This chapter begins by considering the pattern of archaeology in Greece form the past 100 years that has generated huge datasets – and that these datasets have been largely under deployed in making historical conclusions about Greece of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. After reviewing the history of scholarship on ‘Archaic Greece’ (and the relative quietness of scholarship on this topic in the most recent decades) this chapter considers ways in which the huge amount of data from Archaic Greece could be organised and analysed. Various methods from the Digital Humanities are considered, with discussion focusing also on data cleaning and organisation, before proposing that network analysis will be a useful framework for this study in making clear the ways in which the first communities of Archaic Greece formed economic and political alliances – and rivalries – with one another.

‘A large book on a poet little read even in universities might seem to require justification, if not apology. I offer neither’ was Alan Cameron’s defiant introduction to his 500–page study of the poet Claudian. This book is even longer and its subject is even less read than Claudian was in 1970 – the court poet of Honorius might be evaded by undergraduates, but Victor is avoided even by scholars. Still, we offer no apology. As justification for this study of the best attested but least understood of the historians of the later Roman Empire we might invoke the radical nature of its conclusions and their far-reaching consequences. We have shown that Victor wrote not the shabby epitome that is generally identified as his work today, but rather a monumental Historia. The first effort to write Roman imperial history in Latin since the days of Tacitus and Suetonius, Victor’s work was the wellspring of a revival in the study of Rome’s past that would stretch into the fifth century and beyond – that entire tradition was in his debt. He provided both the fundamental narrative and a way of thinking about it that was profoundly influential, so much so that what often seems at first sight to be merely the basic scaffolding of Roman history turns out on closer inspection to be Victor’s own construction. When his Historia assumes its proper place in the study of late-antique historiography, it both answers some very old questions and asks some new and disconcerting ones.

Ammianus Marcellinus had a harsh and unforgiving opinion of the condition into which the art of writing history had fallen in his own day. Few of his contemporaries had turned their hands to that noble but demanding endeavour and of their efforts the less said, the better. More than grumbling generalities, his Res gestae offers specific (though implicit) criticisms of the brief epitomes that passed for history at the time. Ammianus knew and alluded to two recent summaries of Roman history, the breviarium of Eutropius and the still shorter work of Festus, the allusions designed to subtly insinuate how different his own work was from their meagre epitomes. Both of the breviarists had pursued a career in government and risen to positions of rank and power: Ammianus had occasion to mention them in narrating events of the 370s. Yet in spite of their fleeting appearance in his pages, in spite of the rather deeper impress left by their works on his own, Ammianus veiled their writings in a decent obscurity, making no explicit mention of the literary efforts of either Eutropius or Festus. ‘Brevity ought only to be praised when it takes away nothing from our understanding of events’, he declared elsewhere, and left his readers to draw their own conclusions. Nor was the dire state of history-writing likely to improve. The close of the Res gestae, with its defiant declaration that those who would write about the reliqua must ‘forge their tongues to grander styles’, is less a conclusion than a gauntlet, hurled with some force and more feeling. It dares aspirant historians to write of recent events without the crutches of silence or mendacity, confident that, caught between the demands of history and the requirements of politics, they will fall short.6 His own achievement, Ammianus implies, is unrepeatable, or at least unlikely to be repeated. In that sense, at least, he appears to have been a truly lonely historian.

Epitomes, understood broadly, were everywhere in antiquity. Literary, historical, philosophical, geographical, technical, medical, and theological works were all epitomised. The whole system of later- Roman legal writing and scholarship revolved around the making and use of epitomes. Texts and their epitomes circulated side by side; in fact, sometimes they even shared an author. We might be tempted to think that such works were second rate – of interest only to students and tiros – yet serious scholars and litterateurs had no problem with using and even creating epitomes. Cicero had to hand two epitomes, made by Brutus, of the historians Fannius and Coelius Antipater. If we are to believe Plutarch, Brutus in fact occupied himself before the battle of Pharsalus by making an epitome of Polybius. Sallust apparently requested that his teacher Ateius the Philologist make an epitome of Roman history. The omnivorous antiquarian Varro made an epitome of his own work, De lingua latina. Apuleius was also the author of a now-lost epitome, the nature of which is not clear from the two surviving testimonia. The Christian Bible itself contains an epitome: 2 Maccabees. Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, like Varro made an epitome of one of his own works, the Divinae Institutiones. The great Vergilian scholar Servius made an epitome of Donatus for his friend Aquila, the De finalibus. The making of epitomes ought to be understood as a central feature of the intellectual life of the ancients, even if they are reduced to mere footnotes in our histories of their literature. For that reason alone, exploring how they were made and what they were made for is a worthwhile endeavour. More to the point, however, our manuscripts of the two Victorine works both purport to be epitomes, or ‘condensed texts’. To understand what that means, it is worth devoting some time and space to bringing out the key features of the Latin epitome.

