Historia Augusta

The Historia Augusta (English: Augustan History) is a late Roman collection of biographies, written in Latin, of the Roman emperors, their junior colleagues, designated heirs and usurpers from 117 to 284. Supposedly modeled on the similar work of Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, it presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors, collectively known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, written during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I and addressed to those emperors or other important personages in Ancient Rome. The collection, as extant, comprises thirty biographies, most of which contain the life of a single emperor, but some include a group of two or more, grouped together merely because these emperors were either similar or contemporaneous.

The true authorship of the work, its actual date, its reliability and its purpose have long been matters for controversy by historians and scholars ever since Hermann Dessau, in 1889, rejected both the date and the authorship as stated within the manuscript. Major problems include the nature of the sources that it used, and how much of the content is pure fiction. For instance, the collection contains in all about 150 alleged documents, including 68 letters, 60 speeches and proposals to the people or the senate, and 20 senatorial decrees and acclamations.

By the second decade of the 21st century, the consensus supported the position that there was only a single author, who wrote either in the late 4th century or the early 5th century, who was interested in blending contemporary issues (political, religious and social) into the lives of the 3rd century emperors. There is further consensus that the author used the fictitious elements in the work to highlight references to other published works, such as to Cicero and Ammianus Marcellinus, in a complex allegorical game. Despite the conundrums, it is the only continuous account in Latin for much of its period and so is continually being re-evaluated. Modern historians are unwilling to abandon it as a unique source of possible information, despite its obvious untrustworthiness on many levels.

The name Historia Augusta originated with Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, working from a complex manuscript tradition with a number of variant versions. The title as recorded on the Codex Palatinus manuscript, written in the 9th century, is Vitae Diversorum Principum et Tyrannorum a Divo Hadriano usque ad Numerianum Diversis compositae ("The Lives of various Emperors and Tyrants from the Divine Hadrian to Numerian by Various Authors"). It is assumed that the work may have been originally called de Vita Caesarum or Vitae Caesarum ("Lives of the Caesars").

How widely the work was circulated in late antiquity is unknown, but its earliest known use was in a Roman History composed by Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus in 485. Lengthy citations from it are found in authors of the 6th and 9th centuries, including Sedulius Scottus who quoted parts of the Marcus Aurelius, the Maximini and the Aurelian within his Liber de Rectoribus Christianis, and the chief manuscripts also date from the 9th or 10th centuries. The six Scriptores – "Aelius Spartianus", "Julius Capitolinus", "Vulcacius Gallicanus", "Aelius Lampridius", "Trebellius Pollio", and "Flavius Vopiscus (of Syracuse)" – dedicate their biographies to Diocletian, Constantine and various private persons, and so ostensibly were all writing around the late 3rd and early 4th century. The first four scriptores are attached to the lives from Hadrian to Gordian III, while the final two are attached to the lives from Valerian to Numerian.

The biographies cover the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian. A section covering the reigns of Philip the Arab, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian and all but the end of the reign of Valerian is missing in all the manuscripts, and it has been argued that biographies of Nerva and Trajan have also been lost at the beginning of the work, which may suggest the compilation might have been a direct continuation of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars. It has been theorized that the mid-3rd-century lacuna might actually be a deliberate literary device of the author or authors, saving the labour of covering Emperors for whom little source material may have been available.

Despite devoting whole books to ephemeral or in some cases non-existent usurpers, there are no independent biographies of the factual, but short reigns of Emperors Quintillus and Florian, whose reigns are merely briefly noted towards the end of the biographies of their respective predecessors, Claudius Gothicus and Tacitus. For nearly 300 years after Casaubon's edition, though much of the Historia Augusta was treated with some scepticism, it was used by historians as an authentic source – Edward Gibbon used it extensively in the first volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. However, "in modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of deliberate mystification written much later than its purported date, however the fundamentalist view still has distinguished support. (...) The Historia Augusta is also, unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and caution."

Existing manuscripts and witnesses of the Historia Augusta fall into three groups: