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Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen, "The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
01:24:47
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla and today we're talking with George Woodhousen and Justin Stover about the lost history of Sextus Aurelius Victor. In 361, the Emperor Julian commissioned a statue of the greatest historian of his age. It wasn't for Ammianus Marcellinus. It was for a man who was raised on a North African farm by a barely literate father. And his name was Victor or Sextus Aurelius Victor. Ammianus called him a scriptor historicus, a real history writer. He was the the only writer of his age who was really worthy of imitation. And Victor was admired enough that not only did Julian and Amianus to non Christians have him in their authorial pantheons, but so too did Christians like the emperor Theodosius and that ever critical Jerome. Even Greek authors like John the Lydian cite him. And all the way into the 8th century, Paul the Deacon would still turn to him. This guy was famous, but we'll be forgiven for never having read him or honestly even having heard of him. Victor's best known text is about 12,000 words. It's about the size and the style of a long, dull article. It's called the De Caesarebus and it's a kind of condensed history of the emperor, the empire, from Augustus to Julian, from let's say around zero to around 360. And it's not just that the text is kind of boring and a little incoherent, it's that there's another history that's more or less the same, except that it goes on until 395. And it's also got Victor's name on it. And that one's called the Epitome de Caesaribus, the Summary of the Emperors. So we've got two texts, neither of which is exactly bedside reading, that were somehow written by someone who was so well regarded that even non Christians and Christians could agree that he should be in any historian's library. And this guy also deserved statues. I mean, how is there such a gap between what we're reading and what they thought? Well, one reason that George Wodehousen and Justin Stover has shown is that what we have is more or less the AI summary and what Jerome and Ammianus were reading was the real thing. There are other reasons too, though. For a long time, scholars have assumed that there was some source behind Ammianus and other histories of the later Roman Empire, like the Historia Augusta. But Wodhausen and Stover have shown that the source was in fact, Victor. But to understand kind of how this famous historian comes down to us in such short, dull texts, we're going to have to think about how these works circulated in antiquity, what ancient readers would have wanted from them, and what it means for scholars today to try to piece together sources from behind sources. So, you know, one thing that they also show, though, is that late Antiquity was not just a time of preachers and poets. Ammianus was not the only secular historian writing Victor, too, maybe for the first time since Tacitus and Sidonius were writing, you know, he was writing a big Latin history of the Roman Empire, and he could become famous for writing a big history of the Roman Empire. So this is a, you know, technical and detailed books and podcasts are honestly bad places for close readings. I hope you also go read the book. But the story of how Professors Woodhausen and Stover kind of puzzled their way back to Victor is one that I think is worth trying to tell. And we are really lucky to have have them with us. So, George, Justin, welcome. Thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourselves? Who are you? How did you get interested in Victor? Can you give us, I don't know, just a little backstory to this book?
- [03:24]
A
Well, thank you very much, Michael, for inviting us on your podcast. It's great to be with you today to have a chance to talk about this book. So I think I'll pass to Justin now to introduce himself.
- [03:35]
C
Yeah, very nice to meet you, and thank you also for having us there. You know, my background is really not conventional to have written a book like this. I did my doctorate in same metro area where you are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Medieval Latin. So that is Latin that was written after the end of antiquity with a real focus on manuscripts, transmissions, and philology more broadly.
- [04:04]
A
And I started out really as a historian of the early Middle Ages or Late Antiquity, and gradually moved backwards into the later Roman Empire as I sought to understand the origins of things I was seeing in slightly later periods. And by the time we met, which was at All Souls College in Oxford, we were working, I think, both on really quite closely related problems to the bigger problem of Victor. And Justin was working on transmission and in particular on taking the evidence of manuscripts seriously for thinking about ancient literature, you know, looking at manuscripts for what they can tell us, for sort of more literary interpretation of the text that they contain. I was thinking about 4th century history, but perhaps I can again pass back to Justin and he can talk a little bit more about his own work.
- [05:01]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, so Victor was really just this really great example of one of these little kind of manuscripts problems, right, that, as you mentioned in the intro, we have these two separate works and the manuscripts both have the name Victor on them. And me knowing nothing about Roman history, I wondered why. Why do we have these two different works that both have the name Victor on them? Surely there must be some explanation.
- [05:28]
A
And as I said, I was working on 4th century history, especially on the middle of the 4th century, and I could not understand why in what was conventionally thought to be Dipter's work, there were so many mistakes and so many glaring omissions. So that's sort of where we tend. So.
- [05:44]
C
So we both, yeah, we both had this idea that there was. There was something wrong, there was some problem here that had. Had not been addressed. Right. So in spring of 2015, we. We had this conversation where I brought up to George if there was some pat explanation that, you know, ancient historians had that explained the issue behind these two texts.
- [06:07]
A
And I could say, and we'll get into the details of this later. Yes, there is, but it's not a very satisfactory answer. And that's sort of the origin of the whole thing.
- [06:17]
C
And so in a very kind of intense, you know, week, two week period, we just sort of really looked at the evidence there, what the manuscripts actually said, and particularly the paratextual features. Right. And in manuscript studies, paratextual features are all those things that occur around the texts. These are things like titles, like glosses, like all of that. Right. And once we started looking, we realized that something was seriously amiss. As you said, that we know these works, such as the De Kaysari Booth and the Epitome de Caesare Booths, but that's not what the manuscripts called them. The manuscripts called them something else. Historiae Abbreviati, an Abbreviated History, or Labellus Breviatis, an abbreviated little book which suggested that what we have, it was not Victor's actual work, but rather adaptations or epitomes from it.
- [07:10]
A
And after that initial sort of light bulb moment, honestly, everything kind of fell into place remarkably quickly. Now it took us somewhat longer to write what is a very long book, but the core complex of ideas emerged in. I don't know what you'd say, just in about a month or so. And then we spent a lot and we're working them out. And the basic idea. Sorry, we should just say the basic idea is you've got that in your introduction Michael, is that Victor wrote a large scale history at the Roman Empire From Augustus to A.D. 360, which was the year in which he roughly published his work. And that's you. Our book is one of those books where the thesis is in the title. It's about the lost history of sexless Aurelius Victor. And the argument is there was a lost history of Sexus Aurelius Victor.
- [07:55]
B
Yeah, I mean it's great. And you know, like, we really do appreciate when the title tells you what the book is about. We need more of those. So yeah, we're going to get into this big lost history, but maybe before we get there, can you tell us like who was this guy? Sexist Aurelius Victor?
- [08:10]
C
Yeah. So you know, with 4th century individuals, most of them are relatively obscure to us. The two big exceptions are emperors, people conn emperors and then major early Christian figures, church fathers. Right. We know a lot about them, but other people we don't know a lot about. But Victor is an exception. And the reason for that is that he tells us a lot about himself in his work. So as you mentioned, he tells us he was from North Africa, probably from near Lepkis Magna in modern Libya. He tells us that he remembered the reign of the emperor Constantine who died in 337. So we can guess that he was probably born around 320, certainly no later than 330. He tells us that he was born to a father of modest means who didn't have a formal education. And despite this, he tells us he got a very thorough grounding, the liberal arts. And it's to that education that he attributed all of his worldly success. One other thing, Victor is a bit TG about his religious views, but there are hints here and there that show very clearly that even in the rapidly Christianizing empire of the 4th century and even in the Christian heartland of North Africa, he was a pagan.
