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Witness and Christian: Historical Writing in Late Antiquity

When we begin to study historical sources and, in particular, works of the genre of historical writing, we should understand how the authors of these texts perceived their activities. The understanding of the meaning of historical writing in a particular historical period, the tasks and requirements that are set for the author is the basis for a reasoned decoding of a historical text. Similar research work is currently underway in the history of concepts. Reinhart Koselleck worked on the problem of historical shifts in the understanding of historical writing in his articles on the modern period and the Enlightenment. The aim of this article is to elicit an understanding of historical writing in late antiquity by adjusting existing historiographic positions. The toolkit of history of concepts is used to achieve this aim. The period of late antiquity is traditionally regarded as the decline of literature skills, including historical writing. However, it seems that this historiographic position arose more as a result of the steady discursive pattern of Latin authors than as a reflection of the actual situation of late antiquity. Researchers’ attention to this period has grown significantly since the 1990s, but, at the same time, the concept of historical writing was not significantly revised. The image of the period as a decline extended to historical writing. The departure from the classical tradition of historiography was associated with the spread of Christianity in the empire. Christianity offered different guidelines in the past, shifted value priorities replacing historical precedents with the Old Testament and evangelical examples. In addition, the genre of historical writing within the framework of Christianity was transformed into the history of the church, changing its purposes to describe the ideological and political struggle of various religious factions and to make apologetics of the Christian worldview as opposed to the pagan one. However, despite the validity of such notions, it should be emphasized that the spread of Christianity was not a crucial factor that influenced the change in priorities in historical writing. Moreover, the positioning of historical writing as a statement of truth about current events remained unchanged. That means that the understanding of the activity of the author of a historical work did not undergo significant shifts in the period of late antiquity compared to the classical one. The main changes affected the subject matter of historical writing, that is, a sample of precedents that the authors considered necessary to describe within the framework of their current priorities. This conclusion is also confirmed by the fact that most Latin Christian historians directly or indirectly point out that they are based not only on their Christian predecessors, but also on pagan classics. The knowledge of the latter was included in grammatical and rhetorical education at least in the form of epitomes, and served as a source of direct and indirect quotes, imitations and stylizations – not as explicit as, for example, Christian patristics, but rather, by default, as a kind of conventional agreement.