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The following review, recently pre-published online, will appear in the 2018 volume of Journal of Roman Studies (for earlier thoughts arising, see here). [Addendum: the final pagination is JRS 108, 300-302].
J. den Boeft, J. W. Drijvers, D. den Hengst, and H. C. Teitler, Philological and Historical Commentary on
Ammianus Marcellinus XXX. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. xix + 257, maps.
ISBN 9789004299955 (bound), 9789004300927 (e-book). €112.
J. den Boeft, J. W. Drijvers, D. den Hengst, and H. C. Teitler, Philological and Historical Commentary on
Ammianus Marcellinus XXXI. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xix + 357, maps.
ISBN 9789004353817 (bound), 9789004353824 (e-book). €169.
Near the
start of his 30th book Ammianus Marcellinus flashes forward to the
disasters of the Gothic war under Valens and wonders if his narrative will ever
get that far (si ad ea quoque uenerimus, 30.2.8). It is a rhetorical device, of
course, one of many indications of the arduous nature of the historian’s task.
The authors of the Dutch commentary on Ammianus must also have wondered if they
would get to the end of this mighty enterprise. Its history reaches back more
than 80 years. Pieter de Jonge produced the volumes on the first six surviving
books, 14-19, amid his duties as a headmaster between 1935 and 1982 (English
replacing German from 1948 onwards). While De Jonge’s dedication, ambition, and
feel for his author merit admiration, these volumes are uneven, especially on
historical topics, and will need replacing in due course.
This cannot
be said of the work of his successors, known informally as the Quadriga Batavorum, who have now
completed the remaining 12 volumes on Books 20 to 31. Three of them, the
Latinists Jan den Boeft and Daniël den Hengst and the Roman historian Hans
Teitler, have been working on the project since the 1980s; a second historian,
Jan Willem Drijvers, joined for Book 22 in 1995. Since the completion of the
second hexad (20-25) in 2005, the team has accelerated, publishing the
remaining six books at the rate of approximately one every two years. The
insight, comprehensiveness, and reliability of the commentaries have only
increased over the years, and the last two volumes here reviewed are well up to
the exacting and exalted standards of its predecessors (see my reviews of Books
25 to 29 in JRS 99 (2009), 294-6; 103(2013), 351-3; and 105 (2015), 475-8).
Ammianus’
last two books have contrasting structures. Book 30 is dominated by the death
on 17 November 375 of the emperor Valentinian, and a lengthy tripartite
obituary (chapters 6-9), but before that, as in the previous books on Valentinian
and his brother Valens, the narrative switches between eastern and western
events in geographically distinct blocs often covering several years: in chs 1
and 2.1-8, Roman foreign relations with Armenia and Persia from c. 374 to 377/8; in chs 2.9-12, 3, and
5, western events of 374 and 375; in ch. 4 an entertaining, overwritten, and
highly allusive digression on the venality and incompetence of eastern lawyers,
hanging on the emperor Valens’ withdrawal from hearing court cases. The book closes
with an account of the elevation of the four-year-old Valentinian II by junta
of high officials five days after his homonymous father’s death (ch. 10). Book
31, by contrast, is all but monographic (but the commentators reject
Kulikowski’s proposal (JRS 102
(2012), 79-102) that it was originally a separate monograph written much
earlier): the book focuses almost exclusively on how the Gothic migrations in
response to the pressure of the Huns turned from a peaceful crossing of potential
allies in 376 into a Roman-Gothic war, climaxing on 9 August 378 in the Battle
of Adrianople and Valens’ death. Certain important events of the period –
Saracen and Isaurian revolts – are left out altogether, and the only western episode,
the successful campaign of the emperor Gratian against the Lentienses (ch. 10),
is only included to explain why Gratian was delayed in bringing reinforcements
to the east and why his uncle Valens’ jealousy led him to engage without awaiting
them. The ‘Chronology’ in the front matter of each volume and the excellent chronological
guidance passim is very welcome, and
in Book 31 the commentators also point out Ammianus’ historical omissions.
Historical
contextualisation is uniformly thorough. In the initial episode of Book 30,
where various generals of Valens attempt unsuccessfully to detain, and then
successfully to assassinate, his ally king Papa of Armenia, the commentators
use Armenian sources to point out the religious subtext ignored or suppressed
by Ammianus: they are perhaps slightly more willing than in previous books to
see oblique jibes at Christian piety (see on 30.1.2). Equally good is the
clarification of Valentinian’s movements in his last campaign on the Danube in
375, and they rightly point out the clear signs of a whitewash in the narrative
of Valentinian II’s promotion (and suggest, correctly in my view, that Ammianus
was therefore writing before Valentinian II’s death in May 392). If I may be
permitted a personal quibble, however, their argument that this promotion took
place in Brigetio (Szöny), where the young emperor’s father had died, is false.
Neither Ammianus nor any other ancient source explicitly states this, though Hadrien
de Valois evidently inferred it from Ammianus’ text, as indicated by his
chapter heading for 30.10. But the chronicle known as Descriptio consulum or Consularia
Constantinopolitana, which is exceptionally reliable for the 370s and 380s,
places the event in Aquincum (i.e. the right bank of modern Budapest), and this
is surely correct. It is irrelevant (p. 204) that Socrates’ church history,
based on a version of this same chronicle, garbles its source and puts Aquincum
in Italy. Also irrelevant is the fact that Valentinian I had not thought
Aquincum suitable winter-quarters for himself, since emperors on the northern
frontier would not necessarily winter in the same place as most of their troops,
who were scattered over the whole region: e.g. 17.10.10 (Julian in Paris;
compare also the situation at the time of his acclamation in 360), 27.10.16 (Valentinian
and Gratian in Trier). Indeed the point is implied by the difficulty in finding
a doctor to tend the dying emperor, as they were tending to an epidemic among
the soldiers and scattered per varia, 30.6.4).
