The text of the Historia Augusta (HA) is fraught with questions of authenticity. The earliest surviving codex, MS Pal. lat. 899 (P), preserves a series of thirty-odd imperial biographies in non-chronological order, with two alleged lacunae, under the names of six different authors. These authors’ names appear scattered incoherently throughout the Lives, presenting contradictions not only between the index page and individual headings but even between Lives where cross-references imply shared authorship.Footnote 1 General consensus among HA scholars now identifies the six names as an imposture and the ‘missing’ Lives as a charade counterfeiting material that never existed.Footnote 2 Between the writing of the HA and its earliest codex, however, lie over four hundred years of manuscript users, scribes and potential exposure to damaging acts of god and man that rarely feature in discussions of the work's earliest history.Footnote 3 Nor has there been extended consideration of the diverse physical formats employed for manuscripts in the period preceding our surviving witnesses. Reconsideration of manuscript transmission practices provides an alternative explanation for both the lacunae and the inconsistency of the six pseudonyms grounded in the physical realities of manuscript usage. Relying on these alleged devices to characterize the author and explain his compositional aims may thus lead to false conclusions both about the author's goals for the work and about the literary community in which he wrote.
The complexity of the HA's compositional structure necessitates specifying which figure is signified as ‘the author’ when discussing compositional motivations. Even scholars who view the six authorial names as a single writer's imposture acknowledge the diversity of style and informational quality throughout the Lives. In particular, nine biographies, often designated Primary Lives, stand out for their historical accuracy and appear to present the composition of a different writer than the other twenty-one.Footnote 4 Although analysis of vocabulary and mannerisms has revealed that biographies attributed to all six pseudonyms contain similarities, the shared features cluster outside of the Primary Lives.Footnote 5 Various hypotheses postulating the source of the Primary Lives agree that large portions have been copied nearly verbatim into the HA from an earlier biographical series.Footnote 6 It seems probable, therefore, that the HA's text incorporates the writings of at least two figures who could be designated as ‘authors’.
Outside of the Primary Lives, cross-references and verbal idiosyncrasies suggest that a single writer continued the series, incorporating the Primary Lives with varying degrees of emendation.Footnote 7 Anachronisms and a post euentum prophecy date this writer to the late fourth or early fifth centuries a.d.Footnote 8 Recent scholarship awards the title ‘the author’ to this later writer, differentiated from the writer of the Primary Lives as well as from later scribes and copyists.
The significance of the authorial attributions in Pal. lat. 899 changes depending on which hand added them and with what motivation. Most recent discussion presumes that the names were distributed across the Lives by the fourth- or fifth-century author. This fraud has been explained as an attempt to deflect repercussions for publishing a pro-pagan work in a Christian empire,Footnote 9 to provide a literary game for the reader,Footnote 10 to disguise the work as an anthologyFootnote 11 and to satisfy a frivolous author's love of deception.Footnote 12 For such interpretations, the motivation behind the names provides a key to understanding the work's compositional aims. If, however, the attributions originated with a later scribe, attempts to analyse the author's goals through the lens of these attributions are destined for confusion.
Arguments in favour of an author who falsified the scope of his work and invented an ensemble of false identities presume that the ninth-century manuscript Pal. lat. 899 (P) preserves not only the original text of the HA but also its original paratext—the collection of cues surrounding a work from page numbers and indices to titles and incipits that are not integral to the narrative text, but mediate how the reader approaches it.Footnote 13 P, originating over four hundred years after the author wrote, was itself probably a copy of a copy, with an unknown number of stages in unknown formats between it and the earliest versions of the text. These stages between the composition of the text and the creation of P are difficult to assess owing to the work's narrow transmission history. However, both the manuscripts and the author's claims indicate that failures did occur in the centuries between the work's initial composition and the production of P. Comparing the evidence of the surviving witnesses provides clues about the condition of their exemplar. The discernible patterns of loss and scribal correction suggest that the alleged impostures may be the result of events that transpired during transmission—accidental or intentional.
1. TEXTUAL DISPLACEMENT IN THE EARLY MANUSCRIPTS
Two textual displacements in P reveal disturbances in its exemplar attributable to displacement of its folios. In the Life of Carus, Carinus and Numerian, P leaps from section 2.2 to section 13.3, inserting the displaced material after section 15.5 (Pal. lat. 899, 212r and v). More complex is a jumbled series of events from the Lives of Severus Alexander through Maximus and Balbinus. Here, five sections of material that C. Bertrand, O. Desbordes and J.P. Callu designate as αβγδε appear in the order αγβεδ, displacing sections of the Severus Alexander and the Two Maximini into the subsequent Lives.Footnote 14 Both disturbances resulted from physical disruptions to the exemplar, the first caused by a single folio's escape and inaccurate replacement, the second by a loose quaternion, the folios of which were reassembled incorrectly.Footnote 15 Comparison with the other branches of the manuscript tradition proves that the failures originated with P's exemplar.
