Separatism and continuity in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire, A.D. 260–274, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, Stuttgart, ISBN 3-515-04806-5, p. 65.
External links[edit]
Historia Augusta: the Thirty Tyrants (Latin text and English translation)


[hide]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Roman emperors by epoch


List of Roman emperors · Roman Empire · Family tree



Principate Crisis of the 3rd century Dominate Division Successors


Julio-Claudian dynasty (27 BC – 68 AD)
Four Emperors (68–69)
Flavian dynasty (69–96)
Nerva–Antonine dynasty (96–192)
Five Emperors (192–193)
Severan dynasty (193–235)

Barracks emperors (235–284)
Illyrian emperors (268–284)
Gallic Emperors (260–274)
Britannic Emperors (286–297)

Tetrarchies (293–313)
Constantinian dynasty (305–363)
Valentinian dynasty (364–392)
Theodosian dynasty (378–455)

Western Roman Emperors (395–476)
Eastern Roman/Byzantine Emperors (395–1453)

Barbarian kings of Italy
Latin emperors
Holy Roman Emperors



  


Categories: Roman emperors
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Thirty Tyrants (Roman)


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Augustan History

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[hide]This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.




This article needs additional citations for verification.  (July 2013)




This article possibly contains original research.  (July 2013)


Augustan History

Author
Disputed
Original title
Historia Augusta
Language
Latin

Publication date
 Disputed, possibly 4th century
LC Class
DE
The Augustan History (Latin: Historia Augusta) is a late Roman collection of biographies, in Latin, of the Roman Emperors, their junior colleagues and usurpers of the period 117 to 284. It presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors (collectively known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae), written in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I, but the true authorship of the work, its actual date, and its purpose, have long been matters for controversy.
Major problems include the nature of the sources it used, and how much of the content is pure fiction. Despite these conundrums, it is the only continuous account for much of its period and is thus continually being re-evaluated, since modern historians are unwilling to abandon it as a unique source of possible information, despite its obvious untrustworthiness on many levels.[1]


Contents  [hide]
1 Title and scope
2 The dating problem
3 Primary and secondary Vitae
4 Genre and purpose
5 False documents and authorities
6 Examples of falsehood
7 Marius Maximus or 'Ignotus'?
8 Historical value
9 Criticism of the current mainstream view
10 See also
11 Notes
12 References
13 External links

Title and scope[edit]
The name originated with Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, working from a complex manuscript tradition with a number of variant versions.[2] How widely the work was circulated in late antiquity is unknown, but lengthy citations from it are found in authors of the 6th and 9th centuries, and the chief manuscripts also date from the 9th or 10th centuries.[3] (The editio princeps was published at Milan in 1475.) The six Scriptores – "Aelius Spartianus", "Iulius Capitolinus", "Vulcacius Gallicanus", "Aelius Lampridius", "Trebellius Pollio", and "Flavius Vopiscus (of Syracuse)" – dedicate their biographies to Diocletian, Constantine and various private persons, and so ostensibly were all writing c. the late 3rd and early 4th century.
The biographies cover the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian. A section covering the reigns of Philip the Arab, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian and all but the end of the reign of Valerian is missing in all the manuscripts,[citation needed] and it has been argued that biographies of Nerva and Trajan have also been lost[citation needed] at the beginning of the work, which may suggest the compilation might have been a direct continuation of Suetonius. (It has also been theorized that the mid-3rd-century lacuna might actually be a deliberate literary device of the author or authors, saving the labour of covering Emperors for whom little source material may have been available.)[citation needed]
Despite devoting whole books to ephemeral or in some cases non-existent usurpers,[citation needed] there are no independent biographies of the Emperors Quintillus and Florian, whose reigns are merely briefly noted towards the end of the biographies of their respective predecessors, Claudius Gothicus and Tacitus. For nearly 300 years after Casaubon's edition, though much of the Augustan History was treated with some scepticism, it was used by historians as an authentic source – in the first volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example.[citation needed] "In modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of deliberate mystification written much later than its purported date, however the fundamentalist view still has distinguished support. (...) The Historia Augusta is also, unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and caution."[4]
The dating problem[edit]
In 1889, Hermann Dessau, who had become increasingly concerned by the large number of anachronistic terms, Vulgar Latin vocabulary, and especially the host of obviously false proper names in the work, proposed that the six authors were all fictitious personae, and that the work was in fact composed by a single author in the late 4th century, probably in the reign of Theodosius I.[5] Among his supporting evidence was that the life of Septimius Severus appeared to have made use of a passage from the mid-4th-century historian Aurelius Victor, and that the life of Marcus Aurelius likewise uses material from Eutropius. In the decades following Dessau, many scholars argued to preserve at least some of the six Scriptores as distinct persons and in favor of the first-hand authenticity for the content. As early as 1890, Mommsen postulated a Theodosian 'editor' of the Scriptores' work, an idea that has resurfaced many times since.[6] Hermann Peter (editor of the Augustan History and of the Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae) proposed 330.[clarification needed][7]
Others, such as Norman H. Baynes, abandoned the early 4th century date but only advanced it as far as the reign of Julian the Apostate (useful for arguing the work was intended as pagan propaganda). In the 1960s and 1970s however Dessau's original arguments received powerful restatement and expansion from Sir Ronald Syme, who devoted three books to the subject and was prepared to date the writing of the work closely in the region of 395 AD. Other recent studies also show much consistency of style,[citation needed] and most scholars now accept the theory of a single late author of unknown identity.