- [09:26]
A
Now, the earliest phases of Victor's career are the most obscure to us. But he seems to have gone to Rome, which was obviously a major center of education and government in his young manhood. Let's say he mentions how in the year 348 he was particularly disappointed by the lack of any celebration of the 1100th anniversary of the city's foundation. We're not sure how long he spent in the city, we're not even really certain what he was doing there. But we pick him up Next in the 360s when he was in Illyricum, rashly, the modern Balkans. And Victor seems to have entered the late Roman bureaucracy and in particular he was in the service of a man called Anatolius. There was the Praetorian Prefecture chief minister roughly of the region of Illyricum.
- [10:17]
C
So you know Anatolius, he's a really interesting figure. He's from Berytus, which was in modern day root in the law school of the Roman world. He's a highly cultured native of the Eastern Empire with excellent contacts in the Greek speaking regions, but also someone who is clearly bicultural. He held office in the Latin parts of the Empire and of course Latin was the language of law as well. It was taught in Berytus and he was well connected there. Now Victor himself, as we said, was a big believer in the importance of literary culture. So it's really striking that he ended up working for a man like Anatolius. This was probably not a coincidence. We have contemporary evidence, for example from Libanius's letters that Anatolius made it a deliberate point to seek out promising prospects, you know, young men who are had good education to bring them into imperial service.
- [11:14]
A
Now for Victor, being in the Balkans at this time was very fortuitous because it meant that he was on the scene in AD361 when the emperor Julian, famously the last pagan emperor, led an army into the region on the way to fight his cousin Constantius ii, who was senior emperor at the time. Julian met Victor twice on his way through the Balkans and on the second occasion honored him with a bronze statue and promoted him to be governor of the province of Pannonia Secunda.
- [11:47]
C
After that the trail goes a little bit cold and we might be tempted to think that maybe he was sort of a flash in the pan, right, A momentary literary celebrity. But then we hear about him again 30 years later when he was promoted by a very different emperor, that is Theodosius, to be prefect of the city of Rome, probably in the year389.
- [12:12]
A
Now I think it's really crucial to emphasize at this stage how comparatively unusual it was for someone with a background like Victor to end up as prefect of the city of Rome. This was an office dominated by senators, by wealthy and powerful aristocrats. And Victor came from this very different world. When he talks about the poverty of his rural upbringing, he's describing a world away something a world away from the senatorial elite at the 4th century. It's a real achievement for someone like Victor to be prefect of the city after that.
- [12:45]
C
I mean, if Victor could remember Constantine and then was urban prefect in 389, he was at least in his 60s, could have been older. And so it's not surprising that we don't really hear anything about him afterwards. So he probably died not long after that, sometime in the three 90s.
- [13:04]
A
So that's a sort of potted biography of Victor. We might draw out just. Just a couple of points from that. And one of them is that Victor's this really interesting example of the close links in the later Roman Empire between literary culture and political power. In a funny way, the person in the 4th century to whom he was most similar is St. Augustine. Now, Augustine was about 30 years younger than Victor, but he came from a similar rural background in North Africa. He also got an excellent education, which he leveraged into a career at Rome. Thereafter, Victor and Augustine took somewhat different paths, but both are interesting case studies of the kind of social mobility that traditional education could here and there, provide to people in the labour and. Whoa.
- [13:54]
B
Oh, that's great. Yeah. I mean, what. What a life, too. I mean, gosh, you know, going from a farm in North Africa to being prefect Rome. I mean, and like you said, just the power of education and of writing the kind of book that can make you that famous. I mean, it shows just the power of this literary culture. Yeah. Thank you. So the big argument of the book is that Victor writes this big history that becomes kind of the source for a lot of later Roman history, but we don't have the big history. You know, we'll get into what you call the nature of this history in a little bit. But we have these two other texts from him that both kind of trace back to the big history. But before we can say, you know, get to that, can you tell us kind of briefly what the text that we do have are like? You know, what age do they cover? What kind of people, what kind of events is he interested in? Maybe we can start with the Historia abbreviate, the abbreviated history.
- [14:48]
C
Yeah. So, well, let me say something first about the two of them, right? Because for me, unsurprisingly, I would think about them from the standpoint of transmission. From that standpoint, they're very, very different. One of them is only transmitted in two 15th century manuscripts as the third part of this really strange compendium of Roman history, which goes from before the foundation of Rome itself to the year 360 in about 20,000 words. Okay. And the imperial section of this, which is about half the total work, has the title Aurelii Victoris Historiae Breviatae, the Abbreviated History of Arrhenius Victor now, the other text, by contrast, is transmitted really robustly. Quite a few manuscripts from the 9th century on as a standalone work, right? Not as part of the compendium with the title the Labellis de vitat moribus imperatorumenorum Bergliati Sex Libris extreli Victorious, or the little book on the Life and Character of the Roman Emperors, Abbreviated from the Books of Sex through.
- [15:56]
A
Now. The two works have similar but not identical chronological ranges. The Historiae Abrevetae, which we sometimes call Bhab just for short because it's a bit of a mouthful, otherwise covers, as Justin already said, Augustus to AD 360. The Libellus breviatus, in contrast, covers Augustus to AD 395. But beyond that slight chronological difference, the two works are very different in character. The Historiai Breviati is this weird mishmash of historical facts with a lot of moralizing rhetoric and reflections on the shape and meaning of Roman history. Its Latin is often tempted to say, always quite difficult to understand. If you've read some Tacitus in Latin, that gives you a sense of what it's like to read Victor in terms of the complexity of the language and the style. The narrative jerks around a lot as well. It's not very coherent. You're watching an emperor be crowned one moment, and then the next thing you know he's already dead and we're on to the next one. It's quite hard to tell how things fit together. The Nobelis Breviatus, in contrast, the little booklet, is much more coherent. It gives a potted biography of every emperor it covers. It selects a few key events which it talks about, but it focuses mostly on what its title promises, that is, the sort of personal lives and characters of the emperors. Its writing is also mostly fairly straightforward and clear. It's not a text where you look at it and go, I just have no idea what this means. Whereas the Historia Abbreviate is quite often like that.
- [17:43]
C
So given that, it really is no surprise that they had the reception, history and scholarship that they have, there are obvious reasons to treat them as two completely different kinds of work. The weird thing, however, and this is the thing that really should have raised eyebrows more than it has, is that they share a ton of verbatim material, just for the period from Augustus to Domitian. That's the first 11 chapters of the work, and after that there are some slighter parallels. Now, actually, that in a way makes the work the problem more difficult, because, you know, if they were Completely different texts. We could just say, well, they got randomly attributed to the same guy, to this Victor. Right. But clearly, given their connections, which are shared by no other text, something more complex really had to be going on.
- [18:41]
A
Now, we needn't go through all the steps here on this podcast, not least because I think it would stretch a little the patience of listeners. But this is the problem that we set out to solve, really. And in a nutshell, our solution is that neither of these texts is what Victor wrote, but both of them are witnesses to the much larger history he composed. Published in at least two editions, this was an intellectually complex work. It was written in the high style, and it was very much in the tradition of Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, you know, the great Latin historians who set out to write big picture history.
- [19:20]
B
Yeah. Great. So, you know, before we kind of get into the history, can you tell us a little more just about the transmission of this and just some sense of, like, who was actually reading this? Maybe like kind of the original audience, but also kind of as this went through history.