Although most early manuscripts derive from P, two other traditions furnish evidence about the manuscript from which P itself derived.Footnote 16 E. Hohl noticed that the scribes for both P and an independent class of manuscripts designated Σ were confused by the exemplar's letter forms, displaying patterns of errors which suggest that both copied a Frankish source.Footnote 17 S. Ballou, in an unsuccessful attempt to prove a dependency between the branches, uncovered the close relationship between the Σ-branch and the readings left in P by its first corrector, a contemporary to the original scribe who probably employed the same exemplar for the corrections.Footnote 18 Together, these observations suggest that the source of P and Σ was the same exemplar. The evidence of the Σ-class manuscripts must be used with caution, as the earliest, fourteenth-century witnesses show evidence of emendations using the P tradition.Footnote 19 The substantive differences between Σ and P, however, provide clues about the transmission history. Pal. lat. 886 (Π), a set of excerpts from the first nineteen Lives compiled around the same time as P, likewise derives from the same exemplar and can corroborate evidence about its readings.Footnote 20
The relationship between these three branches allows aspects of the exemplar's history to be reconstructed as it relates to the textual displacements. Both failures from P are absent in the Σ-class manuscripts. This fact has perplexed many scholars, owing to the frequent, futile efforts of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century intellectuals to emend these failures in P, unaware of the extant solution.Footnote 21 Yet, writers who preceded the best attempts to correct the disorganization of P possessed a text in which the Life of Alexander Severus followed the proper order, establishing the independence of Σ.Footnote 22 Given the otherwise close relationship between Σ and P, the absence of disorganization in Σ suggests that damage to the exemplar occurred after the Σ archetype had been copied.
The excerpts found in Π, meanwhile, echo P's displacements in the Alexander Severus and the Two Maximini. Since Π is independent from P, the replicated displacement confirms that the confusion was not a lapse made by P's copyist but rather a result of the shared exemplar's condition. The abridged Π, ending at the disrupted Lives of Alexander and Maximinus, cannot confirm the second displacement. None the less, the undamaged text of the Σ-class manuscripts combined with the evidence of displacement from Π confirms that certain errors in P resulted from accidents of transmission unrelated to the author's composition.
The physical defects of the exemplar reflected in the later manuscripts demonstrate the fallibility of the surviving text. Further discrepancies between the independent branches of the text suggest that these displacements were not the only damage the text had suffered by the time the shared exemplar was being copied. Arguments concerning the two great impostures of the HA will thus be weighed against explanations rooted in the physicality of textual transmission and the practices of its scribes.
2. THE LACUNA IN A MULTI-VOLUME EDITION
A major lacuna appears in the HA for the years a.d. 244–260, although the author refers to the Lives of the missing emperors as if relevant biographies had been included. The Life of Gallienus, the first nearly complete life after the lacuna, claims that the emperor's early years had already been covered in a biography of his father, Valerian, on whom only a few paragraphs survive (Gall. 19.7).Footnote 23 Moreover, the programme laid out in the Life of Elagabalus includes all the rulers between Alexander and Aurelian, without stating exceptions (Heliogab. 35.2).
The common position in recent scholarship explains this lacuna as a fiction devised by an author who never wrote the missing Lives.Footnote 24 The major arguments in favour of the fiction are:
1. The author's interest in the physical properties of books near the lacuna.
2. Two passages, Alex. Sev. 64.1–2 and Carus 3.3–8, that skip from Alexander to Gallienus in the lists of emperors.
3. The inclusion of one usurper from the period of the lacuna in the Thirty Tyrants, despite his chronological irrelevance and the absence of other coeval usurpers.
4. The description of major events from the period of the lacuna in the surrounding books.
5. The cleanness of the break, which follows the end of a complete biography.
E. Savino has refuted the first point, noting that the author's interest in physical books is not only internally motivated in the biographies near the lacuna but also extends to most of the non-Primary Lives.Footnote 25 The second argument does not account for the presence of the Lives of the Two Maximini, Maximus and Balbinus and the Three Gordians, the true loss of which would paradoxically strengthen this argument for fictitious loss. In similar fashion, the absence in the Thirty Tyrants of the usurpers Jotapianus and Julius Priscus, easily known to the author through Aurelius Victor, would look the same whether Lives for the usurpers under Decius had been written and then lost or excluded intentionally.Footnote 26 The inclusion of their contemporary, the elder Valens, in the Thirty Tyrants provides no concrete proof regarding the existence of the missing biographies, as his inclusion appears motivated both by the author's struggle to reach the promised number of thirty and by the presence of another, related Valens in the ensemble. The author does not employ even the minimal information he would have found in Aurelius Victor. As in the case of Zenobia, whose story appears across three different biographies, each with a different purpose, Valens may well have appeared multiple times.
