De Rebus Bellicis

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roman paddle wheel ship after De Rebus Bellicis . Miniature from the Oxford manuscript of Notitia dignitatum from 1436, probably by Peronet Lamy

De Rebus Bellicis is a Roman war pamphlet, presumably from the late 4th century AD, in which the unknown author deals with various reform proposals to counter the threat to the Roman Empire from the onrushing “barbarian peoples”.

The work is in a simple Latin and was probably written in the east of the Roman Empire between 364 and 375, ie during the joint reign of Emperors Valentinian I and Valens . Following Santo Mazzarino, Andrea Giardina advocates dating under Constantius II. Other researchers, along with Hartwin Brandt, assume that writing was more likely to have emerged in the early 5th century. It has survived in four manuscripts, which also contain the Notitia dignitatum .

The author also describes various ingenious designs of war machines, such as a paddle wheel ship that is propelled by oxen (Chapter 17). However, it is unlikely that such ships were used in the Roman Navy .

The writing also complains about actual and supposed grievances in the Roman Empire; the proposed solutions are not very practical. Whether this, as Hartwin Brandt assumes, can mainly be explained with the naivety of the author, or whether the actual purpose of the text is to practice traditional imperial criticism in a more original guise is controversial.

The war theorist Flavius ​​Vegetius Renatus also wrote treatises on similar topics around the same time , but his suggestions and explanations are more practical.

After a phase of more intensive examination of writing in the course of the 20th century, the interest of research in this initially waned because the possibilities of knowledge seemed exhausted. As part of a more recent work on the Anonymus de rebus bellicis , the aim of which is a fundamental morphological investigation of the Libellus and this type of text, Stefanie Gräf suggests a different evaluation of the font. The key points are: a. that it is probably a collective publication that has been revised and supplemented over a long period of time.

expenditure

  • Robert Ireland: Anonymi auctoris De Rebus bellicis. Teubner, Leipzig 1984.
  • Andrea Giardina: Anonimo. Le cose della guerra . Fondazione Lorenzo Valla; Mondadori, Milan 1989 ISBN 8804322020 (introduction, edition, Italian translation, commentary and 12 color plates from the Oxford manuscript)
  • Edward A. Thompson : A Roman Reformer and Inventor: Beeing a new Text of the Treatise De Rebus Bellicis with Translation and Introduction . Oxford 1952 (Latin text and translation).

literature

  • Barry Baldwin: The 'De rebus bellicis' . In: Eirene 16, 1978, pp. 23-39.
  • Hartwin Brandt : Criticism of time in late antiquity. Investigations into the reform proposals of Anonymus De rebus bellicis . Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33003-7 ( Vestigia 40).
  • Darío N. Sánchez Vendramini: The "history of coins" in the late antique script "De rebus bellicis" . In: Historia 55, 2006, pp. 125-128.
  • Stefanie Gräf: The Anonymus de rebus bellicis . A morphological study. Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-339-10170-9 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Assumptions based on conclusions from the content in Otto Seeck : Anonymi 3 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 2, Stuttgart 1894, Col. 2325.
  2. ↑ Andrea Giardina: Anonimo. Le cose della guerra. Milan 1989, pp. XL-XLVII

Web links

Commons : De Rebus Bellicis  - collection of images, videos and audio files