The past decade has seen a marked increase in publications dedicated to the ever-enigmatic Historia Augusta (hereafter HA). The two books under consideration follow upon detailed studies by A. Cameron (2011), M. Thomson (2012) and S. Ratti (2012 and 2016). Alongside these books, the Historia Augusta Colloquium, begun in 1962 and assembled every few years since, has published three further collections on the work (2010, 2014, 2017), and the Budé series has added treatments of the biographies of Claudius and the Thirty Tyrants (2011). The central questions of HA research have not changed much for over a century and remain prominent in all these volumes as the primary points of contention. They are: (1) When was the HA written? (2) Who wrote it? (3) What were the author's religious affiliations? (4) What was the author's agenda? (5) Under what circumstances was the work composed and transmitted? S. addresses each of these questions, providing a synopsis of the current trends in research and positing his own answers, which stand at variance with those in other recent scholarship. R., meanwhile, moves to dismiss the centrality of these questions to a literary interpretation of the HA, but offers several solutions nonetheless. Although published second, the volume by S. represents the traditional form of HA scholarship, to which R. responds, and thus appears first in this review.
In each chapter S. addresses one or two of the central questions by outlining the history of the debate and commenting on the plausibility of the major arguments, and then positing an answer. The quantity and depth of the footnotes provide valuable resources for further inquiry, without detracting from the main text's readability. After each chapter come one or two appendices responding to recent scholarship. The book thus reads as five, largely independent theses rather than one continuous discussion. The introduction includes a convenient synopsis of the goals of each chapter and appendix.
The first chapter investigates the HA’s date and authorship, favouring scholarship that finds allusions to the career of Stilicho in the lives of various emperors and usurpers. According to S., such allusions likely date the work to the decade after Stilicho's death, when other authors such as Rutilius Namatianus freely attacked the deceased general. In keeping with scholars who situate the work within the literary circle of the Symmachi–Nicomachi, S. posits the little-known Tascius Victorianus as the HA’s author, a scholar in some way associated with transmitting Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, to which the HA’s author refers. The suggestion is a tidy solution for those who want to see the influence of Nicomachus Flavianus Sr on the production of the HA, but place the work's composition after his death.
The second chapter discusses the author's compositional process and the original contents of the HA. Contrary to most recent scholars, S. denies that absence of the emperors and events from the years ad 238–260 was an intentional fabrication, although he accepts that the author intended the work to begin with the life of Hadrian. He proposes an evolutionary model for the author's compositional process, identifying three stages of writing, over the course of which the author developed ideas about what to include and how to frame his work. S. invokes the Panegyrici Latini as a model for multiple authorship to support his claim that the six pseudonyms under which the work has been transmitted were not intended to hide the true identity of the author, but to give the work the illusion of being an anthology.
In the appendix to Chapter 2, S. hypothesises a seven-volume edition that predates the earliest manuscript to explain the chronological displacement of lives, the disorganisation of the authorial attributions and other textual issues. The hypothesis is intriguing, but ultimately the conjectural word and page counts presented cannot explain fully the specific organisational choices attributed to the later scribes.
The third chapter evaluates the author of the HA’s view of historical trends and the future of the Roman state. The HA favours those emperors who supported the power of the senate and uses historical exempla to promote a traditionalist agenda. To this largely accepted interpretation S. adds a historical optimism, in which the author anticipates the true restoration of senatorial power and lasting Roman dominance over the whole world. This message, he says, would be particularly relevant after the death of Stilicho and the sack of Rome in ad 410, supporting the date proposed in the first chapter.
The fourth chapter examines the allusions to Christianity in the HA and concludes that the author was opposed to Christianity, but that the work was not intended in its entirety as an attack. The review of the evidence contains nearly every passage in which previous scholars have found possible allusions to Christians, making this chapter a helpful reference tool, although S. does not always clarify his own evaluations of the less secure allusions.
The fifth and final chapter assesses the author's view of the limits of historical knowledge and how this view lent itself to the capricious fabrications evident throughout the biographies. Also included are a few summary suggestions related to the completion and survival of the HA.
In general, S. provides copious documentation on previous scholarship, reinterpreting the standard evidence rather than adding substantial new data. Consequently, scholars with strong opinions about previous studies are unlikely to alter their positions on the central questions. His evidence for dating the work to ad 410–418 depends on interpreting one list of geographical regions as a reflection of imperial reorganisation, rather than more general names for the Italian countryside. Nor does he fully address the question of why a work with triumphalist beliefs written after the sack of Rome would contain no clear allusions to the catastrophe from which the state was actively recovering, suggesting only in a footnote (p. 232 n. 486) that the pagan aristocracy did not agree on how to understand the destruction.
The text reads straightforwardly, although at times the selection principles that relegate certain information to the footnotes is unclear. In Chapter 3, for instance, S. classifies the HA author's uses of historical exempla, but relegates the exempla corresponding to each classification to the footnotes. Similarly, in Chapter 4, certain allusions and even open references to Christianity in the HA appear only in footnotes rather than in the extensive catalogue of the main text. The reader should also be careful when referencing the various charts in the book, which suffer from some inaccuracies. Table 1 in the introduction does not list the HA lives in their manuscript order as the footnote claims. Table 5 in Chapter 3 does not reflect the arguments that S. makes about each emperor and cannot be reconciled with Tables 6 and 7.