Both the third and the fourth arguments in favour of a fictitious lacuna presume that the author neither repeats materials nor incorporates other emperors’ deeds in a given biography. This presumption can be disproven by looking more broadly at the deployment of historical data throughout the HA. The Lives covering the emperors in the year a.d. 238 repeat many of the same core facts as necessary for each individual's narrative.Footnote 27 Similar repetitions occur across the Life of Gallienus and the Thirty Tyrants, where the former relates the actions of individual usurpers whose miniature biographies in the latter often contain the same information.Footnote 28 The incorporation in the biographies near the lacuna of several events that occurred under Philip does not stand out as unusual deployment of historical data when considering the author's habits. The Scythian War mentioned at the end of the Life of Gordian III, for instance, not only serves as a suitable transition point from the account of Gordian but also follows the presentation of materials in Zosimus (1.20.1), whose narrative the HA often parallels.Footnote 29
The cleanness of the break where the lacuna begins provides the most compelling evidence for scholars who argue for a falsified lacuna. D. den Hengst has argued that a true lacuna caused by loss of folios would not correspond neatly to the work's internal section breaks, resulting in ‘frayed edges’ around the lacuna.Footnote 30 The undamaged ending of the Life of Maximus and Balbinus is thereby suspicious. An unstated assumption for the ‘frayed edges’ argument requires that any manuscript damage happened to a single-volume copy of the text. With such a codex envisioned, the likelihood that a given quaternion would begin or end perfectly with the beginning or ending of a subsection—such as the Life of Maximus and Balbinus—significantly diminishes.Footnote 31
If we remove the assumption of a single-volume exemplar, both the lacuna and the displacements that start with the Life of Alexander reflect common damage patterns in manuscripts. Several examples of multi-volume manuscript sets survive from the eighth and ninth centuries with more attested in surviving library catalogues.Footnote 32 A multi-volume exemplar for the HA, the earliest copies of which date to the ninth century, would thus fit with habits of manuscript production in the preceding years. In examples located at the library of St. Gallen, the scribes separated their volumes at internal divisions, without concern for the regularity of volume length or quantity of sections contained in each volume.Footnote 33 In a similar vein, the manuscript tradition of the grammarian Nonius Marcellus acquired much of its complexity from an early separation into three volumes containing Books 1–3, 4 and 5–16.Footnote 34 A volume division occurring after the Life of Maximus and Balbinus in the exemplar would help to explain three of the curious features of the surviving tradition. First, it resolves the issue of cleanness at the beginning of the lacuna, since multi-volume sets usually follow major section breaks. Second, it positions the lacuna at the beginning of a volume, where incidental damage is more likely. Third, it positions the Lives of Alexander through Maximus and Balbinus near the outer edge of a volume, where they, too, would be prone to damage. The displacements that occurred between the copying of the archetype for the Σ-class and the production of P and Π would thus follow common patterns of handling damage.
A two-volume exemplar may also help to explain the state of materials in Π. Damage to the Lives following Severus Alexander would have rendered the following pages more vulnerable. As Π contains no excerpts beyond the section of the displacement labelled β (Alex. Sev. 43.7–58.1) by O. Desbordes et al., this could reflect the use of a single, damaged codex that contained no further material.
The possibility of a multi-volume exemplar has been raised by E. Savino, who likewise concludes that the case for a falsified lacuna has been overstated.Footnote 35 Savino's own proposed seven- and three-volume reconstructions, however, leave the cleanness of the lacuna's beginning unaddressed and present inconsistencies in the spatial limitations that he posits caused the collection's chronological disorganization.Footnote 36 The hypothesis of a two-volume exemplar, on the other hand, addresses the strongest argument for a fictitious lacuna. The remaining criteria that support falsification by the author do not adequately prove that the surviving material differs substantially from what we might expect of a work that had suffered true loss. Without stronger evidence to support the claim to fiction, a physical explanation that accounts for the condition of the surviving witnesses offers a simpler solution.
3. A POSSIBLE MISSING VOLUME
The possibility of a multi-volume set raises an alternative explanation for another absent series of Lives mentioned by the author. The Life of Aelius states that the reader should possess Lives for all rulers from Julius Caesar to Hadrian, although only Hadrian appears in the manuscripts (Ael. 1.1). This claim has been dismissed by scholars, often with minimal justification.Footnote 37 Hesitancy to accept the existence of a more complete series results in part from the position of Suetonius in the modern canon of Roman texts. Arguments against a longer HA often take for granted that the author would not have written new Lives for emperors already covered in Suetonius, focussing the debate instead on whether the Lives of Nerva and Trajan ever filled the gap between Suetonius and the HA.Footnote 38 However, no current HA scholar denies that the author incorporated pre-existing work for the Primary Lives.Footnote 39 Although the source for the Primary Lives has been identified variously as Marius Maximus or another unknown writer, both positions admit that the HA's author revised and reproduced pre-existing work.Footnote 40 Instead of questioning whether the author composed new Lives for the emperors covered by Suetonius, we should consider instead the possibility that the author borrowed, condensed and modified the Suetonian series.
A hypothetical reconstruction that includes the Suetonian materials adds at least thirteen more Lives before Hadrian's, depending on how one interprets the apparent conflict between Ael. 1.1 and Ael. 7.5 over the inclusion of Julius Caesar.Footnote 41 The length of this portion of text would more easily fill a full volume than a missing pair for Nerva and Trajan alone. The closest proxy for such a volume—the Suetonian Lives themselves—show that this series is approximately the same length as the proposed volume containing the Lives of Hadrian through Maximus and Balbinus. A character count of two online editions of both texts provides the following data:Footnote 42
Although the addition of the Lives of Nerva and Trajan might make this first volume longer than the second, even if the author emended and condensed the source material, variations in length up to several dozen folios are not unusual in surviving multi-volume sets.Footnote 45
Loss of an entire volume would once more help to explain the unusually clean start to the Life of Hadrian. An entire volume containing not only Nerva and Trajan but also the works of Suetonius or something close to them could easily have been lost, destroyed by accident or simply loaned out, never to return. Letters from Lupus of Ferrières, whose activity immediately preceded the production of P and Π, show that Suetonius was both rare and in demand at that time.Footnote 46 He himself requested to borrow a two-volume copy from the monastery at Fulda.Footnote 47 No other trace survives of this dual-volume arrangement. Like the HA, Suetonius suffers from a narrow manuscript tradition, all extant copies deriving from an eighth- or ninth-century Frankish manuscript.Footnote 48 Thus, even if the loss of the proposed first HA volume were due to lending rather than damage, its absence in the manuscript tradition of both Suetonius and the HA would be unsurprising given the slender transmission for each.