Two works of Roman history survive today with the name of Aurelius Victor attached to them in the manuscripts, the texts commonly (but, as we shall see, inaccurately) referred to as the Liber de Caesaribus and the Epitome de Caesaribus, or Caesares and Epitome for short. The Caesares is a short (ca. 11,000 words), intermittently scrappy, and often perplexing history of the Roman Empire from Augustus down to ad 360. In the manuscripts, it is merely the imperial part of a longer but rather superficial compendium, which aimed to sweep the reader from Saturn and Janus to Constantius and Julian in some 25,000 words – the so-called Corpus tripertitum (another inaccurate title). The Caesares is certainly derived from a fourth-century text and the Corpus of which it forms a part may be roughly contemporary. The Epitome, in contrast, is a coherent, readable, and very concise (ca. 9,500 words) account of the emperors from Augustus to the death of Theodosius I (395). It circulated in manuscripts as a free-standing text. It is generally, though wrongly, supposed to have been written at the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century.

Victor played an enormously important role in both the imagination of the Historia Augusta’s author and in his work: the collection is a sort of twisted hommage tohis influence, right down to its core conceit of six authors writing under Diocletian and Constantine. That ought to encourage us to think carefully about two other works that have often been seen as central to the HA’s project: the Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Annales of Nicomachus Flavianus.The authors of thesetwo Roman histories,both writtenin Latin at the end of the fourth century, could scarcely be more different. Ammianus is the historian of the later Roman Empire, the man whose writings structure so muchof what we think about the period and the way that we think it. Nicomachus Flavianus is a much more ghostly figure, but (perhaps in part because of that) the tendrils of his influence have been detected everywhere in the historiography of late antiquity. The current consensus holds that Victor has little to do with either of them and little to tell us about their projects. This chapter tests that standard view, by analysing what influence his Historia might have had on them, but also by examining Ammianus and Flavianus in the light of a proper understandingof what Victor had achieved.

Famously, Arnaldo Momigliano’s Ammianus is a lonely individual.And no wonder: pre-eminent by qualityand quantity among the extant historians of late antiquity, Ammianus has long been treated by scholars in splendid isolation, as a historian without contemporary rivals or comrades – an impression that, as we have seen, he did little to discourage.

Nicomachus Flavianus is the last of a series of phantoms that Part 2 this book has sought to dispel. As with the elimination of the Kaisergeschichte and Marius Maximus, removing the haze that he has cast over the study of late antique history-writing allows us to see things more clearly, but it also raises some acute questions. Of these, the deepest and most important is whether the Historia of Victor influenced Greek historiography in late antiquity and thereafter. It is obvious that the material in the Libellus breviatus that we have already discussed points in this direction, but to confirm that historians from Zosimus to Zonaras were indebted (directly or otherwise) to Victor we ought also to find connections between their works and the Historia abbreviata. For whatever reason, little work has been done (outside the context of Flavianus)on connections between the HAb and the Greek tradition and almost nothing on the possibility of the former influencing the latter. The HAb’s moralising and sententious character has perhaps discouraged effort, where the plainer andmore factual nature of the LB has made it easier to spot points of contact.

This chapter therefore starts by examining the relationship between the HAb and the Greek tradition. The logical hunting ground for anylinks between them is the period from the middle of the third century onwards.Down to that time, the narratives of Dio, Herodian,and (possibly) Asinius Quadratus present a powerful confounding factor, since they were used by Victor, but were also available to later Greekhistorians. When they giveout, the problem can suddenly come into sharper focus. We show that there are sustained commonalities of facts, language, and ideas between the HAb and a revolving cast of Greek historians, most prominently Zosimus and Zonaras, though Peter the Patrician and John of Antioch also have a role to play.

