Historia Augusta

• 1. Introduction

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  The Historia Augusta is a collection of biographies of Roman emperors written in Latin, covering a span of rulers from 117 to 284. On the surface, it presents itself as the work of six different authors writing during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I. But almost nothing about that claim is true. When the scholar Hermann Dessau examined the text in 1889, he concluded that the six named authors were inventions, the documents embedded in the text were fabricated, and the whole enterprise was probably the work of a single anonymous writer living a century later than the text claims. The question of who wrote it, when, and why has never been fully settled. What makes the Historia Augusta inescapable despite its unreliability is this: for long stretches of the 3rd century, it is the only continuous account in Latin that survives. Historians cannot discard it. They can only use it with, as one summary puts it, extreme circumspicion and caution.

• 2. What the Text Claims

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  Six named authors are listed in the Historia Augusta as its compilers: Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio, and Flavius Vopiscus of Syracuse. Together they are called the Scriptores Historiae Augustae. Their biographies are dedicated to the emperors Diocletian and Constantine and to various private persons, which would place their writing in the late 3rd and early 4th century. The first four authors handle the lives from Hadrian through Gordian III, while Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus cover the emperors from Valerian to Numerian. The title itself was not part of the original text. Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, coined the name Historia Augusta. The title recorded on the oldest surviving manuscript, the Codex Palatinus, is the more cumbersome Vitae Diversorum Principum et Tyrannorum a Divo Hadriano usque ad Numerianum Diversis compositae, meaning roughly The Lives of Various Emperors and Tyrants from the Divine Hadrian to Numerian by Various Authors. The work as it survives comprises thirty biographies. Some cover a single emperor; others group together rulers who were either similar or nearly contemporary.

• 3. The Dating Controversy

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  Edward Gibbon noticed something was wrong as early as 1776. He observed that the numbers and names of the imperial biographers did not add up, and that earlier historians had already spotted the discrepancy. One clear example: the author writing as Lampridius was apparently composing his biographies after the year 324, yet he is cited by Vopiscus, who claims to be writing in 305 or 306. Hermann Dessau pressed the case much further in 1889. He catalogued anachronistic vocabulary, Vulgar Latin words out of place for the period, and a host of names that were plainly false. His conclusion was that a single author composed the entire work in the late 4th century, probably during the reign of Theodosius I. The life of Septimius Severus appeared to draw on the 4th-century historian Aurelius Victor, and the life of Marcus Aurelius borrowed material from Eutropius, neither of whom could have been available to authors claiming to write under Diocletian. Ronald Syme devoted three books to the question and was prepared to date the text to around AD 395. Scholars opposing the Dessau-Syme theory, including Arnaldo Momigliano and A. H. M. Jones, argued there was insufficient evidence to rule out a composition date in the early 4th century, with later editorial interventions explaining the anachronisms. Other proposals ranged from the reign of Constantius II to somewhere between 361 and the 380s, suggested by Alan Cameron, who rebutted several of Syme's arguments in the 21st century.

• 4. Six Authors or One

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  The case against six independent authors rests on a pattern of consistencies that are hard to explain if the scriptores were genuinely separate individuals. All six use the word occido for killing a total of 42 times but employ the alternative interficio only once. That ratio appears nowhere else in Latin writing of the period and genre. All six write biographies not only of reigning emperors but also of their junior colleagues, heirs, and failed usurpers, and they describe their methods in strikingly similar language. They share a fixation on women, wine, and military discipline, and they share a taste for wordplay: Verus was described as truthful, Severus as severe. They also share collective errors, such as calling Diadumenianus by the name Diadumenus. Computer-assisted stylistic analysis has returned ambiguous results: some elements of style are consistent throughout the work, while others vary in a way that suggests multiple authorship, and different research teams have reached opposite conclusions. One scholar who resisted the single-author theory, Daniel Den Hengst, argued instead for a post-Constantinian editor who was also the author of the second half of the text and who inserted material into the first half as well. The names of the authors themselves may be part of the joke. The word vopiscus is a rare Latin term for a twin who survives after its sibling died in the womb, which some interpreters read as a clue pointing to Flavius Vopiscus as the last survivor of the six. Vulcacius is thought to mock Volcatius Sedigitus, an actual literary critic with associations to humor.

• 5. A Library of Fabrications

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  Among the most telling features of the Historia Augusta is its archive of allegedly authentic documents. In all, the work contains around 150 of them: 68 letters, 60 speeches and proposals to the senate or people, and 20 senatorial decrees and acclamations. Ancient historians were expected to invent rhetorical speeches; that was standard practice. But these documents are presented as actual records, and almost all of them have been rejected as fabrications. The stylistic grounds for rejection are reinforced by references to military titles and administrative offices that are not otherwise attested until decades or even a century after the dates the text claims. The text also cites dozens of historians and biographers whose names appear nowhere else in the historical record. The biographer Cordus, for instance, is cited twenty-seven times. Long treated as a real but lost source, Cordus is now understood to be largely an invention: the few details attributed to him that can be checked against genuine sources turn out to have been lifted from Suetonius or Cicero, while everything else is fabricated. Cordus appears almost exclusively in sections where the author relied on the historian Herodian, and his citations disappear once Herodian's own history ends. The text also borrows from legitimate historians without acknowledgment. Herodian is explicitly cited ten times, but his material is also attributed three times to an author called Arrianus, apparently to create the impression of multiple independent sources. Quintus Gargilius Martialis, who wrote about horticulture and medicine, is twice cited as a biographer, which scholars regard as another false attribution.