The author's claims about the original extent of his work require considering the possibility of a series opening with Caesar rather than with Nerva or Trajan. Both M. Meckler and E. Savino argue on thematic principles that the Life of Hadrian suitably introduces the author's narrative goals, rebutting the hypothesis that the author would have wanted to include either Nerva or Trajan.Footnote 49 Meckler notes that Hadrian's biography initiates several dominant themes for the surviving series: the author's ambivalence toward imperial power centred around an emperor neither adored nor reviled universally, the novelty of adopted princes in the figure of Aelius, and the role of adoption in legitimating imperial succession. Savino, accepting these thematic links, argues that a series opening with Trajan would make the connection between this anti-Christian emperor and the Theodosian dynasty too apparent and uncomfortable.Footnote 50 A series beginning with Julius Caesar, however, avoids the issue Savino raises and provides a suitable embodiment of Meckler's major themes in the glorified and hated arch-usurper himself, followed by the nephew who legitimated his power on the basis of adoption.
Savino rejects a pre-Hadrianic series by noting that no surviving manuscript preserves this material and that reinserting it requires hypothesizing medial stages in transmission, which is indeed the supposition under consideration.Footnote 51 Meckler doubts that the author would have reproduced the works of Suetonius and asks why Aelius should be the first presumptive heir to be treated.Footnote 52 Although in the introduction to the Life of Aelius the author appends the idea of biographies for those who ‘in some way came into prominence or the hopes of imperial power’, his primary interest is in figures who reached the official position of Caesar, a designated successor to an Augustus (Ael. 1.1). The author contrasts these heirs apparent to those who had previously been legitimated either through familial relation alone or through traditional adoption (Ael. 2.2). As Burgersdijk has noted, the author envisions the specific Tetrarchic system of adoption into a defined sequence of imperial offices, in which Aelius would reasonably appear as the first unsuccessfully named Caesar for a dynasty defined by adoption.Footnote 53
A three-volume set of imperial biographies corresponds with manuscript production practices in the period preceding the earliest HA manuscripts and provides an explanation for the clean breaks surrounding the missing Lives. Substantial material preceding the Life of Hadrian would also help to explain the curious lack of introduction in a work well known for its colourful prefaces and frequent exposition of the author's motives and accomplishments.Footnote 54 Loss of the first volume and damage to the third would lead a copyist producing a single-volume copy of the remaining Lives to create manuscripts in the surviving format. With a manuscript tradition as slender as the HA's, such a process of loss and damage need only have happened once during the roughly four-hundred-year period between composition and the earliest surviving manuscripts to produce the text preserved in the closely related traditions of P, Π and Σ.
A similar calamity befell the works of Tacitus, for which a damaged multi-volume edition preceded the lacunose surviving manuscripts, causing a mix of clean and rough breaks in the surviving texts.Footnote 55 Where other witnesses such as Jerome help to confirm the original extent of Tacitus’ works, the HA suffers from obscurity, requiring greater reliance on the author's claims. One further feature of the early manuscripts, however, supports the hypothesis of a lost first volume. Discrepancies in the paratexts across the three surviving branches cast doubt on the originality of the paratext in P and its value in interpreting the author's compositional aims.
4. A FRAGILE PARATEXT
A written volume's accompanying paratext usually conveys information about the source and purpose of a text, including authorial ascriptions and tables of contents. Although in the modern world of printing and editions, the author more easily controls the paratextual information surrounding their work, in the case of Medieval manuscripts, the paratext of each volume was often determined not by an author but by the needs and interests of scribes.Footnote 56 Whereas consistency across several branches of a manuscript tradition may imply origination with the author, as in several examples discussed in the recent volume The Roman Paratext, the paratext surrounding the HA is troublesomely inconsistent.Footnote 57
Loss of an initial volume would have disrupted paratextual transmission, particularly if the earlier HA manuscripts followed the customary practice of concentrating these materials in the first volume. In a two-volume copy of Isidore's Etymologies, for instance, only the initial volume offers a title and an index for the entire set (Cod. Sang. 231–2). The second volume contains only an index for the chapter headings, without even the work's title. Scribes also created descriptive paratext for volumes independent of the exemplar, as occurs in a multi-volume copy of Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms (Cod. Sang. 162–6). The branches of the HA manuscript tradition each transmit different paratexts, suggesting that the exemplar lacked authoritative standing, or that copyists invented headings and titles independently.
Four different early titles survive for the HA, one from each of the three surviving branches (P, Π and Σ) and one attested for a lost manuscript from the Abbey of Murbach. These titles are:
P: Vitae diuersorum principum et tyrannorum a diuo hadriano usque ad numerianum diuersis conpositi
Σ: Gesta romanorum principum seu imperatorum et rei p. inuasorum a diuo adriano usq(ue) ad numerianu(m) ab historiographis scripta diuersisFootnote 58
Π: ex libro Spartiani de uita caesarum exerptumFootnote 59
M: Vita cesaru(m) u(e)l tira(n)noru(m) ab helio adriano us(que) ad Car(u)m carinu(m) libri VII
Discrepancies appear in the terminology used for the genre (uita/uitae/gesta), the titulature for legitimate rulers (caesarum/principum/imperatorum) and the term for usurpers (tyrannorum/inuasorum rei p.). While three name the boundaries of the work, two different titles appear for the final Life, and only one tradition divides the HA into seven books. Two describe the work as the composite efforts of multiple authors (of which only one uses the noun historiographis), while one names Spartianus alone.
