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HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
tiousness has seemed an asset, now that airs and graces are at a discount. But,
in the final assessment of his work, we must ask whether, to the best of his
ability, he consistently tried to discover the truth and report it. The answer
to that question cannot be favourable.
6. FLORUS
The historian
Florus' outline of Roman history, ending with Augustus, was in late antiquity
inaccurately described as an epitome of Livy. Doubtless Livy was his main
source, directly or at second hand. But we may detect debts to Sallust and
Caesar, amongst others, and poetic influence, particularly Virgil's and Lucan's.
And Florus records events later than the conclusion of Livy's history. Again,
his attitudes differ from Livy's: he seems, for instance, largely uninterested in
religion. Some contend that he is attempting to create a new genre, a sort of
historical panegyric, midway between prose and poetry. This view is rather
fanciful, but Florus' panegyrical tone is unmistakable. He personifies the
populus Romanus and makes it the hero of his whole narrative. So central
indeed is the position he accords it that sometimes it is simply understood
as the subject of sentences. Conversely the Senate's role is obscured, one
of several ways in which he over-simplifies history. "While he commonly
regards Roman leaders as merely the people's agents, he still, like Velleius,
shows intense interest in individuals. Perhaps he meant his work for
school use: he arranges his material simply, provides occasional summaries,
and is generally more of a story-teller than an enquirer. One may compare
Dickens's A child's history of England: Dickens too preferred to omit recent
history.
Florus has little to say which is new or remarkable. Thus he claims, reasonably
but not originally, that both uirtus and fortuna contributed to Rome's
greatness (praef. 2), and emphasizes, perhaps with Hadrian in mind, that it is
harder to retain than acquire provinces (1.33.8 and 2.30.29). Tending to see
the past in contemporary terms he falls into anachronism, for instance by
misapplying the concept of imperium Romanum to comparatively early periods.
He adopts, perhaps via one of the Senecas and ultimately from Varro, 1 an
interesting but unsatisfactory comparison of the Roman people's history with
four stages of human life, infancy, adolescence, maturity, and old age (jiraef.
4—8). This scheme is nowhere properly justified, and the last period (from
Augustus to Florus' own times), which he does not handle, evidently caused
him difficulty and embarrassment. The populus could no longer credibly figure
1 Though we cannot be sure how Varro used his scheme of four ages.
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