Reviewed by: The Breviarium ab urbe condita Clyde Curry Smith Eutropius . The Breviarium ab urbe condita. Translated with an introduction and commentary by H. W. Bird.Translated Texts for Historians, 14. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993. Pp. lvii + 186. $15.95. The student of early Christianity has to be interested in the Roman Empire in general, and in the fourth century C.E. in particular. In this volume from a series devoted to Latin sources from the fourth through eighth centuries, we see how a surviving figure from the "old Rome" looks at its history, and looks indifferently at matters such as the rising power of Christian influence (referred to only once, as persecuted under Julian, in Book 10.16). A study of Eutropius, who lived from c. 320, and wrote after 364 a "Brief Summary since the Foundation of The City" (Breviarium ab urbe condita) of its 1,118 year history, provides a perspective on and from its aristocratic senatorial class. He is in the ilk of Libanius (314-c. 393) andSymmachus (c. 340-402), from whom letters to him survive. Later books emphasize the frontier with Sassanid Persia, where Julian "the Apostate" died, in whose company Eutropius was present. Moreover, Eutropius' work was one of the influences upon Christian Roman historiography, a major source for the continuing recollection of the imperial state in whose midst Christianity emerged. Among Christian authors influenced by Eutropius, the translator notes in passing Jerome, Augustine, Orosius, Cassiodorus, Jordanes, Isidore, Bede, and Paul the Deacon, the last of whom (c. 800) along with Landolfus Sagax (c. 1000) produced "expanded versions and continuations" which "generally displaced" the original (p. lvi). Yet one might have noted from the manuscript tradition, with twenty examples beginning in the ninth century, several copies of the Breviarium "written or owned in England up to 1100" (cf. Helmut Gneuss, Anglo-Saxon England 9 [1981] 10 and 15 #199), which illustrate quite well the survival of the original. Eutropius' narrative is that old-fashioned kind of history, which John Richard Green (1837-1883) would have labelled "drum and trumpet"—not uninteresting in itself as illustrative of the species, usefully chronological, even if occasionally erroneous, but ultimately from a standpoint lacking socio-economic concerns. We might note the enormity of the war-dead, rather than glorying in the wars! This is an ancient form of propaganda in the dual sense of praise of the Roman past while [End Page 500] providing a pattern for the "current" era and especially the ruler thereof. That it was found worthwhile for the next millenia is indicative of Eutropius' success. What is of some interest are Eutropius' omissions. These Harry Wesley Bird, professor of classics and head of the department at the University of Windsor, Canada, has identified in general in the lengthy introduction, and then elaborated in the copious notes which occupy more pages than the translated text. One senses, in that glorious "positivistic" vein of early twentieth-century historiography, that like John Bagnell Bury or Edward Gibbon—the latter himself correspondingly on his sources, et alia —so Bird on Eutropius: what is needed is to let the text speak for itself (surely a valid perspective), then "augment" that text (one would say in German, Verbessern!) with an erudition from a rich acquaintance with all comparative sources. The preface tells us "This book is primarily intended for students of the late empire who have little Latin and less Greek and no reading knowledge of German or Italian" (italics mine). But if such students lack the classical languages, how would they know the cumbersome apparatus of classical scholarship presupposed in the copious notes and the selected bibliography (pp. 168-174)? For example, to locate Bird's articles in the "E.M.C./C.V.," one must know Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views (Calgary)—a periodical not often included even in extensive treatments of bibliographic abbreviations. In the notes Bird emphasizes the interests of Eutropius: chronology, topography, milestones, and "religious" phenomena, including deification. Certain significant figures, like the Gracchi brothers, are omitted by Eutropius for reasons to which Bird gives speculative voice. Corrections required for any of Eutropius' interests regularly appear as part of Bird's erudition...
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Feb 1, 2012
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