In Defiance of History

Orosius and the Unimproved Past

Victoria Leonard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781317084969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume offers a counterbalance to the dismissal that Orosius's Histories Against the Pagans has suffered in most recent criticism. Orosius is traditionally considered to be a mediocre scholar and an essentially worthless historian. This book takes his literary endeavour seriously, recognizing the unique contribution the Histories made at a crucial moment of debate and uncertainty, where the present was shaped by restructuring the past. The significance of the Histories is recognised intrinsically rather than only in comparison with other texts and authors, principally Augustine of Hippo, Orosius's mentor. The approach of the book is historiographical, exploring the form, purpose, and meaning of the Histories. The themes of divine providence, monotheism, and imperial authority are examined, and the subjects of war and the sack of Rome receive extended analysis. The book foregrounds Orosius's significant historiographical innovations that are seldom explored, such as the subversion of imperial history within a Christian spectrum in the synchronization of the emperor Augustus and Christ. Each chapter contributes to the progression of knowledge about Orosius's Histories and the wider literary and historiographical culture of disruption that characterised the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE.

1 Orosius as a writer of history

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599120-2

Introduction

The Historiae has been in existence for over 1,600 years, and, discounting more recent negative appraisals, the text has enjoyed an astonishing reach and readership over the centuries. And yet fundamental questions about its purpose, the authorial intention behind it, and how we can locate the text remain unresolved. Orosius’s Historiae is a work that defies categorization, and generic misplacement has generated variance, divergence, and opprobrium within its critical reception. As discussed in the Introduction, the privileging of history as an exclusive genre with particular standards that the Historiae does not meet has resulted in its relegation.¹ The multiplicity of the text has seen it categorized not as a work of history, but variously as a chronicle, epitome, polemic, apologia, breviarium, theology, protology, and as a textbook.² In the Prologue, Orosius establishes differing allegiances, methodologies, and objectives alongside one another, determining the text as anything but one-dimensional. In turn, the work has been recognized as in need of constant revision.³ This chapter argues that the slippery nature of the Historiae precipitated its controversial and contested critical interpretations across its reception history.

In order to understand better the polarization in the modern, medieval, and ancient receptions of the Historiae, this chapter returns to first principles, asking: what is the text? What did Orosius think he was doing in writing the Historiae, how did he categorize it, and how did he communicate his understanding of his task to his audience? How did Orosius situate the text within an existing ancient historiographical tradition? And why are these questions not only difficult to answer but also still relevant? The chapter begins by examining the relationship of the Historiae to historiography, and its categorization within alternative genres, including as a breviarium. Orosius’s claims to stylistic brevity as well as his technical dating are investigated, as is how the Historiae aligns with and deviates from Eutropius’s Breviarium of Roman history. The focus expands to consider how the purpose of the text was determined by the audience it was written for and the opponent it was written against. Finally, the chapter turns to the construction of the narrative voice, how it positions authorial motivations and methodologies, and how performative self-elevation orientates Orosius as a Christian authority.

What is the Historiae?

The Historiae is a text that deliberately leaves the reader unmoored, with no reference to the author given by name, and no programmatic statement that communicates how the text should be understood. It is difficult, therefore, to unearth the original intention of the author, which Quentin Skinner argues is crucial in understanding a text.⁴ Instead, indications of authorial purpose can be discerned from the self-reflexive language the text uses to describe itself. Although critical voices have claimed that Orosius referred to his work as a history, seeming care has been taken to avoid designating the text as such, at least where the reader could most expect to find such occurrence, like the Prologue.⁵ The narrative voice describes the Historiae in neutral categories, as opus, ‘a work’ (Prologue 8, 1:7), volumen, ‘a book, roll’ (Prologue 10, 1:8), and opera, ‘work’ (Prologue 13, 1:9). It is deliberately referred to in ways that set it apart from the genre of history writing. Orosius does not locate his work within a tradition of Roman historical writing, nor does he present the text within a framework of Christian historiography or early Christian chroniclers such as Hippolytus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius, or Sulpicius Severus.

Nevertheless, the preoccupation of the text with representations of the past makes it contingent upon history writing. As instructed by Augustine, Orosius’s research methodology centred on histories and annals (historiarum atque annalium): ‘accordingly you bade me set forth from all the records available of histories and annals whatever instances I have found from the past…’ (Prologue 10, 1:4).⁶ The Prologue is then concerned to establish previous historical writing as doing one thing, and the Historiae as doing something quite different. Orosius centres his argument around the choice to begin other works of history not with Creation but with the reign of Ninus, king of the Assyrians: ‘Since nearly all men interested in writing, among the Greeks as among the Latins, who have perpetuated in words the accomplishments of kings and peoples for a lasting record, have made the beginnings of their writing with Ninus…’ (1.1.1, 1:5).⁷ Orosius’s pejorative point is that by starting with Ninus, previous writers have carelessly disregarded over 3,000 years of history, which ‘either have been omitted or unknown by all historians’ (1.1.5, 1:6).⁸ The dismissal of writers in the period between Ninus and Christ, over 2,000 years, completes the polemical attack: ‘2015 years have passed, in which between the performers and the writers the fruit of labours and occupations of all were wasted’ (1.1.6, 1:6).⁹ And it allows Orosius to turn instead to the Old Testament, which does begin at the beginning of time and foreshadows future events:

Therefore, the subject itself demands that I touch upon briefly a few accounts from these books which, when speaking of the origin of the world, have lent credence to past events by the prediction of the future and the proof of subsequent happenings. (1.1.7, 1:6)¹⁰

Christian scripture is set apart as a knowledge resource for the past as well as the future, and the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis, is presented as more accurate for dating history than earlier pagan histories.¹¹ Orosius uses the Prologue to establish an opposition between earlier writers of history on the one hand, and the Historiae, informed by Scripture, on the other. This aligns the Historiae with a more ancient and reliable tradition; beginning with Creation, the Old Testament predates other works of history by thousands of years.