"Computer-aided stylistic analysis of the work has, however, returned ambiguous results; some elements of style are quite uniform throughout the work, while others vary in a way that suggests multiple authorship. To what extent this is due to the fact that portions of the work are obviously compiled from multiple sources is unclear. Several computer analyses of the text have been done to determine whether there were multiple authors. Many of them conclude that there was but a single author, but disagree on methodology. However, several studies done by the same team concluded there were several authors, though they were not sure how many." [8]
Primary and secondary Vitae[edit]
A unique feature of the Augustan History is that it purports to supply the biographies not only of reigning Emperors but also of their designated heirs or junior colleagues, and of usurpers who unsuccessfully claimed the supreme power.[9] Thus among the biographies of 2nd-century and early 3rd-century figures are included Hadrian's heir Aelius Caesar, and the usurpers Avidius Cassius, Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, Caracalla's brother Geta and Macrinus's son Diadumenianus. None of these pieces contain much in the way of solid information: all are marked by rhetorical padding and obvious fiction. (The biography of Marcus Aurelius's colleague Lucius Verus, which Mommsen thought 'secondary', is however rich in apparently reliable information and has been vindicated by Syme as belonging to the 'primary' series).[10]
The 'secondary' lives allowed the author to exercise free invention untrammelled by mere facts[citation needed], and as the work proceeds these flights of fancy become ever more elaborate, climaxing in such virtuoso feats as the account of the 'Thirty Tyrants' said to have risen as usurpers under Gallienus. Moreover, after the biography of Caracalla the 'primary' biographies, of the emperors themselves, begin to assume the rhetorical and fictive qualities previously confined to the 'secondary' ones.[citation needed]
The biography of Macrinus is notoriously unreliable,[11] and after a partial reversion to reliability in the Elagabalus, the life of Alexander Severus, one of the longest biographies in the entire work, develops into a kind of exemplary and rhetorical fable on the theme of the wise philosopher king.[12] Clearly the author's previous sources had given out, but also his inventive talents were developing. He still makes use of some recognized sources – Herodian up to 238, and probably Dexippus in the later books, for the entire imperial period the Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte – but the biographies are increasingly tracts of invention in which occasional nuggets of fact are embedded.[citation needed]
Genre and purpose[edit]
Interpretations of the purpose of the History also vary considerably, some considering it a work of fiction or satire intended to entertain (perhaps in the vein of 1066 and All That), others viewing it as a pagan attack on Christianity, the writer having concealed his identity for personal safety. Syme[citation needed] argued that it was a mistake to regard it as a historical work at all and that no clear propaganda purpose could be determined. In his view the History is primarily a literary product – an exercise in historical fiction (or 'fictional history') produced by a 'rogue scholiast' catering to (and making fun of) the antiquarian tendencies of the Theodosian age, in which Suetonius and Marius Maximus were fashionable reading and Ammianus Marcellinus was producing sober history in the manner of Tacitus. (The History implausibly[citation needed] makes the Emperor Tacitus (275-276) a descendant and connoisseur of the historian.) In fact in a passage on the Quadriga tyrannorum[citation needed] — the 'four-horse chariot of usurpers' said to have aspired to the purple in the reign of Probus — the History itself accuses Marius Maximus of being a producer of 'mythical history': homo omnium verbosissimus, qui et mythistoricis se voluminibis implicavit ('the most long-winded of men, who furthermore wrapped himself up in volumes of historical fiction'). The term mythistoricis occurs nowhere else in Latin.[13]
Of considerable significance in this regard is the opening section of the life of Aurelian, in which 'Flavius Vopiscus' records a supposed conversation he had with the City Prefect of Rome during the festival of Hilaria in which the Prefect urges him to write as he chooses and invent what he does not know.[14]
False documents and authorities[edit]


 This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2013)
A peculiarity of the work is its inclusion of a large number of purportedly authentic documents such as extracts from Senate proceedings and letters written by imperial personages. Records like these are quite distinct from the rhetorical speeches often inserted by ancient historians – it was accepted practice for the writer to invent these himself – and on the few occasions when historians (such as Sallust in his work on Catiline or Suetonius in his Twelve Caesars) include such documents, they have generally been regarded as genuine; but almost all those found in the Historia Augusta have been rejected as fabrications, partly on stylistic grounds, partly because they refer to military titles or points of administrative organisation which are otherwise unrecorded until long after the purported date, or for other suspicious content. The History moreover cites dozens of otherwise unrecorded historians, biographers, letter-writers, knowledgeable friends of the writers, and so on, most of whom must be regarded as figments of the author's fertile and fraudulent imagination.
Examples of falsehood[edit]


