The main — although by no means the sole — protagonist of Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen’s book is the historian Aurelius Victor (fourth century c.e.), who has so far been regarded as the author of one Latin abridgement of Roman imperial history from Augustus to Constantius II usually referred to as S. Aurelii Victoris Liber de Caesaribus.

The de Caesaribus has come down to us within the so-called Corpus tripertitum alongside the Origo gentis Romanae and the De viris illustribus Vrbis Romae: together, they cover all Roman history from its origins down to 358–360 c.e., although manuscripts only attribute to Aurelius Victor the de Caesaribus — which is actually called Aurelii Victoris historie abbreviate ab Augusto Octaviano id est a fine Titi Livii usque ad consulatum decimum Constantii Augusti et Iuliani Caesaris tertium. In parallel, thanks to a different textual tradition, we can read the so-called Libellus/Epitome de Caesaribus, which manuscripts mostly refer to as Libellus de vita et moribus imperatorum breviatus ex libris Sexti Aurelii Victoris a Caesare Augusto usque ad Theodosium. By paying greater attention than in the past to manuscripts as well as to literary and epigraphical evidence, S. and W. persuasively depict the following scenario: both the Historiae abbreviatae (henceforth HAb) and the Libellus represent two reductions of a large-scale historical work that Victor wrote in several books; the HAb were composed already in the fourth century c.e., when Victor’s maius opus was also published, while the Libellus dates to the eighth century and was probably the work of Paul the Deacon. The book’s merits are undeniable and noteworthy: the authors respect the textual traditions of the two works, especially with regard to their titles; they give an excellent explanation of the particular relationships between the HAb and the Libellus; they account for Victor’s reputation among his peers; they strike a significant blow against some theories regarding the Quellenforschung — since there was a longer work by Aurelius Victor, there is no longer any need to hypothesise the existence of Enmann’s Kaisergeschichte or Syme’s Ignotus; finally, they give reasonable explanations for some linguistic oddities which affect the HAb and that should therefore be understood as infelicities introduced in abridging the maius opus.

Accordingly, insofar as the authors’ aim is to induce scholars to rethink Victor’s work(s), they are successful. Yet in the second part of the book S. and W. push their discussion much further, and try to say more about Victor qua man and author, as well as about the influence of his lost maius opus on fourth-century Roman historiography, that is, on Ammianus, the Historia Augusta, Eutropius, etc. Here, their arguments are sometimes less compelling, and some of their ambitious claims — such as the notion that ‘Victor’s Historia requires the history of writing history in Latin be entirely reconsidered’ (192) — seem overblown. In attempting to portray Victor’s personality and literary taste, with reference to the very beginning of the HAb, the authors claim that Victor’s starting date of 31 b.c.e. (722nd year of Rome) is a homage to Dio 51.1 and is not in line with Suetonius (99), Victor’s main source for the emperors from Augustus to Domitian (89). Yet at 52.1 Dio dates the beginning of the empire to 29, and at 53.19 to 27. By contrast, it is in the Aeneid (8.657–731), a much more influential work in Roman cultural memory, that the battle of Actium is regarded as a watershed and as the beginning of a new era. When the authors say that ‘Cicero and Vergil give some sense of the extent and the sophistication of Victor’s knowledge of Latin literature’ (106), the proof of their influence on Victor is not as clear as claimed (and it would have perhaps been better to do linguistic and stylistic comparisons on original texts consistently). For example, atrocitatem rerum of HAb 39.8 is considered an echo of pro rerum atrocitate of Phil. 11.6, but rei atrocitas is a common phrase which we also read in Sallust, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Apuleius, Gellius and others. Virtutum studia of HAb 39.45 would recall Sen. 26, but virtutis studium is widespread.

When it comes to Victor’s influence on other late antique authors, a willingness to stress his importance sometimes overshadows objectivity. I take Ausonius’ Caesares as a case in point. The authors claim that the identification of the emperor with a father, as Ausonius says of Nerva on line 95, is ‘a Leitmotiv in Victor’ (236). Yet this is a Leitmotiv in ancient political thought in general: compare Cicero, Rep. 2.47 or Seneca, Clem. 1.14.2. Later, when they say of Ausonius’ Filius huic fato nullus that this ‘hemistich seems to versify a line in Victor (HAb 15.6: maribus frustratus)’ (237), the authors seem to ignore that the hemistich did not need to be versified by Ausonius, as it was already a line by Vergil (Aen. 7.50–51: filius huic fato divum prolesque virilis/nulla fuit), no doubt a more relevant model for a poem. And on the same page, when S. and W. state that ‘the parallels continue through Ausonius’ coverage of the emperors after Marcus Aurelius. Commodus was killed by a crushed neck (Caes. 116: eliso … gutture); this mirrors Victor’s faucibus pressis’, we might again compare Vergil: elisos oculos et siccum sanguine guttur (Aen. 8.261. Cf. also Ovid, Ibis 569 and Lucan 2.154). Nevertheless, to paraphrase S. and W., their book does require the figure of Aurelius Victor to be reconsidered.