Giovanni De Matociis and the Codex Oratorianvs of the De Viris Illvstribvs Vrbis Romae

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Frankness is not a quality one naturally associates with Themistius, that most sinuous of the fourth century's official spokesmen, but the opening of his first speech (‘On the Love of Mankind’) is disarmingly frank. Invited to address Constantius II at Ancyra in the spring of 342, the young orator had an unusually difficult brief: violent riots in Constantinople had recently seen Hermogenes (a senior general) killed by a mob, relations with Constans (emperor in the west) were tense and war with Persia was rumbling away on the eastern frontier. The situation surely called for cliché — the familiar refuge of the panegyrist in a tight spot — but Themistius responded with a rather daring candour. Not for him some faltering introduction of the various themes set out in the rhetorical handbooks. Instead, he opened by offering his listeners an expert's guide to the tropes of conventional panegyric: those familiar descriptions of magnificent armies, glittering imperial adornment and the emperor's physical vigour (Or. 1.2a–b) to which his courtly audience must have been almost numb. With these curtly dismissed as so much hackwork, he delivered a boldly original oration: a philosophical treatment of the emperor's inner virtue. It is quite a performance. One can see why so many and such different emperors found themselves in need of Themistius’ eloquence.

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Codex Nicholsonianus

Woudhuysen

2021

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New Light on theHistoria Augusta

Stover

2020

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This paper presents a new manuscript of part of the Historia Augusta from Erlangen, which vindicates a more than century-old hypothesis by E. Patzig: that the 1489 Venice edition of the work is textually valuable. On this basis, and building on the recent work of R. Modonutti, I present five new passages that are not printed in modern editions of the HA, six lacunose passages restored, and propose that the lost Murbach manuscript is the source. Armed with this new evidence, I re-examine the question of the great lacuna between the Lives of Maximus and Balbinus and the Lives of the Two Valerians, showing that it is a codicological — and not authorial — feature.

The Poet Nemesianus and theHistoria Augusta

Stover

Woudhuysen

2022

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Lurking in the Historia Augusta's life of the short-lived Emperor Carus is what appears to be a reference to the genuine contemporary poet Nemesianus and an extant work by him, the Cynegetica. Given the HA's predilection for ‘bogus authors’, this is rather surprising, but because some of what the HA says about Nemesianus is true, the otherwise unique details of his life and works that it provides have been generally accepted. We show first that the reference to the Cynegetica is an incorporated gloss in the text of the HA, one that reveals that the text was being read and studied in northern Francia. We then demonstrate that the name ‘Olympius’, which the HA gives to Nemesianus, is not authentic, offering an analysis of the text's onomastic habits more generally. We show that ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ is one of several invented authors in the HA, lent a superficial plausibility by borrowing the name of a real ancient writer. Finally, we reflect on the way that these conclusions might undermine two developing tendencies in the study of the Historia Augusta.