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HISTORY
His identity is likely to remain a mystery. He can hardly be an official of
Theodosius' court, as he makes too many mistakes about the reign of that
emperor. Perhaps he was a Roman senator or a member of his entourage.
He could be the mysterious historian to whom Symmachus addressses Epist.
9.110, but this can be neither proved nor disproved. At any rate he was a
pagan — he never mentions Christianity — and he identifies himself with prosenatorial
points of view. The Epitome must have been written shortly
after Theodosius' death in 395. But to see in it a defence of the stance adopted
by the pagan senators during the usurpation of Eugenius, as some scholars
have done, is to force the evidence. The Epitome is riddled with errors, and
any information for which it is the sole authority must be treated by the
historian with circumspection.
There is no doubt of the anti-Christian sympathies of Virius Nicomachus
Flavianus, one of the leaders of the Roman Senate in the closing decades of the
fourth century. Governor (consularis) of Sicily, where his family owned
estates near Henna in 364, he became successively uicarius of Africa (in 377),
quaestor sacri palatii (in 389) and twice Praetorian Prefect (in 390 and 393).
A militant pagan, who looked forward to the collapse of Christianity, he took
the side of the pro-pagan usurper Eugenius in 393 and held the consulate under
him in 394. After the defeat of Eugenius by Theodosius in that year he committed
suicide. He translated from Greek Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of
Tyana, which was seen in the fourth century as a pagan counterpart to the
Christian gospels, and wrote a history of Rome, entitled Annales, which he
dedicated to Theodosius. Neither work survives, and it is difficult to form a
clear idea of the scope, scale and style of the Annales. Nicomachus Flavianus
is treated by Symmachus with something like idolatry and is represented in the
Saturnalia of Macrobius as a man of immense erudition, and is described in the
inscription set up in the Forum during his consulship in 394 as ' historicus
disertissimus'. It would be rash to argue from this that his history must have
been lengthy, penetrating and discursive. The circle of vastly rich senators to
which he belonged were far too preoccupied with their own affairs to have
deep insight into the political problems of the empire. As Nicomachus Flavianus
himself writes in a letter to Symmachus (Epist. 2.34.2), nihil hac aetate
tractandum pensius domesticis rebus 'these days nothing calls for greater
attention than our private affairs'. His work is shown by its title to have
been arranged annalistically, and in this point it is distinguished from the
surviving compendia. It has sometimes been thought to have been used by
Ammianus Marcellinus in his later books; the hypothesis is possible but
undemonstrable. "We have no reliable evidence on the period covered by the
Annales of Nicomachus. The work may not have dealt with the author's
own times.
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