by Scott McGill
Of the three editions of Ammianus in Gibbon’s library (see Keynes 1980), the working text was certainly Gronovius’s edition of 1693, which contained at the foot of the page not only the notes of Gronovius himself but also the more substantial contributions of Friedrich Lindenbrog (1609), Henri de Valois (or Valesius) (1636), and the latter’s brother Adrien de Valois (1682). Their names consistently recur, with commendation or occasional disagreement, alongside citations of Ammianus. (It has also been shown that Gibbon on occasion filtered his reading of Ammianus – whether consciously or not – through the French rendering by the Abbé de la Bléterie in his Vie de Julien [Bowersock 1977, p. 202], just as he had done when translating Julian [201]). The scholarly benefits of his reading of Valesius and other earlier scholars affect the discussion at numerous points. For example, many of the places where Ammianus is compared favorably to other sources seem to chase up hints from the foot of Gronovius’s page. From this, too, seems to come an overinterpretation of Ammianus (II.xxi.826n168), who is said to have described “eunuchs who were spoliis templorum pasti” (“gorged on plunder from temples,” 22.4.3). But Ammianus nowhere calls these courtiers eunuchs: Eunuchs are mentioned in this context in other sources quoted in the footnotes of his text, and they are also specifically made the subject of the chapter in the capitula composed by Adrien de Valois (Kelly 2009b, p. 239). Reading through commentary also pointed Gibbon to the allusive quality of Ammianus’s text: When Ammianus in a pregnant phrase (see Kelly 2008, pp. 15–18; Ross 2016, pp. 40–44) described the Gothic War battlefield of Ad Salices still white with unburied bones, ut indicant nunc usque albentes ossibus campi (31.7.16), Gibbon, with help from Lindenbrog’s note, recognized the allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid 12.36 … campique ingentes ossibus albent, and wrote of “the wide extent of the fields (II.xxvi.1057).” But an eye for allusion and its interpretation is present in Gibbon’s writing even without help from commentaries. Let me give two examples.
In paraphrasing Ammianus’s famous description of Constantius’s entry into Rome, Gibbon adds wider contextualization to the impressive self‐control of the emperor’s posture: “The severe discipline of the Persian youth had been introduced by the eunuchs into the Imperial palace; and such were the habits of patience which they had inculcated, that, during a slow and sultry march, he was never seen to move his hand towards his face, or to turn his eyes either to the right or the left” (II.xix.698; cf. Amm. 16.10.10). Aside from decorously omitting Constantius’s unwillingness to spit in public, Gibbon has added the detail about Constantius’s education by Persian eunuchs, found nowhere in Ammianus or any other ancient account. The grounds for this seem to be twofold: first, his knowledge that, since the capture of the Persian King Narses’s harem in the year 299, eunuchs had played an important role in the Roman court; second, Gibbon’s recognition and elaboration of an allusion by Ammianus to Xenophon, who describes how his fictional Cyrus trained his subjects (Cyropaedia 8.1.42). This allusion had not been picked up by Ammianus’s early modern commentators, nor did Gibbon note it himself. Indeed, it was not otherwise noted in scholarship until 1928 (Goodenough 1928, 79n84; cf. Classen 1988, 178, 178n6).
Another place in which Gibbon’s close reading of Ammianus picked up a subtlety that other readers had missed came after Julian’s death (see Kelly 2009a, p. 360). After ostensibly blaming Jovian’s surrender of Nisibis on youthful inexperience (25.9.7), Ammianus moves on to a catalog of examples, which ends by pointing out how Romans under the Republic had repudiated such surrenders and handed the responsible general over to the enemy instead, as had happened to Mancinus after Numantia. The implication that this should have happened to Jovian – a position at odds with Ammianus’s ostensible attitude – has not been picked up by modern scholarship. But it was clear to Gibbon (II.xxiv.954).
