Augustan History - Title and Scope

Title and Scope

The name originated with Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, working from a complex manuscript tradition with a number of variant versions. How widely the work was circulated in late antiquity is unknown, but lengthy citations from it are found in authors of the sixth and 9th centuries, and the chief manuscripts also date from the ninth or 10th centuries. (The editio princeps was published at Milan in 1475). The six Scriptores – "Aelius Spartianus", "Iulius Capitolinus", "Vulcacius Gallicanus", "Aelius Lampridius", "Trebellius Pollio", and "Flavius Vopiscus (of Syracuse)" – dedicate their biographies to Diocletian, Constantine and various private persons, and so ostensibly were all writing c. the late 3rd and early 4th century.

The biographies cover the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian. A section covering the reigns of Philip the Arab, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian and all but the end of the reign of Valerian is missing in all the manuscripts, and it has been argued that biographies of Nerva and Trajan have also been lost at the beginning of the work, which may suggest the compilation might have been a direct continuation of Suetonius. (It has also been theorized that the mid-3rd century lacuna might actually be a deliberate literary device of the author or authors, saving the labour of covering Emperors for whom little source material may have been available.)

Despite devoting whole books to ephemeral or in some cases non-existent usurpers, there are no independent biographies of the Emperors Quintillus and Florian, whose reigns are merely briefly noted towards the end of the biographies of their respective predecessors, Claudius Gothicus and Tacitus. For nearly 300 years after Casaubon's edition, though much of the Augustan History was treated with some scepticism, it was used by historians as an authentic source – in the first volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example. In modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of "deliberate mystification" written much later than its purported date, however the "fundamentalist view" still has distinguished support.