The Last Historians of Rome

Minimal quantities of historical writing in Latin survive from the period between c. 120 and the history of Aurelius Victor in 360, and it appears little was ever written. Our knowledge of Roman imperial history of the second, third, and fourth centuries of our era - the period after the first twelve Caesars - therefore derives disproportionately from a group of Latin secular historians writing in the later fourth century.

The Last Historians of Rome project offers a fundamental reassessment of two long works, the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus and the pseudonymous Historia Augusta, and four short texts, two attributed to Victor, as well as the breviaries of Eutropius and Festus. The project aims to transform the understanding of these historians, both individually and as a coherent group, and to massively improve their accessibility to scholars, students, and the wider public.

There is much to be done. These works are not normally associated with each other: Ammianus, whose coverage of the years 96-353 is lost, is seen as an outstanding contemporary historian, the shorter works as trivial and error-prone bluffer's guides to Roman history, and the Historia Augusta's imperial biographies as an unreliable imposture verging on fiction.

The standard editions are either inadequate, or a century old; the manuscript transmissions have been misunderstood and under-investigated. Two still have no conventionally published English translation, and none has a really high-quality, comprehensive, and accessible one.

New insights and discoveries, including by the Project Leads, make a fresh presentation through a reedited text and translation even more urgent. For Ammianus, Kelly has published widely on the need for further conjectural emendation, has brought new insights on prose-rhythm's role in editing, and has reassessed the relationships of the Renaissance manuscripts and, with Stover, the Carolingian ones.

Stover and Woudhuysen have demonstrated that the two Victorine works are actually summaries abbreviated from Victor's original by others. For the Historia Augusta, Stover has identified multiple sources for a neglected second branch of the manuscript tradition including passages that have been omitted in editions for centuries.

At the centre of the project are new critical editions of these historians for the Oxford Classical Texts series. New editions are among the most important and challenging tasks that can be undertaken in Classical Studies, especially for works whose standard editions are outdated, inadequate, or both. Their useful life can last many decades, and they are essential for every scholar, classicist or medievalist, literary or historical, who studies the authors or uses them as a source.

We will publish new annotated translations, making these texts accessible to enthusiastic amateurs and teachable in Anglophone universities. A catalogue assessing the manuscripts and early printed editions, an Onomasticon of the historians, and subsidiary textual studies will both aid the preparation of the editions and stand as important independent scholarly contributions, some of interest beyond Classical Studies.

The three Leads will also co-author a short book interpreting the historians as a coherent group and reassessing their place in the development of Roman historiography.