Augustan History - The Dating Problem

The Dating Problem

In 1889, Hermann Dessau, who had become increasingly concerned by the huge amount of anachronistic terms, Vulgar Latin vocabulary, and especially the host of obviously bogus proper names in the work, proposed that the six authors were all fictitious personae, and that the work was in fact composed by a single author in the late 4th century, probably in the reign of Theodosius I. Among his supporting evidence was that the life of Septimius Severus would have appear to make use of a passage from the mid-4th century historian Aurelius Victor, and that the life of Marcus Aurelius likewise uses material from Eutropius. In the decades following Dessau many scholars fought rearguard actions to try to preserve at least some of the six Scriptores as distinct persons and some first-hand authenticity for the content. As early as 1890 Mommsen postulated a Theodosian 'editor' of the Scriptores' work, an idea that has resurfaced many times since. Hermann Peter (editor of the Augustan History and of the Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae) proposed 330.

Others, such as Norman H. Baynes, abandoned the early 4th century date but only advanced it as far as the reign of Julian the Apostate (useful for arguing the work was intended as pagan propaganda). In the 1960s and 1970s however Dessau's original arguments received powerful restatement and expansion from Sir Ronald Syme, who devoted three books to the subject and was prepared to date the writing of the work closely in the region of 395 AD. Other recent studies also show much consistency of style, and most scholars now accept the theory of a single late author of unknown identity. Computer-aided stylistic analysis of the work has, however, returned ambiguous results; some elements of style are quite uniform throughout the work, while others vary in a way that suggests multiple authorship. To what extent this is because portions of the work are obviously compiled from multiple sources is unclear.