 This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (July 2013)
The untrustworthiness of the HA stems from the multifarious kinds of fraudulent (as opposed to simply inaccurate) information that run through the work, becoming ever more dominant as it proceeds.[citation needed] The various biographies are ascribed to different invented 'authors', and continue with the dedicatory epistles to Diocletian and Constantine, the quotation of fabricated documents, the citation of non-existent authorities, the invention of persons (extending even to the subjects of some of the minor biographies), presentation of contradictory information to confuse an issue while making a show of objectivity, deliberately false statements, and the inclusion of material which can be shown to relate to events or personages of the late 4th century rather than the period supposedly being written about.[citation needed] For example:
The biography of Geta states he was born at Mediolanum on 27 May; the year is not specified but it was 'in the suffect consulships of Severus and Vitellius'.[citation needed] He was actually born at Rome on 7 March 189; there was no such pair of suffect consuls in this or any other year.[citation needed]
A letter of Hadrian written from Egypt to his brother-in-law Servianus is quoted at length (and was accepted as genuine by many authorities well into the 20th century).[citation needed] Servianus is saluted as consul, and Hadrian mentions his (adopted) son Lucius Aelius Caesar: but Hadrian was in Egypt in 130, Servianus's consulship fell in 134, and Hadrian adopted Aelius in 136.[citation needed] The letter is said to have been published by Hadrian's freedman Phlegon (whose existence is mentioned nowhere except in the HA, in another suspect passage).[citation needed] A passage in the letter dealing with the frivolousness of Egyptian religious beliefs refers to the Patriarch, head of the Jewish community in the Empire. This office only came into being after Hadrian put down the Jewish revolt of 132, and the passage is probably meant in mockery of the powerful late 4th-century Patriarch, Gamaliel.[15] Christian theologian Joseph Barber Lightfoot argued for the authenticity of the letter since it doesn't state it was written in Egypt (132) and that an alternative date for the adoption of Aelius was on or before 134.[16]
Decius revives the office of Censor; the Senate acclaims Valerian as worthy to hold it in a decree dated 27 October 251. The decree is brought to Decius (on campaign against the Goths) and he summons Valerian to bestow the honour.[citation needed] The revival of the censorship is fictitious, and Decius had been dead for several months by the date stated.[17]
Valerian writes to 'Zosimius', procurator of Syria (otherwise unknown) instructing him to furnish the young Claudius with military equipment including a pair of aclydes. The aclys (a kind of Homeric javelin) is a weapon only found in poetry (e.g. Virgil, Aeneid VII.730).[18]
Valerian holds an imperial council in Byzantium, attended by several named dignitaries, none of them otherwise attested and some holding offices not known to exist until the following century, at which the general 'Ulpius Crinitus' (a name apparently chosen to evoke the military glories of the Emperor Trajan) takes the young Aurelian (destined to be another military Emperor) as his adopted son. There are no grounds to believe this is anything other than invention.[citation needed]
In the Tyranni Triginta, the author 'Trebellius Pollio' sets out to chronicle 'the 30 usurpers who arose in the years when the Empire was ruled by Gallienus and Valerian' (I, 1). The number 30 is evidently modelled on the notorious 'Thirty Tyrants' who ruled Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War. The chapter contains 32 mini-biographies. They include two women, six youths, and seven men who never claimed the imperial power; one usurper of the reign of Maximinus Thrax, one of the time of Decius, and two of the time of Aurelian; and four who are entirely fictitious.[citation needed]
The Emperor Tacitus is acclaimed by the Senate, meeting in the 'Curia Pompiliana' (no such building[citation needed]) and after orations by the consul 'Velius Cornificius Gordianus' (no such person[citation needed]) and 'Maecius Faltonius Nicomachus' (ditto: most of the 'Maecii' in the HA are invented[citation needed]), he goes to the Campus Martius and is presented to the troops by the Prefect of the City 'Aelius Cesettianus' (no such person[citation needed]) and the Praetorian Prefect 'Moesius Gallicanus' (ditto: the HA has several invented 'Gallicani'[citation needed]). Private letters commending Tacitus are quoted from the senators 'Autronius Tiberianus' and 'Claudius Sapilianus' (no reason to believe in them, either).[19]
In the Quadrigae Tyrannorum, the author includes Firmus, said to have been a usurper in Egypt under Aurelian.[citation needed] There is no certainty that this person ever existed, and the HA's wealth of detail about him is wilful invention.[citation needed] For example, he would eat an ostrich a day, he had a carriage drawn by ostriches, he would swim among crocodiles, he built himself a palace out of cubes of glass.[citation needed]
In the Life of Probus (Ch.XXIV, 1-3), the author 'Flavius Vopiscus of Syracuse' states that the Emperor's descendants (posteri) fled from Rome and settled near Verona. There a statue of Probus was struck by lightning, a portent according to soothsayers 'that future generations of the family would rise to such distinction in the senate they all would hold the highest posts', though Vopiscus (supposedly writing under Constantine) says this prophecy has not yet come to pass. This is one of the strongest indications of the HA's late 4th-century date, as it seems to be a fairly transparent allusion to the rich and powerful senator Sextus Claudius Petronius Probus (consul in 371) whose two sons held the consulship together in 395.[citation needed] Petronius Probus was born in Verona.[citation needed]
Marius Maximus or 'Ignotus'?[edit]


