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AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS 15.5.22 AND EUTROPIUS 10.16.1: AN ALLUSION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Alan J. Ross
Alan J. Ross*
Affiliation:
Howard College, University of KwaZulu-Natal
*
alan.ross@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
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Extract

In Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography, John Marincola downplays the importance of an historian's choice to use first-, rather than third-, person verbs to represent his actions as an historical protagonist within his narrative. Marincola's justification for this rests on the incongruous groupings that arise if one divides first-person narrators from third: among the former we find Velleius, Eutropius and Ammianus representing Latin historians of the Empire. However, as part of a wider study which examines Ammianus' nuanced use of allusion to earlier Latin authors, Gavin Kelly has recently argued for a series of close intertextual relationships between Eutropius and Ammianus. I argue here that Ammianus' relationship with Eutropius also extends to their personal roles within their narratives, and that Ammianus' use of the first person singular makes a bold statement about his historiographical programme.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 424 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

In Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography, John Marincola downplays the importance of an historian's choice to use first-, rather than third-, person verbs to represent his actions as an historical protagonist within his narrative.Footnote 1 Marincola's justification for this rests on the incongruous groupings that arise if one divides first-person narrators from third: among the former we find Velleius, Eutropius and Ammianus representing Latin historians of the Empire.Footnote 2 However, as part of a wider study which examines Ammianus' nuanced use of allusion to earlier Latin authors, Gavin Kelly has recently argued for a series of close intertextual relationships between Eutropius and Ammianus.Footnote 3 I argue here that Ammianus' relationship with Eutropius also extends to their personal roles within their narratives, and that Ammianus' use of the first person singular makes a bold statement about his historiographical programme.

In an allusion which has not previously been noted (by Kelly or any other scholar), Ammianus' initial use of the first person singular to refer to himself as an historical actor in the extant portion of his Res Gestae alludes to the same practice in Eutropius. In a.d. 355 Ammianus (who held the rank of protector domesticus) accompanied his commander, the magister militum Ursicinus, to Cologne on the orders of the emperor Constantius II to suppress the rebellion of the Frankish magister peditum Silvanus.Footnote 4 Ammianus notes his presence among Ursicinus' retinue:

inter quos ego quoque eram (15.5.22).

In similar language, Eutropius records his presence on the emperor Julian's Persian expedition in a.d. 363:

cui expeditioni ego quoque interfui (10.16.1).

Both authors set the indication of their presence on their respective expeditions within relative clauses; both combine the emphatic ego with quoque; although Ammianus uses the first singular imperfect of esse uncompounded with inter, he uses inter as a preposition to the relative.Footnote 5 In Eutropius this is the only use of the first person by the narrator, in Ammianus it is the first use in the extant portion of his work.Footnote 6

In a phrase which has the outward aim of establishing the historian's authority based upon his eyewitness credentials, Ammianus also alludes to the same practice in his recent predecessor Eutropius.Footnote 7 Does the allusion to Eutropius aid or compromise Ammianus' authority, especially since, together with Velleius, Ammianus and Eutropius are so unusual in being first-person participant narrators within the genre of Latin historiography?Footnote 8

Ammianus was certainly aware of Eutropius' career and work. He refers to Eutropius by name, though in the latter's role as proconsular governor of Asia rather than as an historian (29.1.36). Additionally, Kelly has recently demonstrated that by deploying close lexical allusions to Eutropius in, for example, his narration of the final days of Jovian's short reign, Ammianus strives ‘to use the language of breviary to make Jovian's death seem a triviality’.Footnote 9 Alluding to Eutropius thus also brings to mind the genre of breviary history: Eutropius provides not just a source of information for Ammianus, but a genre and historiographical practice with which to engage.Footnote 10

Something similar, I argue, occurs at 15.5.22. Book 15 begins with a preface in which Ammianus outlines his programme: tunc enim laudanda est breuitas, cum moras rumpens intempestiuas nihil subtrahit cognitioni gestorum ‘for brevity is only then to be praised, when breaking untimely delays, it subtracts nothing from the understanding of events’. Scholars have argued that Ammianus here disparages the current trend of breviary history proffered by Eutropius, Aurelius Victor and Festus in the 360s.Footnote 11 Why does Ammianus allude to Eutropius so soon after condemning the latter's chosen genre?

One possible answer may lie in the only substantial alteration that Ammianus has made to Eutropius' text, from the perfect interfui to the imperfect eram. In historical narrative, verbs in the imperfect tense establish a background of events upon which verbs in the perfect tense carry the narration forward in the foreground.Footnote 12 These roles are determined, however, not so much by tense, but by aspect. The perfect is a past perfective, representing complete, bounded action in the past, and the imperfect a past imperfective representing on-going, unbounded action also in the past.Footnote 13 Eutropius mentions his presence in Persia just once and as a single, complete event, whereas Ammianus goes on to include himself in the actions of Ursicinus' mission to depose Silvanus by the use of a further four first-person plural verbs (mirabamur, festinamus, inuenimus, scrutabamus).Footnote 14 Ammianus seems to establish his presence, as well as his procedure for recording it using the first person, as a far more pervasive feature of his narrative than Eutropius does. Ammianus' autoptic presence will recur in two further extensive sections of narrative: the fall of Amida in Books 18 and 19, and, as in Eutropius, Julian's Persian expedition in Books 23–5.

