Ammianus Marcellinus (St Andrews, Latin Historiography – LT4209) (original) (raw)
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[ARTIGO] Exemplary History: Competition in Roman Historiography
História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, 2019
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Journal of Roman Studies, 2018
Huntington HM 45717). The most remarkable of these witnesses are C and H, twins descended from a manuscript (ζ) containing a vast number of conjectures, many of them 'wilful tampering', but some of outstanding quality (K. prints sixty-four of them); R. M. Thomson argued that they were the work of William of Malmesbury, and K. supports his case with additional evidence. A further advance is K.'s establishment of the pattern of contamination to be found in the manuscripts, principally from β to α 2 and from G to β. K. (OCT, ix) does not exclude in principle the possibility that one or more of the 225 renaissance manuscripts known to him preserves a transmitted reading not found elsewhere, though he rightly thinks it unlikely. Nevertheless, in case a future scholar wishes to collate them fully, he provides lists (Studies, 267-79) of both the 225 manuscripts and the 'singular uncorrected and uncorrectable' errors in each of his primary manuscripts, to assist such a scholar to establish the lineage of later ones (OCT, v; 'uncorrectable' is a slippery concept, akin to that of the 'unconjecturable' reading). The textual discussions in Studies (the lemmata give the text of Ihm's 1907 edition, not that printed by K.) are always clear and to the point; whenever possible, K. establishes the reading of the archetype and his arguments are solidly based on linguistic evidence culled from TLL and the PHI database. If the rst person sometimes seems over-prominent, that is perhaps a reection of the fact that, in the last analysis, many editorial decisions have to be subjective. K.'s critical instincts are radical, but the archetype was extremely, often deeply, corrupt (cf. Studies, 3) and the variegated nature of the subject matter makes it much more difcult to arrive at the truth than is the case with, say, the Puteaneus in Livy 21-25. I have counted over fty passages where K. argues that the archetypal reading is lacunose (there will also be many places, not discussed in Studies, where the omission is small and the truth not in doubt; by contrast, not surprisingly, he deletes transmitted words in twenty-three passages). On a number of occasions (Iul. 20.5, 60, Aug. 38.2, 43.1, Tib. 21.5, Galba 6.2, Vesp. 15, Dom. 14.1), when the general sense required is not in doubt, he prints what he calls a 'stop gap' and adds 'quod sententiam dumtaxat nostri redintegrat' (uel sim.). My own preference in these circumstances is to indicate a lacuna rather than ll it, but many will approve of K.'s practice. On several occasions K. adduces the evidence of Orosius or the epitome de Caesaribus attributed to Aurelius Victor (referred to just as 'Epit.' or 'the Epitome'); it is a pity that he did not say elsewhere (at, e.g., OCT, xli or Studies, 49) that they constitute indirect textual evidence. K. accepts forty-six emendations of Richard Bentley, whose plan to edit Suetonius never came to fruition; they are found in his copies, now in the British Library, of the Amsterdam and Leiden editions of 1697 and 1698 respectively. K. also reports conjectures of Eduard Fraenkel, in his copy of Ihm's 1907 edition (now in the Sackler Library in Oxford and transcribed by David Wardle, whose Clarendon Ancient History Series edition of the Life of Augustus (2014) contains a number of textual observations).
Abbreviated Histories: The Case of the Epitome de Caesaribus (c. 395)
The dissertation offers a critical analysis of the Epitome de Caesaribus, a fourth-century Latin series on the lives of the emperors from Augustus to Theodosius (c. AD 395), and consists of seven chapters defining the text, the genre, its sources, its religious milieu, and its political and social ideas. The political ideas in the Epitome were deeply marked by the influence of the ascetic ideal honouring moderation in drink, food, sleep, sex, and emotions such as anger. Within the fourth-century Roman Empire, the epitomator offers moderate pagan views which show interest about dreams, asceticism, and the providential nature of the divinity. The dissertation proposes to see the Epitome as a literary artefact which, through comparison with contemporary authors, allows one to extract from a bland text ideas found among fourth-century elites in the emperor Honorius' Italy (395-423).