 This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2013)
Certain scholars have always defended the value of specific parts of the work. Anthony Birley has argued, for instance, that the lives up to Septimius Severus are based on the now-lost biographies of Marius Maximus, which were written as a sequel to Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars. As a result, his translation of the History for Penguin Books covers only the first half, and was published as Lives of the Later Caesars, Birley himself supplying biographies of Nerva and Trajan (these are not part of the original texts, which begin with Hadrian).
His view (part of a tradition that goes back to J. J. Müller, who advanced Marius's claims as early as 1870) was vigorously contested by Ronald Syme, who held that virtually all the identifiable citations from Marius Maximus are essentially frivolous interpolations into the main narrative source, which he postulated was a different author whom he styled 'Ignotus ("the unknown one"), the good biographer'. He argued that Marius did not write a biography of Lucius Verus, even though the biography of that prince in the History is mainly of good quality, and that 'Ignotus' only went up to Caracalla, as is revealed by the biography of Macrinus.
Historical value[edit]
Ever since it was first published the Historia Augusta has been known not to be particularly reliable. However as it is also the principal Latin source regarding a century of Roman history and so historians must use it..." but only with extreme circumspection and caution"[20]
Criticism of the current mainstream view[edit]
Not all scholars have accepted the theory of a forger working around the last decades of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th. Arnaldo Momigliano and A.H.M. Jones[21] were the most prominent 20th century critics of the Dessau-Syme theory amongst English-speaking scholars. Momigliano, summarizing the literature from Dessau down to 1954, defined the question as "res iudicanda" (i.e. "a matter to be decided") and not as "res iudicata" ("a matter that has been decided"). Momigliano reviewed every book published on the topic by Sir Ronald Syme, and provided counter arguments to most if not all of Syme’s arguments.[22] Alan Cameron rebutted a number of Syme's and Barnes's arguments for a composition date c.395-400, suggesting a composition date between 361 and the 380s.[23]
See also[edit]
Thirty Tyrants (Roman) – about the Tyranni Triginta, one of the books of the Historia Augusta
Titus Aurelius Fulvus
Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 75.
2.Jump up ^ David Magie, Introduction to the Loeb translation, p. xi.
3.Jump up ^ Magie, pp. xxiv-xxv.
4.Jump up ^ The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 5, The Later Principate, E. J. Kenney, Wendell Vernon Clausen, pp43, 45, Cambridge University Press, 1983,ISBN 0521273714
5.Jump up ^ Magie, p. xxxii; Syme (1971), p. 1.
6.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), p. 2.
7.Jump up ^ Momigliano (1984), p. 113.
8.Jump up ^ Prickman, Greg; Head of Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries, (2013) The Atlas of Early Printing "Ninth Century - The Text"
9.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 54ff.
10.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 56-7.
11.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 57-9.
12.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 146ff.
13.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), p. 76.
14.Jump up ^ Syme (1968), p. 192.
15.Jump up ^ R. Syme, Emperors and Biography, pp. 21–24.
16.Jump up ^ "The Christian Ministry",Joseph Barber Lightfoot, p70, org pub 1868
17.Jump up ^ Syme, op. cit., p. 215
18.Jump up ^ Syme, op. cit., p. 216
19.Jump up ^ Syme, op. cit., pp. 238–239
20.Jump up ^ The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 5, The Later Principate, E. J. Kenney, Wendell Vernon Clausen, pp43, 45, Cambridge University Press, 1983,ISBN 0521273714
21.Jump up ^ See publications by Momigliano in the bibliography; A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, Oxford, 1964, p.1071n.1; also cited in the preface of Birley's translation, but with disagreement
22.Jump up ^ See publication by Momigliano in the bibliography
23.Jump up ^ Cameron 2011: 743ff
References[edit]
An English translation of the complete work (by David Magie, London & Harvard 1921) with facing Latin text, is available in the Loeb Classical Library. Partial translation by Anthony Birley as Lives of the Later Caesars in Penguin Books.
Baynes, Norman H. The Historia Augusta. Its Date and Purpose (Oxford, 1926)
Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2011)
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “An Unsolved Problem of Historical Forgery: The Scriptores Historiae Augustae.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17, no. 1/2 (1954): 22-46. In JSTOR
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Review: Ammianus and the Historia Augusta by Ronald Syme.” The English Historical Review 84, no. 332 (1969): 566-569. In JSTOR
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Review: Emperors and Biography. Studies in the Historia Augusta by Ronald Syme.” The English Historical Review 88, no. 346 (January 1, 1973): 114-115. In JSTOR
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Ammiano Marcellino e la Historia Augusta (a proposito del libro di Ronald Syme).” In Quinto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 1:93-103. Roma, 1975.
Momigliano, Arnaldo (1984). Secondo Contributo Alla Storia Degli Studi Classici. Ed. di Storia e Letteratura. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
Syme, Ronald. Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1968)
Syme, Ronald. Emperors and Biography (Oxford, 1971)
Syme, Ronald. Historia Augusta Papers (Oxford, 1983)
External links[edit]
Wikisource-logo.svg Latin Wikisource has original text related to this article: Historia Augusta
Latin text and English translation at LacusCurtius
Latin text with concordance and frequency list at the IntraText Digital Library
Latin text at The Latin Library
Livius.org: Introduction
  


