Augustan History - Genre and Purpose

Genre and Purpose

Interpretations of the purpose of the History also vary considerably, some considering it a work of fiction or satire intended to entertain (perhaps in the vein of 1066 and All That), others viewing it as a pagan attack on Christianity, the writer having concealed his identity for personal safety. Syme argued that it was a mistake to regard it as a historical work at all and that no clear propaganda purpose could be determined. In his view the History is primarily a literary product – an exercise in historical fiction (or 'fictional history') produced by a 'rogue scholiast' catering to (and making fun of) the antiquarian tendencies of the Theodosian age, in which Suetonius and Marius Maximus were fashionable reading and Ammianus Marcellinus was producing sober history in the manner of Tacitus. (The History implausibly makes the Emperor Tacitus (275-276) a descendant and connoisseur of the historian.) In fact in a passage on the Quadriga tyrannorum - the 'four-horse chariot of usurpers' said to have aspired to the purple in the reign of Probus - the History itself accuses Marius Maximus of being a producer of 'mythical history': homo omnium verbosissimus, qui et mythistoricis se voluminibis implicavit ('the most long-winded of men, who furthermore wrapped himself up in volumes of historical fiction'). The term mythistoricis occurs nowhere else in Latin.

Of considerable significance in this regard is the opening section of the life of Aurelian, in which 'Flavius Vopiscus' records a supposed conversation he had with the City Prefect of Rome during the festival of Hilaria in which the Prefect urges him to write as he chooses and invent what he does not know.