Aufidius Bassus

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Aufidius Bassus was a Roman historian who lived in the first half of the 1st century AD. Very little is known about the person of Aufidius Bassus. He was a friend of Seneca and an Epicurean .

Bassus wrote two historical works, which today are lost except for a few fragments: a work called libri belli Germanici (or bellum Germanicum ) about the war against the Teutons in the time of Augustus and a general historical work ( Historiae ). Pliny the Elder tied in with the latter with his historical work ( a fine Aufidii Bassi ).

The work on the German war was probably completed first by Bassus and probably extended to the year 16 AD. The question of which period his histories cover is very problematic. Cassiodorus used the work to compile the list of consulates from 9 BC. Chr. To 31 AD in his chronicle . Even if Seneca the Elder has received a fragment on the death of Cicero , this does not necessarily mean that Bassus chose this period as the beginning of his work. Bassus probably followed up with Titus Livius and described the events up to 31 AD, perhaps also until 41 AD or even until 54 AD.

The histories were probably used as a source for several later historians, most likely including Tacitus in his annals . Tacitus mentions Bassus in Dialogus de oratoribus 23; Quintilian in turn mentions Bassus in connection with the consul and historian Servilius Nonianus , whose historical work was probably also consulted by Tacitus. Ronald Syme assumed that Nonianus was rather the main source in the annals , but this cannot be proven and results from Syme's consideration that a senator like Nonianus would be more likely to be a source of information than a man like Aufidius Bassus, who belonged to the knighthood . Some researchers suspect that Aufidius Bassus was also used by Cassius Dio .

Text output

literature

  • Catherine J. Castner: Prosopography of Roman Epicureans from the Second Century BC to the Second Century AD 2nd edition, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-8204-9933-4 , pp. 12-15
  • Olivier Devillers: Tacite et les sources des Annales . Leuven 2003, p. 12ff.
  • FA Marx: Aufidius Bassus . In: Klio 29 (1936), pp. 94-101.
  • Michael M. Sage: Tacitus' Historical Works: A Survey and Appraisal . In: Rise and Fall of the Roman World . Vol. II.33.2. Berlin-New York 1990, pp. 851-1030.
  • Ronald Syme : Tacitus . 2 vols., Oxford 1958.
  • John Wilkes: Julio-Claudian Historians . In: Classical World 65 (1972), p. 177ff.

Remarks

  1. Seneca, Epistulae morales 30, where Seneca describes that Bassus is already near death.
  2. Mentioned by Quintilian 10.1,103. The majority of modern researchers assume that this is a separate work that was not part of the histories .
  3. ^ Sage, Historical Works , p. 1004. Ronald Syme , Tacitus , Vol. 2, p. 697, takes as the earliest starting date 12 BC. BC, but perhaps Bassus only described the operations of Germanicus .
  4. Seneca maior, Suasoriae 6, 18. It is quite possible that the work was published in individual parts, which Friedrich Münzer assumed ( The source of Tacitus for the Germanic Wars , in: Bonner Jahrbücher 104, 1899, p. 67ff., here p. 68.).
  5. ^ Discussion in Syme, Tacitus , Vol. 2, pp. 697-699. See also Sage, Historical Works , p. 1005.
  6. Quintilian 10.1,103.
  7. Syme, Tacitus , Vol. 1, pp. 274ff. See also John Matthews: The Emperor and his Historians . In: John Marincola (Ed.): A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography . Blackwell, Oxford et al. a. 2007, p. 290ff., Here p. 293.
  8. So already Marx, Aufidius Bassus . See also Bernd Manuwald : Cassius Dio and Augustus . Wiesbaden 1979, pp. 257f .; Peter Michael Swan: The Augustan Succession: An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio's Roman History, Books 55–56 (9 BC – AD 14) . Oxford 2004, pp. 250-252.