Buch, Englisch, Band 337, 155 Seiten
Reihe: Collection Latomus
Buch, Englisch, Band 337, 155 Seiten
Reihe: Collection Latomus
ISBN: 978-2-87031-278-0
Verlag: PEETERS PUB
This short monograph examines the authorship, date, context, redaction
and reception of the Historia Augusta – a corpus of biographies
of emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries, which
purports to be the work of six writers active in the reigns of
Diocletian and Constantine.
Thomson accepts the widely held view that one author, a scholarly
impostor, composed and redacted the Historia Augusta some time
after about 395. Internal evidence –which includes administrative
anachronisms and allusions to events, as well as spurious names,
genealogies and documents– suggests that the corpus was intended for an
audience among the Roman elite of the end of the fourth century. Thomson
argues that the lives were not written for a polemical purpose. Their
author instead responded to widespread interest in the works of
Suetonius and Marius Maximus; his countless fabrications represented
attempts to fill lacunae in the record with material appropriate to the
genre of imperial biography. To this end, the scholarly impostor
plundered the tradition for literary models and historical examples,
apparently unmoved by the strict demands of chronology.
This monograph advances several arguments that may be considered
innovative. After examining the evidence of the text and the tradition,
Thomson substantively revises existing theories on the redaction of the
corpus. He proposes that an extant collection of panegyrics (the Panegyrici
Latini) –or some similar work now lost– may have provided a model
for the otherwise baffling imposture of collective authorship and
tetrarchic date. Thomson also tentatively suggests a connection between
the scholarly impostor, the spurious author Flavius Vopiscus Syracusius
and a Syracusan poetaster and antiquarian active in the relevant period
(Naucellius).
