Among the delights of Ammianus’ Res Gestae are his Roman digressions (14.6 and 28.4), in which he offers a harsh but hilarious picture of urban life at the end of the fourth century. Senators parade their wealth in outrageous ways. They wear several layers of intricately decorated clothes made from expensive materials, and constantly stretch and pose to ensure that every detail is made visible (14.6.9; 28.4.19). Their extravagant and exclusive dinner parties are populated by charioteers and gamblers, but closed to men of true learning (14.6.12-15, 21-22; 28.4.11-14). They are vain and inconstant, boasting of their possessions and exaggerating their accomplishments, while hypochondria and astrological obsessions keep them timid and inert (28.4.18, 4.23; 14.6.23-24; 28.4.24). The effeminacy of the aristocrats has allowed sex roles to become deranged, with aging courtesans being supplicated like queens, and women who, sniffs Ammianus, ‘‘ought to have had three children by now’’ are visible everywhere, dancing and flaunting their curly locks (14.6.19-20; 28.4.9, 4.26). But Ammianus’ attacks on the decadent rich should not lead one to expect sympathy for the common man. The urban poor gape, transfixed by horse racing and theater, and repel passersby with their cooking and chewing in public (14.6.25-26; 28.4.28-34).
Scholars have often mined these passages for insight into Ammianus’ experiences and personality, and to aid in the interpretation of the work as a whole. I will first explore Ammianus’ sophistication and playfulness in constructing these highly artificial digressions. Then I will show how Ammianus’ manipulation of traditional themes may be better appreciated when considered from the point of view of the imperial functionaries who were the intended audience of the Res Gestae.
The Roman digressions are unprecedented in classical historiography. While Ammianus espouses traditionalism in politics and religion, his historiographical method is often novel. In particular, he incorporates elements of scientific treatise, biography, oratory, satire, and even the novel into his work, breaking down generic boundaries in a way which Fontaine (1976, 1992) has argued is typical of late antiquity. Ammianus’ Roman digressions provide a further example of the intrusion of material typically foreign to historiography into his history. They evoke multiple genres without being fully attributable to any particular one.
The digressions have clear affinities with satire, and the later fourth century witnessed a great revival in satire and satirical writing coincident with the rediscovery of Juvenal. Ammianus himself mentions Juvenal in the course of the second Roman digression (28.4.14): ‘‘Some of them hate learning as they do poison, and read with attentive care only Juvenal and Marius Maximus, in their boundless idleness handling no other books than these, for what reason it is not for my humble mind to judge.’’ Juvenal is paired with Marius Maximus, the scurrilous biographer of the third century who followed in the tradition of Suetonius. Ammianus’ attitude toward Juvenal has been often misunderstood as criticism. In fact, the Romans are criticized for reading literature for the sole purpose of enjoying the scenes of degradation and scandal which the authors provide. They are unable to recognize that Juvenal and Maximus describe this behavior for criticism, not celebration or titillation.
By cataloguing the parallels between Juvenal’s Satires and Ammianus’ digressions, Rees (1999) has shown that Ammianus’ use of Juvenal’s specific words and phrases is very rare. Instead, Ammianus manages to treat many of Juvenal’s subjects, to attack many of Juvenal’s villains, and to use many of Juvenal’s techniques, while carefully avoiding direct imitation. Both decry the failure of patronage, the corruption and degeneracy associated with wealth detached from responsibility, the confusion of sex roles, and the chaos of urban life; both employ exaggeration, paint vivid and outrageous scenes, and contrast an idealized past with a degraded present.
On the other hand, it has been repeatedly noted that one of Juvenal’s principal themes, his dislike of Greeks and other foreigners, could hardly have been congenial to Ammianus (Thompson 1947: 15; Smith 1994; Rees 1999). Indeed, Ammianus celebrates immigration to Rome and deplores the xenophobia of the Romans (14.6.21-22). While Juvenal had taken on the role of the last virtuous Roman, confronted by hordes of opportunistic and treacherous easteners, Ammianus portrays himself as an educated outsider shunned by the ignorant and provincial locals. A satirist criticizes his own society for failure to live up to a moral standard shared by satirist and audience, but Ammianus is a critic of Roman society from outside as well as inside. When Ammianus is recast as an outsider, his survey of Roman mores may be reinterpreted as a commonplace of classical historiography, the ethnographic digression. Satire and ethnography share a moralizing purpose and consider similar topics, such as food, clothing, personal appearance, and customs of sex and marriage. The incongruity of the application of the ethnographic method to the civilized Romans produces an ironic humor. Rome itself has become the foreign nation.
