V - The ‘Lonely’ Historian: Contrast and Continuity

Summary

In an aside to his audience after narrating the revolt of the Theruingi and the slaughter of the Roman army under Lupicinus in AD 376, the ’lonely’ historian Ammianus Marcellinus asks the indulgence of his readers on a particularly difficult matter ... The rather poignant parenthesis is consistent with the view that Ammianus presents elsewhere in his history of a public at Rome concerned only with the trivial biographies of emperors and caring more for the details of the private lives of the imperial household than with the grand sweep of res gestae. The last antique historian is indeed a great one, and he may even have been as isolated as is sometimes suggested.