- [19:35]
C
So, you know, you hitched at this in your introduction there. But I like to say that if we got a room of specialists in late antiquity together and asked them which later Latin historian was the most famous in his own day, probably almost none of them would get the right answer, because it's actually Aurelius Victor. He was, by some distance, the 4th century Latin historian, most famous as an historian to his contemporaries. I mean, we've already seen how he attracted the attention of an important figure like Anatolius, the Emperor Julian statue to him. I mean, that's a big deal. Not many literary figures got statues. So clearly Victor's work had some kind of immediate, big impact.
- [20:23]
B
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- [21:24]
A
Sort of decades after his bursting onto the scene, Victor continued to be ready. St. Jerome, obviously the translator of the Bible into Latin and one of the greatest polymaths of the ancient world, sought out a copy of Victor's history for his own research. The Emperor Theodosius was also clearly a fan in some sense or other of Victor's work, hence why he made him prefect of the city of Rome. And it's really interesting to see Christians reading the work of the pagan Victor. That gives us a sense of just how big a deal he was. I mean, if you're thinking of it like this, it's hard to imagine any topic that the emperors Julian and Theodosius would have agreed on, but they both clearly really liked Victor's work. And that's sort of quite striking when you think about it like that.
- [22:13]
C
I mean, we have still more readers to go. You know, as you intimate at the beginning today, the most famous historian of the four centuries, obviously on the interspersed A Linus, right, and you know, he wrote the very long history the Rasgasti, about half of which survives from 353 to the Battle of Adrianople in 378, which was Rome's disastrous defeat at the hands of the Goths. But curiously, as you intimated, the only contemporary historian who Ammianus mentions as an historian is Victor. He's the one who gives us the account of Victor's meetings with Julian and makes clear that he admired Victor. You know, the language he used to describe him is reserved for classics of Greek literature. Authors like Herodotus. And Ammianus specifically says that Victor was worth imitating on account of his sobrietas, his seriousness. Victor is also mentioned in the other long Latin historical work from the later Roman Empire, which is the mysterious Historia Augusta. We're going to pass over at this point some of its more mad and maddening features, but basically it purports to be a multi author compilation of imperial biography stretching from Hadrian to the Rhine Striocletian. There are just two key points we'd like to make here. It has a long section that's taken verbatim from what the H HAB says about Septimius Severus. And second, it mentions N A Victor as a source. Now, like everything in the ha, what it actually says about Victor is almost certainly fictitious, needs to be taken with a lot of salt but it's clearly a knowing reference to the famous historian.
- [23:54]
A
Thereafter we have a bit of a gap in references to Victor, but I mean, we have a sort of broader gap in the 5th century A.D. when it comes to history, at least in the Latin speaking parts of the Roman world. But he surfaces again in 6th century Constantinople, where his work was read and cited by one of the great Byzantine antiquarists, antiquarian, a bureaucrat and scholar called John Melidian. John Melidian's work is fantastic. I mean, it's sort of, if you could turn minor bureaucratic feuds into the stuff of real antiquarian scholarship, that's what John is doing. Victor's work was also still available in the 8th century in Italy, where the famous Lombard historian Paul the Deacon made extensive use of it. We can perhaps return to what Paul was doing with Victor a little bit later on. So Victor has this long term reception from his own day into the 8th century AD. And I think that in some ways that's the key takeaway. Right. Victor's reception is really extensive and relatively few other ancient historians enjoyed this kind of fame over such a long period. It's also noticeable that Victor crosses all sorts of traditional boundaries in terms of the reception of his work. Victor was read by pagans and Christians. He's read in the Latin speaking regions of the empire, but also by native Greek speakers. And his work was popular in the later Roman Empire, but it survived and it continued to be used in the early Middle Ages as well.
- [25:29]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's great. So, you know, one of the tricky things though when it comes to Victor's history is that it survives so much in Epitome in these kind of abridged summary forms. And I don't know, online I hear people mocking this kind of stuff all the time. It's like reading the AI summary instead of reading the whole book. But that's not just like a 21st century lazy student kind of thing. Every big book that we have in antiquity seems like it has its little abridged excerpt versions. Can you tell us about the genre of epitome? Who are writing these epitomes? What are they doing?
- [25:58]
C
Yeah, yeah. So it's an enormous topic and we're really only going to be able to scratch the surface here. The reason it's such a big topic emerges only when you start to think about it in material terms. Right. About book culture before printing. Right. So when we think about condensed versions of stuff, of cribs, your AI summaries, whatever, we have a Low estimate of them. Right. We think of them as designed for people who don't want to put in the effort. Students perhaps who fail to attend any teaching that semester, not that that ever happened. But when you don't have the mass production of books, what printing makes possible? A long book is a significant financial investment and it raises practical problems like where are you going to store your 140 rolls that contain the complete history of Libby for daily practical use for students, for less well off literate classes. In fact, for everyone who just wanted to read, especially read outside of an institutional context, it made a lot of sense to have a short or shortened version of a text. As a result, these shortened versions, epitomes played a massive role in ancient literary culture and we have a huge amount of evidence for their production, their dissemination, their use. They're also very varied. It depends on what purpose they served. Okay, so some of them just excerpted choice passages, a bit like a commonplace book. Others were sort of an index or a guide to a much longer work. Others still were wholesale summaries. That is like crunching down a much longer work into bite sized pieces.
- [27:46]
A
It's worth pointing out that epitomes of historical works were particularly common in the ancient world. History was often written on a large scale and so there was a demand for quick forms of reference to allow you to access these much more detailed, much longer works. And also ancient readers wanted different, sometimes slightly incompatible things from the historical works they read. Some wanted factual snippets and others were interested in say, character sketches of famous people or immoralizing more generally. Epitome's were sort of obvious solution to these various problems. They gave you access at much shorter lengths to these very long works. They allowed you to focus on the thing you were particularly interested in. So Livy is a good example here. And as we've said, he wrote an absolutely enormous work. I think Justin will correct me, but north of a million words, probably in its original complete. For we have loads and loads of different epitomes of Livy and they focus on very different things. So we've got the perioche, of which David Levy has recently produced a magnificent new edition, half of it, the rest of the edition is due to come out in a few years I think, and the perioche are kind of a summary of the whole of Livid's history. We've then got the De Viris Illustribus, the Un Famous Men, which was actually transmitted along with the Historia Breviati in that weird corpus of histories that Justin was talking about earlier, and that crutches down Livy's work into a series of brief biographies of famous figures. The historian Florus does something similar, but Florus wasn't interested in people, he was interested in wars. And so you get sort of little accounts of all Rome's wars. And then finally, and most oddly, one might say we have Julius Obsequiens, who has just listed all the prodigies, the religious prodigies in Livy's work. And that's sort of an epitome of the text. If you've got particular interest in that, it's very, very useful. Perhaps not so much more broadly. In fact, when you think about Latin history in general, Latin history writing in general from its beginning, we have remarkably few works of Latin history that survive in their entirety. Almost all of them are partially preserved or not really preserved. And so epitome's play this really crucial role in our knowledge of the ancient historians, because they often provide us with our best or our only evidence for what was going on. The perioche, for example, which I mentioned earlier in connection with Livy. Are there any real guide to roughly two thirds of Livy's work which doesn't survive? And that's not an atypical case in some ways.
- [30:43]
C
So it's really. So it's. Epitomes are what allowed us to crack the Victor question. The fact that they were so ubiquitous made them overly plausible and attractive solution to the Victor problem. And the very different purposes they could have and the different forms that they could take help to explain why these two texts attributed to Victor look so different. Of course, it doesn't hurt that both of them are in fact, explicitly described as epitomes in the manuscripts, as abbreviated texts.