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4th-century history books
Forgery controversies
Literary forgeries













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Augustan History

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Augustan History

Author
Disputed
Original title
Historia Augusta
Language
Latin

Publication date
 Disputed, possibly 4th century
LC Class
DE
The Augustan History (Latin: Historia Augusta) is a late Roman collection of biographies, in Latin, of the Roman Emperors, their junior colleagues and usurpers of the period 117 to 284. It presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors (collectively known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae), written in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I, but the true authorship of the work, its actual date, and its purpose, have long been matters for controversy.
Major problems include the nature of the sources it used, and how much of the content is pure fiction. Despite these conundrums, it is the only continuous account for much of its period and is thus continually being re-evaluated, since modern historians are unwilling to abandon it as a unique source of possible information, despite its obvious untrustworthiness on many levels.[1]


Contents  [hide]
1 Title and scope
2 The dating problem
3 Primary and secondary Vitae
4 Genre and purpose
5 False documents and authorities
6 Examples of falsehood
7 Marius Maximus or 'Ignotus'?
8 Historical value
9 Criticism of the current mainstream view
10 See also
11 Notes
12 References
13 External links

Title and scope[edit]
The name originated with Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, working from a complex manuscript tradition with a number of variant versions.[2] How widely the work was circulated in late antiquity is unknown, but lengthy citations from it are found in authors of the 6th and 9th centuries, and the chief manuscripts also date from the 9th or 10th centuries.[3] (The editio princeps was published at Milan in 1475.) The six Scriptores – "Aelius Spartianus", "Iulius Capitolinus", "Vulcacius Gallicanus", "Aelius Lampridius", "Trebellius Pollio", and "Flavius Vopiscus (of Syracuse)" – dedicate their biographies to Diocletian, Constantine and various private persons, and so ostensibly were all writing c. the late 3rd and early 4th century.
The biographies cover the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian. A section covering the reigns of Philip the Arab, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian and all but the end of the reign of Valerian is missing in all the manuscripts,[citation needed] and it has been argued that biographies of Nerva and Trajan have also been lost[citation needed] at the beginning of the work, which may suggest the compilation might have been a direct continuation of Suetonius. (It has also been theorized that the mid-3rd-century lacuna might actually be a deliberate literary device of the author or authors, saving the labour of covering Emperors for whom little source material may have been available.)[citation needed]
Despite devoting whole books to ephemeral or in some cases non-existent usurpers,[citation needed] there are no independent biographies of the Emperors Quintillus and Florian, whose reigns are merely briefly noted towards the end of the biographies of their respective predecessors, Claudius Gothicus and Tacitus. For nearly 300 years after Casaubon's edition, though much of the Augustan History was treated with some scepticism, it was used by historians as an authentic source – in the first volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example.[citation needed] "In modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of deliberate mystification written much later than its purported date, however the fundamentalist view still has distinguished support. (...) The Historia Augusta is also, unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and caution."[4]
The dating problem[edit]
In 1889, Hermann Dessau, who had become increasingly concerned by the large number of anachronistic terms, Vulgar Latin vocabulary, and especially the host of obviously false proper names in the work, proposed that the six authors were all fictitious personae, and that the work was in fact composed by a single author in the late 4th century, probably in the reign of Theodosius I.[5] Among his supporting evidence was that the life of Septimius Severus appeared to have made use of a passage from the mid-4th-century historian Aurelius Victor, and that the life of Marcus Aurelius likewise uses material from Eutropius. In the decades following Dessau, many scholars argued to preserve at least some of the six Scriptores as distinct persons and in favor of the first-hand authenticity for the content. As early as 1890, Mommsen postulated a Theodosian 'editor' of the Scriptores' work, an idea that has resurfaced many times since.[6] Hermann Peter (editor of the Augustan History and of the Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae) proposed 330.[clarification needed][7]
Others, such as Norman H. Baynes, abandoned the early 4th century date but only advanced it as far as the reign of Julian the Apostate (useful for arguing the work was intended as pagan propaganda). In the 1960s and 1970s however Dessau's original arguments received powerful restatement and expansion from Sir Ronald Syme, who devoted three books to the subject and was prepared to date the writing of the work closely in the region of 395 AD. Other recent studies also show much consistency of style,[citation needed] and most scholars now accept the theory of a single late author of unknown identity.

