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HISTORY
nature of the crisis was remained vague. The quantifying methods of the
economic or social historian were not available to Ammianus, or to any other
historian of antiquity. Their approach was a moral one. The decadence and
corruption of individuals and institutions was for them a sufficient explanation.
Ammianus could not conceive of the fall of the Roman empire. But he was
agonizingly aware of its decline, and this is the grand theme of his history.
His hero is Julian, whom he must have known personally. Julian's reign is
recounted in detail in Books 16—25, hi s wisdom and the soundness of his policy
are emphasized — though not without reserve - and the long obituary notice of
him (2J.4) makes it clear that for Ammianus his qualities far outshone those of
any other ruler of his age — uir heroicis paene connumerandus ingeniis, 'a man to be
numbered almost among the characters of legend'. Those passages were written
a quarter of a century after Julian's death, the fruit of long study and reflection.
Even in his old age Ammianus was haunted by the thought that had Julian lived,
the squalor and disaster of succeeding years might have been avoided. In this
sense there is a tragic colouring to Ammianus' view of Roman history. It was a
tragedy of lost opportunity
Discussion of Ammianus' sources was a favourite occupation of nineteenthcentury
scholars. Today the matter can be dealt with briefly. There was no
continuous narrative source on any scale available to Ammianus for the period
covered by the surviving books. He made extensive use of documents - diplomatic
and official correspondence, laws and edicts, speeches of emperors, and the
like — to which his position must have given him easy access. Such sources he
evidently sought out in public archives. He read Aurelius Victor, and probably
Eutropius, and he may well have had other compendia at his disposal. But apart
from documents his main sources were his own observation and the critical
examination of •witnesses — ea quae uidere licuit per aetatem, uel perplexe interrogando
uersatos in medio scire ' what I could see myself because of my age, or
what I could learn by careful interrogation of "participants" ' (15.1.1). This is
the method of Thucydides rather than that of Tacitus. That Ammianus can
sometimes be shown to have got things wrong is no argument against the
validity of his method.
Ammianus' native language was Greek. He probably learned Latin in his native
Antioch — Libanius inveighs against the growing interest in the language of
court, army and law — and he certainly used it daily throughout his army
service. In his retirement, if not before, he read much classical Latin literature.
His Latin has a Greek tinge to it, particularly in the frequency of participial
phrases, and perhaps also in his sometimes odd word-order. But it is not, as
some scholars used to suggest, a kind of translationese. He combines the freedom
to form new words and the verbose style of official Latin of his own day with an
eagerness to stud his text with archaic and poetic words and classical flosculi, in
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