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HISTORY
long and discursive history. Many scholars have denied its very existence, and
they may well be right. But in general it is today accepted, but with caution.
It appears to have contained detailed information on places and events on the
Danubian frontier. The Kaisergeschichte maintains a ghostly existence just
beyond our field of vision. There are however many historical compendia
which still survive.
The earliest in date is that of Sextus Aurelius Victor. Born in Africa probably
about 330 he was, he declares, of humble country stock. Perhaps he was the
son of a small-town curia/is, or of a colonus under the lex Manciana, who
acquired quasi-ownership of waste land which he brought under cultivation.
At any rate, like many men in the fourth century, he found literary skill a
means of upward social mobility. He probably practised at the bar or entered
the ranks of the civil service. He was in Sirmium when it surrendered to
Julian in 361. He attracted the favourable notice of the emperor, who appointed
him governor {consularis) of the province of Pannonia Secunda, corresponding
roughly to present-day Serbia. He presumably fell from office, like most of
Julian's appointees, after the emperor's death in 363. But he must have commended
himself to subsequent emperors, as we find him holding the office of
iudex sacrarum cognitionum under Theodosius, who in 389 appointed him to
the prestigious dignity of Prefect of the City of Rome, an office usually held
by senior members of the Senate. Thereafter he disappears from view. Ammianus
Marcellinus, who was writing his history in Rome in 389 and who may
well have known Victor personally, speaks with approval of his sobrietas
(soundness, steadiness: 21.10.6). One would like to know more about a man
who rose so high from such unpromising beginnings. Our only source of
information is his resume of the history of the Roman empire from Augustus
to Constantine II in about fifty printed pages written, on internal evidence, in
360. It is generally known as the Caesares, though it bears other titles in some
manuscripts. Though Julian probably knew of its existence, it was not composed
at his behest or dedicated to him.
It is biographical in its approach, in the sense that Victor treats Roman
history reign by reign and concentrates on the character and activities of each
emperor. But he does make some attempt to surmount the limits of biography
and to write history both by the inclusion of narrative passages and by the
frequent moral and political judgements which he expresses, often in rather
sententious fashion. His work is an example of that fusion of the methods of
history and biography which was characteristic of the age. J Victor's method
is not to give a balanced summary of the political and military events of each
reign, but rather to pick on one or two episodes to the neglect of the rest. He
tries not to present his characters in black and white, but to see both their
1
Cf. Momigliano (1969) 186—303.
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