• 6. The Biographies and Their Reliability

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  The Historia Augusta draws a distinction, which modern scholars have formalized, between primary lives of reigning emperors and secondary lives of their heirs, junior colleagues, and unsuccessful claimants. Figures such as Hadrian's heir Aelius Caesar, the usurpers Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, and Macrinus' son Diadumenian fall into the secondary category. None of these secondary lives contain much solid information; they are padded with rhetoric and obvious fiction. Scholars have estimated that the biography of Avidius Cassius contains roughly 5% reliable historical detail, Geta similarly around 5%, while Pescennius Niger runs to about 29% and Clodius Albinus to about 32%. The longer the text runs, the worse the reliability becomes. After the biography of Caracalla, even the primary lives begin to assume the fictive qualities that had previously been confined to the secondary ones. The life of Alexander Severus, one of the longest in the entire collection, turns into an extended rhetorical fable on the theme of the philosopher-king. The author's earlier sources had run out. He still drew on recognized texts, including Herodian up to 238, and probably Dexippus in later sections, as well as Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, but the lives increasingly become tracts of invention with occasional embedded facts. One example of the author's working method: a true historical note about Philip banning male prostitution, sourced from Aurelius Victor's own account of Philip's reign, appears not in any biography of Philip but inside the life of Alexander Severus, apparently because the author had no Philip biography in which to place it. This suggests the gap in the middle of the collection was deliberate, a way of not abandoning useful material when no suitable biography existed.

• 7. Purpose and Literary Judgment

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  Ronald Syme described the Historia Augusta as the most enigmatic work that Antiquity has transmitted. Opinions on its purpose range widely. Some scholars read it as entertainment, possibly satire in the spirit of texts like 1066 and All That. Others have argued it is a pagan attack on Christianity, with the author concealing his identity for personal safety. Under this reading, the gap in the middle of the text, which skips the reign of Philip the Arab and avoids discussing Decius and Valerian, is deliberate: by the late 4th century, Philip was being claimed as a Christian emperor, and Decius and Valerian were notorious persecutors of the Church whose deaths Christians interpreted as divine punishment. Syme himself rejected the idea of any clear propaganda purpose. He saw the text as primarily a literary exercise, a piece of satire produced by what he called a rogue scholiast catering to the antiquarian tastes of the Theodosian age, when Suetonius and Marius Maximus were fashionable reading. The author openly signals his own game in the life of Aurelian, where the narrator Flavius Vopiscus records a supposed conversation with the City Prefect of Rome during the festival of Hilaria, in which the Prefect urges him to write as he chooses and invent what he does not know. David Rohrbacher has argued that the author has no political or theological agenda at all, and that the Historia Augusta is the equivalent of a literary puzzle, with the reader's recognition of its numerous elaborate allusions being the only purpose behind its existence. Despite all of this, the text left real traces in the historical record. Edward Gibbon reproduced its account of Gallienus uncritically in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Modern scholars believe Gallienus was posthumously maligned and was in fact one of the main architects of the later Roman imperial structure, a corrective that required untangling Gibbon's dependence on a document that was inventing quotable quips about losing Egypt and Gaul.

• 8. Manuscripts and Transmission

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  The oldest surviving manuscript of the Historia Augusta is Vatican Pal. lat. 899, known as the Codex Palatinus or P, written at the abbey of Lorsch in the first quarter of the 9th century in Caroline minuscule. It contains several gaps marked with dots for missing letters, a disrupted order of biographies between Verus and Alexander, and a transposition of passages caused by a loose gathering of pages inserted in the wrong place. The manuscript also carries six centuries of editorial corrections, beginning with the original scribe and including Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini, none of whom showed any knowledge of any other version of the text. A group of 15th-century manuscripts, designated as Sigma, rearranges the lives in chronological order and corrects or omits the corruptions found in P. Peter Marshall concluded, after reviewing research up to the 1980s, that the improvements in these manuscripts are within the capabilities of Italian humanist scholars of the period and do not require an independent source. The earliest known use of the Historia Augusta appears in a Roman History composed by Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, who served as consul in 485. Sedulius Scottus, writing in the 9th century, quoted from the biographies of Marcus Aurelius, the Maximini, and Aurelian in his Liber de Rectoribus Christianis. The editio princeps, based on a copy of the Codex Palatinus probably made for Petrarch in 1356, was published in Milan in 1475. An edition published at Venice in 1516 was followed closely by one edited by Desiderius Erasmus and published by Johann Froben in Basel in 1518. Isaac Casaubon's critical edition of 1603, from which the name Historia Augusta originates, remained the benchmark for generations.