Historia Augusta


The Historia Augusta is a late Roman collection of biographies, written in Latin, of the Roman emperors, their junior colleagues, designated heirs and usurpers from 117 to 284. Supposedly modeled on the similar work of Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, it presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors, collectively known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, written during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I and addressed to those emperors or other important personages in Ancient Rome. The collection, as extant, comprises thirty biographies, most of which contain the life of a single emperor, but some include a group of two or more, grouped together merely because these emperors were either similar or contemporaneous.
The true authorship of the work, its actual date, its reliability and its purpose have long been matters for controversy by historians and scholars ever since Hermann Dessau, in 1889, rejected both the date and the authorship as stated within the manuscript. Major problems include the nature of the sources that it used, and how much of the content is pure fiction. For instance, the collection contains in all about 150 alleged documents, including 68 letters, 60 speeches and proposals to the people or the senate, and 20 senatorial decrees and acclamations.
By the second decade of the 21st century, the consensus supported the position that there was only a single author, who wrote either in the late 4th century or the early 5th century, who was interested in blending contemporary issues into the lives of the 3rd century emperors. There is further consensus that the author used the fictitious elements in the work to highlight references to other published works, such as to Cicero and Ammianus Marcellinus, in a complex allegorical game. Despite the conundrums, it is the only continuous account in Latin for much of its period and so is continually being re-evaluated. Modern historians are unwilling to abandon it as a unique source of possible information, despite its obvious untrustworthiness on many levels.

Title and scope

The name Historia Augusta originated with Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, working from a complex manuscript tradition with a number of variant versions. The title as recorded on the Codex Palatinus manuscript, written in the 9th century, is Vitae Diversorum Principum et Tyrannorum a Divo Hadriano usque ad Numerianum Diversis compositae. It is assumed that the work may have been originally called de Vita Caesarum or Vitae Caesarum.
How widely the work was circulated in late antiquity is unknown, but its earliest known use was in a Roman History composed by Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus in 485. Lengthy citations from it are found in authors of the 6th and 9th centuries, including Sedulius Scottus who quoted parts of the Marcus Aurelius, the Maximini and the Aurelian within his Liber de Rectoribus Christianis, and the chief manuscripts also date from the 9th or 10th centuries. The six Scriptores – "Aelius Spartianus", "Julius Capitolinus", "Vulcacius Gallicanus", "Aelius Lampridius", "Trebellius Pollio", and "Flavius Vopiscus " – dedicate their biographies to Diocletian, Constantine and various private persons, and so ostensibly were all writing around the late 3rd and early 4th century. The first four scriptores are attached to the lives from Hadrian to Gordian III, while the final two are attached to the lives from Valerian to Numerian.
The biographies cover the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian. A section covering the reigns of Philip the Arab, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian and all but the end of the reign of Valerian is missing in all the manuscripts, and it has been argued that biographies of Nerva and Trajan have also been lost at the beginning of the work, which may suggest the compilation might have been a direct continuation of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars. It has been theorized that the mid-3rd-century lacuna might actually be a deliberate literary device of the author or authors, saving the labour of covering Emperors for whom little source material may have been available.
Despite devoting whole books to ephemeral or in some cases non-existent usurpers, there are no independent biographies of the factual, but short reigns of Emperors Quintillus and Florian, whose reigns are merely briefly noted towards the end of the biographies of their respective predecessors, Claudius Gothicus and Tacitus. For nearly 300 years after Casaubon's edition, though much of the Historia Augusta was treated with some scepticism, it was used by historians as an authentic source – Edward Gibbon used it extensively in the first volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. However, "in modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of deliberate mystification written much later than its purported date, however the fundamentalist view still has distinguished support. The Historia Augusta is also, unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and caution."

