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Ausonius’ Fasti and Caesares revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

R. P. H. Green
R. P. H. Green
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow, r.green@classics.arts.gla.ac.uk
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Extract

This paper reconsiders certain questions about Ausonius’ two incomplete works on historical themes, Fasti and Caesares, with particular attention to points raised in a recent article by R. W. Burgess. Of the Fasti we have only a few tantalizing snippets, the packaging and not the core: what did the work look like when it left Ausonius? What was its coverage? was it in verse or prose? The Caesares as we have it breaks off in mid-quatrain, at line 139: did it go beyond Elagabalus? What of the evidence in Giovanni Mansionario that Ausonius treated certain imperatores from Decius to Diocletian?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , December 1999 , pp. 573 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1999

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References

1 Burgess, R. W., ‘Principes cum tyrannis: two studies on the Kaiserges chichte and its tradition’, CQ 43 (1993), 491–500.Google Scholar

2 Green, R. P. H., The Works of Ausonius (Oxford, 1991), 720.Google Scholar

3 Uncertainties about the text, and the significance of the variants, need not concern us here: see Green (n. 2), 160–1 and 554–7.

4 Burgess (n. 1), 495, n. 18.

5 Green (n. 2), 555.

6 The evidence given is the Chronicle of Jerome, dated by Burgess to 382.

7 Burgess, R. W., The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar

8 The notice seems to derive from an outdated list at the front of a Veronese manuscript: see Reeve, M. D., amplsquosemicolonSome manuscripts of Ausonius’, Prometheus 3 (1977), 112–20.Google Scholar

9 Green (n. 2), 556.

10 See Green (n. 2), 556–7.

11 In Ep. 17, in case that should be thought an exception, the ten lines of verse with which the letter opens are not an introduction but part of an Ausonian joke.

12 Green (n. 2), 554–6.

13 Cf. Juvenal 8.242.

14 M. D. Reeve (n. 8), 120; Green, R. P. H., ‘Marius Maximus and Ausonius’ Caesares’, CQ 31 (1981), 226–36;Google ScholarSivan, H., ‘The historian Eusebius (of Nantes)’, JHS 112 (1992), 158–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Not molire, as Burgess gives it on 496.

16 Aurelius Victor 31.3.

17 Burgess (n. 1), 496, commenting on Green (n. 2), 557–8.

18 Perhaps consisting of Alexander Severus, Maximinus Thrax, Philip, Decius, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius II, Aurelian, Tacitus, Probus, Carus, and Diocletian.

19 These must have included Constantine, Constans and Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valentinian I, Valens, and Gratian, preceded by some of the tetrarchs and ending perhaps with Valentinian II and Theodosius I.

20 In his second sentence he calls Ausonius’ correspondent poncium paulinum primo beati ambrosij notarium (which he was not), then nolanus episcopus, which he later became.

21 Green (n. 14), 230; Sivan (n. 14), 162.

22 Burgess (n. 1), 497. The relevant appendix contains twenty-seven names.

23 I am grateful to the audience at a Manchester University Classics seminar in October 1996 who listened to a rather indigestible paper in which these points were raised, and in particular to Dr. John Briscoe and Prof. Tim Cornell for their helpful comments. A CQ referee later made others.