- [31:20]
B
Yeah.
- [31:20]
A
Yeah.
- [31:20]
B
I mean, you know, sometimes the title actually does tell you what's going on, but. That's great. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, just that point that so many of these texts are, you know, one of those kind of like, light bulb moments, like. Right. That's. That's how most of the stuff that. That, you know, that I'm. That I'm used to also comes to us and. But I don't know, like, it's. It's deceptive. Like, you read the book, you know, it's got covers. Like, it seems like you got the whole thing, and you just have to. You got to remind yourself, like. No, no, this is. This is, you know, the, you know, little snippets of it.
- [31:52]
C
One of my favorite anecdotes about epitomes is that you know, in the, in the, the Bible that, at least in the Catholic Bible, the book of Second Maccabees is explicitly an epitome of Jason of Cyrene. Right. You have a historical epitome that's, you know, a canonical part of scripture for religious groups. It's just wild.
- [32:11]
A
I know on that, on that front, we could just convey how universal this kind of behavior was. Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, spends the eve of the battle of Arsalus, I think, compiling an epitome of, or partially compiling an epitome of Panidius. And as you know, the pumice is raising Gan from Vesuvius. Pliny the Elder is engaged in making excerpts of. I forget what work it is, but this was just, you know, this was just a constant part of ancient literary culture. It really was fundamental to what they were trying to do.
- [32:48]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and like, seeing it like this, like real upper class elite activity, like, this is not something that, I don't know, like lowly grad students are doing to give notes to other people. Right. This is what you do when you're good, not what you do when you kind of can't do the work. Yeah, it's great. Okay, so let's get into the work, though. Tell us about Victor as a kind of historian. What kind of facts is he interested in? What would have set him apart from other contemporaries? You two mentioned names in particular. He seems kind of real precise about those, but give us a sense.
- [33:23]
A
So perhaps names will allow me to take the lead on this, because that's one of my particular interests. Before we get into Victor's facts, as it were, it's worth pointing out, it's worth caveating that we obviously don't have all of Victor. We only have the epitome. So we have to be a little bit cautious. But we can highlight some things that Victor was clearly very interesting. So he really did care about the names people bore. And he offers precise and accurate information about the obstan. Complex nomenclature of many Roman historical figures. He was also obsessively interested in literary culture and particularly whether emperors had shown signs of it. In fact, at one point, Victor says explicitly that ideally, emperors should be good men and educated individuals, but if they can't be good, they should at least be educated, which is quite a shocking thing to encounter in an ancient text. Right. That's not the typical ancient approach to these problems. So those are two sort of categories of things that victim is very interested in and which he transmits a lot of information about. And Then there's a third thing, which is Victor is deeply interested in the minutiae of Roman government. He cared about both how the Roman constitution had evolved under the emperors, but also how the bureaucracy functioned. He had strong views about different departments of the late Roman government. And he occasionally sort of wanders off from his topic to attack some group of officials, usually on a fairly tenuous basis. And you occasionally feel as though Victor's in the office and the guys on the other side of the wall are making a lot of noise again, and he's going to write what a bunch of, you know, fools they are and they can't do the paperwork properly.
- [35:19]
C
I mean, he does say at one point, the worst people in the world are quartermasters. They are the worst type of individuals.
- [35:29]
A
And actually that quartermasters. We should. We should point this out. A big feature of Victor's history is that where the heroes are highly educated civil servants. There's a little bit of autobiography there. Perhaps the villains are invariably the soldiers. It's the army which is the big problem in the Roman Empire subject. Just before I forget one other thing, one final thing let's say that sets Victor apart is he's a lot more interested in the role that women played in imperial government and in Roman history than was typical for ancient historians. Now, it won't surprise your listeners, probably some of what is outright misogynistic, but Victor also names a lot of women who are otherwise neglected by our sources, and he ascribes to them real agency. So he adds some sort of deeper interest in this topic than a lot of his peers. An episode we might single out is a role he ascribes to Plotinor, the wife of Trajan, in the accession of Patriot, which is. I mean, she's really front and center of that account, and that's quite unusual.
- [36:43]
C
And not just that, but also his tax policy. She talks about how he explicitly advised Trajan on how to manage tax policy in a way not to alienate the rich, which is really quite interesting.
- [36:57]
B
Yeah, great. So, you know, the other, like, kind of thinking about him as a historian, he really seems to have loved Sallust. Can you tell us about this influence? Like, what kind of, I don't know, stylistic vocab choices? Is Sallust kind of inspiring in picture?
- [37:12]
C
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't pick that up. So, you know, obviously Victor did draw on a wide range, sorts of models, but Sallust really was very special to him. Now, I think it's hard for us to understand today, but by the 4th century sallust really were the classic works of Roman history. In fact, there's one late Roman grammarian who's active in Victor's lifetime, probably, who suggested that there were only four authoritative sources for Latin usage. Two of them verse, Terence and Virgil, and two of them prose, Cicero and Sallust. Okay, so what did Victor take from Sallust? Curiously, in antiquity, people who imitated Sallust tried to mimic his prose style, and this is not actually that comet by weaving together bits of Celestian phrases into their own texts. Right. A bit like sentones of Homer or Virgil, but on a smaller scale than prose. And that's what Victor did. He did strive to write a facsimile of Celestian prose. And at times, he really was quite good at it. But it wasn't just style. He also took ideas and tone from Salis. Like, you know, everyone knows if you know anything about Salus, that he's basically a declinist. Right. Things are bad and getting worse. The solution is always, in some form or other, the return to ancestral Roman values. Right. And for Salis, that always brings with it this really deep suspicion of foreign influence. Right. That somehow wrote the causes of Rome's decline are always these external things brought in, corrupting the original Roman thing. Victor absolutely shared Silas sense that Rome was in decline, but in contrast, he tended to see outsiders in a more nuanced way. Certainly they could be these vectors of corruption, but Victor argues they could also be sources of renewal. After all, Victor himself was from North Africa and proud of his roots in the region. So he saw the potential of the Roman provinces provided that they participated in the Roman paideia. Right. In that Roman system of education that everyone across the whole empire, throughout all the provinces share.
- [39:32]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's great. So, and, you know, I should say, like, you track kind of similar influences across a whole range of authors. There's, you know, Tacitus is an influence. Livy, Cicero, Seneca. There's a lot, like, picture the guy read a lot. Right. But can you tell us maybe about some kind of broader ambient knowledge, grammar, philosophy, things like that? I don't know. Anybody who could have written Victor's text would have read Cicero. But are there kind of, I don't know, things he tells us about or kind of like knowledge that he deploys that would help you kind of scope him as an author? Like, oh, yeah, that's a Victor insight.
- [40:08]
A
That's a really interesting question. So maybe I can pick up on the Cicero a bit first. As you say, standard knowledge. For, for an educated Latin speaking Roman. But Victor put Cicero's works to quite an interesting use. He has a negative view of Cicero and that probably goes back to the fact that in antiquity there was this idea that Cicero and Sallust were sort of opponents, which might also be the historical truth, but there was definitely an idea in the later Roman Empire that they didn't like each other. So Victor often sort of uses a particular bit of Ciceronian phrasing or a Ciceronian idea, but he subverts it, he turns it into a punchline by reversing the key idea or something like that. That said, Victor's reading was much wider than just the Latin classics. He simply knew a ton of stuff. He tells us about the names of fishes, about the etymology of the names of different barbarians tribes, about Roman religious rituals. He was a persnickety and pedantic author and he clearly cared about getting details right. He shows some awareness of technical, legal and philosophical language as well. It's hard to gauge how deeply he was imitated in legal and philosophical problems, but there's stuff there definitely.
