ABSTRACT
When in late August 1997 the contributors to this volume gathered in Durham, it was fifty years since the publication of E.A.Thompson’s pioneering study of the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus.1 This book had appeared in an age when Englishspeaking scholarship (at least) had largely ignored Ammianus: in an isolated, but appreciative, essay J.W.Mackail had once remarked of the historian that he ‘has in this country long suffered undue and unfortunate neglect’.2 In Thompson’s day, only M.L.W.Laistner accorded him a useful survey.3 Ammianus fared rather better among French and German scholars, and in 1947 Thompson was able to turn to the still basic work of Gimazane (then nearly sixty years old) and to Ensslin’s sharply concise overview of the political and religious outlook of the Res Gestae.4 While acknowledging Ammianus’ qualities-rating him a better historian even than Tacitus-Thompson was the first to abandon reverential insistence on the reliability and impartiality (Gibbon’s ‘accurate and faithful guide’) of a narrative earlier applauded by Mackail as that of ‘an officer and a gentleman’, in favour of more critical analysis of the prejudices and pressures which shaped Ammianus’ coverage of contemporary events. Through a lively examination of selected episodes in the narrative, Thompson exposed not only the extent to which the sympathies of the ‘middle-class’ curialis from Antioch (who became a Roman army officer) coloured the substance of what he wrote, but also the political constraints which he believed the coercive regime of the emperor Theodosius I imposed upon the composition of the last part of the work (Thompson regarded Books 26-31 as a later product than the rest). Thompson’s approach, which centred upon the engagement between Ammianus’ own contemporary experience and the writing of the Res Gestae, also led him to question the emphasis which traditional Quellenforschung had accorded to identifying the historian’s written sources: for him Ammianus’ surviving books were not derivative, but-as the historian himself claimed them to be-first-hand history compiled from personal observation and encounter. The debate about Ammianus’ source material continues to this day, especially in relation to the narrative of Julian’s ill-starred military intervention in Persia, where the opportunities of comparison with other contemporary accounts and fragmentary survivals have generated a series of investigations into the elusive extent of Ammianus’ literary dependence for the record of events in which he himself participated.5 Thompson’s stress on the priority of autopsy in the Persian narrative found influential backing from Louis Dillemann in 1961;6 and more
recently thirty years on Charles Fornara has defended the same view against the continuing fascination with Ammianus’ sources.7
