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HISTORY
of the others. However they all seem to have answered the needs of a new
ruling group, who had to be reminded of the past of the empire which they now
administered, and at the same time to have served as vehicles for the political
outlook of those who still remembered the Roman past, the Italian senatorial
class and its dependants, now partly excluded from the key decision-making
positions in the empire. One must beware of exaggerating the gulf which
separated the two groups, illiterate soldiers may briefly have held supreme
power in the dark days of the third century. But the military establishment that
surrounded Valentinian and Valens and which monopolized so many high
offices of state did not consist of ignorant barbarians. Its members came in
the main from the towns of the Danubian provinces, from Rhaetia to the
Black Sea. Sons of middling landowners and members of small town councils,
they had been to school, though few of them had gone on to study rhetoric.
But their whole outlook was provincial and local and in particular non-
Mediterranean, their experience military rather than political. 'What they lacked
was a sense of the greatness of the Roman empire, of the stages through which
it had passed, of the problems which its rulers had solved, of the dangers of
regionalism and division. Similarly, the civilians who rilled posts in the vast
new bureaucracy created — or tolerated — by Diocletian and Constantine
were not ignoramuses. They too were the sons of local worthies from the
cities of Gaul, Spain, and Africa, men who had learned their Virgil at school
as well as studying the shorthand which was now often the key to promotion.
But they were provincials, their horizon limited by the boundaries of their
city or their province. The ecumenical outlook of the old Roman Senate was
strange to them. They had to be indoctrinated with it. They had to learn to
surmount the narrow limits of space and time within which their political
thinking had been confined, and draw long-term lessons from the contemplation
of the more than millenary history of the Roman state. So, in broad
outline, thought the authors of these fourth-century compendia of Roman
history and their patrons. And each sought to meet the need in his own way.
Before coming to the surviving compendia, however, a word must be said
about a fourth-century historical work which does not survive and which, in
the view of some scholars, never existed. In 1884 E. Enmann argued at length
that the numerous agreements between Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, and
the Historia Augusta pointed to a common source, a narrative history of the
Roman empire from the second to the end of the third century, which he dated
in the reign of Diocletian. Subsequent studies suggest that a date shortly after
the death of Constantine in 337 provides a better working hypothesis. This
anonymous — and hypothetical — work of history is generally referred to as
Enmann's Kaisergeschichte. Opinions vary as to its scale, but it is generally
thought to have been a fairly brief chronicle in the style of Florus rather than a
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