In The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta, R. aims to move beyond the central questions of HA scholarship by shedding light on the literary circles in which and for which the author wrote. Using the extensive history of research on the HA’s allusions to other literature, he argues that the allusions themselves were the primary literary goal of the author, whom he envisions writing to a select group of similarly educated individuals. In order to reconstruct the author's ‘interpretative community’ (p. 170), a phrase borrowed from S. Fish's model of reader response, R. examines internal references to the HA’s audience and other late antique literary circles in order to understand the character of intellectual discourse that shaped the HA. By focusing on the general aspects of late antique readership, he tries to bypass needing to identify a specific compositional date or author, as well as many of the arguments over the compositional process and survival of the work. His introduction addresses these questions in rapid succession, including a very selective discussion of the scholarship that supports his conclusions.
The first chapter sets forth the premise that the HA is replete with allusions that do not inform the reader's response to the biographies themselves, but instead challenge the reader to recognise the literary work to which allusion has been made. R. invokes recent work on late antique readership to justify examining the larger patterns of allusion in a cultural context, rather than painstakingly proving each individual case. What follows is a swift overview of possible allusions throughout the HA categorised by either type, such as the invented names, or by classical author. In the cases of Cicero, Horace and Virgil, these allusions are fairly well established, and the reader-response approach makes intuitive sense. For other cases, such as Pliny the Elder and Optatian, more discussion of late antique readership and reception would be welcome.
The second chapter exposes the varieties of pseudo-research present in other late antique texts, situating the HA into a literary context and rescuing it from being treated as an isolated instance of frivolity. R. rightly calls attention to passages in which the author represents his readership as inquisitive intellectuals, practised in debate and discussion, with an eye for historical detail. This type of intellectual community makes an ideal readership for as heavily allusive a work as R. makes the HA out to be.
The third and fourth chapters each turn to specific late antique authors, both to identify allusions to their works and to address the author's religious affiliation and agenda. The third chapter, ‘Religion in the Historia Augusta’, examines possible allusions to the works of Jerome and Ambrose, as well as whether these allusions expose any strong religious sentiments. R. accepts Cameron's The Last Pagans of Rome (2011) as a definitive rebuttal to the narrative of widespread hostility between Christians and adherents to traditional Roman religion. Although he does see mockery of some ascetic principles, he detects only jests directed at Jerome, in whom the HA’s author otherwise found inspiration for falsifying his own biographies. In the fourth chapter R. turns his focus to Ammianus Marcellinus, to whom he traces many of the key themes that have been proposed as evidence for the HA’s composition date. He instead suggests a narrow range of possible dates between ad 408 and 410, using a combination of research into possible allusions to Stilicho, the dates of composition for Jerome's works and a legalistic interpretation of the term ‘child princes’ (principes pueri).
R. convinces best when demonstrating the literary habits of late antique readers and authors. He makes reasonable propositions, for instance, as to how the author could expect his audience to know certain works by Jerome, limiting his identified allusions to a small number thereof. The slim selection of evidence presented for most of the allusions, however, relies on previous knowledge of HA scholarship, cited briefly in endnotes that do not provide extra contextual information. This limits the reader's ability to weigh the plausibility of the argument as a whole. Although R. hopes that his argument depends ‘not on the acceptance of individual claimed allusions but on the plausibility and power of the overall picture’ (p. 21), enough of the allusions strain credibility to set the larger argument at risk. The utopian peace that Probus foresees for Rome (Prob. 20.1.6) was allegedly inspired by Jerome's Commentary on Isaiah (pp. 124–6), but R. produces no clear verbal parallels, and the theme of a peaceful world after wars and conquests can be found likewise in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, with which the HA’s audience would more probably be familiar. Removing this specific allusion would weaken the case R. makes for the author's knowledge of Jerome's commentaries and the composition date.
It is also difficult to accept that the allusions in the HA were themselves the central aim of the composition and that they function primarily to focus the reader outwardly, instead of commenting to any degree on the HA’s narrative. R. goes so far as to suggest that an allusion to Ammianus’ treatment of the Battle of Adrianople ‘reveals [the author's] distance from the actual events … and his audience's interest in Ammianus's account rather than the disaster itself’ (p. 139). He does not explore the possible implications the intertext may have for the life of Aurelian, which contains the allusion. Nevertheless, R. makes a refreshing move away from the standard topics of HA research and is one of the few scholars who treats it as a literary work and not as a historiographic monstrosity.
Both volumes are somewhat technical, but useful introductions to the HA and its scholarship, and would be most at home on the shelves of other scholars. The extensive annotations and treatment of HA scholarship S. includes make his book valuable to anyone beginning research on the HA. R., by veering away from discussion of historical details, places the HA in a literary and intellectual context often ignored in debates over the central questions. The difference between their approaches can best be illustrated by how they analyse the same passages, particularly in their respective chapters on Christianity. For one example, in the life of Alexander Severus, the emperor exclaims to the Palestinian god Marnas (Alex. 17.4). Both scholars suggest that the author's knowledge of Marnas may derive from Jerome's Life of Hilarion. S. posits that the author intended the invocation of Marnas to emphasise Alexander's eastern origins (p. 194). R., on the other hand, suggests that readers would recognise an allusion and ‘mock Jerome's obsession with this otherwise-unknown eastern god’ (p. 111).
A reader inclined to invest in both volumes will find that they complement each other well. R. crafts a lively and generally persuasive depiction of the HA’s audience and reading habits, for whom the author included the many patent allusions. S. provides the reader with copious documentation to help them navigate the scholarship on the traditional research questions and evaluate the more tenuous allusions.
