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APPENDIX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS
HISTORIA AUGUSTA
Collection of lives of emperors and pretenders from Hadrian to Numerian; lives of
Nerva and Trajan probably lost. Addressed to Diocletian, Constantine and other
contemporaries, and purportedly written from before 305 till after 324. Attributed to
six otherwise unknown authors. On date and purpose see excursus below. Sources:
Avid. Cass. 3.3, Marcus Aurelius 19.21, L. Verus 11.4, Macrinus 15.4, Aelius 1.1,
Severus 20.4, Pescennius Niger 9.1 (dedications to Diocletian); Geta 1.1, Heliogabalus
2.4, Alexander Severus 65.1, Claudius 4.2, Maximinus 1.1, Gordiani 34.6 (dedications
to Constantine); Proculus 12.6, Satuminus 11.4, Aurelian 10.1 (methods); Capitolinus et
Balbinus 4.5, Triginta tyranni 11.6 (aims); Avidius Cassius 9.5, Hadrian 12.4, Pertinax
15.8 (Marius Maximus); Clodius 12.14 (Herodian); Alexander Severus 49.3, Gordiani
2.1 (Dexippus).
EXCURSUS ON THE NATURE AND
DATE OF THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA
A certain disquiet regarding the obvious errors and inconsistencies of the Hist. Aug.
was general in nineteenth-century scholarship, but there was no systematic attempt
either to diagnose the peculiar features of these texts or to put forward a hypothesis to
explain them. It was as a result of his work as editor of volume 11 of the Prosopographia
Imperil Romani that Dessau in 1889 published a paper in which he mustered and
analysed these errors and inconsistencies, and concluded that the work was a forgery,
written by a single hand in the reign of Theodosius, drawing partly on the historical
epitomes of Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, and containing veiled references to persons
and events of the late fourth century. 1 The authors to whom the lives were attributed
were creatures of the author's imagination. Historians who perforce made use of the
Hist. Aug. were disconcerted to find the branch upon which they were sitting suddenly
sawn off, and tried to save their sources from Dessau's destructive critique. This they
could only do by supposing that texts of the Diocletianic or Constantinian periods had
been worked over or edited by a later writer or writers. This was the view of Mommsen,
who postulated a single editor in the Theodosian age. 2 The problem now became one
of distinguishing original text and interpolations, a type of problem with which
Mommsen's study of Roman law had made him familiar. Other scholars put forward
similar hypotheses, sometimes involving more than one editor or reviser. This
approach to the problem was pushed to its limit by von Domaszewski, 3 who postulated
a series of editors who worked over the original text between the fourth and sixth
centuries, 'bringing it up to date', rather as a standard legal text-book or Mrs Beeton's
1
H. Dessau, 'Ober Zeit und Personlichkeit der Scriptores Historiae Augustae', Hermes 24 (1889)
337-92.
2
T. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften vn (Berlin 1909) 302-62.
3
A. von Domaszewski, S.H.A.W. 7 (1916) 7, 15; 8 (1917) 1; 9 (1918) 6; 11 (1920) 6.
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