- [41:39]
C
Yeah. I give one example of that that just shows how you have to be very careful in reading Victor, but how being careful can really pay some rich reward. So let's go to the first decades of the third century with the Emperor Caracalla, the son of Septimius Severus. When he was on the throne, there was definitely some contemporary gossip about his relationship with his mother, Julia Domna. People alleged that there might have been an inappropriate relationship between the two. This was obviously fascinating to Victor, not least because, as we mentioned, he had this interest in the way that powerful imperial women could shape policy. So when he came to cover these two people, he tells this elaborate story about how Julia Domnus seduced her stepson, as Victor has it, Caracalla, by performing a striptease for him, pretending she didn't know that he was watching. Now, the key line that Victor uses in this episode, she took off her modesty with her shame, is taken verbatim from the most famous triptease in ancient history, which is Herodotus, Account of Gyges and the Wife of Candales. So it's a small thing, but it really shows the depth of Victor's reading and the way that he used what he did, how he embedded it in this broader tradition of history writing and deployed very subtle techniques to get that across to the most attentive readers.
- [43:08]
B
That's great. Okay, so I, I'm going to ask you to, to speculate A little bit. I mean, you two have earned the right to speculate. But like how do you actually think this text was organized? Like what, what do you think the work covered? You know, like what. What's the story of the Empire for. For Victor?
- [43:24]
A
So that's a, that's a really interesting question and it's, it's also one where it' but we can say a little about it and we do we cover some of this in the book, we hope, quite a cautious way. We know from the title of the novella spread a little booklet, one of the two epitome that Victor's work was divided into libri, or books. These were paratextual units containing a chunk of text which helped to organize the work. It looks from internal evidence as though there were five of these books in the first edition of the history. Not coincidentally, probably, Sallust had written a lost history in five books. And one of the things we've argued elsewhere is that Sallust's books were very long. And so Victor's history, even though it was only in five books, it was a chunky piece of work as far as we can tell. Victor set out to write a true imperial history. It aimed to tell its readers about the emperors, but also about what had happened in the empire over time. As we've said, Victor had quite wide interests and the content seems to have been very varied. But he was particularly keen to trace the mechanics of imperial power, who was in charge and why and how that control had been shared, or was. Victor was also a self conscious historian. Even in the epitomes that we have, there's a lot of reflection on the meaning of Roman history. Victor Cayley paused his narrative fairly often and said, okay, but what does this all mean, right? What's the significance of what I'm telling you? And for him a really important idea was what you might call recapitulation. That is the sense that Roman history sometimes almost literally repeated itself. So the warlike Emperor Trajan was a new Romulus, and the cultured Palian, the cultured Hanian, sorry, the cultured Hadrian, who succeeded him was a new Nuba, who was the second king of Rome. Does this sense in Victor that there were these very long cycles in Roman history that brought everything back if you let enough time pass? And that incidentally is an idea that Victor probably got not so much from Sallust as from Livy. It's an interesting sign potentially of Livian influence on Victoria.
- [46:12]
B
You know, it's great and I mean, part of me hearing recapitulation also just thinks of, like, other Christian texts and how, you know, Christ is a new Adam. And that's just kind of in the air at the same time, even if, you know, even if it's not Victor's thing. That's great. Okay, so, you know, that's the speculative part. Thank you for indulging me. Let's get back to the evidence, though. You know, what's the role of Paul the Deacon in all of this? We talked about some of the reception history that we've got. You know, John letis in the 6th century. But we have this 8th century guy in Lombard writing a Lombard history. But he becomes like a main character in the book because he seems to kind of help you really crack the code here. So, you know, maybe tell us a little bit about Paul the deacon, but, like, how did he help you get to the story of Victor's history? When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the.
- [47:08]
A
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C
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C
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B
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A
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- [47:58]
C
Yeah, so just for those who are not, yes, enthusiasts for Paul the Deacon, I can give a little bit about who he was. He was a deacon. His name was Paul. He lived in the middle to the late 8th century A.D. he came from Lombard Italy, himself was a Lombard. He worked in many different genres. He wrote poetry, for example, some very good poetry. But also was particularly known for his historical writing, a history of the Lombards as well as a Roman history. In geographic terms, his career stretched from the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassini, Cassino in southern Italy, all the way to the court of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne in Aachen. Now, for our purposes, what makes Paul particularly interesting is that he's the first person whom we can say for certain knew the labellus breviatis because he includes large parts of it in his Historia Romana and Also the last person to mention Victor as the author of an historia or a major history. This gave us an idea. So one of the things Paul is famous for was making epitomes. Okay, so one work that he wrote was an epitome of the lexicographical work of the lexicographer Festus, which is this sort of encyclopedia of Latin usage, but also includes bits on Roman history, religion, culture, etc. And most of we have one damaged manuscript to Festus's original text that only has part of it. For the rest of it, the only knowledge we have of it comes from Paul's epitome. So our idea was, what if Paul was the one who produced Phillibella's Breviatis? And believe it or not, we came to this view very quickly after we began working on Victor. But for a while, for a few years, it was just this tantalizing provocation.
- [49:57]
A
I can take over here and continue the story. In the summer of 2018, Justin organized a panel on transmission at the Celtic Conference in Classics, which was at St. Andrews that year. When I was sitting in the audience for one of the sessions for this panel, I was listening to a paper on Marshall, which was very interesting, although it's not what I work on. And the speaker said in passing that of course there was some scholia to Isidore Seville, the great early medieval encyclopedist by Paul the Deacon. Now, I had never heard of these scolia, and they were actually pretty obscure, sometimes bafflingly, even to people working on Paul himself. And as the paper went on, I found the article from the 1920s that published the Scodia. I opened it, I scrolled through, and my heart almost stopped when I came across a chunky paragraph attributed to Victor the Historian. Now, this paragraph was a completely mad discussion of emperors and archery and the extent to which archery makes emperors bad, which was immediately and recognizably Victor, like nobody else in antiquity, could have written something like this. But the paragraph was mostly not in either the Historiae Breviati or the Labellus Breviatis. One sentence in it, however, happened to overlap with the Labellus Breviatis.
- [51:27]
C
So, I mean, we really couldn't believe our luck. Like, at a single stroke, we not only did we have proof of a big loss to true by vector, but we could also show that Paul was the last person with direct access to it, that it made it all the way to the 8th century in southern Italy. Now, it also gave very good indication for what we believed, which was that Paul was the one who had written the Libellus Breviatis. And some years later, as we were writing the book, I think we were able to prove pretty definitively on textual grounds that it must have been him who compiled the lb.
- [52:03]
B
Wow, what a story. This is really wonderful. Okay, so great. So the second half of the book, then it looks at some of the kind of broader implications of Victor having written this widely read history of the Roman Empire starting in the 360s. Then he keeps kind of adding to it for the next 25 years. But the first implication comes with how modern readers understand the sources of later Roman history. And there's at least one big implication of this that has to do with the Kaisergescheckte, or the kind of emperor history, which is this hypothetical lost source, a kind of imperial history that would have fed into some of our other sources, like the abbreviated history, the Historia Augusta Utopius Brevarium. Can you tell us about this theory? What was it trying to solve? And kind of how does Victor having written this history, how does that provide a more elegant or a better solution to this problem?
- [53:03]
A
Okay, great. Thanks very much, Michael. I think this actually links up nicely with something we were talking about at the start of the podcast, which is why ancient historians were not particularly exercised by the sort of Victor question, if you want to call it that, until very recently. And that's because the scholarly orthodoxy was that Victor was of little importance because he was basically just a version or a reflection of a contemporary but much more influential work that was the Kaisergesikta, or History of the Emperors, sometimes known as the KG for short, just because it's a bit of a cumbersome word. The Kaisergesichte was theorized by a scholar called Alexander en Mann in the 1880s. Enman noticed that the Latin historical works of the fourth century, which cover the history of the Roman Empire, overlap in wording, and they also share, or they seem to share some crucial factual errors. His solution to this conundrum was to posit his lost History of the Emperors, which was the common source of all these extant texts, some of which you mentioned in your question. Now, fairly rapidly, En man's theory became the standard scholarly account of. Of what was going on. It made this immediate enormous splash. In fact, a contemporary scholar, a great figure called Otto Zeit, actually wrote a review of it while on his honeymoon. It was that exciting to him. And he sort of has this slightly apologetic footnote at the end of the review saying, I would have gone to this sooner, but I'VE actually just got married. I'm away. So not only, sorry, did Endman theory rapidly become the standard scholarly account, but it sort of embedded into the scarletly furniture. At this stage, if you look at reference works from the past decade or so, they'll tell you that N Man's theory is pretty much as good as that. Now, Justin and I are quite severe critics of N Man in some ways in the book, and because we criticize him a lot, I think it's really worth emphasizing that he detected a real problem and he offered a bold effort to resolve it. He was just on the wrong track. So there's a core issue that he would write to light on. His solution is not one we would follow. And unfortunately, because of the way in which he led scholarship to think about this lost common source, he really cut off work that was being done at the time, focused on Victor, and sent scholarship instead down a bit of a blind alley.
- [55:52]
C
So for us, as we were working on this, as soon as we realized the basic insights, that what we have is not Victor's history as we wrote it, but an abbreviated version of it, we realized that the need for the Kaiser Gekte, as Edmund posited it, completely vanished. Right. So the basic problem that he was trying to solve was that there were sources later than the story of breviata, later than 361, that shared some of its wording and had some of its facts, but provided more detail. Now, because Edmond believed that the Historia Breviata was indeed the whole work of Victor, he needed to come up with this complex hypothesis to explain where those additional details came from. However, if there's no numerical identity between the story of Breviata and what Victor wrote, the very need to have that thing just completely vanishes.
- [56:55]
A
Now, another crucial thing is that the Kaisergesichter has always been presented as basically a short and factual work, something that gave you names, dates and key events, but not a lot more than that. And the problem is that the late Roman sources share much more than these basic factual details. They have big ideas about Roman history in common, which crop up, you know, in this work and then in that work. And it's sort of hard to reconcile that with the. With the Kaisergeshipte as En man hypothesized it. So, for example, what are the big turning points in Roman Empire imperial history? If you look at the Latin historians of the 4th century, they tend to identify the ephemeral Emperor Nerva, the predecessor of Trajan, as this crucial hinge figure. In the Roman story. And they also attribute a lot of importance to the overthrow of the Emperor Alexander Severus in AD235 and the accession of Maximinus Thrax at that date. So they've got deeper ideas than really people would be comfortable attributing to the Kaisergeship. And scholarship has never had a good answer for why this should be the case. But Victor just solves the problem. He was someone who cared deeply about the shape of Roman history and who had complex historiographical ideas, and it just sort of vanishes.
- [58:24]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, this kind of like, I don't know, hypothetical bare source that then kind of spreads out. It reminds me of in kind of New Testament world, like the Hue hypothesis, that the idea that Matthew, Mark and Luke kind of share this source and kind of from that comes the other stuff. And now scholars in kind of New Testament world are questioning that thesis, but it seems like there's a kind of similar thing going on there.
- [58:53]
C
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up because one of the things that we're really proud of that we did in the book was take a close look at Edmond's actual intellectual context in which he was working. I mean, this was in the 1880s at the university of Dorpat. Right. Whose leading light was named Theodosius von Harnack. That's the father of the famous Adolf von Harnock of the metal criticism. Right. So he's very much working in a place in which ideas that are deriving from the New Testament and how to do the critique of it is very much in the air.
- [59:29]
A
Yeah, it's really interesting that you bring up the New Testament parallel, Michael, because actually, for us, as we were working on this, Austin Farrer's classic, controversial essay on dispensing with Q was something that really spoke to us when we were trying to sort of clarify our own methodology. And it was just. Whether you agree with it or not, it's a really clearly argued piece for thinking about these problems. And I suppose in broader terms, it's something we hardly need to convince your audience of, but it is a fundamental point that the division between Roman history and early Christian or New Testament studies impoverishes both of them, which is slightly trite, but it's true they benefit from more sort of intellectual cross fertilization.
- [60:13]
B
Yeah, great. Okay. So kind of getting back to the text here, the second kind of big implication here has to do with the Historia Augusta, which is this.
- [60:22]
C
This.
- [60:22]
B
I don't Know, famously difficult text to get behind. And it's not like Victor is the only source for that text. But I don't know, what do you end up kind of thinking that the historian Augusta kind of took from Victor? How does seeing Victor as a kind of major source actually illuminate this difficult little text?
- [60:42]
C
I have a professional obligation here to provide a health warning before anything I say. Do not spend too long on the Historia Augusta if you value your sanity. The Historia Augusta is just the huge problem in late antique Latin history writing. The basic issue is this. It's this collection of imperial biographies that goes from Hadrian all the way up to right before the assassin Diocletian, so to Carus, Korinus and Numerian in the separate biographies pretending to be written by six different authors who are working under and dedicating their works to figures like Diocletian and Constantine. But as another great 19th century Roman historian, Hermann Dessau, showed, it was actually written by a single author at least a century later, which causes all sorts of of questions about why this might have come about. Now, one of the reasons Dessau was able to redate the Historia Augusta was precisely that verbatim use of Victor in the Life of Septimius Severus that we've already mentioned above. Contextually, it's really clear if you look at the two texts side by side, as we do in the book, that Victor has to be the source and the ha the debtor. And that means the ha had to have been written after 361, after the story of Breviata. So that brings the obvious question, why? Why did the author go to all these lengths to create this obfuscation for his readers? Why did he pretend multiple authors? Why did he pretend to fake date? For us, this got us thinking about other cases of forgery and impostures. Late Antiquity, one of the most fertile grounds for this is the Trojan War. We have a number of these texts like, and they're very exotic, like Dictys of Crete and Darius of Phrygia. And what we constantly see is this idea that these late texts, which of course are almost entirely dependent on Homer for their content, since Homer is the only source of the Georgian War, they take a polemical stance towards Homer, arguing that he was late, dismissing him as derivative and unreliable. And for us, maybe, we thought maybe that could explain something about Victor and the story of Augusta. If indeed Victor is a major source of the story of Augusta, then maybe one point to the chronological imposture is to make it look like it is the genuine source. Right? It's the source and Victor's derivative, which incidentally is exactly what scholars believed before Dessau came along.