"Computer-aided stylistic analysis of the work has, however, returned ambiguous results; some elements of style are quite uniform throughout the work, while others vary in a way that suggests multiple authorship. To what extent this is due to the fact that portions of the work are obviously compiled from multiple sources is unclear. Several computer analyses of the text have been done to determine whether there were multiple authors. Many of them conclude that there was but a single author, but disagree on methodology. However, several studies done by the same team concluded there were several authors, though they were not sure how many." [8]
Primary and secondary Vitae[edit]
A unique feature of the Augustan History is that it purports to supply the biographies not only of reigning Emperors but also of their designated heirs or junior colleagues, and of usurpers who unsuccessfully claimed the supreme power.[9] Thus among the biographies of 2nd-century and early 3rd-century figures are included Hadrian's heir Aelius Caesar, and the usurpers Avidius Cassius, Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, Caracalla's brother Geta and Macrinus's son Diadumenianus. None of these pieces contain much in the way of solid information: all are marked by rhetorical padding and obvious fiction. (The biography of Marcus Aurelius's colleague Lucius Verus, which Mommsen thought 'secondary', is however rich in apparently reliable information and has been vindicated by Syme as belonging to the 'primary' series).[10]
The 'secondary' lives allowed the author to exercise free invention untrammelled by mere facts[citation needed], and as the work proceeds these flights of fancy become ever more elaborate, climaxing in such virtuoso feats as the account of the 'Thirty Tyrants' said to have risen as usurpers under Gallienus. Moreover, after the biography of Caracalla the 'primary' biographies, of the emperors themselves, begin to assume the rhetorical and fictive qualities previously confined to the 'secondary' ones.[citation needed]
The biography of Macrinus is notoriously unreliable,[11] and after a partial reversion to reliability in the Elagabalus, the life of Alexander Severus, one of the longest biographies in the entire work, develops into a kind of exemplary and rhetorical fable on the theme of the wise philosopher king.[12] Clearly the author's previous sources had given out, but also his inventive talents were developing. He still makes use of some recognized sources – Herodian up to 238, and probably Dexippus in the later books, for the entire imperial period the Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte – but the biographies are increasingly tracts of invention in which occasional nuggets of fact are embedded.[citation needed]
Genre and purpose[edit]
Interpretations of the purpose of the History also vary considerably, some considering it a work of fiction or satire intended to entertain (perhaps in the vein of 1066 and All That), others viewing it as a pagan attack on Christianity, the writer having concealed his identity for personal safety. Syme[citation needed] argued that it was a mistake to regard it as a historical work at all and that no clear propaganda purpose could be determined. In his view the History is primarily a literary product – an exercise in historical fiction (or 'fictional history') produced by a 'rogue scholiast' catering to (and making fun of) the antiquarian tendencies of the Theodosian age, in which Suetonius and Marius Maximus were fashionable reading and Ammianus Marcellinus was producing sober history in the manner of Tacitus. (The History implausibly[citation needed] makes the Emperor Tacitus (275-276) a descendant and connoisseur of the historian.) In fact in a passage on the Quadriga tyrannorum[citation needed] — the 'four-horse chariot of usurpers' said to have aspired to the purple in the reign of Probus — the History itself accuses Marius Maximus of being a producer of 'mythical history': homo omnium verbosissimus, qui et mythistoricis se voluminibis implicavit ('the most long-winded of men, who furthermore wrapped himself up in volumes of historical fiction'). The term mythistoricis occurs nowhere else in Latin.[13]
Of considerable significance in this regard is the opening section of the life of Aurelian, in which 'Flavius Vopiscus' records a supposed conversation he had with the City Prefect of Rome during the festival of Hilaria in which the Prefect urges him to write as he chooses and invent what he does not know.[14]
False documents and authorities[edit]


 This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2013)
A peculiarity of the work is its inclusion of a large number of purportedly authentic documents such as extracts from Senate proceedings and letters written by imperial personages. Records like these are quite distinct from the rhetorical speeches often inserted by ancient historians – it was accepted practice for the writer to invent these himself – and on the few occasions when historians (such as Sallust in his work on Catiline or Suetonius in his Twelve Caesars) include such documents, they have generally been regarded as genuine; but almost all those found in the Historia Augusta have been rejected as fabrications, partly on stylistic grounds, partly because they refer to military titles or points of administrative organisation which are otherwise unrecorded until long after the purported date, or for other suspicious content. The History moreover cites dozens of otherwise unrecorded historians, biographers, letter-writers, knowledgeable friends of the writers, and so on, most of whom must be regarded as figments of the author's fertile and fraudulent imagination.
Examples of falsehood[edit]


