The last 25 years have witnessed a renewed interest in late antique emperorship and biography. Nevertheless, Jovian's interregnum of 7 months and 22 days was often only noteworthy for the ‘shameful’ peace treaty with the Sassanid Empire (Amm. 25.7.12–13), and it seems to be too short for such a project. Moreover, the evaluation of his reign ranges between two precise positions. On the one hand, O. Seeck (‘Iovianus 1’, RE 9 [1916], 2006–11) had collected all the available textual sources fostering the negative image of Jovian. On the other hand, G. Wirth (‘Jovian. Kaiser und Karikatur’, in: E. Dassmann and K. Thraede [edd.], Vivarium. Festschrift Theodor Klauser zum 90. Geburtstag [1984], pp. 353–84) defended Jovian's honour and argued that his policies were a critical transition from the hectic times of a hyperactive Julian to the pragmatic Valentinian and Valens. Has not everything been said about this emperor? D.'s answer is no.
As a specialist on Ammianus Marcellinus, the primary narrative historical source for Jovian (Ammianus 25.5–10), D. reaches out to the sociologically informed scholarship to prove the agency of a pragmatic emperor who had to negotiate constantly his power and legitimacy in discourse with the people he governed and the military and the civil apparatus on which he depended. Thus, the actions of the individual emperor, his communication by his legislation, coins and inscriptions, and his ‘image’ transmitted by not strictly ‘historical’ narratives have to complete substantially our modern vision (D.W.P. Burgersdijk and A.J. Ross, Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire [2018]). In this matter, D. puts himself in the tradition of the German Kaisergeschichte that recently gained a new impetus for the High Empire by A. Winterling (Zwischen Strukturgeschichte und Biographie: Probleme und Perspektiven einer neuen Römischen Kaisergeschichte 31 v. Chr.–192 n. Chr. [2011]).
Nevertheless, D. does not stop here, but he includes an eccentric source, the Syriac Julian Romance, dated probably to the beginning of the sixth century, whose third part, called the ‘Jovian Narrative’, gives a glimpse into the ‘Nachleben’ or collective memory about Jovian's actions in Northern Mesopotamia. With the book's subtitle – History and Fiction – D. makes it clear from the beginning that he is dealing with two distinct traditions. By bringing them together D. aims to establish a broader picture of Jovian's agency in a critical part of the empire's periphery, Northern Mesopotamia and its Christian communities on both sides of the border.
After a short introduction, in which D. summarises the principal Greek and Latin sources and Jovian's treatment in modern historiography to the present day, he unfolds his project in two parts. Part 1, ‘History’, deals with Jovian's rise to power; the retreat from Mesopotamia and the treaty with Sassanid Persia, based on a thorough examination of the Greek and Latin literary sources; his rule of the empire through the analysis of his ‘image’ represented in statues, inscriptions and coins, his legislation – based on an examination of several laws of the Codex Theodosianus that one should attribute to Jovian –, the selection of officials in the East and the West; his religious policy (taking into account Themistius, or. 5); and, finally, his death.
Part 2, ‘Fiction’, thoroughly interprets Jovian's ‘image’ in the Syriac Julian Romance (British Library MS Add. 14.641 and Paris MS Syr. 378). Its recent complete translation into English with the Syriac text on facing pages (M. Sokoloff [ed., trans.], The Julian Romance: a New English Translation. Revised edition [2017]) made the Julian Romance widely accessible. Within this text one can distinguish three accounts, called the Eusebius Narrative, the Julian Narrative and the Jovian Narrative, which is the longest. After summarising the Julian Romance, D. details the history of its scholarship more extensively than Sokoloff in his edition. The following chapter handles the so-called Jovian Narrative and its interpretation. Although D. states throughout his retelling and analysis that we are in front of fiction, he underlines that the historical framework, such as the date of Jovian's dies imperii (27 June 363 ce) and the main characters, is accurate. The text establishes antithetical images of Julian, as the bringer of war and persecution, and of Jovian, as the New Constantine, the bringer of peace for the Christian community in Edessa. The tone is reminiscent of the Church Historians. Jovian succeeds in making the King of Kings accept the peace treaty through his agency, informed by his Christian virtues, his willingness to sacrifice his own life and to enter into a son–father relationship with Shapur II. One should consent to D.'s conclusion that this and the other subplots exemplify for the intended audience how cross-cultural relationships should evolve in this frontier region of the empires. Furthermore, the text appeals to the reigning emperors to imitate Jovian and Shapur II. One should side with D. and see the text as a message to instil in its readers this lookout for peace at the beginning of the sixth century in the wake of Justinian's war against Persia.
The other important subplot of the Jovian Narrative is the transfer of the inhabitants of Nisibis to Edessa, which would eventually become the origin of Syriac Christian literature and, as such, an expression of a distinct Christian identity. The historic loss of Nisibis is acceptable, and the focus shifts entirely to Edessa. This most Christian town is happy to welcome the New Constantine, the most Christian emperor Jovian. In this perspective, while heavily relying on anti-pagan and anti-Jewish resentments, the Jovian Narrative argues for the geopolitical status quo because it brought peace to the region and gave Edessa the Christian leadership of the Syriac-speaking community.
The book ends with a short epilogue underlining D.'s main points. Five appendices give information on the chronology and itinerary of the retreat (1), the size of Jovian's army (2), a summary of the Eusebius Narrative (3), the dates (4) and the personae (5) in the Jovian Narrative. They complement and intertwine the two traditions in a valuable and transparent way. D.'s bibliography is plurilingual and complete.
Despite his short reign, Jovian's agency was crucial for at least one part of the periphery of the Roman Empire, Northern Mesopotamia, at peace for the next 150 years. By assembling and interpreting all the extant sources on Jovian, D. makes a significant contribution to the recent field of ‘imagology’, the scholarship on the production, the perception and the reception of Late Roman imperial agency, most notably concerning its reception in a variety of textual genres and documentary sources. By including the Jovian Narrative of the Julian Romance, and its many related debates, D. broadens the horizon of expectations beyond the strictly historicistic Kaisergeschichte. He demonstrates what the classically trained scholar could gain by including (Syriac) texts that do not strictly qualify as historiographical for this region of the Later Roman Empire. While D. draws on his earlier studies, the reorganisation of the material, the reworking of the arguments and the broadening of its scope make this monograph even more valuable. Although D. is presuming the transformation of the historical memory of Jovian's agency into the narrative and thus is advocating for the existence of a particular collective memory in Northern Mesopotamia, he does not wonder if one should also understand this transformation as the passage from the ‘communicational level’ to the ‘cultural level’ of the collective memory about Jovian by the Syriac Christians, according to the categories and concepts proposed by Jan and Aleida Assmann. The scholarly consensus that the Julian Romance is one of the oldest known Syriac texts, which is not a translation from a Greek original and its presumable origin in Edessa, the heart of the Western Syriac literature, points clearly in this direction. Future studies on the ‘image’ of Roman emperors in Syriac texts compared to Graeco-Latin sources would take profit from this approach. D.'s monograph shows in an exemplary way how the groundwork should be laid for further studies.