Attempts to resolve the differences and uncover the ‘original’ title have reached differing conclusions. J.P. Callu argues that the Abbey of Murbach catalogue's accuracy on other well-attested titles lends authority to both its wording and the unique seven-book division.Footnote 60 Savino, following Pecere, posits that P conveys the most likely original title because of its similarity to a line from the biography of Macrinus.Footnote 61 The Σ-branch, distinctive for using the term gesta, can offer only supplemental information, since its earliest witnesses bear traces of correction against P.Footnote 62 The disagreement between all four independent witnesses to the title despite the shared exemplar suggests two possibilities: either the scribes at the head of each surviving tradition lacked a title and invented as necessary or certain scribes wilfully modified the title from their exemplar.Footnote 63
The case of Π, the oldest witness independent of P, supports the first possibility, as at several instances neither the original scribe nor the correctors who had access to other manuscripts reproduce the paratext from P. The physical formatting of both manuscripts’ initial folios displays conscious planning for each paratext. In Π, the title and the incipit for the Life of Hadrian show no signs of cramping or deviation from the lining. It would seem, then, that the title was written concurrently with the main text and could have occupied more space if the scribe had both knowledge of and desire to reproduce the title attested in P. Instead, Π contains a brief title, conveying neither the boundaries of the series nor the notion of multiple authorship. The titles of the individual Lives in Π, where the original scribe has included them, likewise diverge from P. The Life of Aelius appears as De Commodo et Helio Vero, an odd title that implies two subjects, rather than one (Pal. lat. 886, 143v). This misinformation results from a line in the text itself, where the subject is identified as Ceionius Commodus, qui et Aelius Verus appellatus est (Ael. 2.1). Although misconstrued, this title, like that of the Life of Hadrian, occupies space planned concurrently with the body text. It bears little resemblance to P's title: incipit eiusdem Spartiani Helius. Although Π shared an exemplar with P, the scribe derived unique titles from internal information.
Although the original scribe for Π may have chosen not to reproduce an extant paratext, it seems probable that the subsequent manuscript users who wrote additions and corrections would have imported the paratext from their corrective text, had it been possible. No fewer than three other hands appear in Π, ranging from a close contemporary of the original scribe to an eleventh- or twelfth-century hand. Of these three correctors, at least the first two had access to an independent manuscript. In the excerpt from the Life of Marcus Aurelius (Aur. 19.4), the first corrector emended the negative conjunction nec to non, switching to the reading attested in P, although nec is not an evident error in the abridgement. The second corrector, in a segment of poetry from the Life of Macrinus, replaces nihil with the equivalent word nil attested in P (Opil. 11.6). This replacement does not correct any metrical issues, and unnecessary doublings remain. As such, the second corrector cannot have discovered the replacement by principles of metrical scansion. Similarly, in the Life of Septimius Severus (Sev. 14.11), this corrector has replaced the word paulo with populo, even though paulo is not recognizable as an error in the context of the excerpts (148v).Footnote 64 Although both correctors must have possessed a witness to the text independent of Π, neither emends the paratext to match P. The first corrector, when he does make additions to the paratext, occasionally reverses the usual order of names, for example De Antonino marco (144v), or adds elements absent from P, for example De Vero Antonino (145r). The second corrector, for his part, makes no emendations to the paratext. There are thus not one but three independent reader/writers, whose activities do not reproduce P's paratext despite access either to the shared exemplar or to another manuscript with readings from the P tradition.
Attempts to determine the original title may well come to differing conclusions because none of the four traditions reproduces an ‘original title’. Works from antiquity often gained titles later in their transmission from a readership desirous of easy reference.Footnote 65 Additionally, manuscript users were in the habit of adding descriptive information, whether for others or for their own personal benefit. Codex Bambergensis 54 E.III.19 (B), a direct copy of P, shows the scribe's individual initiative for the paratext. On the first folio of the codex, the title page lists not six but eight authors, as well as a novel title: Excerpta Spartiani de principibus – de iulio capitolino – de aelio spartiano et de mario maximo – de aelio lampridio – de uulcacio gallicano et auidio cassio – de trebellio pollione – de flauio uopisco.Footnote 66 This scribe, drawing information from within the text, has added Marius Maximus and Avidius Cassius to the list of authors. Marius Maximus must appear, owing to his name appearing within the first lines of the surviving HA text, as a biographical forerunner.Footnote 67 Why Avidius Cassius should be named as an author of his own biography is more perplexing but must again result from the scribe's misunderstanding of internal information.
Contemporary descriptive titles resemble those found in P and M. Although O. Pecere has argued that the title formulation a … usque … belongs to the fourth to sixth centuries, the same formulation appears in the component pieces of ninth-century multi-volume codices to describe the contents of the individual volumes.Footnote 68 The second volume of Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms at St. Gallen, for instance, gives the title Incipit tractatus Aurelii Augustini a psalmo XXXVI usque in psalmum quinquagesimum (Cod. Sang. 165). The title is not a general title for the commentary but a description of the contents in one specific volume. The variation in the HA titles that include this formulation supports the hypothesis that the scribes crafted them employing similar contextual information. Although diuo hadriano (P/Σ) and helio adriano (M) refer to the same figure, the latter formulation draws from the biography of Hadrian (1.2), while the former follows Suetonian patterns for naming divinized emperors. As for the final life, Carum carinum (M) names the first and last figures in the biography—perhaps more sensible with the a … usque … formula—whereas numerianum (P/Σ) names not the final emperor treated but the emperor usually listed last when Carus, Carinus and Numerian appear together in the work.Footnote 69 Neither title is provably original, since both conform to a conventional title pattern employed in the period when the manuscripts were created.
