The Roman Empire of Ammianus

by John Matthews

John Matthews' brilliant analysis of Ammianus and his world is foundational for the study of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. Matthews' Ammianus is a man very much in touch with his times, engaged in many of the exciting events that he describes, and a commentator motivated by a passionate devotion to justice.



The empire that he depicts in The Roman Empire of Ammianus is undergoing a profoundly important intellectual transition as Christians and non-Christians dealt with each other in new ways, and a profoundly important political transition as Rome's ability to control its frontiers was severely challenged.



This new edition of the volume offers a new Introduction by the author, and corrections to the original text. In Matthews' brilliantly researched and compellingly written pages we encounter brigands, philosophers, bishops, barbarians and one of the most extraordinary figures in all of Roman the Emperor Julian, who occupies for Matthews - as he did for Ammianus - a central place in the history of these times.



Ammianus has been recognized for centuries as the last great historian of the Classical Latin tradition. It is thanks to Matthews that we can at last begin to appreciate the brilliance and complexity of the tapestry he wove with his words.

Genres: History

608 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1989

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. If adding books to this author, please use John^^^Matthews.

John F. Matthews, John M. Schiff Professor of Classics and History, came to Yale in 1996 from the University of Oxford, from where he holds the degrees of MA and D.Phil., and where he for many years taught Greek and Roman History. He was successively University Lecturer, Reader and Professor (ad hominem) of Late Roman Studies, and Fellow of Queen's College. In July 2003 he received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leicester, his home city in the United Kingdom.

Professor Matthews' research interests focus primarily on the social and cultural history of the later Roman period. He is the author of Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, A.D. 364-425 (1975), Political Life and Culture in Late Roman Society (1985 - twelve collected papers), The Roman Empire of Ammianus (1989), Laying Down the Law; a Study of the Theodosian Code (2000), and most recently The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business and Daily Life in the Roman East (Yale University Press, 2006), the winner of the 2007 James Henry Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association as "the best book in English in any field of history prior to CE 1000 ". He is also co-author, with Tim Cornell, of the widely-translated Atlas of the Roman World (1982). He has published many articles conference proceedings, ranging from the second-century tax law of Palmyra to the career of the philosopher Boethius in the sixth, and is one of four contributors from the Department to the Blackwell Companion to the Roman Empire. He is currently working on the early history of the city of Constantinople.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the Royal Historical Society and the London Society of Antiquaries. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His wife, Veronika Grimm, is also a member of the faculty of the Department of Classics. (source: http://www.yale.edu/classics/faculty_...)

Reviews

[Steve]

Mid-4th Century Floor Mosaic, National Museum of Roman Art, Mérida

I’ve had a particular interest in the Late Roman Empire for over a decade now – partly motivated by my sense that the Euro-American Empire is itself stumbling towards its demise, a process that has only been accelerating since 2016 – and because the without a doubt most engaging and, in some passages, actually exciting text on the subject was written by a witness, Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. CE 333 – ca. 400), towards the end of the 4th century. Generally referred to as the Res Gestae, only the last eighteen of thirty-one books have survived to our day, but precisely those eighteen books cover 26 years that overlap with Ammianus’ adult life and treat events at which he was either present or could find living witnesses to question at length. So, with the disappearance of the volumes covering CE 96 – 352, the text we have before us closely compares with Thucydides’ remarkable contemporary history of the Peloponnesian War.

Though Edward Gibbon had some reservations about his style (“the vices of his style, the disorder and perplexity of his narrative”, “his love of ambitious ornaments [that] frequently betrayed him into an unnatural vehemence of expression”), he recognized Ammianus as an “accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices which usually affect the mind of a contemporary” as he wrote his chapters on the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Ernest Stein declared him to be the greatest literary genius the world had seen between Tacitus and Dante.This, of course, is an egregiously eurocentric assertion, ignoring the peaks of the literature of the Tang and Sung dynasties, not to mention the best of the inimitable compositions of the Heian Era

