Trevor Lee, The Ohio State University
Tacitus’s central impact on the Res Gestae by the fourth-century Latin historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, has generally been assumed as obvious by many academics. Shared vocabulary from Tacitus occurs more than almost any other ancient author in the Res Gestae, and such instances have been relatively well observed by modern scholarship. Yet, the recorded Tacitean allusions in Ammianus’s history leave a surprising amount of ambiguity in their thematic trends and literary purposes.
In an older study, Blockley (1978) posits that the full set of borrowings are generally scattered, brief, and often have no contextual correlation with their source passages. Such an analysis is conducted by close, lexical analysis of a highly specific set of pairings and is ultimately constrained by a narrow scope.
More recently, Kelly (2008 and 2009) has interrupted this debate by challenging the concept of Ammianus’s central reliance on Tacitus. While Tacitus may be Ammianus’s predecessor in terms of strict narrative chronology (the two end and start with the reign of Nerva, respectively), the Res Gestae ultimately lacks a single, standard literary model owing to any prior author. Additionally, Kelly’s study notes the methodological issues involved with previous discussion of Ammianus’s allusions. Scholars are often hyper-focused on the lexical qualities of a possible phraseological pairing and lack awareness for an allusion’s deployment multiple times within the Res Gestae. Likewise, many academics are overly concerned with observing Ammianan allusions in themselves without concern for broader narrative significance.
This paper will reassess Ammianus’s relationship with Tacitus by offering a more systematic study of Tacitean allusion from a collective and thematic perspective. It will demonstrate that both Blockley and Kelly’s viewpoints are simultaneously correct: that Ammianus is capable of highly intricate, thematically appropriate allusions, yet also inserts brief, and contextually dissimilar ones as well. In addition to several, shorter parallels, this examination will include a close reading of the double allusion of Tac. Ann. 1.65, a restless night prior to a battle between Germanicus and Arminius, with Amm. 18.2.10, the emperor Julian’s own expedition across the Rhine, and Amm. 22.15.22-23 a seemingly unrelated digressionary description concerning the habits of the hippopotamus.
In doing so, I revisit Blockley’s seemingly obsolete argument in order to better frame it within Kelly’s own restructuring of Ammianan intertextuality. These modern authors, who focus primarily on Ammianus, will also be synthesized with the methodological classifications made by Kaufmann (2016) regarding the varying levels of contextual relevance in allusions of Late Latin poetry. I subsequently aim to challenge the dependence on literary purpose to qualify an allusion’s classification as such in the Res Gestae. Considering such topics, this paper will provide an important reconsideration of the current debate concerning Ammianus and his intertextual practice to better illuminate how such parallels can be better identified and justified. Such an examination can hopefully clarify the value of purpose in an allusion and provide a useful later comparandum to earlier Latin prose authors through Ammianan intertextuality.