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HISTORY
There survives in a medieval florilegium a short history of the Roman
empire under Constantine, which appears to be an excerpt from a longer
work. 1 Crisp, clear and accurate, the extract makes no mention of Christianity —
except in a few passages where verbatim excerpts from Orosius have been
interpolated into the text - and the author may be taken to have been a pagan.
Some have seen in this fragment a portion of the Kaisergeschichte of Enmann.
At any rate it reminds us how much of the literature of late antiquity has
perished and how provisional any judgements must be that are based on what
chance and prejudice have preserved.
Roman historiography appeared to be degenerating into a series of jejune,
derivative and superficial compendia, designed to remind a new ruling group
of a tradition which they had forgotten or never learned, when suddenly
towards the end of the fourth century a major historian, comparable with
Sallust or Tacitus, appeared. Ammianus Marcellinus, though writing in Latin,
was a Greek, familiar with the living tradition and practice of Greek historiography
and welding it together with Roman gravity and sense of tradition
to form a new whole. His situation can be compared to that of Claudian, "who
brought to the Latin west the skill and flexibility of contemporary Greek
poetry, and successfully united it to Roman tradition to form a new, vigorous
and viable poetic manner.
Ammianus Marcellinus was born in Antioch in Syria c. A.D. 325—30. He
probably belonged to a family of curiales — wealthy city landowners whose
members served on the city council. He would have the usual literary education
of the upper-class youth in a great Greek city, studying classical literature and
rhetoric. There is no reason to believe that he was ever a pupil of Libanius,
though they knew one another in later life. His education completed, he took
the unusual step of entering the army, perhaps as a means of escape from
the increasing burdens falling on members of the curial class. He was enrolled
in the protectores domestici, a corps recruited partly from experienced men
from the ranks, partly from young men of good family, whose members
acted as liaison officers and staff officers at the headquarters of commanders.
From 353 or 354 he was attached to the staff of Ursicinus, the magister
equitum, who was then in command of the Roman army on the Persian frontier,
and remained with him for some seven years, travelling back from Mesopotamia
through Antioch to Milan and on to Gaul and Cologne, then back via
Sirmium to the east, again to Thrace, and back to Nisibis for Constantius II's
campaign of 359. He took an active part in the fighting, was in Amida throughout
its siege and capture by the Persians, and had several hair's-breadth escapes,
1 Formerly attributed, along with an excerpt on Italy under Odovacar, to an Anonymus Valesianus
(from Valesius, the Latin form of the name of the first editor Henri Valois), the work is now usually
referred to as Excerptum Valesianum r. The other excerpt belongs to the work of a much later •writer.
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