Introduction

In more recent periods, the Historiae has been critically marginalized, or a narrower range of questions have been asked of the text. For most of the twentieth century, scholarship has kept returning to the issues of Orosius’s relationship with Augustine, and his reliability as a historian. The jarring of awkward categorization and the Historiae as a text that fails to fit is leant on by Peter Van Nuffelen to understand the stigmatization of the Historiae as an inadequate assessment of the contemporary time. The fool’s paradise Orosius offers jars with a conventional view of the declining Roman western Mediterranean in the fifth century. Orosius’s work has been critically judged and judged harshly, but mostly against the wrong criteria, centred either on the standards of the theological intellectualism set by Augustine, or according to ideals of the truth, objectivity, and reliability.