- [63:32]
A
Now, as for what Victor means for the history of Augusta, I suppose you could think that the past generation has seen a flurry of work on the History Augusta and its purpose. Some scholars want to see it as a kind of pagan, anti Christian work of history. Others interpret it as this great literary joke, an elaborate literary fraud with lots of signs for the reader that something's not quite right. The problem with these two approaches, which at their cause have real insights into the work, is that the Historia Augusta is just a, not a very good anti Christian work. It doesn't mention Christianity very often and when it does mention it, it's sort of vaguely positive about it. And B, for all its complexities, and those are very real, the Historia Augusta is a bit of hack work. It's not a very coherently composed or well written text. And it's become harder and harder to reconcile the sort of super sophisticated polemical author imagined by mor scholars with the actual text of the Historia Augusta. So I think we say that the main thing Victor does here is that he reopened and he sets on a new footing the whole question of what the Historia Augusta was designed to do, the reason it contains so many falsehoods, and indeed perhaps even to really touch a third rail of the scholarship when the Historia Augusta was written. We could also perhaps think of it the other way around if. And there is. There's so much of the epitomes of Victor reflected in the Historia Augusta, how much more of his original work might be lying concealed there. Also, that's a sort of. That's a tantalizing question which obviously we think about a fair bit.
- [65:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, by the end of the chapter we see that Victor isn't just like a source of this text, that the Historia Augusta has kind of like, I don't know, plagiarized like big sections of Victor. It reminds me of Pseudo Dionysius with Proclus, where, you know, Pseudodynicius just kind of like copies and pastes a big section from Proclus's On Evils. And nowadays I think we would call that stealing or plagiarism or something like that. Maybe with Dionysius it's more complicated. But if Victor is this kind of well known figure, I don't think that the Historia Augusta thinks it can get away with it. It's something more complicated than that. So what do we learn about the Historia Augusta from this kind of copy and paste job.
- [66:13]
C
Well, we might think that if we look at the Trojan War examples, that it's obvious that these texts are lying when they say Homer is whatever, he's just a plagiarist, just a latent, unreliable witness. And yet Darius of Phrygia, probably written in the 6th century and just a century after he's written. Right. Isidora Seville will call him the very first pagan historian. So you can get away with it. Right. You know, when you start looking at it in context of other things. And there are Scholia on Dionysius, which talk about how Proclus stole all of this from Dionysius. Right. So we have to be a little bit careful because we might think of it as all sophisticated literary games. But there's a lot of evidence from antiquity that people did take. Yeah, they could be taken in by stuff like this.
- [67:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, it was quite recent when people really figured out that Proclus and the order of Proclus and Dionysius there fair. All right, so let's get to the other part of this. The Historia Augusta is kind of famously unreliable. It comes with a health warning that we got here. My sense is that Ammianus is kind of on the other side of this. He is, for Roman historians, kind of the most reliable, maybe the only reliable late ancient source. There's one scholar who describes Ammianus as a kind of lonely figure in late antiquity. He's like the one guy doing what he did at the time. But your book shows that he's not so alone, both in style and in substance. Ammianis is a fan of Victor. And so maybe you can give us kind of an example of a way Ammianis drew on Victor. But I don't know, maybe. Are there more kind of bigger implications of this too? What do we learn about the risk Estei in seeing Ammianus and Victor as colleagues?
- [68:14]
C
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. You know, you're absolutely right that there's been this tendency in the scholarship, particularly in the 20th century, to make Ammonist as this very singular figure. Right. So the great Mamiliano called him the lonely historian. Right. One with no peers, no rivals in his scholarly craft. And our view of Victor and our argument does change all that.
- [68:38]
A
Right.
- [68:39]
C
So when Ammonus was writing around 390. Right. That's the year after Victor's urban prefecture, Victor was the most famous and admired contemporary historian. So it's no wonder that when Ammonus comes to mention him, he says that this is a man to be emulated on account of his seriousness. Now, at first glance, that would make Ammianus a bit less special. Right. You know, he is not just the only serious historian writing in this age of. Of hacks and abbreviators and whatever people say, but in other ways, I think we could think of it as a really positive development. It gives us a context for what Ammianus was trying to do in his work. Give an example. Right. Think about the history of the first century, the Julio Claudians. We have for much of that period two separate Latin sources, Tacitus and Suetonius. And the fact that we have both really allows us to draw out the individual historiographic projects that each of them is undertaking to set in sharp relief their strengths and weaknesses, because we have both of them to compare. Right. And I think that's something we could say about Victor and Ammianis too. Maybe the fact that both of them were writing allows us to cast what Ammianis was trying to do in much sharper perspective.
- [69:59]
A
So I think I can give a useful example here of a way in which what Justin said is true. Victor had a really very low opinion of the Roman army and he says some absolutely damning things about it in the course of his work. The soldiers he claims, were greedy, they were stupid, they were violent. In fact, at one stage he says plainly that the whole world was not enough to satisfy the greed of the soldiers. So I think you could fairly pull. Victoria, an anti military historian, if you will. Right now, Ammianus was an officer in the Roman army who'd been on active duty and had seen combat. He's not exactly hyper positive about the army in which he served, but he was usually fairly keen to explain and justify the behavior of officers and men under the pressure of battle.
- [70:57]
C
Battle.
- [70:58]
A
And I think you can imagine Ammianus as wanting to give his readers a sense of what it was like to be in the Roman battle line when the barbarians were advancing towards you. Not to excuse everything the soldiers did, but to help people like Victor, educated civilians, understand what those soldiers had to confront the pressures they faced. I think, in other words, that part of what he was doing in this was pushing back against Victor and Little. And indeed, at the very end of his work, Annienus famously signed off as a Miles quondam et graecus, a former soldier and a Greek. And it's really tempting to detect the contrast to Victor, the Latin speaking North African who was a civil servant in his background. Right?
- [71:54]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean there's like a, I don't know, man in the arena version of that. What do you know? And I mean, like both of you were saying, the fact that he's not alone, I think also shows us that there's like a real appetite for this. Right. Like, you know, someone who is likely to read one history book is likely to read two history books. Like, these aren't really competing markets. They're, you know, they're showing there's a broader interest there. Yeah, that's a. Oh, sorry, please go ahead.
- [72:24]
A
That's a really interesting point. And actually, I mean, something we argue in more detail in the book, but there's very little evidence for the writing of history in Latin between the age of Tacitus and Suetonius and Victor. And then immediately after Victor, you get this explosion in historical writing. And we would argue that. But he's a driving force behind that. Right. People suddenly go, yes, you can do this. And it's really interesting. And you see what these responses do. Sorry, I didn't mean to.
- [72:51]
B
No, no, no, no, that's helpful, thank you. I mean, as you're saying, so Ammianis, he's writing in Latin, but he's going to identify as a Greek here. But a lot of this book is interested in Latin literature. But we also do know that Victor was read by Greek writers as well, and that's not super surprising. Lots of people were bilingual. In my head, the influence goes the other way, although when I say it out loud, that's probably not true. Laws were written in Latin, but whatever. There's lots of people who are bilingual, but I don't know, I was surprised to find out that even Eunapes is reading. Victor Eunepias is the author of the Lies of the Sophist, the Kind of Lives of Different Philosophers. But can you tell us a little bit about the Greek reception of this work?