The closeness of Gibbon’s reading of Ammianus, and his firm view that Ammianus was an unbiased and unmediated source, led him to put a particularly strong emphasis on the historian’s status as eyewitness. We have already heard how he decides that Ammianus was present at Julian’s deathbed and had heard his magnificent deathbed speech; but he also suggests (following La Bléterie: Pocock 1999–2015, vol. 6, p. 210) that an unnamed soldier who contributed to the debate on the appointment of a successor to Julian was, in fact, Ammianus himself (II.xxiv.946n100). Gibbon was the first scholar to infer from Ammianus’s description of the bones on the battlefield of Ad Salices that the historian had himself visited the site (II.xxvi.1057). Gibbon called his splendid version of Ammianus’s digression on the mores of Roman senators “an authentic state of Rome and its inhabitants, which is more peculiarly applicable to the period of the Gothic invasion” (III.xxxi.174–175), inferring the personal disappointments of the historian. Gibbon’s attitude to these passages has been foundational for later scholarship. Like him, it has tended to count the two digressions, 14 books apart, as texts that can be “melted together” and read as a unity. The tendency has also been to “detect the latent prejudices, and personal resentments, which soured the temper of Ammianus himself” (III.xxxi.175): Ammianus is seen as the bourgeois interloper looked down on by the nobles. Some rather obvious points – that these biographical inferences are speculative and unlikely and the digressions themselves are remarkably timeless and closely wrapped up in the traditions of Roman satire – have been overlooked (Kelly 2008, 132‐41; Ross 2015). Similarly, in a broader investigation of Ammianus’s appearances or alleged appearances as a character, I found that the approach arguably founded by Gibbon was still the standard one, though a rather more artful Ammianus could be identified (Kelly 2008, pp. 31–103).
38.3 Concluding Thoughts on Decline
For Gibbon, Ammianus was “the last subject of Rome who composed a profane history in the Latin language” (II.xxvi.1074n114). One could read this as a purely factual (though actually false) statement. It is tempting, however, to see it as rather more teleological in import, akin to a remark in the character sketch of Boethius: “The last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman” – a judgment that context and choice of comparanda imply is both political and literary (IV.xxxix.550). Gibbon saw Claudian as writing “in the decline of arts, and of empire,” as if these were two parallel processes. Gibbon’s immensely influential attitude to the history of late antiquity was also intimately tied in to his view of the literature of the period. Modern historians of late antiquity have reacted against the description “decline and fall,” and even those with a more catastrophist view of the process tend to leave out “decline” (cf. the titles of Heather [2005] and Ward‐Perkins [2005]). Gibbon saw a deeper and more protracted descent. His opening three chapters on the Antonine Golden Age of the second century describe a Roman state whose population and sophistication approached those of Europe of his own time – a far more optimistic view than most modern historians of the Roman Empire would adopt – and a similar position is adopted in the “General Observations” that close the third volume of the work. The late antique world, and late antique literature, lies, as it were, in a depression between, and cannot match, the ancients or the moderns. It has been attractively argued by John Matthews (1996, p. 30) that “decline” is, for Gibbon, an attitude pervading his thinking rather than a strictly analytical approach; and moreover, that “Gibbon conceived the nature of the artistic and literary culture of a society as fundamental to an evaluation of that society in all its aspects, and saw the relationship between the two, the arts and society, as a very intimate one; if, indeed, he consciously distinguished them at all” (p. 32). In Gibbon’s thought political decline and literary decline, therefore, seem to be self‐reinforcing, rather than the latter being considered a product of the former. Indeed, the falling off from linguistic classicism may to some extent have seemed powerful evidence for wider decline.
Gibbon was an acute, learned, and in many ways sympathetic scholar of late antique literature, but his approach was shaped by underlying attitudes, none of them fundam
entally surprising. A sense of belatedness (and decline?) in late antique literature, along with a separation of secular literature from Christian writings (not necessarily conceived of as literary), went back to late antiquity itself. A Ciceronian reaction against the ostentatious vocabulary and metaphors of much later Latin prose and the jeweled style of later Latin poetry had been conventional since the Renaissance. It makes sense that a historian would admire detailed contemporary narrative and that a man of the Enlightenment would be suspicious of Christian sectarianism. Beyond these approaches there is, of course, much subtle interpretation of many authors to be found in the Decline and Fall, ripe for further study. Both in the impact of these detailed interpretations – as we saw with Ammianus – and in his more general influence, Gibbon has had an enduring influence on scholarship and popular views of late antique literature.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
My thanks to various friends who have read this piece, including Sarah Cassidy, Felicity Loughlin, and Justin Stover.
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Bowersock, G.W. (1977). Gibbon and Julian. In: Gibbon et Rome à la lumière de l’historiographie moderne (ed. Pierre Ducrey, F. Burkhalter, and R. Overmeer), 191–217. Geneva: Droz.
Brown, Peter. (1971). The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. London: Thames and Hudson.
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Classen, C. Joachim. (1988). Nec spuens aut os aut nasum tergens vel fricans. Amm. Marc. XVI 10, 10. Rheinisches Museum 131: 177–186.
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Gibbon, Edward. (1761). Essai sur l’étude de la literature. London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt.
Gibbon, Edward. (1776, 1781, 1788). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. London: W Strahan and T. Cadell. Cited by original volume and chapter number and page number in the edition of David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1994).
