The authorship of the Historia Augusta: Two new computer studies

Journal article

The Historia Augusta is a collection of biographies of Roman emperors stretching from Hadrian(117-138) to Carus (282-83) and his son Carinus (283-285). The lives purport to be written by six different authors, Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio, and Flavius Vopiscus, working under the Emperors Diocletian (284-305) and Constantine (306-337). For much of the period it covers, the HA represents the only extended narrative source, and the testimony it offers is invaluable. Unfortunately, the HA is also famous for its bizarre details and puzzling omissions, its lurid focus on emperors’ peccadilloes and personal habits to the detriment of their political accomplishments. It also notoriously includes documents – speeches, letters, laws– which are almost certainly fabricated, and cites a whole host of authors nowhere else attested and which are probably invented. But the problem of the HA is not only its unreliability as an historical text: it also includes throughout troubling anachronisms, mentions of office and titles that only came into being in the middle of the fourth century, decades after the supposed date of its composition. In 1889, Hermann Dessau put forth the provocative thesis that the HA was in fact the work of a single author working under the reign of Theodosius (379-395), and that division of the lives between six authors and their dedications to Diocletian and Constantine were merely a literary ploy. Ronald Syme – the most influential exponent of the Dessau thesis – would famously term the author ‘a rogue grammaticus.’

Authors: Stover, J; Kestemont, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
• Volume: 59
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 140–157
• Publication date: 2016-12-27
• Acceptance date: 2016-04-27
• DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12043.x
• ISSN: 2041-5370