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Review Article: Ammianus Marcellinus and His World

Ammianus Marcellinus is important for all modern historians of the Later Roman Empire in two quite separate ways. The eighteen extant books of his Res Gestae provide a narrative account of the years between 353 and 378 that, though partial and selective in many respects, nevertheless, in grandeur, sweep, and richness of detail, surpasses all similar narrative accounts of similar compass that survive from the ancient world, not excepting even Herodotus and Thucydides. Edward Gibbon paid Ammianus a famous and familiar tribute when he took his leave of "an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices which usually affect the mind of a contemporary"1-and the fullness and variety of Gibbon's own narrative immediately begins to reflect his dependence on the far less precise, less detailed, and less reliable narrative of Zosimus. But Ammianus Marcellinus is not only a source of valuable information about events, institutions, and society, he is himself an important part of the world of the fourth century in which he lived and wrote. He was born in the Greek East, he served in the Roman army, he travelled as far north and west as Cologne, he toured Roman Mesopotamia and served in the expedition that penetrated to Ctesiphon in 363, he visited the battlefields of Thrace after a Roman army perished there in 378, and he composed his history in Rome for a western, Latin-speaking audience. These two facets of Ammianus Marcellinus receive separate presentation in John Matthews' important new book on the historian: The Roman Empire of Ammianus first surveys Ammianus' narrative chronologically in ten chapters grouped together as "Part One. Res Gestae" (pp. 3-228), then considers a series of eight central themes or topics in "Part Two. Visa vel Lecta" (pp. 231-472), the two parts being supplemented by detailed endnotes (pp. 473-553), a lengthy bibliography (pp. 554-71), and a very full and helpful index (pp. 572-608). Any new book on Ammianus inevitably invites comparison with Edward Thompson's classic study published in 1947, which has served to introduce so many of us, including both author and reviewer, to the historian by its provocative analysis of his attitudes and prejudices.2 But the real model and inspiration for M.'s book is not Thompson's slim volume; it is Sir Ronald Syme's thick study of Tacitus, published in 1958, whose essentially dialectical method M. adopts, investigating the historian