Following Ammianus' wider intertextual engagement with Eutropius (in which he employs close but subtly varied lexical allusion, drawn from the final chapters of Book 10 of the Breviarium and which comments on Eutropius' historiographical practice), this allusion may thus further exemplify Ammianus' objections to breviary history. Ammianus will not refer to his presence in a breviary fashion as a single event, but as an on-going feature of his narrative. The allusion strengthens his opposition to Eutropius' genre and sets out his programme for self-presentation. First-person narration in Ammianus can be seen as a response to contemporary historiographical practices.Footnote 15 It is neither incidental nor merely a straightforward statement of eyewitness authority.Footnote 16

References

1 Marincola, J., Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 179.

2 Marincola (n. 1), 79 and 179. Such over-simple categorization can be problematic: Chris Pelling's recent analysis of Caesar's narrative demonstrates that, in texts where the author appears as a character, the use of the third person does not exclude some of the aspects, particularly focalization, more commonly associated with first-person narration. Pelling, C.B.R., ‘Xenophon's and Caesar's third-person narratives – or are they?’, in Marmodoro, A. and Hill, J. (edd.), The Author's Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2013), 39–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Kelly, G., Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian (Cambridge, 2008), 240–53.Google Scholar

4 For the episode see Drinkwater, J.F., ‘Silvanus, Ursicinus and Ammianus Marcellinus: fact or fiction?’, in Deroux, C. (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History VII (Brussels, 1994), 568–76Google Scholar and Hunt, D., ‘The outsider inside: Ammianus on the rebellion of Silvanus’, in Hunt, D. and Drijvers, J.W. (edd.), The Late Roman World and its Historian (London, 1999), 51–63Google Scholar. For Ammianus' first-person narrative here and elsewhere, see Kelly (n. 3), 38–41.

5 It seems to be a feature of Ammianus' style to split inter from esse, especially in relative clauses, e.g. 14.11.2, 14.11.14, 15.5.4, 16.12.7, 21.14.4, 23.6.69, 25.4.20, 30.1.2. He only once uses interesse in the sense of ‘to be among’, and this does not occur in a relative clause: ne feruentibus proeliis interesset (31.7.5). It may be the case that *intereram was not an available option on stylistic grounds, even though it would have further aided the identification of the allusion.

6 Ammianus has used the first person to refer to his presence with Ursicinus in Antioch in Book 14. However, there he only uses the first person plural (14.11.5). Ammianus was a junior protector domesticus (a mid-ranking staff officer) in 357 (16.10.21). It seems unlikely that he played a major part in any event in the lattermost of the lost books, which narrated the years leading up to 353. Ammianus had already avoided the first person singular in Book 14, and so it seems likely that 15.5.22 is the first use of the first person singular in the whole work.

7 For autopsy as a means of constructing authority, see Woodman, A.J. and Martin, R.H., The Annals of Tacitus, Book 3 (Cambridge, 1996), 168–70Google Scholar and Marincola (n. 1), 79.

8 Velleius' presence in his narrative has prompted criticism of his lack of objectivity as an historian: see Woodman, A.J., Velleius Paterculus: The Tiberian Narrative (Cambridge, 1977), 43–5Google Scholar and Marincola (n. 1), 198.

9 Kelly (n. 3), 252.

10 All the passages of Eutropius that Kelly identifies as sources for allusion in Ammianus also appear in the final chapters of the Breviarium, e.g. Amm. Marc. 25.10.12 ~ Eutr. 10.17.3, Amm. Marc. 25.9.9 ~ Eutr. 10.17.1. Kelly (n. 3), 240–50. The allusion at Amm. Marc. 15.5.22 also follows and corroborates the pattern.

11 Sabbah, G., ‘Ammianus Marcellinus’, in Marasco, G. (ed.), Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 2003), 43–84, at 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kelly (n. 3), 240.

12 See Pinkster, H., Latin Syntax and Semantics, trans. Mulder, H. (London, 1990), 237–9Google Scholar for ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ tenses. In their survey of the use of ‘narrative’ tenses in Books 22 and 23 of the Res Gestae, Kroon and Rose confirm that Ammianus' use of the perfect, imperfect and historic present follows the practice of Classical Latin narrative: Kroon, C. and Rose, P., ‘Atrociter corruptus? The use of “narrative” tenses in Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae’, in Risselada, R. and de Jong, J.R. (edd.), On Latin: Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honour of Harm Pinkster (Amsterdam, 1996), 71–89.Google Scholar

13 Comrie, B., Aspect (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar, esp. 13, 71 and 83 for references to Latin, pace Pinkster, H., ‘Tempus, aspect and Aktionsart in Latin (recent trends 1961–1981)’, ANRW 2.29.1 (1983), 270–319.Google Scholar

14 Eutropius favours the perfect throughout his chapter on Julian's Persian expedition and death (10.16), reflecting the nature of breviary history which demands a compressed series of successive events, without the ‘backgrounding’ created by the imperfect. Ammianus uses a combination of imperfect verbs and historic presents during the narration of his mission (15.5.22–31). The historic present essentially functions as an alternative for the perfect within historical narrative, albeit with a heightened emotional intensity: see Pinkster (n. 12), 239–40, Kroon and Rose (n. 12), 76. It is a curious phenomenon, and one whose investigation is beyond the scope of this note, that the densest pockets of the historic present in Ammianus, according to Ehrismann's list, cluster around the sections of extensive first-person narrative in Books 15, 18 and 25: see Ehrismann, H., De temporum et modorum usu Ammianeo (Strasbourg, 1886)Google Scholar, 9.

15 Pace Matthews, J., The Roman Empire of Ammianus (London, 1989)Google Scholar, 162, who suggests that ‘Eutropius’ book will have held scant interest for Ammianus'. Ammianus viewed it as both a precedent and a rival.

16 I would like to thank Rhiannon Ash, Gavin Kelly and Chris Pelling for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this note, and especially Chris for sending me a pre-publication copy of Pelling (n. 2).