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is similarly taken further than in the earlier work, the campaign against Licinius written up as though it were a holy war, and the role played in it by Constantine’s eldest son Crispus, which is recorded in the Church History, is here entirely omitted, so as cover over the awkward fact that he had been executed at his father’s orders in AD 326. All this certainly makes one suspicious of Eusebius’s honesty as a reporter. The situation is not helped by the fact that a high proportion of what we know about Constantine is dependent on Eusebius’s Life, which (like Book X of the Church History) includes a large number of imperial letters and edicts, either allegedly transcribed from official copies or translations of Latin originals, or summarized by Eusebius himself. In most cases there is no other evidence from which to check his accuracy, and it has been shown that the range of such material known to him was actually rather narrow; he met the emperor personally only at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and before that would have had limited access to documents and information from the western half of the empire, Constantine’s portion at the time. Eusebius’ is also the only eye-witness account of the Council of Nicaea, of which no official Acts survive, and is notoriously disingenuous, since he himself, as an Arian sympathizer recently formally condemned by another council, had much to explain away; he therefore glosses over the actual doctrinal issues so far as he can, and focuses instead on the unprecedented phenomenon of Constantine’s appearance as patron of the church:

      he passed through the assembly like a heavenly angel, giving out a bright radiance as if by shafts of light, gleaming with fiery rays of purple, and adorned with the bright light of gold and precious stones. So much for his physical appearance. He could also be seen to be adorned in his character by fear of God and downcast eyes, his ruddy complexion, his gait and the other aspects of his appearance, including his height, which surpassed all those around him (II.10).

      Eusebius’s deficiencies as a sober historian vividly illustrate however his ideological purpose as a Christian apologist, in which he was followed by many later Christian writers. His Church History, the first of its kind, was a pioneering work, taking the history of the church from the time of Jesus up to Eusebius’s own day. Though it is by no means devoid of stylistic pretensions, it differs from classical history in that it has a point to prove, and it includes verbatim documents in order to help its case. His Chronicle, surviving in Syriac and in the Latin version by Jerome, was essentially a chronological table beginning with Creation, and presenting the ancient kingdoms of the Old Testament as well as all Greek and Roman history as part of a linear progression which would eventually culminate with the Second Coming and the end of the world. Eusebius’s own linear thinking was further worked out in his apologetic works, the Praeparatio Evangelica and the Demonstratio Evangelica, which propounded the view that all previous history was in fact a preparation for the coming of Christ and the establishment of Christianity, and his Chronicle was to provide the basis for the later Christian world chronicle, which became a standard medieval historical form in both Greek and Latin. Unlike the Life of Constantine, which had a more obviously topical relevance, the Church History and the Chronicle immediately became standard; the former was translated into Latin and continued in the late fourth century by Rufinus and became a model for later church historians such as Socrates and Sozomen, both lawyers who wrote in Constantinople in the fifth century.

      The audience for such works was no doubt largely if not entirely Christian; but there was also a need for historical works of a secular kind, and this may be the explanation for the series of short historical compendia in Latin which date from the middle of the fourth century and include Aurelius Victor’s De Caesaribus and the Breviarium of Eutropius. With the social and cultural changes of the third century, especially the decline of the Senate and shift of focus from Rome, senatorial history in the manner of Tacitus had apparently ceased to be written, while a Greek history of Constantine’s reign written by one Praxagoras, a pagan, has failed to survive intact. But from the end of the fourth century secular history in Greek underwent a considerable revival, which was to continue until the time of Theophylact Simocatta, writing in the seventh century; Zosimus’s New History falls into this category, though it is by no means one of the best examples. We ought also to include here the Latin Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, by far the most important historical work of the fourth century, deserving to rank with the classic writers of the republic and early empire, and a work with a vigour and power all its own.

      As he signs off his work, Ammianus tells us that he had begun it with the year AD 96, the reign of Nerva, which is also the point at which both Tacitus and Suetonius had ended:

      This is the history of events from the reign of the emperor Nerva to the death of Valens, which I, a former soldier and a Greek, have composed to the best of my ability. It claims to be the truth, which I have never ventured to pervert either by silence or a lie. The rest I leave to be written by better men whose abilities are in their prime. But if they choose to undertake the task I advise them to cast what they have to say in the grand style.

      As he tells us here, he ended with the disastrous Roman defeat and death of the Emperor Valens at Adrianople in AD 378. Since the part we have, beginning at the year AD 354, late in the reign of Constantius II, comprises eighteen books in itself, and is written on a very large scale, the first part (probably up to the section on Constantine, which is unfortunately lost) must have been considerably abbreviated by comparison; some scholars have believed that he wrote two separate works, but this is unlikely. In any case, Ammianus’s focus of interest changed in the last six books, which deal in famous detail with Rome and the vices of its late fourth-century senatorial class; though he was a pagan himself, the scathing vehemence with which he condemns the love of luxury among these Roman grandees makes it unlikely that he was the recipient of their patronage, or a spokesman for a supposed senatorial ‘pagan reaction’ (see Chapter X); book 28 includes a lengthy excursus on the vices of the nobility (28.4; cf. also 14.6), in the course of which Ammianus remarks that ‘some of them hate learning like poison but read Juvenal and Marius Maximus with avidity. These are the only volumes that they turn over in their idle moments.’ There seems to be a personal note here, but his actual milieu while in Rome remains a mystery, as does the identity of his patrons, if any; there are many other details about him which remain equally obscure, for instance his exact relation to contemporary Latin writers, including the author of the mysterious Historia Augusta (see below). Nor is it clear when he began writing, or how far his conception of the work changed during a long period of travel, which lasted from the death of the Emperor Julian (AD 363) until his arrival in Rome some time before AD 384. Completion of the work came in the early 390s.

      Ammianus describes himself as ‘a Greek’, and it is generally believed, though not on conclusive evidence, that he came from Antioch, a major seat of imperial administration in the east, where Latin would have been used in official and military circles. His inspiration was certainly the Emperor Julian, on whose ill-fated Persian expedition he served himself as an officer, and his books about Julian (20–25) are masterpieces of writing. Julian’s death during this campaign from an unexplained arrow shot (25.3; cf. Ammianus’ obituary of Julian, 25.4) must have been a severe blow to Ammianus himself; somehow, however, the material he had evidently collected while serving on this campaign became the basis of a grand imperial history, stretching backwards in time to AD 96 and forwards to AD 378.

      Ammianus is an original. A staunch conservative in his views, he admired Julian not only for his personal qualities as a leader, but also for his attempt to revive the independence of cities. Like Julian, Ammianus disliked the centralist policies of Constantine, and his account of Constantine, which would have been a major counterpart to that of Eusebius, is a great loss. As a pagan, Ammianus was no great lover of the Christian church, and his Roman books emphasize the unseemly conduct of ecclesiastical parties in Rome in the 370s and 380s, but his judgement remained independent, and Julian’s idea of preventing Christians from teaching as a means of reducing their influence earned his criticism:

      the laws which he enacted were not oppressive, and what they enjoined or prohibited was precisely stated, but there were a few exceptions, among them the harsh decree forbidding Christians to teach rhetoric or grammar unless they went over to the pagan gods. (25.4)

      In general, though, even a hasty look at his choice of vocabulary and his frequently expressed

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