The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor by Justin A. Stover and George Woudhuysen (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor by Justin A. Stover and George Woudhuysen
• Peter Van Nuffelen

The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor Justin A. Stover and George Woudhuysen Edinburgh Studies in Later Latin Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 525. ISBN 978-1-4744-9284-4

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There are few books that live up to the claims made on their back cover, but The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor by Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen surely is a "radical rewriting of the history of fourth-century Latin literature." It is commonly accepted that Aurelius Victor was one of the fourth-century writers of historical breviaria, together with Festus and Eutropius, and that the Historiae abbreviatae (also called Liber de Caesaribus) represent the work as he wrote it. Scholars further tend to agree that a later summary history, the Epitome de Caesaribus, has been wrongly attributed to Victor and dates from the end of the fourth century.

The meticulous sifting of all the evidence by Stover and Woudhuysen unearths, however, a different reality. In fact, the Historiae abbreviatae and the Epitome de Caesaribus are epitomes of a lost, much larger history by Aurelius Victor that covered imperial history from Augustus to Julian. An accumulation of arguments builds a compelling case for this thesis. On the one hand, there are positive indications, such as the titles for both works in the medieval manuscripts and parallels in content and text up to 360 ce, including an identical phrase in the first person (Hist. Abr. 8.7; Aur. Vict. Epit. 8.6). These are, on the other, flanked by surveys of ancient epitomizing and critical reflections on methodological flaws in the work of the predecessors of Stover and Woudhuysen, to show that their solution fits with what we know about ancient literary practices.

Widely read in Late Antiquity, the history of Victor survived until the eighth century in Italy, when Paul the Deacon used it. Stover and Woudhuysen provide a convincing case that Paul actually created the Epitome de Caesaribus. A crucial piece of evidence are the Scholia Vallicelliana, composed by Paul on the basis of Victor, among other ancient authors. Stover and Woudhuysen also suggest that the Origo Constantini imperatoris (also called Anonymus Valesianus I), which they date to the early medieval period (eighth to ninth century instead of the fourth) also derives from Victor, as does the list of emperors in the calendar of Polemius Silvius (448–449 ce). This reinterpretation of the evidence makes much sense. The Historiae abbreviatae are known for their errors and confusions, which would be surprising for a work by a well-educated bureaucrat but which now can be safely blamed [End Page 271] on the epitomator. Indeed, Stover and Woudhuysen are at pains to stress the high quality of Victor's history, which must have contained precise and unique information, reflected a good knowledge of Greek and Latin classics, and relied on much of earlier Latin and Greek historiography as sources—in sum, "a worthy heir of Tacitus and fitting predecessor for Ammianus" (118).

They do not halt their iconoclasm there. The second part of the book challenges the commonly accepted existence of the Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte (EKG). This is a hypothetical source for much of fourth-century Latin historiography, supposedly covering imperial history until 337 or 357. Its core is a range of textual correspondences between Eutropius and the Historiae abbreviatae. The detailed criticism of the EKG hypothesis in chapter 6 is an impressive achievement, closely scrutinizing the assumptions that have closed the eyes of modern scholars for the more plausible assumption that Eutropius used Aurelius Victor. Just last year an edition of the fragments attributed to the EKG was published by B. Bleckmann (Paderborn, 2022), which sadly appeared too late for Stover and Woudhuysen to engage with.

As the EKG is taken to be a source of the Historia Augusta, this late...