The quest for the lost sources behind our surviving historical narratives is an endeavour not for the ingenuous, or the easily excited. One path to fulfilling this quest involves the development of hypothetical relationships between sources known (or speculative). This is the path of Quellenforschung. The other path is confined to the recovery of ‘fragments’, that is to say the gathering of explicit references to lost authors and their works. Although this may be the less spectacular route, ventures in fragment collecting have the potential to reveal much about the working methods of a historian, the transmission of texts, and the circulation of knowledge. Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have produced a book which realises the potential of such a venture.
The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (FHistLA) is the first concerted attempt to gather the testimonia and fragments of the Latin[1] historians from the fourth to seventh centuries AD, ostensibly picking up where the collections of Hermann Peter and the recent Fragments of the Roman Historians left off.[2] The task before Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen is considerable, not least because of the debates around many of the authors covered by this volume.
Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have set out, in the spirit of Felix Jacoby, to ‘give the reader a clear sense of what we know and what we do not know’ (6) about the lost historians in question. Their approach is cautious and minimalist, including as fragments only those texts which are ‘explicitly attributed to a particular author or work’ (6). This approach excludes hypothetical works, partially preserved works, or projected works (2), and the authors make a particular point of distinguishing their aims from those of the traditional Quellenforscher. The results of this approach can be stark. Take, for example, the editors’ approach to the late 6th century historian, Secundus of Trent, long believed to be a major source behind books two to four of Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards. Earlier adepts of Quellenforschung, such as Reinhard Jacobi in the second half of the 19th century, identified around 50 chapters of Paul the Deacon’s work as being wholly or partially derivative of Secundus’ lost work.[3] By contrast, Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen assign Secundus one fragment, not from Paul the Deacon, but from a scolion in a manuscript containing a collection of canon law (242-3).
FHistLA falls into two parts. The first, the introduction, outlines the methodology adopted in the volume, before turning to the questions of genre and circulation. Consonant with their austere approach to fragments, Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have excluded biographies, verse histories and chronicles from their collection, while acknowledging that the generic boundaries between these genres is not always clear cut. Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen also admit uncertainty about the precise nature of some of the historical endeavours of their chosen historians. The purpose of this policy of exclusion is to present the reader with a snapshot of the state of a particular, recognisable type of historical writing during the period of Late Antiquity.
The discussion of circulation patterns suggests that many of the works of these lost historians were never widely circulated, either geographically or, more specifically, beyond the social circle of the historian. This, according to Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen, has significant implications for those who subscribe to theories about the importance of those works by authors such as Nicomachus Flavianus, the Younger Symmachus, and Cassiodorus, in the shaping of the extant historiographical traditions: or, as they put it “[w]e have no reason to suppose that these lost works were the success stories that some scholars have made them out to be” (18, cf. 203-7 for comments on Cassiodorus’s History of the Goths). The authors may well be right. Yet in this instance the authors may be pushing their conclusions further than what their methodology permits. Just as it may be imprudent to assign too much significance to works which no longer survive, so too the reliance on explicit testimonia alone may unfairly diminish the importance of a lost work. For such testimonia depend on a limited number of surviving sources, and also on the habit of individual authors (i.e. do they cite their sources?).
The introduction finishes with a stimulating discussion of the social contexts in which these historians operated, and some thoughts on the nature of Latin historiography in Late Antiquity. Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen draw attention to the continuation of Romano-centric narratives compiled by members of the Roman elite throughout the period. The changes in Latin historiography are, in the opinion of the authors, more to do with the changes to the political contexts of the late antique West, rather than to the widespread adoption of Christianity, as has sometimes been posited. This feeds into the authors’ broader argument that presents the fourth century as being less a threshold of a new age of Latin historiography, but rather part of a longer continuum of Roman historical literature.
The second part of the volume presents the testimonia and fragments (in the original language of the citing authorities: mostly Latin, but also Greek, Syriac, and Armenian) followed by an English translation and commentary. The translations are clear, and form an important component of the commentary. Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen pay particular attention to the nuances of language, and attempt to extract as much meaning as possible from the often-meagre testimonia. As in the many cases in which we only know the names of works, the authors discuss these titles in some detail. In the process we are presented with several tantalising suggestions. The Omnimoda historia of Nummius Aemilianus Dexter, rather than being a systematic, narrative ‘Universal History’, is presented as being possibly either a historical miscellany similar to those produced by Favorinus of Arles and Aelian in earlier centuries, or an ‘all-encompassing’ history, akin to the second part of Eusebius’ Chronicle, which was ‘both universal in its coverage and varied through its use of material explicitly drawn from other authors.’ (62).
Over the course of the commentary, the authors attempt to lay some ghosts. For example, on the basis of a careful reading of Sidonius Apollinaris Ep. 8.3.1, the supposed translation of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Nicomachus Flavianus is argued to be more likely a reference to a Greek transcription in Flavianus’ possession, rather than Latin translation, of the Life (51-53). Likewise, Naucellius’ supposed translation of an epitome of Aristotle’s lost work on constitutions is argued to be a translation of a Greek work on republican Roman history, on the basis of their reinterpretation of a corrupt passage in Symmachus Ep. 3.11.3 (69-72).
The focus of the commentary is mainly historiographical, although occasionally Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen offer interpretations of historical matters. Indeed, their discussion of the fragments of Frigeridus amounts to an excellent historical commentary on Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks 2.8-9, dealing with the question of the crossing of the Rhine in (possibly) 406, the usurper Constantine III, and the exploits of Aetius. The brief excursus on the attempts by Renaissance humanists to find traces of Ablabius’ history behind the text of Jordanes amounts to a tantalising foray into reception studies (145).
Given the contested nature of late antique historiography, the commentary is often combative in tone. This is perhaps most in evidence in Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen’s discussion of Nicomachus Flavianus’ lost Annals and Cassiodorus’ History of the Goths. Yet behind many of the authors’ interpretations lies their adherence to their methodology and their minimalist approach. The result is that, irrespective of whether one agrees or not with a particular point of interpretation, one has to admire the intellectual consistency throughout the volume.
Furthermore, the authors have been successful in their aim of presenting the reader with a sense of ‘what we know and what we do not know’ about a particular author. As such Van Hoof and Van Nuffelen have produced a fundamentally useful book, even if one comes away with a better sense of ‘what we do not know’, about an author and his work. Even so, FHistLA represents a stimulating contribution to scholarship on the intellectual world of the late Roman period in the West, and its sober conclusions may well spur us to think more about the sources we have, rather than those we do not.
Notes
[1] Although the title of the work indicates that it is Latin historians that will be the focus, at least one of the historians discussed in this book may have written in Greek (Ablabius = FHistLA 13 = FGrHist 708).
[2] T. Cornell, et al. (eds) The Fragments of the Roman Historians (Oxford 2013).
[3] R. Jacobi, Die Quellen der Langobardengeschichte des Paulus Diaconus: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte deutscher Historiographie (Vienna 1877), 91-96.