A paratext that post-dates composition may also help explain other anomalies. C. Bertrand-Dagenbach notes that the HA is the only known source to designate the Emperor Alexander as Alexander Severus, and does so only in the paratext.Footnote 70 Sources from the third to the fifth centuries usually refer to him as Aurelius Alexander, Severus Alexander or simply Alexander.Footnote 71 The HA itself follows its contemporaries in the body text, which led the third corrector of Π to supply the title De Aurelio Alexandro from internal information (156r).Footnote 72 A switch in the paratext to Alexander Severus would be unidiomatic for the writer of the body text but not remarkable enough to suggest any intentional fraud. Rather, it appears to derive from internal information that Alexander was given the name Severus, which had been borne by his great-uncle, without the knowledge that his official inscriptions placed Severus before Alexander.Footnote 73 Although such an error is possible in the late fourth or early fifth centuries, the likelihood increases in later periods when the work was being copied. The author never commits the error in the body text.
Numerous errors and emendations in the titles of P itself suggest that its scribe also produced a paratext independently of the author's design. At Gall. 14.1–2, the scribe mistakenly rubricated the words Et Claudius as though a separate life of Claudius were beginning (Pal. lat. 899, 159v). This rubrication error immediately follows a lacuna that occurs during the description of a conspiracy against Gallienus. A quick reading of the first sentence in this pseudo-Life would make it seem as though Claudius were being elevated to imperial office owing to the verb electus est, but the true Life of Claudius begins much later. Shortly after that error, the scribe rubricates Saloninus Gallienus as a separate section, but there is no matching indication of a separate Life of Saloninus in the index, as there are for the similarly rubricated individual Lives of the tyrants (160v). In the midst of the Thirty Tyrants (15.4), the name Ballista was mistakenly rubricated mid-sentence, then erased and rewritten by either the original scribe or the corrector (167v). Once again, the context reveals the reason for the rubrication, since the sentence describes Ballista's usurpation. The real miniature biography of Ballista, however, appears three sections later (Tyr. Trig. 18). The reverse issue occurs at the beginning of the biography of Trebellianus (Tyr. Trig. 26), where the scribe wrote the name in black ink, which was then erased, and a rubricated title crowded into the available space (171r).
Perhaps most telling is the bifurcated life of Tacitus. The paratext presents Tacitus and his brother Florianus in separate Lives with individual incipits and index entries.Footnote 74 However, the resulting Life of Florianus concludes by returning to the Senate's elation at the election of Tacitus as emperor (Tac. 18–19). Structurally, this suggests that Tacitus and Florianus should be considered one book, as are the Lives of the Two Maximini, Two Valerians and Gallienus and Saloninus, which all conclude with a summary review of the principal figures. Indeed, modern editions ignore P's paratextual evidence and set Florianus’ biography inside the Life of Tacitus.Footnote 75 These errors of rubrication and the uncertainty in the titles point to a scribe whose exemplar lacked key paratextual elements, a hypothesis further supported by the activity of the corrector who identified some errors but allowed others to remain.
Allowing space for scribal invention, O. Pecere's observation that the title De uita caesarum (Π) would be a natural emendation for an audience familiar with Suetonius does not necessarily conflict with J.P. Callu's observation that the Abbey of Murbach catalogue tends to transmit accurate titles for other works.Footnote 76 In the absence of an authoritative title, the solutions offered by P, Σ, Π and M each represent reasonably conjectured descriptive titles for a series of imperial biographies influenced by Suetonius, yet distinguished by a focus on minor figures and usurpers. The conflicting evidence in the four surviving titles and the paratextual discrepancies between the two oldest independent manuscripts (P and Π) show that, despite the close relationship between all surviving branches of the manuscript tradition, the paratext itself was malleable. Although incipits and explicits are notoriously fragile, this degree of fragility in the title as well suggests that the paratextual tradition as a whole had become disrupted, which the loss of an initial volume would cause.Footnote 77
5. THE AUTHORIAL NAMES
Paratextual inconsistencies between the most closely related branches ought to make the modern reader wary of placing too much authoritative weight on data supplied by these reader-aids. Nevertheless, the century-old debate over single or multiple authorship for the HA depends substantially on uncorroborated paratextual evidence from P. As part of his proof of single authorship, H. Dessau noted that P's distribution of the Lives among the six spurious authors created contradictions.Footnote 78 Cross-references between the Life of Pescennius Niger and the Life of Clodius Albinus, for instance, directly claim shared authorship, yet the manuscript attributes these lives to different authors.Footnote 79 While Dessau was correct to question the truth of multiple authorship, it does not necessarily follow that the contradictions originated with the author. When examining the body text of the HA separately from the headings and from the table of contents, the fiction of multiple authorship all but disappears, leaving instead a host of falsified sources and ample material for a perplexed scribe to cause modern confusion.
