Jeremy Swist (Xavier University)
Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae (ca. 390 CE) is nominally a continuation of Tacitus’ historiographical oeuvre. Like Tacitus, Ammianus employs allusions to, and exempla of, early Rome and its original kings. As Timothy Joseph, Thomas Strunk, and others have shown, Tacitus’ regal references allow readers familiar with canonical authors such as Livy and Ovid to evaluate emperors such as Augustus and Tiberius by the precedents and standards set by kings such as Romulus and Numa. Such parallels are present in many other historians of imperial Rome such as Cassius Dio, Aurelius Victor, and Eutropius (Schulz). They arguably participate in, and respond to, the wider discourse, ideology, and iconography of imperial refoundation, in which Augustus and his successors grounded their legitimacy in consciously styling themselves new founders of Rome (Angelova).
A contemporary of Victor and Eutropius, Ammianus frequently employs exempla, though his use of regal exempla specifically has never been sufficiently examined. This paper argues that Ammianus responds to the discourse of refoundation by taking regal exempla in a new direction. Like others, Ammianus uses the kings as cultural touchstones to evaluate emperors by their resemblances, for better or worse. Ammianus’ novel approach illustrates an estrangement and distancing, both physical and figurative, of the city of Rome from its emperors in the fourth century. He signals this in the Roman digression of Book 14, when “the security of the age of [Numa] Pompilius has returned” as a consequence of the city bequeathing her patrimony to the Caesars (14.6.3-6). Rather than re-embodiments of the kings, emperors such as Constantius II and Valens are presented as foreign monarchs viewing Rome from without. Such dissociations reflect not only Ammianus’ aims to style these rulers as un-Roman, but also his own identity as a Greek and former soldier and imperial bureaucrat resident in Rome, resentful of his exclusion from its aristocracy (Rohrbacher). For example, when Constantius II enters Rome he views the senators as the “asylum of the whole world,” invoking Romulus’ foundation of Rome as a sanctuary for the disreputable (16.10.4-6). Ammianus’ multiple exempla of Numa, who in late antiquity was an icon of philosophical paganism (Brandt 1988), highlight the emperors’ moral and religious departure from the mos maiorum as well. This includes a Neoplatonic digression on the visibility of guardian spirits (familiares genii) to men such as Numa, but not to Constantius due to his vices (21.14.2-5).
Ammianus’ employment of regal exempla is consistent with a wider, conscious rejection of the kings as imperial models in the historiography and oratory of the later fourth century (Nixon & Rodgers). But unlike these other authors, for whom the kings’ exemplarity comes up short, for Ammianus it is the emperors who fail to embody the Romanitas of Romulus and Numa, who are as foreign to them as the city of Rome itself. Thus Ammianus is a counterpoint to the conversion of the discourse of imperial refoundation from that of Rome to that of Constantinople, and from Romulus to Constantine.