Rome in Late Antiquity: Clientship, Urban Topography, and Prosopography

Abstract

ne may ask anachronistic questions of history, as the great Witold Kula once observed, as long as the answers are not anachronistic. So my intention here is to examine certain passages from Ammianus Marcellinus, relating them to realities and beliefs of the fourth century— realities and beliefs that, in my opinion, deserve to be better understood through a comparison with those present in some later authors of the fifth and sixth centuries. Two very well known digressions by Ammianus on the vices of the senate and people of Rome have been frequently analyzed. Each passage has been variously judged: as a precious source of factual information,1 as a malevolent venting of personal rancor,2 or as a purely rhetorical construction of invective purposely designed to overthrow the schemes proposed by Menander (a rhetorician of the third century c.e.) as suitable for the praise of a city.3 One of these digressions is that of Book 14 (chap. 6), which was very probably already in circulation in 392 together with the rest of the first twenty-five books. The other digression is to be found in Book 28 (chap. 4.6–35) and was probably outlined at the same time as the first (which it resembles and complements, especially concerning the eating habits of the Romans, both aristocratic and plebeian), but it was published some years