The Roman Friends of Ammianus

Abstract

The ninth book of the correspondence of Q. Aurelius Symmachus contains a number of letters lacking the names of their addressees. Otto Seeck once suggested that one of these letters might have been written to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. This suggestion has been accepted and built upon by most subsequent writers on Ammianus, and it has come to be generally agreed that he had connections among the senatorial aristocracy of Rome; connections, according to some scholars, that led to serious distortions in his history. A. Alföldi, in an attempt to rehabilitate his fellow-Pannonian, the brutal emperor Valentinian, maintained that Ammianus, ‘body and soul on the side of the senators’ (who hated Valentinian), presented ‘his dear Roman aristocrats’ with a picture of Valentinian ‘as black as one-sided hatred can contrive’. W. Ensslin suggested that Ammianus was a supporter of the usurper Eugenius whom Theodosius crushed in 394, and that the letter in question was deliberately published without his name to protect Symmachus' family—in which he has been followed by W. Hartke, and, with added refinements, by R. A. Pack.