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The Later Roman Empire. Averil Cameron
Читать онлайн.Название The Later Roman Empire
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isbn 9780007391844
Автор произведения Averil Cameron
Издательство HarperCollins
Ammianus has often been criticized for his supposedly uncouth Latin, which many scholars have attributed to his having been brought up as a Greek-speaker, but though often clumsy, his Latin is vivid, even melodramatic, and his highly-coloured vocabulary, which shows through even in translation, gives it a unique flavour. Comparison with contemporary writers shows that what has often been attributed to Ammianus’s poor Latin is in fact standard late Latin usage. Because of the vividness of Ammianus’s own writing, and his sharp eye for the bizarre, he has been seen as an essentially unclassical writer. However, this view is actually a disguised value judgement, which goes together with the notion of a qualitative ‘decline’ from the classical to the medieval. With the revaluation of late antiquity we can at last take Ammianus on his own terms (as Edward Gibbon did) and recognize in him one of the great writers of antiquity.
This is hardly the case with the author of the Historia Augusta, who seems to have composed his strange work in Rome very close in date to the completion of Ammianus’s Res Gestae. Purporting to be the work of six authors writing under Constantine, this is a collection of imperial biographies beginning with Hadrian in the early second century, which become progressively more fanciful and scandalous and less historical as they reach the middle and later third-century emperors. Its purpose hardly seems to have been that of serious history, and indeed, as we have seen, Ammianus writes scathingly about the contemporary taste for such biographies, so different from the serious purpose of his own work (see above on his reference to Marius Maximus, 28.4). Though some scholars have seen the Historia Augusta as a document of anti-Christian propaganda, it is hard to regard it as anything but light reading. As regards the Constantinian date, there are in fact many apparent anachronisms, of which enough are convincing to make it almost certain that this is a late fourth-century work; moreover, stylistic analysis aided by computer techniques suggests that it is the work of a single author (‘the joker’, as Syme calls him). It is our own misfortune that we have to rely so heavily for third-century history on what was no more than a bow to prevailing popular taste.
A final Latin work of the late fourth century must be mentioned in connection with the so-called pagan revival. This is the lost Annales by Nicomachus Flavianus, the pagan senator who committed suicide after the defeat of the usurper Eugenius by Theodosius I at the River Frigidus in September, AD 394. Like the Historia Augusta, this work, known from contemporary inscriptions, has been made into a cornerstone of the theory of a heavily ideological pagan revival among the senatorial class of the period, which it is assumed would have extended to its view of the Roman past. But while Nicomachus Flavianus himself evidently saw the battle at the River Frigidus as representing the confrontation of Christianity and paganism, and indeed is said by Christian authors to have cited oracles promising a pagan victory and the suppression of Christianity, we know hardly anything about the nature of the work itself. Nicomachus himself did however translate from Greek into Latin the tendentious Life of the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana by the second-century writer Philostratus. It would have been strange indeed if the literary productions by pagans written in so tense a period as the 390s, when Theodosius I’s anti-pagan legislation had stirred up violence in a number of cities, did not somehow reflect their ideological stance; after all, as we have seen, Christian writers constantly interpreted historical events in such a way as to demonstrate the triumph of Christianity or to explain away its setbacks. The greatest work of this kind was Augustine’s City of God (De Civitate Dei), a work of twenty-two books written in part at least to explain why God had allowed the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in AD 410. There is no likelihood however that Nicomachus’s Annales was a similarly philosophical or meditative work. Indeed, a number of fundamental problems have been exposed in the general theory of pagan revival insofar as it has been based on specific literary sources; these will be discussed further in Chapter X.
The genre of biography, the Life, plays an important role in the literary sources of this period. The encomium, or panegyric, had always had elements of biography in it, and Eusebius’s Life of Constantine combined both these forms, while also owing something to the existing tradition of lives of philosophers and holy men. Later in the fourth century both Christians and pagans developed such writing further. The classic work on the Christian side was the Life of Antony, the Egyptian hermit (d. AD 356), often held to be the first example of Christian hagiography (saints’ lives) and attributed to Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria since AD 328 and a central figure in the religious controversies of the fourth century. The work exists in Syriac as well as Greek, and some uncertainty surrounds its origins. The Greek text which survives presents Antony as being above such worldly concerns as rhetorical education; this was also a stance adopted by Athanasius himself, but rejection of culture was a matter of degree – the Life does not hesitate to have Antony delivering elaborate speeches or receiving imperial letters from Constantine. Whether or not by Athanasius, the Life was quickly translated into Latin and transmitted to Christian circles in Rome by Jerome, where it became the key text in the promulgation of the ascetic lifestyle. Augustine writes in the Confessions of its role in the process of his own spiritual development (see below). The Life of Antony set a moral and literary pattern: it emphasizes ascetic renunciation (symbolized by the desert) at the expense of worldly knowledge, and presents the life of the Christian holy man in terms of the progress of the soul towards God. The saint is marked out by his holiness, and indicated to others by the miracles he can perform (in Antony’s case, taming wild animals). This literary pattern, often influenced by the secular rhetorical encomium, was followed in countless later works from the fourth century into the Middle Ages. Hagiography can and does vary greatly in the extent of its historical content, from the virtually non-existent to the heavily circumstantial; each work has to be taken on its own merits, but it was certainly the Life of Antony which provided the classic model, and it would be hard to overestimate its importance. Jerome, characteristically, tried to go one better, himself composing Latin lives of rival hermits, Hilarion and Paul, as well as the Life of Malchus, all three of them essentially literary imitations of the Life of Antony.
Two other interesting Lives may be cited, both of women. First, the Greek Life of Macrina written by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. This is also a highly literary and indeed philosophical work, drawing on Plato’s Phaedrus for its presentation of the immortality of the soul. Macrina and Gregory came from a large landowning family which also included the great figure of Basil of Caesarea. As we learn from the Life, as a woman Macrina had not received the secular education given to her brothers, but had stayed at home with her mother in Pontos, where she later established a kind of religious community at the family home. She, according to Gregory, had the true philosophy, not Basil, despite all the glittering prizes he had won at Athens. The other, very different, Life of a woman is that written about Melania the Younger (d. AD 439), who at the age of twenty persuaded her husband Pinianus, whom she had married at thirteen, to renounce their vast inherited properties in order to lead a life of asceticism and religion. The Life of Melania the Younger survives in both Latin and Greek versions, which are similar but not identical; the original may have been written in Greek c. AD 452 by Gerontius, a deacon at Melania’s monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. As we have seen, Christian works were often immediately translated, and indeed Melania herself was fluent in both languages. The evidence of the Life is of great importance, not simply for Melania herself and her family connections with the Roman senatorial aristocracy but also as a primary document for economic history, since it provides detailed information about Melania’s estates and the sources of senatorial wealth. This is a good example of a hagiographical text which combines the ascetic theme (‘the angelic life’) with a large amount of hard historical material. Finally, both the Life of Macrina and the Life of Melania the Younger are witnesses to a feature of Christian writing which is hard to parallel in classical sources in their choice of a woman as the main subject. There was much in late antique Christianity that was deeply inimical to women, yet the fact that Christian women