Aurelius Victor was the most famous historian of the second half of the fourth century: admired by Ammianus Marcellinus, read by St Jerome, and honoured by the Emperors Julian and Theodosius. Born no later than the 320s in North Africa, to a father whom he described as a poor country bumpkin, Victor obtained an excellent education, perhaps at Carthage, perhaps at Rome, perhaps in both. He seems to have entered imperial service as a bureaucrat and was certainly working in Illyricum for the Praetorian Prefect Anatolius in the 350s. In 360 (or perhaps early 361), he completed his Historia. This was the first serious work of secular history in Latin since the era of Tacitus and Suetonius. It swiftly won him the favour of the Emperor Julian, who met Victor twice in the course of his advance into the Balkans in 361. At the second of these encounters, the Emperor honoured Victor with a bronze statue - a striking compliment to a man of letters - and made him governor (consularis) of the province of Pannonia Secunda. Victor is not known to have held any office in the next quarter century, but in 389 he was made Prefect of the City of Rome by Theodosius, to whom he erected a statue with a dedicatory inscription (CIL 6.1186). The date of Victor’s death is unknown, but his work continued to find readers and admirers in the following centuries, down to Paul the Deacon in the eighth century.
Victor’s contemporary reputation is hard to square with the two short surviving works attributed to him in the manuscripts. The first of these is the Historia Abbreviata Aurelii Victoris (HAb), commonly but erroneously known as the De Caesaribus. This is in fact the final part of an ancient compilation known as the Corpus Tripertitum, which offers a history of Rome from the very beginning to 360. The second is the Libellus breviatus … ex libris Sexti Aurelii Victoris (LB), commonly but erroneously known as the Epitome de Caesaribus. This is a summary of Roman imperial history from Augustus to Theodosius. Conventionally, the HAb was understood to be the totality of Victor’s work, while the LB was thought to have little to do with him - its anonymous author was assumed to have used his work as one amongst many sources. From the works in their extant state it is difficult to understand why late antique readers thought so highly of Victor.
In fact, however, both HAb and LB are epitomes, or summaries, of Victor’s original Historia. This is precisely what their titles in the manuscripts mean and it is (in many ways) a quirk of intellectual history that those were simply ignored by centuries of scholarship. As epitomes, however, they differ in their method of compilation. The HAb is often incoherent and hard to follow - this is because it was assembled by stringing together verbatim extracts of Victor’s work, with little regard for syntax or logic. The LB was compiled with greater care, much more effort having been put into making the text flow coherently. The origins of the HAb are murky, but it seems certain that it was a product of late antiquity, assembled before the end of the sixth century at the latest and possibly much closer to Victor’s own day. The LB, in contrast, was compiled by Paul the Deacon in the eighth century. Some notes made by Paul to Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies also preserve some further extracts from Victor.
Although it is obviously disappointing that Victor’s History did not survive intact, the two epitomes and Paul’s notes allow us to reconstruct the broad outlines of the work and see its very considerable learning and sophistication. The History circulated in at least two versions, or editions. One of these terminated in 360, and formed the basis of the HAb. The other continued the historical narrative to the 380s and was evidently the text that Paul had available. The history was in multiple books, probably five in the first edition, modelled on the Histories of Sallust, with a sixth added for the second. Sallust was the most significant influence on Victor’s language, style, and conception of history, but he had read very widely indeed in both Latin and Greek - from Cicero to Lactantius and Herodotus to Herodian. Victor’s understanding of the Roman past was unsparing and often cynical, but by no means totally pessimistic. History moved in cycles of decline and renewal, the Romans reenacting episodes from their past, especially their founding and the reigns of the seven kings. Rome’s strength had been renewed by the infusion of new peoples into the Roman order and at the same time it was constantly threatened by their lack of Latin culture. Victor was particularly interested in the way that the Roman constitution had changed under the emperors. Victor was not a Christian - and there was sharp criticism of Constantine and Theodosius in his pages - but his references to pagan religion are strikingly distant. Irony, often signalled by allusion to earlier authors, was a key device Victor used to express his views of historical figures and events.
There are no satisfactory editions of any of the witnesses to Victor’s History. The standard for both HAb and LB is Pichlmayr’s 1911 Teubner, marred by a conservatism that in particular makes the HAb unreadable. The Budé editions of the two texts - Dufraigne’s 1975 HAb and Festy’s 1999 LB - contain useful notes and French translations, but present texts that are frequently wrong, though often thought-provoking. There are also texts with German translations and notes produced by the Kleine und fragmentarische Historiker der Spätantike (KFHist) project at Dusseldorf. The only published English version of the LB is the 1654 rendering appended to Robert Codrington’s translation of Justin (dedicated to Oliver Cromwell). Though obviously somewhat dated, Codrington had read the text very carefully and is usually at least close to its meaning. For the HAb, there is H.W. Bird’s volume in the Translated Texts for Historians series. Though anyone who has battled with the HAb deserves some credit, Bird’s translation is unfortunately unreliable and must be used with caution.
The Last Historians of Rome project (September 2024-August 2029) is
funded by a Standard Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC), and is led by scholars at the Universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham.
