Aurelius Victor

Sextus Aurelius Victor (* around 320, † around 390) was a late antique Roman historian .

Life

Victor most likely came from one of the North African provinces of the Roman Empire. Despite coming from a humble background, he received a very good education - probably in his home country. In 337 at the latest he moved to Rome, where he presumably pursued legal studies. In the following years he made a career in the Reich administration. In the city of Sirmium in Pannonia , he probably worked in the office of the provincial governor there. He was not a Christian, but stuck to the old religions and was promoted by the also non-Christian Emperor Julian . Julian made him governor of the province of Pannonia Secunda , whose capital was Sirmium , in 361 , and gave him consular rank; at the latest then he must have been accepted into the senatorial rank. Julian's death in 363 was probably a setback for Victor; maybe even then, at the latest in 365 he lost his office. Nothing is known about his activities in the following decades; it does not appear again in historiography until after a quarter of a century: Emperor Theodosius I appointed him city ​​prefect of Rome in 388 , but he only held this high office until 389. He probably died shortly afterwards.

Imperial history

In 360/361 Victor wrote the work Historiae abbreviatae , which became known as Liber de Caesaribus or Caesares . It briefly deals with the Roman imperial history from Augustus to Constantius II and is the only surviving work by Victor. The Historiae abbreviatae , despite their brevity, provide important information about the third and fourth centuries. Conspicuous are Victor's habit of judging the personalities described according to their level of education, his lively aversion to the superior strength of the military and the (presumably due to deep disapproval) withholding the role of Christianity and the Church. Victor shows a strong propensity for moral judgment, using historical examples to illustrate general principles. Victor wrote a classical, very demanding Latin. This distinguishes his work strikingly from other breviary of late antiquity such as that of Rufius Festus . Victor orientated himself stylistically on Sallust and Tacitus (which is why he did not write pure biographies), whereby he even surpassed the peculiarities of Tacitus; He also shared the conservative basic attitude of these authors and, like them, sharply criticized the signs of decline that he perceived as such, whereby he by no means spared the Senate, since he accused the senators that it was their own fault, finally disempowered around the middle of the third century to have been: They preferred a comfortable, secure life in insignificance, while allowing "barbarians" (meaning soldiers here in general) to rule the emperors.

Victor introduced a time-division of the Roman imperial history, which already anticipated some usual in modern times: first Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasty , then adopted empire and Severus , then from Maximinus the soldiers empire , finally Dominat from 282/284. The Severer - compatriots Victors from the North African provinces, gentis nostrae - are seen positively (also Caracalla ); With the end of this dynasty, the decline begins for Victor, for which he blames the soldier emperors. Its sources were primarily works that have been lost today: probably the emperor's biographies of Marius Maximus, which reached as far as Elagabal , and, for the subsequent period, the Enmann emperor's story . As already mentioned, he knew the works of Suetonius and Tacitus, but possibly only used them indirectly (via a lost intermediate source or summary).

Corpus Aurelianum

Even in late antiquity , Victor's imperial history was linked to two anonymous writings, the Origo gentis Romanae ( Origin of the Roman People ), which describes the legendary prehistory of the founding of Rome, and De viris illustribus urbis Romae ( On the famous men of the city of Rome ), one Presentation of Roman history up to the end of the republican era in the form of 86 short biographies. All three works together offer an overview of the entire Roman history up to around 360 AD and form the so-called Corpus Aurelianum , which was wrongly ascribed to Victor as a whole.

The Origo has some value as a source for the history of Roman mythology , especially since it makes use of lost literature. De viris illustribus is a linguistically undemanding summary of the content of a now lost original, probably Hyginus' collection of biographies . The "famous men" also include military failures, rebels and external enemies of Rome.

Epitome de Caesaribus

In the period between 395 and 408, an unknown non-Christian author wrote a brief account of the imperial history from Augustus to the death of Emperor Theodosius the Great (395), combining material from Victor's work with news from other sources, some of which have now been lost. This undemanding work is known under the (inauthentic) name Epitome de Caesaribus . It is often inappropriately referred to as the short version of Victor's Imperial History, although only a relatively small amount of his material is taken from there.

reception

In the opinion of the vast majority of scholars, Victor's imperial history was one of the sources of the Historia Augusta (which establishes a terminus post quem for this ). Possibly has Ammianus Marcellinus , Victor figured in the lost parts of his written around 400 histories drawn from it. The church father Jerome wanted to get a copy based on identification of a letter. Otherwise, however, the aftereffect was very small, because Victor's linguistically and stylistically demanding work was replaced by the simpler Epitome de Caesaribus , which shows the predominance of a need for elementary factual knowledge in late antiquity. In the Middle Ages, Victor's imperial history was as good as unknown; it has only survived in two humanistic manuscripts. Medieval historians considered the Epitome de Caesaribus to be a work of Victor.

The writing about the famous men is also handwritten independently of the Corpus Aurelianum . In the 14th and 15th centuries it became very popular with the humanists, who - following information in the handwritten tradition - believed that they had excerpts from the historical work of Livy before them, when they assumed the younger Pliny to be the author ; around two hundred manuscripts from this period have survived.

The writing about the origins of the Romans, however, is only preserved in those two humanistic manuscripts that also pass on to Victor's work. The famous historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr wrongly declared this Origo gentis Romanae in 1827 to be a forgery by a Renaissance humanist.

The first edition of the entire Corpus Aurelianum was obtained by Andreas Schott in Antwerp in 1579.

Editions and translations

• Harold W. Bird (Ed.): Liber De Caesaribus of Sextus Aurelius Victor . Translated Texts for Historians . Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 1994, ISBN 0-85323-218-0 (English translation with detailed commentary and a good introduction, but also with some typographical errors).
• Franz Pichlmayr (Ed.): Sexti Aurelii Victoris Liber de Caesaribus. Praecedunt Origo gentis Romanae et Liber de viris illustribus urbis Romae; subsequitur Epitome de Caesaribus . Leipzig 1911; reprinted several times, most recently Teubner, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-8154-1108-4 .
• Kirsten Groß-Albenhausen and Manfred Fuhrmann (eds. And transl .): S. Aurelius Victor, The Roman Emperors. Liber de Caesaribus . 2nd edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2002, ISBN 3-534-13664-0 .
• Markus Sehlmeyer (ed. And translator): Origo Gentis Romanae. The origins of the Roman people . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16433-4 .

literature

• Michael von Albrecht : History of Roman literature from Andronicus to Boethius and its continued effect . Volume 2. 3rd, improved and expanded edition. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-026525-5 , p. 1175 f. (brief overview)
• Harold W. Bird: Sextus Aurelius Victor. A Historiographical Study . Liverpool 1984.
• Peter Lebrecht Schmidt : Sex. Aurelius Victor, Historiae abbreviatae. In: Reinhart Herzog (ed.): Restoration and renewal. The Latin literature from 284 to 374 AD (= Handbook of the Latin Literature of Antiquity , Volume 5). CH Beck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-31863-0 , pp. 198-201
• David Rohrbacher: The Historians of Late Antiquity . London / New York 2002, pp. 42-48.

Web links

Wikisource: Aurelius Victor  - Sources and full texts

• Thomas M. Banchich: English translation of the anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus in De Imperatoribus Romanis
• Text of the works (Latin)