Modern research has long reviled and thereby neglected Orosius’ Histories against the Pagans (Historiae adversus paganos) as a clumsy and simplistic work of history. Orosius’ apologetic vision of the history of humankind has conventionally been left in the shadow of Augustine's (allegedly) more sophisticated philosophy of history. Recent years, however, have seen a new wave of Orosian studies in which Orosius’ Historiae is considered as a complex narrative and skilful manipulation of the past, worth analysing and reassessing as the outcome of a particular intellectual milieu. L.'s volume belongs to this renaissance of Orosian studies. L.'s perceptive analysis focuses on examining ‘what the Historiae is, what it does, and what it means’ (pp. 8–9). She demonstrates that Orosius is connected with ancient history writing – as he both follows the previous Roman tradition and subverts it. Orosius’ Historiae was a reaction to the accusations after the sack of Rome in 410 ce, according to which Christianity and the neglect of the old gods had caused the fall of Rome.
In the short introduction L. discusses Orosian studies and illustrates the waves of fluctuating attitudes towards Orosius’ work in the Middle Ages via the Renaissance to modern scholarship. The book's main discussion is divided into three parts: first, Chapters 1–2 examine Orosius as a writer of history and his techniques of constructing time. Second, Chapter 3 explores his method of linking Christian monotheism and Roman imperial authority, especially the Christianisation of the image of the emperor Augustus. Third, Chapters 4–5 analyse Orosius’ apologetical use of war in his narrative of the past and the minimisation of the sack of Rome in 410 into a ‘non-event’. I introduce here only a few fascinating openings L. makes in her insightful and rich analysis.
L. shows how Orosius’ Historiae resists the traditional categories of ancient history writing, as the work is a historiographical innovation in antiquity, embracing elements of chronicle, history, breviarium and apologetic. Orosius defies – hence the title of L.'s book – traditional Roman history writing and instead constructs his own interpretation of history, based on the influence of the Christian God throughout time. Nor is the Historiae ecclesiastical history, as it is Roman ‘secular’ history in content and form, but retold from a Christian theological perspective.
L. also examines the issue of the audience – widening her discussion to the intended audience and the eventual readership. She shows how Orosius’ (as well as his patron Augustine's) apologetic discourses represent the social milieu as partitioned into Christians and pagans and thereby miss ‘the more fluid religious boundaries of the late fourth and early fifth centuries’ (p. 31) with lax Christians, recent converts to Christianity, those pagans prepared to convert, those operating under the pretence of Christian conversion, those Christians still practising pagan traditions, and one could go on with a wide repertoire of individuals with their situations and choices.
In order to write convincingly and achieve his apologetical objective, Orosius needed to organise past events into a cogent and synchronic system. L. demonstrates how Orosius’ universal coverage of past time was complex. Orosius is able to layer the time in the past through the geographical description of the world. Orosius reinterprets the four kingdoms – in vogue in late antique history writing – by combining Babylonia and Persia into one empire and adding the Carthaginian empire, and thus achieves a more western focus. The outcome, as L. stresses, is the narrative of the fall of the east and the rise of the west. L. also perceptively demonstrates how Orosius uses specific dating systems (ab urbe condita, consular and Olympiad dating) for his apologetic purposes. All the synchronism in Orosius’ universalistic chronographic system is needed to reveal the correlation between past events and the Christian God's interference in history – God's punishment in endless repetitions.
In what L. describes as Orosius’ ‘aggressive rewriting of the past’ (p. 94), he aligns the monarchic rule of Roman emperors with the authority of God. This culminates in the ‘sacred alliance’ of Christian monotheism and imperial authority. For this purpose, the image of Augustus is sanitised and Christianised, to the extent that Augustus is represented as the mirror of Christ, and the beginnings of the rule of the emperors and Christianity are paralleled. For his apologetic objectives – to prove the progress of improving times – Orosius portrays the shift from Republic to monarchy as one from war and confusion towards peace and order. Again for apologetic purposes, Orosius manipulates dates, times and events; as an example, L. discusses the deliberate confusion and contradiction of the Nativity and the Epiphany that Orosius impossibly makes occur at the same time as Augustus assumes monarchical rule. Thus, Orosius creates the correlation between Christ and Augustus and ties the political and religious hegemony of Rome and Christianity together.
L.'s analysis culminates in her perceptive examination of Orosius’ strategic use of war (Chapter 4) and his minimising of the sack of 410 for his apologetic purposes (Chapter 5). Orosius condemns Roman warfare and victories and stresses their negative outcomes, the human suffering. L. calls this critique of war, conquest and victory ‘proto-postcolonial discourse’. However, L. shows how Orosius’ seemingly post-colonial and pacifistic critique of Rome is soon replaced by the alliance of Christianity and Roman imperial authority. For Orosius the Christian present is better than the pagan past, and, to display this, he subverts the Roman glorified past with a mass of intertextual allusions to Graeco-Roman literature and argues that the miseries of the pre-Christian past were the punishments inflicted by the Christian God. While Orosius painstakingly lists the terrible cost for the conquered peoples during the Republic, he evades the evils of empire after the birth of Christ. Orosius’ postcolonialism becomes mismatched with his Christian political theology that propagates the Christianised Roman empire in salvific terms. As L. states, after all the Historiae is ‘in fact a deeply conservative text, investing heavily in the existing political status quo combined with the ostensibly orthodox version of Christianity’ (p. 117); and his ‘fervent reaction against war, and his anti-colonial stance and pacifism are, in the end, strategies in arguing against pagan historiography’ (p. 120). That goal fulfilled, Orosius moves forward with Christian imperialism.
The tension between anti-colonial discourse and Christian imperial universalism is most plain in the narrative of the sack of Rome. The concept of human sin is fundamental in Orosius’ retributivist theology in which humans are the cause of disasters: the Christian God interferes as divine judge in human affairs. War is the consequence of pagan disbelief while peace is the reward for Christian belief. The sack of Rome needs to be explained as an anomaly in an otherwise incessant peace. Thereby Orosius downplays the sack, stressing its mildness to the extent that it is represented as a peaceful non-event, omitting the violence and slaughter, portraying the attacker Alaric as the Christian ally of Rome, mocking the inhabitants of Rome as only desiring entertainment, luxury and theatres, and obscuring the fact that the city was besieged three times over two years and suffered heavily from famine. Alaric's Goths are minimised into mere tools of God who chastises pagan Rome. In Orosius’ eschatological view, Rome is a threshing-floor on which the unworthy and irreligious are winnowed away.
L.'s volume is a wise and balanced book, filled with intellectual depth and intensive discussion. Every sentence is well-thought out and clearly formulated. Her analysis of Orosius’ ‘proto-postcolonial’ discourse and its subsequent deconstruction is thought-provoking and inspiring.