P names six authors on the index page and in the incipits and explicits to individual Lives: Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Aelius Lampridius, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus Syracusius. Of these, four appear within the body text. Capitolinus and Lampridius appear together in a list of inspirations for the HA's writing style. Rather than imitating the traditional historiography of Sallust, Livy, Tacitus or Trogus, the author says he will imitate ‘Marius Maximus, Suetonius Tranquillus, Fabius Marcellinus, Gargilius Martialis, Julius Capitolinus, Aelius Lampridius and others’ (Prob. 2.6). Suetonius and Marius Maximus we know as biographers from the works of the latter and the reputation of the former.Footnote 80 The other four are spurious. Fabius Marcellinus appears earlier in the HA, as the purported author of a Life of Trajan (Alex. Sev. 48.6).Footnote 81 Gargilius Martialis appears shortly before Marcellinus and allegedly wrote a Life of Alexander containing excessive detail about the emperor's dining habits (Alex. Sev. 37.9). Both works can be included safely in the author's lengthy catalogue of invented sources.Footnote 82 Capitolinus and Lampridius, who round out the list, appear nowhere else and are associated with no specific biographies. If it were not for the paratext, these two would be considered further fictionalized sources for an author attempting to validate his material.Footnote 83
Trebellius Pollio seems the strongest candidate for internal mention of multiple authorship, but likewise fills a literary function employed elsewhere and receives attention as a co-author on the evidence of the paratext. The author cites Pollio twice within the body text of the later Lives: for a series of Lives from Philip the Arab through Claudius (Aurel. 2.1) and for condensing the Lives of thirty pretenders into a single volume (Quatt. Tyr. 1.3). Modern editions give the impression that such a series has survived under the name Trebellius Pollio, assigning to him the fragmentary Life of Valerian through the Life of Claudius, including the Thirty Pretenders. In both the table of contents and the incipits of P, all of these Lives are assigned rather to Julius Capitolinus with the word eiusdem, up until the Life of Claudius.Footnote 84 The index and the explicit to the Life of Claudius are the only places at which the manuscript attests Pollio's authorship. The corrected attributions stem from scholarly activity, not from the witness of the earliest manuscripts.
As a literary character, Pollio acts like the author's other false authorities, to justify his organizational principles. Prior to Pollio's introduction, when the author compressed the Lives of Maximinus and his son into a single book, he claimed that this was the practice of one Tatius Cyrillus (Maximin. 1.2).Footnote 85 Cyrillus, like so many of the other authorities cited for their biographical habits, is otherwise unknown. Pollio's inclusion as the originator of a thirty-tyrant compendium follows this same pattern. He also acts as a foil for the author's writing habits from the Life of Aurelian onward. In a notorious conversation between the author and an urban prefect, Junius Tiberianus, Pollio's name arises at the pivotal moment when the two discuss how the author should write (Aurel. 2.1).Footnote 86 Although Tiberianus protests that Pollio wrote too ‘carelessly’ (incuriose) and ‘cursorily’ (breuiter), the author convinces him that the biographer is more reputable than mendacious historians like Tacitus. As in the case of Cyrillus, the author deploys Pollio as a fictitious inspiration for his literary decisions.
Pollio thereby becomes the opposing figure to Junius Cordus, the infamous ‘whipping boy’ of the HA.Footnote 87 Cordus appears as a foil for the author's writing habits, especially when they could be subject to criticism.Footnote 88 But whereas Cordus represents everything scurrilous, petty and pointless about the biographical genre, Pollio represents restraint, ingenuity and truthfulness. Pollio and Cordus also share the distinction of being two of the few spurious authors whose names derive securely from identifiable literary references. Another ‘whipping boy’ named Cordus appears in the Satires of Juvenal, which the author knew.Footnote 89 Trebellius Pollio, as A. Birley has argued, derives from the combination of Asinius Pollio and his ally Trebellius Fides in Cicero's Sixth Philippic.Footnote 90 Similarities between the critiques of Trebellius’ biographies and the criticisms of Julius Caesar attributed to Asinius strengthen the plausibility of the allusion.Footnote 91 As Birley suggests, the author may even be punning by referring to Trebellius’ Fides in passages where he purports to champion the truthfulness of biographies, before embarking on wild inventions.Footnote 92
The name Trebellius Pollio thus conveys a particular meaning within the body of the text. He acts as a foil, invented for the author's convenience. His presence in the headings, on the other hand, results from scholarly emendations. In fact, of the six alleged authors, only Aelius Spartianus appears in the body text, in a dedicatory inscription to the Life of Aelius (Ael. 1.1). Spartianus is also the only author named in a paratext independent of the P family, credited by Π with the entire collection. For Capitolinus, Lampridius and Pollio, the paratext of P alone implies their authorship. If the multi-author fiction is original, neither Π nor the title from M shows any awareness thereof. Either the scribes, correctors and indexers for both other manuscripts elected to ignore the exemplar's paratext or the paratext found in P stands independent from the shared textual tradition.
The body text presents an image of authorship distinct from that of the headings attested in P. The text has a dominant narrative voice that never directly claims collaboration; the headings give six names that break up the author's own claims about his work's continuity. Despite attempts to identify a unifying feature among the Lives assigned to the various authorial names, no obvious solution has emerged. T. Honoré proposed a typology based on puns—Spartianus for the ‘Spartan’ rulers, Capitolinus for the Senate-friendly, Lampridius for the wastrels carousing by lamplight—yet this theory has evident flaws.Footnote 93 Why should the militaristic Pertinax be Capitoline, while Didius Julianus, mocked for his lack of military courage (Did. Iul. 6.6–7), belongs to Spartianus? Savino's conjecture that less important rulers were drawn into the orbit of the more notable counterparts despite differing typologies explains such pairs as Elagabalus and Alexander, but not the separation of Macrinus and Diadumenianus.Footnote 94 M. Thomson's proposal that the name Lampridius derives not from the word for lamp (lampas) but from a type of voracious eel (lampreda) and is deployed for emperors of insatiable appetites causes chronological issues if true.Footnote 95 Although he hypothesizes that lampreda could have been current in the fourth and fifth centuries, the earliest records of the word appear in the eighth century a.d. Without earlier testimony, associations between Lampridius and appetite would more reasonably originate with the scribes of the eighth and ninth centuries. Furthermore, the absence of the grandest eater of all the emperors, Maximinus, from the list of Lampridian Lives makes that proposed typology suspect.