Orosius does not claim explicitly to be writing better history; in fact, in the Prologue, he does not claim to be writing history at all. Like Olympiodorus of Thebes, who wrote that his twenty-two books were not a history (συγγραφή) but a collection of materials for a history (ὕλη συγγραφῆς), Orosius instead offers a Christian reconception of history that corrects mistaken versions of the past.¹² Designations of the text as a history are employed cautiously, but while a preference is shown towards more neutral descriptors, it is not an absence that is altogether sustained. There are three self-references to the work as ‘history’:

These matters will now be set forth by me more fully, unfolding my history orderly (2.3.10, 1:47);¹³

At the same time, then, Cyrus, king of the Persians, whom I have mentioned above in the unfolding of my history… (2.6.1, 1:52);¹⁴

I have woven together an inextricable wicker-work of confused history… (3.2.9, 1:83).¹⁵

The paucity of references to the text as a history reflects Orosius’s desire to differentiate his work from those of earlier pagan historians and his self-conscious awareness that his Historiae moves in a new direction. Orosius is similarly cautious in his reluctance to identify specifically pagan historians (gentiles historici), directing his apologetic in the broadest of terms (1.3.6, 1:43). The oppositional tension between Orosius as a more trustworthy Christian author and pagan writers who are false and unreliable is sustained throughout the work: ‘but we have already spoken somewhat about the different opinions of disagreeing [pagan] historians, and let it suffice that these have been detected and that what is falsely known is the knowledge of lies’ (5.3.4, 2:78).¹⁶ Orosius’s approach to genre is apologetical. The text is simultaneously contextualized within but excluded from the genre of history in its revision of the past from a Christian perspective.

Genre and brevity

If the Historiae is not, comfortably or at least traditionally, a history, then what is it? The presentation of the Historiae is determined not only by Orosius’s self-conception of the work, which has been explored in the opening section of the chapter; with each reception, the text is reframed and re-presented, and made contingent upon other textual outputs through generic categorization. Various allegiances are evident, including elements of epitome, breviarium, chronicle, and classical history, leaving the issue of genre open to critical renegotiation. Marie-Pierre Arnaud-Lindet describes the Historiae as ‘a sort of breviarium’ of the misfortunes of the world since its origin.¹⁷ This conforms to Benoît Lacroix’s interpretation: ‘De cette conscience qu’il faut au public moins cultivé des récits courts et directs, plutôt que des théories, est née l’Historia adversus Paganos. Orose est invité à écrire pour le peuple et dans le sens de Justin et d’Eutrope.’¹⁸ As Lacroix argues, Orosius wrote in a direct style, avoiding theorizing and following the example of Eutropius and Justin. This determines how the text should be understood, that it was not simply apologetic or history but had a wider purpose, rewriting secular and political history from a Christian perspective and in competition with Roman breviaria. Similarly, Arnaldo Momigliano situates the Historiae in a Christian chronographic tradition alongside the Chronica urbis Romae and Sulpicius Severus’s Chronica. For Momigliano, Orosius gives ‘the final Christian twist to the pagan epitome of Roman history’.¹⁹ Understanding the Historiae as an epitome or breviarium responds to the condensed nature of the text, universal in scope, but epitomizing in style, offering a compressed history of the world since Creation but contained within one volume. Less in the detail of derivation and more in stylistic allegiances, the Historiae can be located as an epitome or breviarium in comparison with the earlier Roman breviaria of Festus and Eutropius.²⁰

Just as the declared aim of epitomes and breviaria is extreme brevity, with decorative features of the original such as speeches, digressions, or lengthy passages of text omitted, so the same is true for the Historiae.²¹ Brevity is positioned as a constant source of anxiety for the authorial voice in the text, often preoccupying the moments of rhetorical self-reflection that intersperse the text. Peter Van Nuffelen interprets Orosius’s references to the brevity of the text as ‘statements of imperfection’, signalling to the reader that the detail of suffering from the past is not comprehensive and is therefore inadequate.²² The methodological objective to be brief is established in the Prologue, where an ordered and concise exposition of the material is part of Augustine’s instruction to Orosius on composing the text: ‘…and unfold them systematically and briefly in the context of this book’ (Prologue 10, 1:4).²³ Van Nuffelen observes that the instruction situates the work ‘in the tradition of writing brevitas rather than that of full-scale historiography’.²⁴ The intended brevity of the text is then addressed twi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on texts and translations
• List of figures
• Foreword: past, present, and future in Orosius and late antique historiography
• Introduction
• 1 Orosius as a writer of history
• 2 The making of time
• 3 The emperor and the divine
• 4 Apologetics and the providence of war
• 5 The sack of Rome: Christianizing disaster
• Bibliography
• Index