Isaac Casaubon published a critical edition of the Historia Augusta in 1603, establishing the modern name for this late Roman collection. Before his work, the text appeared under different titles within manuscript traditions like the Codex Palatinus written during the ninth century. That specific manuscript records the title as Vitae Diversorum Principum et Tyrannorum a Divo Hadriano usque ad Numerianum Diversis compositae. This long Latin phrase translates to The Lives of various Emperors and Tyrants from the Divine Hadrian to Numerian by Various Authors. Scholars assume the original work may have been called de Vita Caesarum or Vitae Caesarum. How widely the work circulated in late antiquity remains unknown, but its earliest known use appears in a Roman History composed by Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus in 485. Lengthy citations from the text appear in authors of the sixth and ninth centuries including Sedulius Scottus who quoted parts of the Marcus Aurelius biography within his Liber de Rectoribus Christianis.
Textual Transmission History
Existing manuscripts of the Historia Augusta fall into three distinct groups that reveal significant textual corruption over time. A manuscript from the first quarter of the ninth century known as Vatican Pal lat 899 contains several lacunae marked with dots indicating missing letters. This codex also shows confusion in the order of biographies between Verus and Alexander alongside transposition of passages where two long sections became loose and inserted in wrong places. Six centuries of editorial corrections follow on this manuscript beginning with Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini yet none of these editors betray knowledge of any other witness. A group of fifteenth-century manuscripts designated as Sigma rearrange lives in chronological order while subjecting corruptions to drastic emendations or omitting them altogether. Research through the 1980s suggests these improvements come from sources independent of the earlier codex though Peter Marshall notes readings nowhere provide beyond powers of humanists active at the time. Three different sets of excerpts exist one possibly by Sedulius Scottus but how they relate to the primary codex remains unclear. The editio princeps published in Milan in 1475 used a copy of the Codex Palatinus likely made for Petrarch in 1356 as its basis.