Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus (325/330–after 391) was a fourth-century Roman historian. His is the penultimate major historical account written during Antiquity (the last was written by Procopius). His work chronicled in Latin the history of Rome from 96 to 378, although only the sections covering the period 353–378 are extant.[1]

Contents

Biography

Ammianus was born between 325 and 330 in the Greek-speaking East,[2][1] possibly at Antioch.[3] The surviving books of his history, the 'Res Gestae', cover the years 353 to 378.[4] Ammianus served as a soldier in the army of Constantius II in Gaul and Persia.

He was "a former soldier and a Greek" (miles quondam et graecus),[5] he tells us, and his enrolment among the elite protectores domestici (household guards) shows that he was of noble birth. He entered the army at an early age, when Constantius II was emperor of the East, and was sent to serve under Ursicinus, governor of Nisibis in Mesopotamia, and magister militum.

He returned to Italy with Ursicinus, when he was recalled by Constantius, and accompanied him on the expedition against Claudius Silvanus, who had been forced by the allegedly unjust accusations of his enemies into proclaiming himself emperor in Gaul. With Ursicinus he went twice to the East. On one occasion he was separated from Ursicinus and took refuge in Amida, which was thereupon besieged by the Sassanid king Shapur II; he barely escaped with his life.[6] When Ursicinus lost his office and the favour of Constantius, Ammianus seems to have shared his downfall; but under Julian, Constantius's successor, he regained his position. He accompanied this emperor, for whom he expresses enthusiastic admiration, in his campaigns against the Alamanni and the Sassanids; after the death of Julian, he took part in the retreat of Jovian as far as Antioch, where he was residing when the conspiracy of Theodorus (371) was discovered and cruelly put down. Though pagan, he was mostly tolerant of Christians.[7]

Work

The walls of Amida, built by Constantius II before the Siege of Amida of 359

At Rome, he wrote in Latin a history of the Roman empire from the accession of Nerva (96) to the death of Valens at the Battle of Adrianople (378),[8] in effect writing a continuation of the history of Tacitus. He presumably completed the work before 391, since at 22.16.12 he praises the Serapeum in Egypt as the glory of the empire, and the temple was destroyed by Christians at the end of that year. Res Gestae Libri XXXI was originally in thirty-one books, but the first thirteen are lost (modern historian T.D. Barnes argues that the original was actually thirty-six books, which would mean that nineteen books had been lost). The surviving eighteen books cover the period from 353 to 378. As a whole it has been considered extremely valuable, being a clear, comprehensive and in general impartial account of events by a contemporary. Like many ancient historians, Ammianus had a strong political and religious agenda to pursue, however, and he contrasted Constantius II with Julian to the former's constant disadvantage; like all ancient writers he was skilled in rhetoric, and this shows in his work.

Eye witness

He provides a dramatic account of the siege of Amida by the Persians in 359 AD, in which he participated:

I myself, having taken a direction apart from that of my comrades, was looking around to see what to do, when Verennianus, one of the guard, came up with an arrow in his thigh; and while at the earnest request of my colleague I was trying to pull it out, finding myself surrounded on all sides by the advancing Persians, I made up for the delay by breathless speed and aimed for the city, which from the point where we were attacked lay high up and could be approached only by a single very narrow ascent ; and this was made still narrower by mills which had been built or the cliffs for the purpose of making the paths. Here, mingled with the Persians, who were rushing to the higher ground with the same effort as ourselves, we remained motionless until sunrise of the next day, so crowded together that the bodies of the slain, held upright by the throng, could nowhere find room to fall, and that in front of me a soldier with his head cut in two, and split into equal halves by a powerful sword stroke, was so pressed on all sides that he stood erect like a stump.

Critique

Edward Gibbon judged Ammianus "an accurate and faithful guide, who composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary."[9] But he also condemned Ammianus for lack of literary flair: "The coarse and undistinguishing pencil of Ammianus has delineated his bloody figures with tedious and disgusting accuracy."[10] Ernst Stein praised Ammianus as "the greatest literary genius that the world produced between Tacitus and Dante".[11]

According to Kimberly Kagan, his accounts of battles emphasize the experience of the soldiers but at the cost of ignoring the bigger picture. As a result it is difficult for the reader to understand why the battles he describes had the outcome they did.[12]

Scholars have often believed that Ammianus' work was intended for public recitation for two reasons: the overwhelming presence of accentual clausulae, which implies that it was intended to be read aloud; and epistle 1063 of Libanius to a Marcellinus of Rome which refers to public recitations. However, virtually all major works of Greek and Latin prose possessed such clausulae; and some scholars have rejected the identification of Libanius' Marcellinus with Ammianus, since Marcellinus was a very common name and the tone suggests Libanius was addressing a man much younger than himself (Ammianus was his contemporary). It is a striking fact that Ammianus, though a professional soldier, gives excellent pictures of social and economic problems, and in his attitude to the non-Roman peoples of the empire he is far more broad-minded than writers like Livy and Tacitus; his digressions on the various countries he had visited are particularly interesting.

Ammianus' work contains a detailed description of the tsunami in Alexandria which devastated the metropolis and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean on 21 July 365. His report describes accurately the characteristic sequence of earthquake, retreat of the sea and sudden giant wave.[13]

His work has suffered terribly from the manuscript transmission. Aside from the loss of the first thirteen books, the remaining eighteen are in many places corrupt and lacunose. The sole surviving manuscript from which almost every other is derived is a ninth-century Carolingian text, V, produced in Fulda from an insular exemplar. The only independent textual source for Ammianus lies in M, another ninth-century Frankish codex which was, unfortunately, unbound and placed in other codices during the fifteenth century. Only six leaves of M survive; however, the printed edition of Gelenius (G) is considered to be based on M, making it an important witness to the textual tradition of the Res Gestae.[14]

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Ammianus Marcellinus
  2. ↑ Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Classical World, Israel Shatzman, Michael Avi-Yonah, 1975 Harper and Row, p.37, ISBN 0060101784
    East and West Through Fifteen Centuries: Being a General History from B.C. 44 to A.D. 1453, George Frederick Young, 1916 Longmans, Green and Co, p.336
    University of California Publications in Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 1943 University of California Press, p.3
    Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Cambridge University Press, p. lxvii
  3. ↑ The possibility hinges on whether he was the recipient of a surviving letter to a Marcellinus from a contemporary, Libanius - Matthews 1989: 8.
  4. ↑ The Eye of Command, Kimberly Kagan, p23
  5. ↑ Amm. 31.16.9
  6. ↑ The Eye of Command, Kimberly Kagan pp29-30
  7. ↑ Warren T. Treadgold (1997). A history of the Byzantine state and society. Stanford University Press. pp. 133–. ISBN 9780804726306. http://books.google.com/books?id=nYbnr5XVbzUC&pg=PA133. Retrieved 22 August 2010. 
  8. ↑ The Eye of Command, Kimberly Kagan, p22
  9. ↑ Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 26.5
  10. ↑ Gibbon, Chapter 25.
  11. ↑ E. Stein, Geschichte des spätrömischen Reiches, Vienna 1928
  12. ↑ The Eye of Command, Kimberly Kagan, p27-9
  13. ↑ Kelly, Gavin (2004): “Ammianus and the Great Tsunami”, in: The Journal of Roman Studies, 94, 141-167 (141). Note that in the fifth century BC the Greek historian Thucydides had already connected these seismic events in his Peloponnesian War(see book I, 22).
  14. ↑ Clark, Text Tradition.

References and further reading

External links