Manuscripts, literary context, and the texts of the HAb and LB themselves all point towards the same conclusion: Aurelius Vi tor wrote a long, discursive work of history, of which we today have only a remnant.This is a radical idea in the context of current academic opinion, but it is entirely logical in the light of the evidence, indeed demanded by it. Crucially, moreover, it is only on the assumption that Victor wrote a major work of history that what was said about him in late antiquity makes any sense at all. Victor has much the most extensive Nachleben of any fourth-century historian writing in Latin.His later reputation is one impossible to square with the Historiae abbreviatae, but it makes plenty of sense if he was the author of a Historia of serious literary ambition and deep research. It is thus to the testimonia that we must turn next.They stretch from the middle of the fourth century down into the eighth and offer crucial new evidence,evidence that decisively confirms the thesis advancedin the previous chapters.

In what follows, we continue to assess Victor’s reputation in late antiquity primarily against the evidence of the Historiae abbreviatae, since all scholars acknowledge that that is his work and because, as we have seen,it preserves some portion of what he wrote in his own words. We also, however, examine the degree to which those who can be shown to have had some knowledge of Victor’s work, as the HAbpreserves it, share details, emphases, or wording with the Libellus breviatus.

We have argued so far that Victor wrote a long history, the first version of which was published in ca. 360 and which would become the foundational and most influential work of Roman historiography of thelater fourth century (and beyond). An excellent place to test this hypothesis is Ausonius’ Caesares, a summary treatment in verse of imperial history made by the leading Latin poet of the age. We showthat Victor was Ausonius’ main source for the emperors after Domitian. This modest conclusion has considerably weightier implications than might appear at first sight. Ausonius has often been thought to have used an earlier historical account of the emperors from Nerva to Elagabalus, the work of the so-called ‘consular biographer’ Marius Maximus.Marius Maximus is the keystone of most attempts to reconstruct the sources of the Historia Augusta In consequence of this, he plays a very important role in the study of ancient historiography more generally,one quite out of proportion to the slender evidence for his existence. After surveying the development of scholarship on the sources of the HA, with particular attention to the work of Sir Ronald Syme, we show that Maximus is largely a phantasm. Far from being an important source for imperial history of the second and early third century, he isno more than yet another ‘bogus author’ cooked up by the Historia Augusta. The removal of Marius Maximus from serious scholarly consideration opens up once again the question of the HA’s true sources, one that wepursue in greater detail in Chapter VIII.

‘The problem of the Historia Augusta’, Fergus Millar warned in 1964, ‘is one into which sane men refrain from entering’.Duly admonished, it seems wisest to approach one aspect of the text that is no longer controversial. Nearly all scholars agree that the author of the HA knew and used the work of Aurelius Victor: this was one of the factors that tipped Dessau off that the collection might not be what it claims.Nevertheless, the issue of the HA’s debt to Victor has generally been relegated to no more than a footnote in the voluminous literature of Quellenforschung – an example of the use of breviarists, Kaisergeschichte texts,and minor historians. Real attention has been focused elsewhere.As a result, even though many of the parallels we discuss below have already been marked and discussed in the scholarly literature, no one has ever assembled them before. The same might be said for Eutropius – while many scholars are willing to accept that the HA did indeed use the text of Eutropius, most of the actual evidence for this has been relegated to discussions of the KG.

What follows is a new analysis of the HA’s sources, one freed at last from the illusions of the KG, Marius Maximus, and Ignotus. Instead, we focus on authors whose works survive (at least in part) and who were certainly familiar to and usedby the mischievous scriptor of the HA: Victor and Eutropius.For reasons that will become obvious, it is Victor who here commands the lion’s share of attention. In fact,this chapter can be thought of as a continuous exposition of the HA read against Victor’s work – an exposition that is necessarily selective, because the wealth of material is so great. Our emphasis throughout is on verbal overlaps, asthe surestguarantee of influence, rather than on vaguer (though often stillrevealing) similarities of ideas and fact.