As I already pointed out in my reviews of Ammianus’ text(*), Ammianus was born into a high ranking family in Antioch(**) – the third city of the Empire after Rome and Alexandria – and was taken into the Emperor’s personal guard – the protectores domestici – as a teenager, probably because his father was an officer of the guard. He was taken under the wing of Ursicinus, the magister equitum orientalis (the commander of all the cavalry in the eastern Empire), and personally witnessed the future emperor Julian’s rise in Gaul and later participated in the then emperor’s ill-fated Persian campaign. Though his mother tongue was Greek, Ammianus wrote his history in Latin; purportedly, the text is shot through with Graecisms (indeed, an entire book is dedicated to the topic!), but however it may read in the original, even the rather stolid German translation(***) I read had me on the edge of my seat whenever Ammianus was reporting his own experiences, particularly his multiple brushes with death in Mesopotamia. Indeed, five years after finishing the text many of his masterfully evoked images remain crystal clear in my mind’s eye.



The Arch of Constantine, Rome, ca. CE 315

Shortly after finishing Res Gestae I resolved to read John Matthews’ (literally) weighty The Roman Empire of Ammianus (1989), but distracted by so many other competing texts I finally read the book in these first weeks of 2021.

Matthews offers a detailed investigation of the text, the author and his historical milieu that extends, corrects and tempers, while trying to resolve lacunae and contradictions in Ammianus’ narration and discursive asides. In the first part Matthews does this while reading the text chronologically and expanding upon it in varied response to its changing foci, with the exception of Chapter 7, where he describes the competing schools of Neo-Platonism – the “philosophical” represented by Plotinus and the “theurgical” upheld by Iamblichus – and Julian’s unfortunate adherence to the latter, material tacitly assumed by Ammianus throughout his history. Notable here is the conflict that ensued between the traditional haruspices – the official omen readers of the Roman culture – and the theurges who accompanied Julian everywhere he went. On a number of occasions during the Persian campaign the haruspices advised Julian against continuing, in particular on the morning of Julian’s demise. The theurges and Julian believed that their rites had the power to force the gods to their will. That evening the theurges were instead gathered at Julian’s deathbed meditating upon the immortality of the soul.

Ammianus himself was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, upper-class Roman, so was neither a Christian nor followed Julian’s inclinations to magical Platonism. In fact, he was critical both of Julian (“superstitious, rather than a legitimate observer of divine matters”) and his predecessor, the Christian emperor Constantius, whose obsessive concern with the theological disputes of the early Christian church he found to be “old woman’s superstition”. He disapproved of Julian’s law forbidding Christians to teach Greek culture, particularly philosophy, but did not mention the “martyrs” Christian apologists ascribed to Julian’s responsibility after his death when they mixed truth with calumny in an early example of “canceling”.



Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, Museo Tresoro, Basilica di San Pietro, Vatican, CE 359

In the second part, Matthews continues this thematic, rather than chronological approach. Among the topics covered in these more topically organized chapters are a presentation and assessment of Ammianus’ views of the qualities of a good emperor and to which degree the emperors covered in his history manifested same; a discussion of the political structure and function of the empire; and the physical setting and social structure of the empire. The longest chapter of the book is “Barbarians and Bandits”, a generous discussion, with much added literary and archaeological material, of the “barbarians” most fully treated by Ammianus: the Alemanni and Goths, Huns and Alans, Saracens, Isaurians and Moors. In the last two chapters Matthews turns to an analysis of what Ammianus’ text reveals about his own viewpoint on religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and on historiography, on the other, and argues that despite the choice of language of composition of his history and his likely choice to have set its beginning where Tacitus left off, Ammianus placed himself primarily in the tradition of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius and Cassio Dio rather than in the Roman tradition, for multiple reasons including the “need to place a narrative in nothing less than its entire geographical and cultural context.”

(*) These can be read here:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

(**) That, in any case, is the most wide-spread view; G.W. Bowersock has mounted a cogent argument for Alexandria as Ammianus’ birthplace.

(***) As I don’t read Latin; the Loeb library translation is clumsy and, according to experts, unreliable; the Penguin Classics translation is an abridgement; and the Landmark edition has been progressing at a snail’s pace for at least the last six years, I read a complete and reliable translation in German.