- [73:41]
C
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you're wrong in your bias there. Right. I mean, I think that is the general place where scholarship is at, is that, you know, the Greek cultural world is absolutely the more prestigious in late antiquity. The Latin world is much more derivative. It's downstream, whatever. So that means Latin authors would read Greek stuff, they would translate Greek stuff into Latin, but that the influence really didn't go the other way. You know, I don't doubt that that's true in a general sense, particularly in technical disciplines. It's definitely true in something like medicine, for example, but I'm not sure it's really true in history. Right. So what works do we know were translated? Well, we don't have much good evidence for secular works of Greek history being translated into Latin. We do know the ecclesiastical ones were. But we do know that just 10 years after Eutropius wrote his Breviarium, it was translated into Greek by a guy named Panius. Right. In Eutropius own lifetime. And it was so popular that it wasn't just once. It was translated two more times over the next several hundred years. So that seems to suggest that actually Greeks thought, oh, we would like to access Latin historical materials. And you know, Victor as the author of a history, we already know he was being read in Constantinople by John the Lydian. He's a promising figure for someone to have, you know, had a transmission into, into Greek. And then as we said, he was connected to that intellectual culture of Anatolius, the praetorian prefect of Illyricum. And it was exactly that same context that Eunapeus himself was connected with. Right. So they really did share these. Not direct personal links probably, but they both knew some of the same people. So, you know, I think Victor is one of the most ideal conduits for Latin materials to have entered into Greek and that Eunapes is an ideal conduit for how material from Victor could have entered the Greek literary tradition. Now of course it's unfortunate that we don't really have much of Eunapeus's historical work, so we just have fragments, so we can't be entirely certain. But we do know that Eunapest was a major source of another historian called Zosamen, who was probably right in the middle of the fifth century. And Docimus's history was designed to show how conversion to Christianity had basically wrecked the Roman Empire. And you know, this is a. There's a lot of cognate material to such a view of Roman history in Victor, so he may well have found it there.
- [76:39]
A
Now we can trace ideas and facts and stories that seem to have their origin in Victor's work in the Greek tradition all the way down into the 12th century. The Byzantine historian Zenarius gives this incredibly detailed account of Roman imperial history. And we argue in the book that quite a bit of it, quite a bit in it, even ultimately came from Victor. How direct this access to Victor's work was for Greek historians is an open crest at the very least. As Justin mentioned, John the Lydian shows that the work was still available in the Constantinople of Justinian. If we had to guess, we would say it didn't survive all that much longer. But by then it was in the bloodstream, so to speak, so people could access it without ever needing to read Victor or necessarily even realizing that he was the ultimate source of what they were reading.
- [77:36]
B
Oh, interesting. Okay, so maybe we can back up a little bit to start to wrap up. I mean, this is a big, often technical book. The book is. It's open access. People can go read it and search away. But kind of stepping back from it, it's been a couple years since you wrote it. What's at stake in this book? Why does it matter that we know the sources behind some better known Late Roman sources and that it's Victor? How does that change your broader understanding of Late Antiquity?
- [78:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, you know, when you've written a book, and particularly when you've written a book that's rather long, there is definitely a temptation to, you know, lose sight of the wood for the tree, so to speak. Right. You really get into, you know, arguing individual points, clarifying points of detail that you. You. It's hard to keep in sight. Why it all matters for us, the reason we got into this initially, as we said, was that we wanted to solve a rather small problem in the transmission of two Latin texts. Right. Why the paratexts of the two texts attributed to Victor, both attributed to him, even though they were different. But in resolving that small problem, we found that there are some huge implications for our understanding of the later Roman Empire. And in a funny way, what we feel like we've done is sort of like discovering a new text. These are texts that people have known about for a long time, have been reading for centuries. The Estori Brevian and Labellus breviantis. But they haven't really been reading them. Right. They haven't been appreciating them for what they actually are. And it really is amazing what you miss when you think you know what there is to be found already.
- [79:24]
A
So an analogy we've sometimes used to explain this is to imagine that you're once again a child and you're back at your grandparents on a wet Sunday afternoon. And I hope that's not too much of a culturally specific British analogy for your listenership, but it's a common fact of life over here. You're doing some ancient puzzle which has emerged from, say, a biscuit tin. It's very confusing and you're not making a great deal of progress. And at some point, a passing pair of sees what you're doing and flips over a box nearby that shows you the puzzle, and suddenly you can see what the bits you piece together so far actually mean. Right. How they combine to form this coherent image. And we'd say, in a way, the work we've done with Victor is a bit like that.
- [80:19]
B
Right.
- [80:20]
A
All the pieces, or most of the pieces were there all the time. People just didn't understand how to arrange them. And once you put them in the right arrangement, suddenly all kinds of things become obvious that were not before.
- [80:33]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's great. I love that image. Do you have anything that kind of pops to mind in terms of what non specialists might take from this book? I mean, this is a specialist book, right. There's charts of how prepositions are used in it. But as you're. I don't know, as you're talking to undergrads, do things from the book kind of come up in teaching or. I don't know, what would you hope a non specialist would take from this?
- [80:58]
A
Yeah, that's a question we've thought about a lot. So for me, as a Roman historian and primarily a late Roman historian, stuff from this book comes up quite often in teaching because we're talking about key sources and I cover simplified format and some of the things we argue in greater detail. But for non specialists, I suppose what. What I'd say is that academic work, particularly in history, can often feel like you're tinkering around the margin. You fix a date here, you resolve a confusion there and that's all valuable. Progress is incremental in most of these subjects. We learn more with each generation. But the lesson of the book, in a way, is that sometimes there are big, big questions hiding in plain. And in a sense, for non specialists, that might be the main lesson. What are the big ideas in your field? What are the fundamental assumptions in whatever it is you do that everyone seems to think are true, but which everyone's a bit vague about?
- [82:02]
C
Right.
- [82:03]
A
Why do we believe this? What is it we really think? And that's a broader lesson from some of the work we've done.
- [82:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's really. That's great. Okay, so last question, always. What are you working on next?
- [82:20]
C
Well, you know, what we'd really like is for people to read Victor. And you can start, as you mentioned, by reading our book, which is open access. You can go to Edinburgh University Press website and download a PDF for free. You can find it on JSTOR on Academia all over place. The. The place.
- [82:38]
B
It's in the show notes too.
- [82:39]
C
Yes. So, but you know, after that you might actually want to read Victor's text after we've made such a big deal about it, but unfortunately that's slightly difficult to do for two reasons. Number one, the Latin text, particularly the Historia Breviata, is a wreck and there's really no satisfactory edition of it. And the LB needs a new edition as well. Even so that even if there was a good text, Victor's Latin is very challenging, so you might want to read a translation, but there's no good English translation that we could wholeheartedly recommend of either text. And indeed, the only published translation of the Labellus Breviatis is from the 17th century. There is also one that's available online which has. Yes, yes. So. But we're attempting right now to solve these problems. So I'm at work on new editions of the two works, both of them new critical editions, and together we're translating them for Liverpool's translated Texture Historian series. And both of these, the editions and the translations are part of a larger project which is generously funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council called the Last Historians of Rome Project. And we'd be very remiss if we did not mention here our colleagues on that project. Professor Gavin Kelly, Dr. Agnese Bergagnia, Veronica Fishella. The aim of this project is to sort of begin where we left off with Victor, to look at and edit the works not just of Victor, but of all the secular Latin historians of the later Roman Empire. So that's Ammianus Marcellinus, the Historia Augusta, Eutropius and Festus as well.
- [84:28]
B
It sounds really, really wonderful, George. Justin Bothy, thank you so much for being here. It's been a real pleasure talking with.