The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (AD 300–620). Edition, Translation and Commentary by Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (AD 300–620). Edition, Translation and Commentary by Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen Michael Kulikowski The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (ad 300–620). Edition, Translation and Commentary Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 342. ISBN: 978-1-10-842027-3 The astonishingly prolific duo of Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen have struck again. Only months after Brepols brought out their Clavis Historicorum Antiquitatis Posterioris, An Inventory of Late Antique Historiography (ad 300–800), we get this complementary volume, offering texts, translations, and carefully selective commentary on twenty late ancient Latin histories and three spurious or dubious ones. All of these are texts that survive only as fragments or are known only from testimonia. The authors set out strict rules of selection, excluding biography on grounds of genre, and chronicles both on generic grounds and because of forthcoming editions by Richard W. Burgess and this reviewer. They also, crucially and rightly, exclude hypothetical lost works—those whose existence can be inferred on the basis of parallels between extant texts—noting that such lost texts are very often inferred without sufficient rigor ("scholars should raise the bar significantly for what counts as an allusion" [21, note 88]). Even where there is a rare consensus that Quellenforschung has indeed detected an authentic lost text—as with the so-called Kaisergeschichte posited by Alexander Enmann in 1884—recreations of its contents cannot help but drift towards mere speculation. Application of these strictures leaves us with the following authors: the only probably late antique Carminius and the anonymous De origine Patavina; the fourth-century Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, Nummius Aemilianus Dexter, Protadius, Naucellius, Pseudo-Hegesippus; the probably fifth-century Sulpicius Alexander, Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, Favius and Consentius; the undateable Ablabius; and the later fifth- and sixth-century Symmachus, Maximianus of Ravenna, Marcellinus Comes, Cassiodorus, Roterius, Secundus of Trent, and Maximus of Zaragoza; and finally the probably imaginary Bruttius, Latinus Alcimus Alethius, and Tyconius. It is a heterogeneous list, but no more so than the Greek historians brought together by Jacoby, or the fragmentary Latin historians of the Republican and early Imperial period collected in Cornell's now standard collection. Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen's substantial introduction is strong on the context of historiography in the Latin culture of Late Antiquity. They reject the idea that secular historiography, and the writing of secular history in this period, is in any meaningful sense a reflection of pagan identity. It was simply part of the social habitus of being an elite Roman in this era. The texts are taken from the best critical editions available, and the authors' choices are judicious: they use Mommsen rather than Giunta or Grillone [End Page 536] for Jordanes, Fridh for the Variae of Cassiodorus, and so on. They are also extremely conservative with speculation: wherever choices are to be made between maximalist or merely possible interpretations and scant conclusions that admit the stark limitations on certainty, they go with the latter. This conservatism is infinitely preferable to the flights of fancy that surround some of these authors, especially Flavianus, Naucellius, and Cassiodorus. The one place where one might quibble is in their hasty rejection of the possibility that the short recension of Isidore's History of the Goths might be the work of Maximus of Zaragoza—that theory, unproved to be sure, accounts for otherwise irreconcilable differences between long and short recensions, and the point should have been argued rather than dismissed out of hand. That minor point aside, their discussions are models of concision and judiciousness. A whole industry exists around the lost Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus and its supposed influence on scores of late ancient histories. A comprehensive demolition of this nonsense was essayed a decade ago by Alan Cameron in the Last Pagans of Rome—a demolition ignored by those with an investment in the Flavianus myth—and one might hope that the more sober, unelaborate dismissal of every beam in the mythic architecture here (36–58) will have greater effect. A similarly sober, undemonstrative account of the lost Gothic history...