As the title suggests, this slender volume touches upon a variety of topics in the study of the mysterious late Roman biographical work called the Historia Augusta. Some of T.'s contributions are provocative and valuable, but the volume as a whole suffers from a reluctance fully to flesh out his suggestions.
The introduction offers a swift but competent summary of the most important approaches to the Hist. Aug. T. provides his own belief that the author was motivated chiefly by ‘a desire to produce a great work of scholarship, which would fill the gaps in the tradition’. This suggestion would benefit from a more thorough explanation and defence; it seems less than compelling because of the absurd nature of the material the author has invented to fill the gaps. The brief discussion of sources in the introduction does not engage with the more complicated problems, but source criticism is not important to T.'s work overall.
Chapter 1 on authorship is one of the more interesting. T. rehearses the traditional arguments to prove that the six different names which are attached to the various lives really represent a single author. Next he asks a question that has been under-explored in the literature: what are the parallels for the very idea of group authorship? Modern scholars familiar with collaborative work and edited volumes have not often enough recognised the strangeness of the concept in antiquity. T. points to parallels with the Panegyrici Latini, which share with the Hist. Aug., in addition to collective authorship, a late Roman scholastic milieu and an interest in imperial lives in a period that saw a blurring of panegyric and biography. Frustratingly, however, he does not explore the ramifications of this suggestion for how we might interpret and understand the work. In the rest of Chapter 1 T. offers some new and plausible interpretations for the invented names of the six authors.
In Chapter 2 T. surveys earlier work on the date of the Hist. Aug. and agrees with the general scholarly consensus of around 400. His argument is weakened by limiting his evidence to administrative terminology (which is not firmly datable) and allusions to current events (many of which are of questionable value). In dealing with these allusions, T. can come across as something of a bystander, for example noting only that certain connections are ‘potentially interesting, without being conclusive’ and ‘the stuff of learned controversy’. What better place to indulge in learned controversy than the pages of a scholarly book?
Chapter 3 seeks to contextualise the Hist. Aug. by arguing that the invented genealogies and forged documents point to an aristocratic audience. He follows in the footsteps of many, from Dessau to Syme to Cameron, in considering the (occasional) praise of important late Roman families such as the Ceionii, the Anicii and the Probi as attempts to flatter contemporaries. Despite the popularity of the idea, it seems problematic to me. Why someone would feel flattered to be mentioned in a context of fictions and absurdities is not clear; such praise would surely risk being understood ironically. The rest of the chapter recapitulates and advances connections between the Hist. Aug. and Apicius, the Juvenal scholia and Ausonius. This promising material deserves a fuller conclusion than ‘our impostor belonged within this milieu’.
Chapter 4 is not easy to read. In 2008, T. argued that the poet Naucellius, a correspondent of Symmachus and the author of poems in the Epigrammata Bobiensa, was the author of the Hist. Aug. (‘Logodaedalia: Ausonius and the Historia Augusta’, in C. Deroux [ed.], Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History XIV, pp. 445–75). The circumstantial argument is not convincing, as T. recognises here, leaving this chapter awkwardly recapitulating the purported connections between the authors, but then arguing against their significance. He concludes by suggesting that there might be some connection, at least, between Naucellius and the author of the Hist. Aug., but again more specific detail about how we might explore the possibility and what it would mean for interpretation is generally lacking.
Chapter 5, on the other hand, is provocative and interesting. T. reclassifies the lives into three groups by accepting the non-chronological order preserved in the manuscripts. This classification serves to simplify the implausibly complex modern theories of the order of composition. The primary lives in the first group include only the nine lives that Syme once attributed to ‘Ignotus’, a biographer whom Syme considered far superior to the gossipy Marius Maximus whom the author of the Hist. Aug. frequently cites. What Syme attributed to another source may perhaps be attributed to different methods of composition found between the first and second group. The second group begins with the chronologically disordered lives of (in order) Elagabalus, Diadumenianus, Macrinus, Clodius Albinus and Alexander Severus. The Clodius Albinus seems particularly lost, separated from the Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger which remain in the first group, but T. shows that citations of Herodian and of the invented biographer Cordus, which are features of the Albinus, are found in lives of the second group, and only in those lives. The non-sequential order of publication seems to me to favour interpretations of the work as composed privately, for a small group, rather than, for example, Dessau's argument that the book was composed for the public book market.
Chapter 6 offers evidence for the history of the Hist. Aug. in the early Middle Ages. This is overall a useful and convincing synthesis. Like many scholars, T. places too much weight on the only use of the Hist. Aug. in Late Antiquity, two passages in Jordanes ultimately attributed to the Roman history of Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, perhaps the great-grandson of the fourth-century Q. Aurelius Symmachus. T. concludes from this bare fact that the Hist. Aug. ‘relied upon the cultural networks of the late Roman aristocracy for its dissemination and preservation’ and ‘passed through successive generations of the Symmachi-Nicomachi’. But the claim that the circles of the earlier Symmachus are the ‘milieu’ in which the Hist. Aug. was created is not one derived from the text.
T.'s conclusion is titled ‘Toward an Interpretation’, and I wish he had gone even further towards one. T. claims that the author's antiquarian research ‘legitimated the prerogatives of the Senate’ and ‘celebrated and reinforced the cultural identity of privileged groups’, but what percentage of the thirty-book work could really be said to do that? In a section on ‘hermeneutics’ T., placing the Hist. Aug. in the context of the proliferation of untrustworthy contemporary panegyric and hagiography, argues that ‘we should acknowledge that our author may have operated within conventions of truth and verisimilitude entirely unfamiliar to us’. This would make sense if the fictionalised parts of the Hist. Aug. could be interpreted allegorically or ideologically, but in fact much of the author's inventiveness represents a type of joke or game formed from allusions to authors such as Cicero and Ammianus. This form of purposeful allusion cannot have been understood by the author as a kind of higher truth.
Fresh approaches to the Hist. Aug. are very welcome, and T. has the beginnings of a number of intriguing arguments. One hopes that he is busy right now deepening and expanding these arguments for future publication.