The unsystematic method of assigning the authorial names to Lives provides supporting evidence that these attributions developed later in the manuscript tradition. As Thomson notes, sequences of attributions that appear disordered in modern editions, where the Lives have been reordered for chronology, appear contiguously in the arrangement of P.Footnote 96 The contradiction between the texts and the ascriptions for the Lives of Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus, senseless if they had appeared side-by-side chronologically or were added by the author, fits neatly for a scholar adding attribution to the disorderly sequence of the manuscripts. The Life of Niger appears in a sequence of Lives attributed to Spartianus, while the Life of Albinus appears much later, surrounded by other Capitoline Lives.Footnote 97 The attributions suit the manuscript, independent from the work's narrative and despite the disorganization and damage affecting other elements of the work.
Evaluating the significance of the paratextual materials to the author's original project requires recognizing that the scribes who produced the manuscripts viewed their role not simply as transcribers but as correctors for deficiencies in the text.Footnote 98 Scribes missing authorial information for their manuscripts tended to supply the information based on available evidence, as they did with the titles.Footnote 99 The sixth-century Latin Anthology, preserved in the Codex Salmasianus, ascribes poems to the best of the classical poets and equally to otherwise unnamed figures. When other sources for this collection exist, the attributions do not always agree.Footnote 100 A work known as De uiris illustribus circulated under Pliny the Younger's name in several manuscripts, a scribal conjecture for a manuscript lacking attribution later reproduced by copyists.Footnote 101 At times, false attributions came from interpretations of difficult information, as when in some codices of the Panegyrici Latini the abbreviation memet was reinterpreted to match the name of another contributor, Mamertinus.Footnote 102 One might suspect that a similar, erroneous expansion of the abbreviation u.c. created Vulcacius Gallicanus, found only at the Life that includes those initials. Aside from such possibilities, the contextual cues of the HA offer sufficient information for earnest scholars to supply three names from biographers not recognized as fictitious inventions and a fourth from the dedication to the Life of Aelius. Either an author inventing six pseudonyms has bungled his own device by attributing lives that cross-reference one another to different characters, or a scribe who had limited familiarity with the work has invented attributions loosely following the manuscript order, drawing the names for the authors from the damaged text available to him.
6. CONCLUSIONS
MS Pal. lat. 899 is not the author's draft of the HA; so much is undeniable. What physical forms the copies took from the first draft through over four hundred years of transmission can only be speculated on, aided by faint clues in the earliest surviving manuscripts. It is important nevertheless to remember that the text had a physical history and readership in the span between composition and the creation of its earliest witness, P.
The model proposed here challenges two broad assumptions concerning the transmission of the HA that have shaped the central debates over the plausibility of the lacunae and the authorial attribution of the work. First, it is usually assumed that the work was always contained in a single codex, leading to suspicion over the clean break that starts the lacuna. Second, most scholars presume that the paratext in P originated at the hands of the author, leading to debates over the purpose and function of six fictitious authors.Footnote 103 Neither of these is a neutral assumption about the state of the manuscripts prior to the earliest witnesses, and the indirect surviving evidence indicates that these assumptions may be flawed.
Discrepancies in the titles, headings and authorial attributions between the four major manuscript traditions point to a damaged exemplar without an authoritative paratext. The patterns of missing material—from the malleable paratext to the lack of a general introduction to the discrepancies between the surviving material and the stated boundaries of the work—fit loss patterns not for a single codex but for a three-volume set that has suffered some combination of lending, loss and damage. This probability is further supported by the evidence of physical damage behind textual displacements in the surviving manuscripts near the ends of two of the proposed volumes. Lacking sufficient information to fill out their paratexts, the scribes and correctors for both Palatine manuscripts would naturally have gathered data from the work itself, filling in the titles and authors on the evidence of faulty context clues.
In response to the question why the author chose to hide behind six, clearly fictitious, pseudonyms and then decided to excise a set of potentially controversial biographies despite the authorship charade, the answer may be that he did not. The accidents likely to have occurred in the four hundred years between composition and our earliest copy, as well as the habits of scribes copying damaged manuscripts, raise the possibility that the author never planned these supposed fictions at all. In the absence of compelling evidence that the paratextual material of Pal. lat. 899 derives from an exemplar that preserved the original headings and ascriptions, further debate on the nature of the HA using this evidence risks unnecessary confusion. It creates the contradictory image of an author clever enough to remember that he should omit certain would-be usurpers from his list of thirty tyrants, yet unobservant enough to create inconsistencies in his authorial attributions; careful enough to deploy information he wanted to preserve despite a planned lacuna, but incautious enough to damage text on only one side thereof. In short, it risks proposing an author who is only as clever or forgetful as an argument needs him to be.
Absolving the author of the HA from the unprecedented fictions of inventing six pseudonyms and faking a lacuna allows for productive research situating the author into the literary context of his contemporaries. Refining computer analyses to distinguish one author from his substantial copied material may help compare his process of editing and revising to other late antique compilers, where analyses designed to differentiate six authors against one have proven inconclusive.Footnote 104 The last remaining major fiction, the time of the work's composition, may fruitfully be compared to faux-historical dialogues or perhaps exercises in persuasive rhetoric, setting aside the fruitless debates over false identities and religious fervour. Recognizing the variability of codex structure and that medieval scribes were not simply copyists but revisionists and scholars who sought to supply full manuscripts where only partial ones survived transforms the HA from a monstrous literary enigma back to a curious—if often scurrilous—testament to the literary practices of its day.