Ammianus’ digression on the Huns neatly parallels his Roman digressions. The first Roman digression begins with a brief history of the city, and similarly the Hunnic digression begins with the history and origins of the tribe (14.6.3-6; 31.2.1). The bestial nature of the Huns is revealed in their consumption of raw and wild food, including meat which is warmed not over a fire but under the saddle during a day of riding (31.2.3). The repulsive Roman commoners have equally primitive eating habits, while the aristocratic Romans offer the opposite vice of luxury (28.4.34, 4.13). While the Romans dress in excessively elaborate clothing, the Huns wear primitive clothing produced by sewing the skins of many field mice together (14.6.9; 31.2.5). The Romans’ absurd boasting about even their shortest journeys from home can be contrasted with the Huns’ lack of any permanent home whatsoever (28.4.18; 31.2.10). And the excessive and embarrassing superstition of the Romans differentiates them from the godless Huns, who are bound by no religion at all (28.4.24; 31.2.11).
In addition to satire and ethnography, the digressions also draw upon comedy. The army of masters and attendants speeding through the city suggests a similar scene in Terence’s Eunuch, as Ammianus’ quotation makes clear (14.6.16 with Ter. Eun. 780). The mock names of the Roman plebeians which are derived from words for food and other vulgarities represent a crude and comic form of humor (Bartalucci 1960). The Romans who prefer mime and comedy to serious literature (14.6.18-19) assume comic roles, such as the parasite (28.4.12) or the lover of the courtesan (28.4.9). The Romans who call for the scales at a banquet, in order to boast of the size of the delicacies served, and the Romans who are absurdly inconsistent in their treatment of slaves, are reminiscent of the comic blowhard Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyrica (28.4.13, 4.16).
Finally, Pack (1953: 184) argues that ‘‘certain affinities with the epideictic literature of the Greeks’’ undergird the digressions. He sees Ammianus’ portrayal of the Romans as a kind of reverse encomium, an invective which has structural similarities to the city panegyrics like Aelius Aristides’ To Rome or Libanius’ Antiochicus. Ammia-nus’ methodical cataloguing of the flaws of Rome may be understood as a parody of the panegyrics delivered to people and places which constituted a central part of late antique court culture.
The Roman digressions belong, then, to no particular genre. Instead, Ammianus’ use of the themes and forms of different genres provides several shifting generic ‘‘lenses’’ through which his audience could potentially see and interpret the digressions. The novelty of the digressions demanded from Ammianus’ readers a willingness to test a variety of possible frameworks for interpretation, and suggests that his audience was more impressed by the virtuosity of the display than troubled by the innovation. Let us turn now to a more careful consideration of the nature of this audience.
Historians of ancient Rome have long been unable to resist the temptation to quote Ammianus’ Roman digressions as the perfect example of the sad decline and fall of the Roman aristocracy from their previous state of liberty and vigor. Of course, almost every Roman historian, even those writing five centuries earlier during the republic, had bemoaned the corruption of the contemporary elite; one of the most pessimistic, Sallust, was particularly influential in shaping Ammianus’ language, style, and outlook. In addition, the fourth century was not an era of decline for the empire, nor was it perceived as such by contemporaries. And Ammianus himself, despite frequent dourness, is openly optimistic about the future of the empire in the last sentence of the narrative (31.16.8) and in the very introduction to the first Roman digression, where he celebrates the fact that ‘‘the tranquillity of Numa’s time has returned,’’ and that the name of the Roman people is everywhere ‘‘respected and honored’’ (14.6.6). Thus, despite the seductiveness of the idea, it is clearly incorrect to represent Ammianus’ digressions as expressions of despair at the imminent collapse of the West.
An equally tempting, and more defensible, approach to the digressions has been to mine them for autobiographical detail. Ammianus uses the familiar second person to describe the tribulations of ‘‘you,’’ ‘‘an honorable stranger,’’ who frequents the houses of the great and, after a warm initial welcome, is snubbed and ignored on future visits (14.6.13). ‘‘Erudite and serious’’ men (like Ammianus) are ignored in favor of gamblers or gossips (14.6.15). In fact, as Ammianus recalls with indignation, a scarcity of food recently led to the expulsion of intellectuals from the city, but space was made not only for actresses but also for their servants (14.6.19). This is often interpreted as a reference to events of 383, when Ammianus may have been resident in the city and perhaps even among those expelled. More extravagant extrapolations from these comments have led some to portray the whole of Ammianus’ Roman digressions as the outgrowth of a fit of pique over his mistreatment. The highly contrived nature of the digressions and of the history as a whole make such psychological interpretations unsatisfying, however, when a literary explanation is readily available. Ammianus has adopted the satirical pose of the cranky outsider, familiar from the work of Juvenal, who is typically portrayed as somewhat foolish, and as somewhat uneasily enmeshed in the corruption he describes (cf. Braund 1996).