 This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (July 2013)
The untrustworthiness of the HA stems from the multifarious kinds of fraudulent (as opposed to simply inaccurate) information that run through the work, becoming ever more dominant as it proceeds.[citation needed] The various biographies are ascribed to different invented 'authors', and continue with the dedicatory epistles to Diocletian and Constantine, the quotation of fabricated documents, the citation of non-existent authorities, the invention of persons (extending even to the subjects of some of the minor biographies), presentation of contradictory information to confuse an issue while making a show of objectivity, deliberately false statements, and the inclusion of material which can be shown to relate to events or personages of the late 4th century rather than the period supposedly being written about.[citation needed] For example:
The biography of Geta states he was born at Mediolanum on 27 May; the year is not specified but it was 'in the suffect consulships of Severus and Vitellius'.[citation needed] He was actually born at Rome on 7 March 189; there was no such pair of suffect consuls in this or any other year.[citation needed]
A letter of Hadrian written from Egypt to his brother-in-law Servianus is quoted at length (and was accepted as genuine by many authorities well into the 20th century).[citation needed] Servianus is saluted as consul, and Hadrian mentions his (adopted) son Lucius Aelius Caesar: but Hadrian was in Egypt in 130, Servianus's consulship fell in 134, and Hadrian adopted Aelius in 136.[citation needed] The letter is said to have been published by Hadrian's freedman Phlegon (whose existence is mentioned nowhere except in the HA, in another suspect passage).[citation needed] A passage in the letter dealing with the frivolousness of Egyptian religious beliefs refers to the Patriarch, head of the Jewish community in the Empire. This office only came into being after Hadrian put down the Jewish revolt of 132, and the passage is probably meant in mockery of the powerful late 4th-century Patriarch, Gamaliel.[15] Christian theologian Joseph Barber Lightfoot argued for the authenticity of the letter since it doesn't state it was written in Egypt (132) and that an alternative date for the adoption of Aelius was on or before 134.[16]
Decius revives the office of Censor; the Senate acclaims Valerian as worthy to hold it in a decree dated 27 October 251. The decree is brought to Decius (on campaign against the Goths) and he summons Valerian to bestow the honour.[citation needed] The revival of the censorship is fictitious, and Decius had been dead for several months by the date stated.[17]
Valerian writes to 'Zosimius', procurator of Syria (otherwise unknown) instructing him to furnish the young Claudius with military equipment including a pair of aclydes. The aclys (a kind of Homeric javelin) is a weapon only found in poetry (e.g. Virgil, Aeneid VII.730).[18]
Valerian holds an imperial council in Byzantium, attended by several named dignitaries, none of them otherwise attested and some holding offices not known to exist until the following century, at which the general 'Ulpius Crinitus' (a name apparently chosen to evoke the military glories of the Emperor Trajan) takes the young Aurelian (destined to be another military Emperor) as his adopted son. There are no grounds to believe this is anything other than invention.[citation needed]
In the Tyranni Triginta, the author 'Trebellius Pollio' sets out to chronicle 'the 30 usurpers who arose in the years when the Empire was ruled by Gallienus and Valerian' (I, 1). The number 30 is evidently modelled on the notorious 'Thirty Tyrants' who ruled Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War. The chapter contains 32 mini-biographies. They include two women, six youths, and seven men who never claimed the imperial power; one usurper of the reign of Maximinus Thrax, one of the time of Decius, and two of the time of Aurelian; and four who are entirely fictitious.[citation needed]
The Emperor Tacitus is acclaimed by the Senate, meeting in the 'Curia Pompiliana' (no such building[citation needed]) and after orations by the consul 'Velius Cornificius Gordianus' (no such person[citation needed]) and 'Maecius Faltonius Nicomachus' (ditto: most of the 'Maecii' in the HA are invented[citation needed]), he goes to the Campus Martius and is presented to the troops by the Prefect of the City 'Aelius Cesettianus' (no such person[citation needed]) and the Praetorian Prefect 'Moesius Gallicanus' (ditto: the HA has several invented 'Gallicani'[citation needed]). Private letters commending Tacitus are quoted from the senators 'Autronius Tiberianus' and 'Claudius Sapilianus' (no reason to believe in them, either).[19]
In the Quadrigae Tyrannorum, the author includes Firmus, said to have been a usurper in Egypt under Aurelian.[citation needed] There is no certainty that this person ever existed, and the HA's wealth of detail about him is wilful invention.[citation needed] For example, he would eat an ostrich a day, he had a carriage drawn by ostriches, he would swim among crocodiles, he built himself a palace out of cubes of glass.[citation needed]
In the Life of Probus (Ch.XXIV, 1-3), the author 'Flavius Vopiscus of Syracuse' states that the Emperor's descendants (posteri) fled from Rome and settled near Verona. There a statue of Probus was struck by lightning, a portent according to soothsayers 'that future generations of the family would rise to such distinction in the senate they all would hold the highest posts', though Vopiscus (supposedly writing under Constantine) says this prophecy has not yet come to pass. This is one of the strongest indications of the HA's late 4th-century date, as it seems to be a fairly transparent allusion to the rich and powerful senator Sextus Claudius Petronius Probus (consul in 371) whose two sons held the consulship together in 395.[citation needed] Petronius Probus was born in Verona.[citation needed]
Marius Maximus or 'Ignotus'?[edit]