Textual transmission

Existing manuscripts and witnesses of the Historia Augusta fall into three groups:
  1. A manuscript of the first quarter of the ninth century, Vatican Pal. lat. 899, known as P, and its direct and indirect copies. P was written at Lorsch in Caroline minuscule. The text in this manuscript has several lacunae marked with dots indicating the missing letters, a confusion in the order of the biographies between Verus and Alexander, and the transposition of several passages: two long ones which correspond to a quire of the original which became loose and was then inserted in a wrong place, and a similar transposition in Carus. P is also distinguished by a succession of six centuries of editorial corrections, beginning with the original scribe, and includes such worthies as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini; none of these editors betray any knowledge of any other witness.
  2. A group of 15th-century manuscripts, designated as Σ. Not only are the lives rearranged in chronological order, but the corruptions present in P have been subjected to drastic emendations or omitted altogether. Beginning with Ernst Hohl, some have asserted that the improvements in the text come from a source independent of P. Although admitting that "this question still remains to be answered definitively", author Peter Marshall noted that research undertaken through to the 1980s had improved scholarly knowledge concerning the methods and abilities of early Italian humanists, and concludes by saying that "the Σ manuscripts nowhere provide readings which are beyond the powers of the humanists active at the time.
  3. Three different sets of excerpts, one of which Theodor Mommsen suggested was possibly the work of Sedulius Scottus. How any are related to P is unclear.
In Marshall's opinion, the best scholarly editions are those by H. Peter and E. Hohl.
A copy of the Codex Palatinus was the basis of the editio princeps of the History, published in Milan in 1475. A subsequent printed version was published at Venice in 1516, and this was followed closely by an edition edited by Desiderius Erasmus, and published by Johann Froben in Basel in 1518.

Debates on dating

In 1776, Gibbon observed that there was something wrong with the numbers and names of the imperial biographers, and that this had already been recognised by older historians who had written on that subject. A clear example was the referencing of the biographer "Lampridius" by "Vopiscus", who was meant to be writing his biographies in 305–306. Then, in 1889, Hermann Dessau, who had become increasingly concerned by the large number of anachronistic terms, Vulgar Latin vocabulary, and especially the host of obviously false proper names in the work, proposed that the six authors were all fictitious personae, and that the work was in fact composed by a single author in the late 4th century, probably in the reign of Theodosius I. Among his supporting evidence was that the life of Septimius Severus appeared to have made use of a passage from the mid-4th-century historian Aurelius Victor, and that the life of Marcus Aurelius likewise uses material from Eutropius.
In the decades following Dessau, many scholars argued to preserve at least some of the six Scriptores as distinct persons and in favour of the first-hand authenticity for the content. As early as 1890, Theodor Mommsen postulated a Theodosian "editor" of the Scriptores' work, an idea that has resurfaced many times since. Hermann Peter, editor of the Historia Augusta and of the Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae, proposed a date of 330 for when the work was written, based upon an analysis of style and language. Others, such as Norman H. Baynes, abandoned the early-4th-century date but only advanced it as far as the reign of Julian the Apostate, useful for arguing the work was intended as pagan propaganda.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Dessau's original arguments received powerful restatement and expansion from Ronald Syme, who devoted three books to the subject and was prepared to date the writing of the work closely in the region of AD 395. Other recent studies also show much consistency of style, and most scholars now accept the theory of a single author of unknown identity, writing after 395. Although it was believed that the Historia Augusta did not reference any material from Ammianus Marcellinus' history, which was finished before 391 and which covered the same period, this has now been shown not to be the case, and that the Historia Augusta does in fact make reference to Ammianus' history.
Not all scholars have accepted the theory of a forger working around the last decades of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th. Arnaldo Momigliano and A. H. M. Jones were the most prominent 20th-century critics of the Dessau-Syme theory amongst English-speaking scholars. Momigliano, summarizing the literature from Dessau down to 1954, defined the question as res iudicanda and not as "res iudicata". Momigliano reviewed every book published on the topic by Ronald Syme, and provided counter-arguments to most if not all of Syme's arguments.
For instance, the reference in the Life of Probus about the emperor's descendants which has been taken to refer to Sextus Claudius Petronius Probus and his family may, in the opinion of Momigliano, equally refer to the earlier members of the family, which was prominent throughout the 4th century, such as Petronius Probinus and Petronius Probianus. Momigliano's opinion was that there was insufficient evidence to dismiss a composition date of the early 4th century, and that any post-Constantinian anachronisms could be explained by an editor working on the material at a later date, perhaps during the reigns of Constantius II or Julian.
Other opinions included H Stern's, who postulated that the History was composed by a team of writers during the reign of Constantius II after the defeat of Magnentius on behalf of the senatorial aristocracy who had supported the usurper. In the 21st century, Alan Cameron rebutted a number of Syme's and Barnes' arguments for a composition date c. 395–400, suggesting a composition date between 361 and the 380s.