Aquincum was the provincial capital of Valeria with a massive military camp and
a second amphitheatre, the largest north of the Alps, for the army: it was the
obvious place for an acclamation that would be approved by as many troops as
possible. In Book 31, a particularly significant contribution is the late
dating of Gratian’s campaign against the Lentienses in 378, in summer rather
than spring, ensuring that he really was very late indeed. The massacres of
Gothic teenagers in the eastern provinces after Adrianople (31.16.8) are dated
to late 378, against Zuckermann’s proposal of early 379.
While Book
30 has been transmitted in a slightly better condition than 28 and 29 (some
passages of which are marred by repeated lacunae), Book 31 has particular
problems of its own. The better of the two ninth-century manuscripts of
Ammianus was the Hersfeldensis, which was haphazardly used for Gelenius’ 1533
edition before being dismantled in the late sixteenth century, to the extent
that only a few recycled pages survive, a bifolium from book 30 among them. But
by Gelenius’ time, the Hersfeldensis went no further than the penultimate
chapter of book 30, where Gelenius accordingly stopped. For Book 31 the Vaticanus
(V, Vat. Lat. 1873) is therefore the sole authoritative source for the
text. An additional problem arises between 31.8.5 and 31.10.18, where at some
point after the first copies were taken the Vaticanus lost two pages (the
central bifolium of a gathering, not a single page, as on p. 146 and in most
Ammianus scholarship). The apparatus of Seyfarth’s Teubner, from which the
lemmata are taken, is inadequate here, as was sharply pointed out in the review
by Rita Cappelletto (RFIC 109 (1981),
80-85), and unfortunately the commentators do not really make up for this
inadequacy. For these pages Seyfarth printed the readings of only one of the
three renaissance manuscripts that are direct copies of the Vaticanus, namely E (Vat. Lat. 2969), as well as those of
Accursius’ editio princeps, which used
both V and E. Since E was copied by
an intelligent humanist who was prone to emendation, its readings cannot be
trusted as representing the transmitted text. At a couple of points, the
commentators follow Seyfarth in not giving relevant information. So at 31.8.5 a
reader without access to Clark or Sabbah’s edition would infer that E’s acutius
observantes was the transmitted text, whereas F and N both have, and V presumably had, the nonsense word adiutius (the commentators support
Petschenig’s cautius; given the reconstructed
reading of V, diutius should be considered). Likewise at 31.10.7, Mallobaudes alta pugnandi cupiditate
raptatus, alta (where E and Accursius have autem) is not a conjecture of Valesius
but the reading of F, N, and presumably V.
My own
impression is that the text of Book 31 is in a slightly worse condition than
that of 30 because of the absence of Gelenius, though it is noteworthy that the
commentators propose changes from Seyfarth’s text, the lemma text, with almost
exactly the same regularity in the two books (about 30 in book 30, and about 50
in book 31, which is just over one and a half times as long). Given Seyfarth’s
conservatism, changes proposed to the text tend to be emendations, but there
are a few vindications of the text transmitted by V: The restoration of quam at
30.8.6 with the sense potius quam is
clearly right; so is the removal of Valesius’ –que at 31.16.7; etiámtum impraepedítus
in the description of king Papa’s murder (30.1.20) is probably also correct,
although the argument from prose rhythm against Gelenius’ reading praepeditum is false, since Ammianus
also accents etiam túm in clausulae (e.g.
30.3.9). (I would also restore V’s readings at 30.1.10 iactique (for prose rhythm) and 31.16.9 aetate, doctrinis). Of
the places where they advocate conjectures to improve on Seyfarth’s text, about
a dozen are their own. The palm goes to 30.9.3, where sense is brilliantly rescued
from ut solent occupationis spe uel
impuniae quaedam sceleste committi with occultationis
and impunitatis ([at the start of
reigns] ‘when some criminality tends to be committed in the hope that it will
be unnoticed or unpunished’: cf. 27.7.2). If other conjectures that they
propose are incremental improvements, they are mostly either definitely or
probably right: e.g. 30.10.1 <ex> cohortibus , 31.6.2 uiaticum [cibos] et bidui dilationem (where
V
actually has the lemma form cibus,
surely even likelier to be a gloss], 31.14.2 in palati<n>is (‘among courtiers’). If I have a reservation in the area of textual criticism it would
be that although they take Ammianus’ immensely regular prose rhythm seriously,
both as part of his style and as a tool for establishing his text, they could
be bolder in accepting the consequences. For example at 31.3.1 they propose an
entirely cogent solution to an irregular clausula (a transposition of the first
two words of Tanaitas consuetudo
nominauit), before stepping back from it in favour of accepting ‘incidental
irregularities’. For all that, there is no doubt that they have contributed
more to understanding the text and language of Ammianus than anybody since
Charles Clark and his collaborators over a century ago.
This review
has focused on matters of historical detail and textual criticism; much more
could have been said about points of language, geography, intertextuality, and
indeed the general mood of Ammianus (which they stand closer to Matthews’
optimism than Barnes’s pessimism) and his attitude to the history of his own
times. Produced without fanfare or the support of large grants, and occupying
the three original contributors long into retirement, this commentary is a model
of learning and insight, and of selfless, collaborative scholarship, which will
help Ammianus’ readers for centuries to come.