 This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2013)
Certain scholars have always defended the value of specific parts of the work. Anthony Birley has argued, for instance, that the lives up to Septimius Severus are based on the now-lost biographies of Marius Maximus, which were written as a sequel to Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars. As a result, his translation of the History for Penguin Books covers only the first half, and was published as Lives of the Later Caesars, Birley himself supplying biographies of Nerva and Trajan (these are not part of the original texts, which begin with Hadrian).
His view (part of a tradition that goes back to J. J. Müller, who advanced Marius's claims as early as 1870) was vigorously contested by Ronald Syme, who held that virtually all the identifiable citations from Marius Maximus are essentially frivolous interpolations into the main narrative source, which he postulated was a different author whom he styled 'Ignotus ("the unknown one"), the good biographer'. He argued that Marius did not write a biography of Lucius Verus, even though the biography of that prince in the History is mainly of good quality, and that 'Ignotus' only went up to Caracalla, as is revealed by the biography of Macrinus.
Historical value[edit]
Ever since it was first published the Historia Augusta has been known not to be particularly reliable. However as it is also the principal Latin source regarding a century of Roman history and so historians must use it..." but only with extreme circumspection and caution"[20]
Criticism of the current mainstream view[edit]
Not all scholars have accepted the theory of a forger working around the last decades of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th. Arnaldo Momigliano and A.H.M. Jones[21] were the most prominent 20th century critics of the Dessau-Syme theory amongst English-speaking scholars. Momigliano, summarizing the literature from Dessau down to 1954, defined the question as "res iudicanda" (i.e. "a matter to be decided") and not as "res iudicata" ("a matter that has been decided"). Momigliano reviewed every book published on the topic by Sir Ronald Syme, and provided counter arguments to most if not all of Syme’s arguments.[22] Alan Cameron rebutted a number of Syme's and Barnes's arguments for a composition date c.395-400, suggesting a composition date between 361 and the 380s.[23]
See also[edit]
Thirty Tyrants (Roman) – about the Tyranni Triginta, one of the books of the Historia Augusta
Titus Aurelius Fulvus
Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte
Notes[edit]
1.Jump up ^ Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 75.
2.Jump up ^ David Magie, Introduction to the Loeb translation, p. xi.
3.Jump up ^ Magie, pp. xxiv-xxv.
4.Jump up ^ The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 5, The Later Principate, E. J. Kenney, Wendell Vernon Clausen, pp43, 45, Cambridge University Press, 1983,ISBN 0521273714
5.Jump up ^ Magie, p. xxxii; Syme (1971), p. 1.
6.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), p. 2.
7.Jump up ^ Momigliano (1984), p. 113.
8.Jump up ^ Prickman, Greg; Head of Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries, (2013) The Atlas of Early Printing "Ninth Century - The Text"
9.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 54ff.
10.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 56-7.
11.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 57-9.
12.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), pp. 146ff.
13.Jump up ^ Syme (1971), p. 76.
14.Jump up ^ Syme (1968), p. 192.
15.Jump up ^ R. Syme, Emperors and Biography, pp. 21–24.
16.Jump up ^ "The Christian Ministry",Joseph Barber Lightfoot, p70, org pub 1868
17.Jump up ^ Syme, op. cit., p. 215
18.Jump up ^ Syme, op. cit., p. 216
19.Jump up ^ Syme, op. cit., pp. 238–239
20.Jump up ^ The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 5, The Later Principate, E. J. Kenney, Wendell Vernon Clausen, pp43, 45, Cambridge University Press, 1983,ISBN 0521273714
21.Jump up ^ See publications by Momigliano in the bibliography; A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, Oxford, 1964, p.1071n.1; also cited in the preface of Birley's translation, but with disagreement
22.Jump up ^ See publication by Momigliano in the bibliography
23.Jump up ^ Cameron 2011: 743ff
References[edit]
An English translation of the complete work (by David Magie, London & Harvard 1921) with facing Latin text, is available in the Loeb Classical Library. Partial translation by Anthony Birley as Lives of the Later Caesars in Penguin Books.
Baynes, Norman H. The Historia Augusta. Its Date and Purpose (Oxford, 1926)
Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2011)
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “An Unsolved Problem of Historical Forgery: The Scriptores Historiae Augustae.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17, no. 1/2 (1954): 22-46. In JSTOR
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Review: Ammianus and the Historia Augusta by Ronald Syme.” The English Historical Review 84, no. 332 (1969): 566-569. In JSTOR
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Review: Emperors and Biography. Studies in the Historia Augusta by Ronald Syme.” The English Historical Review 88, no. 346 (January 1, 1973): 114-115. In JSTOR
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Ammiano Marcellino e la Historia Augusta (a proposito del libro di Ronald Syme).” In Quinto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 1:93-103. Roma, 1975.
Momigliano, Arnaldo (1984). Secondo Contributo Alla Storia Degli Studi Classici. Ed. di Storia e Letteratura. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
Syme, Ronald. Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1968)
Syme, Ronald. Emperors and Biography (Oxford, 1971)
Syme, Ronald. Historia Augusta Papers (Oxford, 1983)
External links[edit]
Wikisource-logo.svg Latin Wikisource has original text related to this article: Historia Augusta
Latin text and English translation at LacusCurtius
Latin text with concordance and frequency list at the IntraText Digital Library
Latin text at The Latin Library
Livius.org: Introduction
  


Categories: Crisis of the Third Century
Latin biographies
Latin prose texts
Roman-era biographers
Roman historiography
4th-century history books
Forgery controversies
Literary forgeries













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