The audience which could appreciate this sort of play would have to be sophisticated in its knowledge of literary forms and conventions. The senatorial aristocracy at Rome has seemed to some to be the obvious choice (Thompson 1947: 15-16; Seyfarth 1969; Sabbah 1978: 507-539), but the vitriol of the Roman digressions against the aristocracy would then need to be explained away. Cameron (1964) argued forcefully against an aristocratic Roman audience, and Matthews (1989: 8-9) took the next step by rejecting a Roman audience of any class. The Greek orator Libanius, writing from Antioch in 392, had received reports of recitations of Ammianus’ history. Libanius’ sources were perhaps imperial courtiers who had been present in Rome when the emperor Theodosius visited in 389. Matthews suggested that Ammianus’ history was first read before an audience of imperial functionaries and bureaucrats who would have appreciated an outsiders’ view of the city from a resident alien. Frakes (2000) expanded upon Matthews’ suggestion with a prosopographical study which demonstrated Ammianus’ special focus upon bureaucrats and administrators in his history. He showed that 34 percent of those mentioned by name in the Res Gestae are civil administrators, and 30 percent members of the military (Frakes 2000). The Roman digressions may be better appreciated with this audience in mind.
The digressions emphasize the insularity and inexperience of the senatorial elite, which is naturally opposed to the cosmopolitan and sophisticated class of imperial functionaries. The aristocrat who has achieved some minor rank, for example, struts through the city as if he were the general Marcellus returning from the capture of
Syracuse (28.4.23). A military audience would know that a skilled general arranges his forces carefully, placing a brave mass of soldiers in the middle and following them with light-armed troops, javelin throwers, and reserve forces. The Romans perform a grotesque parody of this operation, arranging their households in the streets ‘‘as if the signal had been given in the camp,’’ with the weavers and the blackened kitchen staff in the front and the slaves, the idle plebeians of the neighborhood, and the eunuchs bringing up the rear (14.6.17). A similar contrast may be seen in the criticism of those Romans who take a somewhat long journey to their estates, and then believe that they have equaled the conquests of Alexander, and those who take a pleasant sail in the lake, especially when the weather is hot, and believe that they are rivaling Duilius, the first Roman to win a naval triumph (28.4.18). And perhaps we can see Ammianus or members of his audience in the role of the veteran, retired from imperial service, who enjoys an enormous crowd of admirers and who is treated with the respect due to a paterfamilias, but whose entertaining stories are actually tall tales invented to demonstrate the audience’s gullibility (28.4.20).
Ammianus’ use of the traditional satirical theme of clothing may also be seen through a bureaucratic lens. Members of the bureaucratic militia, military or civilian, wore elaborate clothing with the practical purpose of demonstrating rank; the Romans’ extravagant and frivolous attachment to fancy dress reveals them as poseurs (14.6.9; MacMullen 1964).
The emphasis on learning and education that is apparent throughout the Res Gestae underscores another traditional theme which would resonate particularly with administrators. In modern Rome, he complains, the singer has replaced the philosopher, the stage director has replaced the orator, and huge musical instruments have taken the place of libraries (14.6.18). The Romans read with care only a few frivolous works rather than the many varied works which the true Roman heritage offers; Ammianus’ learned audience is by implication the true heir to that patrimony (28.4.15). Ammianus’ constant asides on figures from the classical past criticize in two ways. The Roman aristocrats fail to live up to the moral examples of the ancients, and they also fail in their insufficient familiarity with classical literature. Ammianus assures his educated audience that their superior learning is equivalent to superior morality.
Momigliano famously called Ammianus ‘‘the lonely historian,’’ but Ammianus, a member of the military and bureaucratic elite which ran the late empire, would not have perceived himself as such (on the rise of this elite during Ammianus’ lifetime, see Banaji 2001: esp. 115-127). Like many rising meritocratic elites, members of the late Roman bureaucracy championed education over bloodline, were eager to portray themselves as the true inheritors of the classical past, and were willing to overlook religious and regional differences to further their class interests. Among well-read bureaucrats, the fundamental differences between late antique and republican Rome encouraged an acontextual approach to classical literature and an appreciation for the witty manipulation of classical forms. The collapse of the west Roman state and the rise of polities rooted in religion and ethnicity meant that the late Roman bureaucracy was a ‘‘dead end in history’’ (Morony 1989: 24), but Ammianus’ Res Gestae remains as a monument to this class at its confident apogee.
FURTHER READING
Ammianus’ Roman digressions are discussed from a variety of perspectives in Cameron 1964; Demandt 1965: 14-21; Kohns 1975; Salemme 1987; Blockley 1999; Rees 1999; Cracco-Ruggini 2003. On Ammianus’ audience, see Seeck 1893; Cameron 1964; Seyfarth 1969; Sabbah 1978: 507-539; Rosen 1982: 35-41; Matthews 1989: 8-9; Frances 2000.
World History
