ABSTRACT
So much of ancient historiography centres explicitly or implicitly on war, and Chapter 4 reveals how the Historiae is no exception: the Historiae is a history of war. Orosius explicitly formulates his narrative around warfare, which is positioned as punishment for manifest or hidden sin, both individual and collective, and for which humankind is directly responsible. Orosius pushes hard against a glorified version of the past. The Historiae takes issue with the Roman state ideology of conquest and victory, and the Republican and imperial notion of war as triumphant and glorious, reversing them to demonstrate war as bad and bloody. This historiographical approach invests in an ideology of condemnation that emphasizes the negative outcomes both for conquerors and conquered alike. This chapter demonstrates that Orosius’s critique of war and empire was part of a proto-postcolonial discourse which was swiftly curtailed with the interweaving of Christianity with imperial authority in the Roman empire. Orosius is exceptional in his systematic rejection of the narrative of Republican and imperial virtue, and therefore of the principles on which all Roman and nearly all classical histories had been written. Although the bemoaning of warfare, especially military disaster, was not new in antiquity, this chapter argues that the comprehensive and sustained hostility towards war encapsulated in the Historiae was unique to Orosius. This innovation, once aligned with Christianity, would be enormously influential.
