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Three Notes On The Vita Probi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Timothy D. Barnes
Affiliation:
The Queen's College, Oxford

Extract

In 1883 Alexander Enmann demonstrated the existence of ‘eine verlorene Geschichte der romischen Kaiser’. Not all of his arguments or conclusions were valid, but one fundamental postulate is undeniable: Aurelius Victor in 359/60 and Eutropius a decade later independently used a common source, a lost Kaiser geschichte of relatively brief compass. This lost work (it ought now to be clear) went down to the death of Constantine in 337, and traces of it can also be discovered in other writings of the late fourth century: in Festus’ Breviarium, in Jerome's revision of Eusebius’ Chronicle, in the Epitome de Caesaribus—and in the HA. If the HA used the Kaisergeschichte, its composition postdates 337— as Otto Seeck stated plainly in 1890.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1970

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References

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page 198 note 5 Jahrbücher für classische Philologie, cxli (1890), 638.Google Scholar

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page 199 note 2 The reason is obvious and simple. In this pointed form, the sentiment is appropriate only for the writer of a breviarium—a literary genre which hardly began before Eutropius. But Eutropius was unpolemical: ’res Romanas … brevi narratione collegi strictim … ut tranquillitatis tuae possit mens divina laetari …‘ (praef.).

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page 201 note 1 Hermes xxiv (1889), 337 ff.Google Scholar Mommsen cited Prob. 13. 1 twice, as genuine evidence: Römiscnes Staatsrecht ii3 (1887), 254, 914–15.Google Scholar

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page 202 note 10 Note also Prob. 18. 5.

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page 203 note 1 Cf. Alex. 26. 9. Chastagnol, A., Historia-Augusta-Colloquium Bonn 1966/67 (1968), 60Google Scholar, holds this passage copied from Eutropius, Brev. 8. 23—but fails to cite Jerome, Chronicle, under A.D. 232 (Gr. Chr. Schr. xlvii. 215).