Gibbon, Edward. (1779). A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell.
Gibbon, Edward. (1796). The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon Esq. with Memoirs of His Life and Writings (ed. John, Lord Sheffield). London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell.
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Kelly, Gavin. (2008). Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian. Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, Gavin. (2009a). Ammianus Marcellinus: Tacitus’ heir and Gibbon’s guide. In: The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (ed. Andrew Feldherr), 438–461. Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, Gavin. (2009b). Adrien de Valois and the chapter headings in Ammianus Marcellinus. Classical Philology 104: 233–242.
Keynes, Geoffrey. (1980). The Library of Edward Gibbon. 2nd ed. Dorchester: St. Paul’s.
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Matthews, John. (1996). Gibbon and the later Roman Empire: Causes and circumstances. In: Edward Gibbon and Empire (ed. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault), 12–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paschoud, François. (1977). Gibbon et les sources historiographiques pour la période de 363 à 410. In: Gibbon et Rome à la lumière de l’historiographie moderne (ed. Pierre Ducrey, F. Burkhalter, and R. Overmeer), 219–245. Geneva: Droz.
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Ross, Alan. (2015). Ammianus, traditions of satire, and the eternity of Rome. Classical Journal 110: 356–373.
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*NOTE
References to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall give the original volume number, the chapter, and page and note references in the standard modern edition by David Womersley (1994), each of whose three volumes incorporates two volumes of the original. The original volume 1 was published in 1776, volumes 2–3 in 1781, and volumes 4‐6 in 1788. Gibbon’s Vindication (1779), a defense against critics of his treatment of Christian topics in volume 1, is cited by page numbers in volume 3 of Womersley’s edition. His Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761) is cited by section number; his Memoirs from the first edition of 1796.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Visions of Late Antique Literature
James Uden
Why read the authors who come at the end? Why linger at the end of an epoch, a civilization, a Companion? Authors of the late antique period of the Roman Empire have historically, with a few exceptions (Augustine, Boethius), occupied a marginal position within the scholarly discipline of classics. Late antique literature has been characterized by critics as uninspired and imitative and as the product of failing creative powers; or as drily exegetical, technical, or rhetorical; or as languorously decadent and dissipated. Yet for some poets, essayists, and novelists, the lateness of this literature has proven its primary attraction. Indeed, throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of Rome’s final era end has enjoyed a surprisingly enduring symbolic appeal as the expression of exclusion from the canon, of romanticized or paradigmatic decline, or of the conflict between Christianity and the “pagan” Muses. In a 2009 poem, the Australian poet Peter Porter addressed the American John Ashbery: “In the end, aren't you a bit pissed/at living in the world’s most powerful country?/Wouldn’t you rather, like the Late Roman Poets,/coruscate in the margins of a worn‐out Empire?” (“To John Ashbery,” Porter 2009, 58). The distance of late Roman and Greek authors – their temporal distance from their models in the classical past, and frequently their geographical distance from Rome and Greece itself – makes them seductive precursors for writers who feel their own ages equally distant and late, or who perhaps feel a sort of lateness to be vital to their art.
This romance with lateness has found itself increasingly at cross‐purposes with an academic effort to rewrite the narrative of the late Roman world. In Peter Brown’s influential The World of Late Antiquity (1971), the later empire represents no end at all but is instead an era of “astounding new beginnings” (p. 7), of dynamic transf
ormations in cultural, political, and religious life. The barbarian invasions that long dominated the historiographical imagination were instead “a ‘gold rush’ of immigrants from the underdeveloped countries of the north” (p. 122). This chapter, though, testifies to the continuing significance of narratives of decline outside the academy. It offers a brief – and necessarily selective – survey of artistic engagements with late antique literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in poems, novels, essays, and films. It is clear, first, that the reception of late Latin and Greek literature by these writers and artists has developed largely independently from, or in defiance of, historians’ redefinitions of late antiquity. For some writers the period that encompasses Libanius, Claudian, and Procopius has seemed startlingly modern; for most, stubbornly late. Second, the critical depreciation or neglect of late antique literature within the academy has often made it attractive to those who are working outside of it; there is frequently something rebellious, countercultural, or anti‐academic in a self‐identification with late Greek and Roman authors. Third, in strong contrast to dismissals of late antique literature as excessively formalist or rhetorical, many of the poets and novelists surveyed in this chapter attempted to recast its works in highly personal terms. Even when it has involved no little historical invention or anachronism, nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century writers have tried to fill the gaps of tantalizingly unfamiliar texts with the shapes of recognizable personalities, desiring to hear for themselves the voices of late antiquity.
